An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Last time with the 3DO, the 1994 release list went out with a whimper when we looked at Theme Park, VR Stalker, Waialae Country Club, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, and World Cup Golf.
Previously on the PS1, we drove through late September ’96 with Project Overkill, Ridge Racer Revolution, Casper, Burning Road, and NASCAR Racing.
We’re now going to be good sports about this and continue going through the end of September with MLB Pennant Race, Myst, NHL Powerplay ’96, PGA Tour 97, and Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Battle Pinball.
**This post was originally published on 4/9/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
MLB Pennant Race
Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America
Publisher: SCEA
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Beaning Barry Bonds: 30 Minutes
It’s been a few installments since we’ve had to deal with a Baseball game, and for good reason. The 1996 MLB regular season ran from the beginning of April to the end of September, meaning any Baseball game looking for relevancy would have wanted to come out during the first half of the season from April to June. Of the four previous Baseball games released in 1996, two were in April, one in June, and one latecomer in July. Unless you name your game after the World Series you aren’t going to get much interest when releasing one of these in the Fall, since most potential customers would want to buy a sports game in anticipation of an upcoming season instead of to relitigate a closing one. That’s why Madden is traditionally an August franchise. Yet here we are at the end of September the ’96 with MLB Pennant Race.
At some point I’ll need to trawl back through my previous sports games reviews to see if and when I explained what any given sport is or how games representing those sports tend to play so that I can just link back to those posts whenever we encounter one. That’s a problem for future me. For now, we get to take one last look at the 1996 MLB season with the most okay-est mechanics and presentation we’ve yet seen from a Baseball game. The main innovations here are that the controls are comprehensible by human beings and pitching involves aiming at different parts of the batting box, adding a much-needed additional layer of mechanical depth. Or it would be if the baseball engine under the hood were up to the task. This thing turns the player into every irate baseball fan by getting you to yell at the umps for making so many bad and weird calls. On top of that, fielding still sucks, and the physics feel off enough to dampen any fun to be had. You could call the experience a mixed bag; real 6/10 energy.
Otherwise, it looks and sounds passable enough. It has all the licensing and game options you would want, though apparently, they used the rosters and stats from the 1995 MLB season, which would have been a fatal flaw at the time but is just funny now. That goes back to why this seems to have been released so late. This was Sony’s first in-house Baseball game which was supposed to have come out in the PS1 launch window. Seemingly, development went as badly as possible, leading to a full year delay. The middling experience, messy development, and situational irrelevance made this game dead on arrival and almost immediately forgotten. Yet, Sony still wanted their own line of sports games, so they got back on that horse and kept churning these out such that the Pennant Race games eventually turned into the 989 Sports MLB series and then MLB The Show, which as of now is the only Baseball game series left standing. I guess the lesson is that when you fail, keep trying until you can use your unlimited capital to secure a monopoly.
Myst
Developer: Cyan Worlds
Publisher: Psygnosis
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Channeling My Wood If You Know What I Mean: 20 Minutes
I’m not going to explain Myst. I’ve played something like 3 or 4 distinct versions of this game throughout my lifetime. You’ve likely played it, or seen it played, or know what it is already. It’s frickin’ Myst, one of the most important and influential video games ever made, up there with Pong, Super Mario Bros and Doom. Also, if you’re an asshole like me you could even say it was the first good Adventure game ever made.
Just like the last time we saw this game on Saturn, the PS1 release is a straight port of the original version with an abysmally slow d-pad cursor. The only difference I could spot, and maybe this is just self-deception, is that this PS1 port has even slower scene transitions than the Saturn release from the year before. Like, there are significant load times after each click such that this thing is almost unplayable. Not to mention that Myst had been out for so long by this point that the multimedia game gold rush it started was already dying out. Also, Riven: The Sequel to Myst is only a year away from release by now, and this port has all the feel of a quick and perfunctory beating of a dead horse. But maybe that kind of strong language should be saved for the lower quality Myst ports that we have yet to encounter.
NHL PowerPlay ’96
Developer: Radical Entertainment
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Committing Crimes Against Canada: 30 Minutes
Since we’ve already looked at one underwhelming sports game, how about we add a second one. The first Hockey game of the season comes to us from the random matchup of Radical Entertainment and Virgin Interactive. I say that because Radical, who would eventually go on to develop games you’ve played or heard of, was just breaking out of their early port house and licensed game mercenary phase and Virgin was in the middle of attempting to break into the console market after spending the early 90’s on multimedia publishing, mainly in Europe. Part of that effort seems to have involved making a play at the sports market, going up against EA, Sony, and Acclaim. They started this effort with Radical’s next gen Hockey game for some reason.
Not that hockey exists, but it’s a popular enough fictional sport, existing only in movies and video games, to get lumped in with real stuff like football, the other football, basketball, and baseball. The developers of this game were able to do enough business to get the canonical teams and players of the time and put in enough modes to make this into a complete package. Enough work also went into the graphics, menus, and sound design to make it appear entirely respectable. Yet how does it handle? Badly. We only have two other Hockey games to compare it against, Sony’s NHL FaceOff, which is unambiguously good, and Sega’s NHL All-Star Hockey, which is unambiguously poor. Powerplay falls in between the two, but closer to the bottom end of the comparison.
The fatal flaw with this game is that the camera is zoomed all the way in and is overly twitchy. I don’t easily get motion sick from games, but I can’t make it through a full match in this thing. There’s also little onscreen indication as to where the puck is at any moment, and the controls for switching players ain’t great. This all leaves the experience feeling extremely messy and imprecise. The basic idea of hockey being a kind of cold soccer that moves as fast as basketball is compelling, but it seems to have been hard to capture that concept in video game form, with only a few developers figuring it out. It’s a shame that this game fails to properly come together at the point where the user gets involved. Still, I can’t say I expected anything coming in, and there would only be one follow-up to this thing in ’97 before Radical moved on and Virgin abandoned its sports publishing misadventure.
PGA Tour 97
Developer: EA Sports
Publisher: EA Sports
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Landing In The Bunker: 30 Minutes
Now this is a game where I did have some expectations coming in, and I’m still having trouble processing what happened here. Let’s start where we left off the previous year with PGA Tour 96, I was hard on it then, because it’s an experiential downgrade compared to the best golfing available on 8- and 16-bit platforms, but in the intervening time I’ve softened on it. You don’t need to look any further than the previous 3DO post to figure out why I’ve changed opinion. From that base, PGA Tour 97 takes two steps forward and 2.5 steps back, which is a frustrating place to end up.
On a purely surface level, this year’s game has four more golfers, a simplified menu, same number of courses, additional sound design, and some UI tweaks. That’s probably enough for an annual franchise in the mid-90’s, but still only just whelming given the existence of Tecmo World Golf (or VR Golf ’97 according to contemporary reviewers but I don’t trust them) and in all the important ways, it feels like a step back from the previous year. The most notable issue is that the shot bar has somehow been made even worse, being made smaller and slightly less responsive. Though the biggest problem is that whatever they did to overhaul the game engine makes the ball move like it’s on some alien planet. Nothing looks right or feels right. It’s not World Cup Golf bad, but it trends in that direction. I’m having a hard time expressing just how the gameplay feels off, but maybe I’ll be able to identify it when I get to the Saturn version.
Saban’s Power Rangers Zeo™ Full Tilt Battle Pinball
Developer: Kaze
Publisher: Bandai
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Its Morphin’ Time: 30 Minutes
Pinball games have tended to be second-quintile experiences so far, and licensed games have a well-earned reputation, so I went into this expecting nothing. Somehow, against all odds, this is by far the most interesting game we’ve seen this entry.
Now, I have little affinity for the Power Rangers franchise. I’m pretty sure I watched some amount of the first few seasons when I was very young, and I have vague memories of seeing one of the movies in theaters, which might have been the second one. Combine that with my previously established distaste for pinball, and I probably should hate this game. But here’s the thing, Kaze went and did the thing that I always complain about with pinball games, they used the medium to do something with the experience that you wouldn’t be able to get out of a physical board.
The most immediate departure from previous pinball games is that this thing features something pretending to be a story mode. This involves seeing highly compressed clips from the show and playing through five sets of stages in any order with each set containing two or three boards. Each of those boards has some set of objectives while also containing MoBs you can bounce the ball off of, wacky stage effects, boss fights, and even hidden Megazord summons. Cumulatively, this stuff goes beyond what you would get out of a physical pinball machine, and with a total of like twelve boards it makes for a more compelling package than the small collections we’ve seen so far.
The downsides come in the form of the boards themselves being small and uninteresting when considered on their own, which fits with what we know from Kaze’s prior work, while at the same time being a visual mess. Also, other than the novelty of the main mode there isn’t much else to write home about, and I can’t imagine any of the tenuous Power Ranger branding would have kept fans happy. I mean, just looking at the title, this screams soulless cash-grab. What little I can find from contemporary reviewers is far less charitable than I am, so maybe there was some well-known story-based pinball game on PCs or something that makes this look like old hat, though I doubt it. As far as I’m concerned, the novel use of pinball gameplay and slightly unhinged brand misuse endear this thing to me at a level above what it deserves, and that’s what really counts.
Yeah, that was largely mediocre, but the cruft has to go somewhere on the calendar. We’re going to be in for a more exciting time in the next installment, so look forward to that as we update the Ranking of All PS1 Games.
1. Air Combat
…
33. Saban’s Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Battle Pinball
54. PGA Tour 97
67. MLB Pennant Race
73. NHL Powerplay ’96
74. Myst
…
141. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
We’re doing a bit of a switcharoo with the next couple of posts, so next time we’ll be going through our final batch of September ’96 PS1 games as we fight our way through Street Fighter Alpha 2, Time Commando, Tobal No. 1, and Tokyo Highway Battle.
After that we’ll go through our Round-Up of the year 1994, seeing how the fortunes of the 3DO and Jaguar rose a little and fell a lot as the 32-bit era really kicked off.
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 for Millenials, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
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