An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time with the PS1 we raced through September ’96 by look at Project Overkill, Ridge Racer Revolution, Casper, Burning Road, and NASCAR Racing.
Previously with the 3DO, we went insane trying to sort out all of the PC ports with Space Shuttle, Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, The Incredible Machine, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
Now, we’re finally, painfully, closing out the 1994 release catalog with Theme Park, VR Stalker, Waialae Country Club, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, and World Cup Golf. My God help our souls.
**This post was originally published on 3/20/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Theme Park
Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 1994
Time to Jacking Up Ice Cream Prices: 25 Minutes
I have now completed the trifecta of Theme Park console ports. We first saw it on the PS1 and then eventually on the Saturn as part of their Fall 1995 line-ups. The 3DO release is mechanically identical to those, and it either came out in late ’94 or contemporaneously with the others in late ’95. I’m going with ’94 because that’s what I wrote down two years ago and I’m not uprooting the schedule just to accommodate frickin’ Theme Park. Anyway, the only notable features this time around are the long load times, poor technical performance, and difficulties associated with using a three-button controller. The 3DO controller has like half the number of inputs as the PS1 or Saturn and you can really feel it here. Really, it’s kind of impressive this thing even runs, because you can tell it doesn’t want to. Aside from that, all my prior observations about the game still apply, even if those observations were badly written. I don’t think there’s a High Octane release for the 3DO, so we’re free from the threat of Molyneaux for a while.
VR Stalker
Developer: Morpheus Interactive
Publisher: American Laser Games
Release Date: 1994
Time to Becoming The Bogey: 25 Minutes
Oof, where do I even start. Let’s get the name out of the way. You might be like me and have some apprehension upon seeing the title “VR Stalker“. Knowing the 3DO by reputation, you would be forgiven in assuming that this is some kind of scummy softcore stalking smut. That was my initial thought, but after a couple of seconds I remembered that this isn’t a Japanese Saturn game, so it probably isn’t that kind of fetish material. It is instead a completely different, and decidedly American, kind of fetish material. I’ll let you judge which fetish is worse.
The game opens with an overlong intro movie that lays out a completely unhinged, and entirely unnecessary premise. In this world, Big Willy’s military cuts led to New York and LA being randomly nuked by the woke mob a vague outside force who want to corrupt our fluids take our freedoms for reasons. Everything collapses and the US is conquered by whoever. Fortunately, the “militias” have worked secretly in the desert for years on a project to retrofit fighter aircraft with remote piloting systems, turning them into VR combat platforms that can stalk the skies. So, you, the player, go on missions to blow up various military bases in the American West in order to liberate those states from the liberals. The cutscene laying this out feels like it takes ten minutes and most of the disc space. With this we get to experience Defcon 5‘s subtext as the main text. Yay.
Yet, despite the level of effort which went into the setup, the gameplay itself is that of an extremely unremarkable Flight Combat sim of its era. It looks and feels like a bargain bin CD that you could’ve picked up at a K-Mart in the mid-90s. It looks as basic as possible, there’s little-to-no sound design, the flight and combat carry no oomph, and the draw distance is an issue. The one nice thing to say is that it maintains a stable, decent framerate. For variety, the game gives you a few copies of F-14’s, F-16’s, and A-10’s, which functions as your lives system. This is basic but passable, since Air Combat is still a year out and I can’t judge it by those standards. What I can judge it on is the fact that the second mission spawns your plane in already under target lock from an unseen enemy and there’s no chaff button. I ran through all of my lives without getting more than a few seconds into that mission, and the game gives no reason to dig further.
This seems to have been the first game from Morpheus Interactive, and based entirely on their predilections I would guess they’re likely an offshoot of American Laser Games, who published this thing despite not having that extensive a track record of publishing games from other studios. Not that any of these details amounts to much, Morpheus would go on to release a forgotten adventure game called Secrets of the Luxor on PCs in 1996 before shutting down. I was hoping to have escaped the long arm of ALG, but here we are, and as we will see later, they saved the worst for last.
Waialae Country Club
Developer: T&E Soft
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Date: 1994
Time to Sweet Drive: 30 Minutes
Continuing further down our path into gaming purgatory, here’s a T&E Soft Golf game. I’ve played so many of these things. They all run on the same engine and they’re all terrible. Though, I suppose this is the first one we’ve seen based on the Waialae course in Hawaii. I can’t remember If I’ve talked about it yet, but all three True Golf games released for the 3DO are actually 3D remakes of games that were originally released on the Super Nintendo from ’91 to ’93. That means this hopelessly janky game engine was made to up-port a set of mid-tier 16-bit golf games to a failing console in ’94, only for those versions to then be ported again to the Saturn and N64 from ’95 to ’97. Not to mention their repurposing this 3D engine for non-Golf games, much to the detriment of all mankind.
Because we’re talking about T&E Soft, the only thing we can learn from this game’s background is the efficacy of performing Roger Corman levels of asset recycling. This version of Waialae plays the same as Pebble Beach, has the same awkward caddie FMV, with similar controls and menuing; it might as well be an expansion pack for that earlier game. I’ve devoted too much time to talking about these True Golf games. They’re all bad and the only one that’s bad in an interesting way is Wicked 18, which we will see later on the 3DO.
With all that nothing being said, here are some fun facts about the Waialae golf course. It was created in 1927 and has been a staple of the PGA Tour as some variation of Hawaiian Open for as long as the PGA Tour has existed. The first winner of the Hawaiian Open was named Gay Brewer, demonstrating that people really don’t name their kids like they used to and maybe we’ve lost something along the way. Also, this course was the site of the first PGA Tour win by a Japanese golfer in 1983. That golfer is Isao Aoki and he seems to be considered as the second greatest Japanese golfer of all time. If Waialae is especially popular among Japanese golf enthusiasts, then this fact could be considered as either a cause or effect. Finally, Craig Stadler came runner-up at the 1985 and 1987 Hawaiian Opens, a detail I include for no particular reason.
Who Shot Johnny Rock?
Developer: American Laser Games
Publisher: American Laser Games
Release Date: 1994
Time to A Bad Mid-Atlantic Accent: 15 Minutes
I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of the 3DO’s wrath.
It hath led me, brought me into darkness, but not into light.
Surely against me is it turned, it turneth its hand against me all day.
My flesh and skin hath it made old; it hath broken my bones.
It hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail.
It hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.
It hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: it hath made my chain heavy.
When I cry and shout, it shutteth out my prayer.
Anyway, whenever I think Light Gun Shooters from American Laser Games couldn’t become any more unplayable, the floor drops out from under me. Who Shot Johnny Rock? reaches a new low by being a bad port of the Sega CD version instead a straight bad port of the Arcade game. This has the slowest cursor, worst hitboxes, worst timing windows, and worst technical performance of all of these things. The audio and video feel like they took that compressed 16-bit version, poorly decompressed it, and then recompressed it again for the 3DO. While the game’s subject matter, 1920’s gangster pastiche, is inoffensive by ALG standards, it’s still a torturous experience. Like this studio’s other games, the only positive thing to say about it is that the hired stuntmen got a few good stunts out of this to add to their demo reels.
I think this is the last ALG game…. I pray to every god that this is the last ALG game.
World Cup Golf
Developer: Arc Developments
Publisher: U.S. Gold
Release Date: 1994
Time to Finding the Flag: 35 Minutes
We last encountered World Cup Golf two years ago with the PS1 and Saturn ports. That was relatively early in this journey and has served as a memorable lowlight. The PS1 version is still sitting at the bottom of that console’s ranking, where it rightfully belongs. Yet, as you have seen above, we’ve been through some miserable experiences and learned the true meaning of pain in the time since those reviews. While I agree with my earlier assessments, I’ve grown more forgiving towards games that are basically playable and not deranged reactionary canards. My bar has been lowered. It also helps that the 3DO version has turned out to be the real version of this thing.
You see, those later ports are the “Professional Edition”, meaning that they were updated from the original release. Updating the game makes sense on its face since the PS1 and Saturn are real consoles, while the 3DO isn’t. That reasoning goes horribly wrong because those port jobs fundamentally destabilized the game engine, disorganized the menus, and broke vital gameplay mechanics in ways that made the results into unplayable horrors. Here’s the dark secret about this game: it’s originally a DOS game that was hastily ported to CD-based consoles. As such, the gameplay revolves around moving an onscreen cursor around to open various submenus which give precise control over aiming, stance, spin, power, clubs, and everything else. You’re supposed to play this using literal windows, and it basically works as such.
Now, the presentation is still screwy. It’s pretty clear that the different screens are pre-rendered and will pull up the image closest to where the ball is, leading to your golfer being positioned anywhere on any given screen and zero sense of distance or effect for the ball when it’s in the air. Yet, I can see the idea of creating a 3D golf course using a bunch of prerendered views as worth trying during the wild west of multimedia PC gaming in the wake of Myst. While the idea didn’t pan out, as long as the game is playable you get a mostly inoffensive conceptual dead-end. The lack of effort in this initial 3DO port turns out to be this game’s saving grace, as the functional DOS controls are maintained, just at a slower pace.
The problems seem to have occurred when Arc tried updating this thing to use genuine 3D courses, console-style menus, controlpad-based gameplay. The technical changes were a disaster, leading to 10x the load times as on 3DO and half the frame rate. Meanwhile the removal of the cursor completely broke everything else. The Professional Edition might be the most catastrophic console-to-console port job of all time. So, congratulations to Arc Developments for making it into the history books with that one.
Discovering the truth behind World Cup Golf has called some of my own deep-seated assumptions into question and might singlehandedly justify looking through the 3DO catalog as context for the PS1. But that also means this isn’t anywhere near the worst game I’ve ever played, while at the same time being unambiguously bad and misguided. Life’s funny like that sometimes.
We’ve done it. We covered the 3DO through to the end of 1994. But guess what? We’re only 55% of the way through the catalog. The ride’s only halfway done. The doors are locked, and you can’t leave. We’re going to update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and you’re going to like it.
1. Guardian War
…
21. Theme Park
50. Waialae Country Club
55. World Cup Golf
59. VR Stalker
71. Who Shot Johnny Rock?
…
73. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
Next time we’re going to get sporty with the PS1 as we look at the late September 1996 releases of MLB Pennant Race, Myst, NHL PowerPlay ’96, PGA Tour 97, and Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Pinball.
There isn’t a next 3DO installment. Instead, the next time we talk about this blighted console it will be as part of the 1994 Round-Up, where we’ll look over what the 3DO and Jaguar were able to accomplish with their one-year head start in the fifth generation console race. Spoiler: they didn’t do much.
You can find me streaming sometimes over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. Those streams have us looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I have going on, such as my effort to play through every PS1 JRPG.
I also randomly appear like a cryptid over on the Deep Listens podcast network. Be sure to check out their podcasts about obscure RPGs, real video games, anime you didn’t watch as a child, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
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