An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Previously, we looked at our penultimate batch of September ’96 PS1 games with MLB Pennant Race, Myst, NHL Powerplay ’96, PGA Tour 97, and Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Battle Pinball.
We’ve now finally reached the end of September, and thus the end of our current PS1 segment, with one last batch of hot bangers: Street Fighter Alpha 2, Time Commando, Tobal No. 1, and Tokyo Highway Battle.
**This post was originally published on 5/15/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Maining Dan: 45 Minutes
I could have sworn I made a timeline of post-Street Fighter II Capcom Fighting games, but I can’t find it anywhere. I know that I at least explained the interplay between all of these later CP System II games. As a refresher, after the Street Fighter II well ran dry, they branched out with the SF Alpha, Darkstalkers, and Marvel series experimenting with the finer nuts and bolts of their base 2D Fighting mechanics. The different series had overlapping releases where they added, removed, switched around, and calibrated all kinds of highly technical mechanics while keeping things visually interesting and at least somewhat playable for beginners. So far, we’ve seen home ports of the first SF Alpha, Children of the Atom, and the first two Darkstalker games totaling out to like five releases, not including the 3DO port of Super Turbo. The thing with all these CPSII ports is that they look great, sound great, have dialed in performance, and maintain the mechanical grognardery of their original releases. Street Fighter Alpha 2 is no different.
From what I can discern, this game adds five characters on top of the previous roster, Zangief and Dhalism from SFII, Gen from SFI, Rolento from Final Fight for some reason, and everyone’s favorite fangirl Sakura in her first appearance. Mechanically, it’s mostly the same as the last one, except with an overhauled chain combo system, whatever the hell that is. The mechanics being changed from game to game are several orders of magnitude above my head, and you gotta be at least tangentially involved with the fighting game scene to tell the difference. I would say that was the Achille’s Heel of this era of 2D Fighters, but contemporary reviews only just complained about these not being in 3D, so what do I know.
Looking through some of those contemporary reviews, you can tell those guys still maintained a respect for the CP System II, but there’s a throughline of dismissiveness about 2D fighters as a genre. I’ve been having a near impossible time putting myself into the mindset of looking at these games and stuff VFII and thinking the latter are better looking. I’ll get deeper into the topic eventually, but it feels insane to think that guys would look at Lara Croft in the first Tomb Raider and go, “aw yeah, triangles”, whereas Street Fighter Alpha, not even a horny game, had all that care put into Chun-Li’s animation; this is obviously more appealing than anything that could’ve been done with basic polygons…what were we talking about again? Anyway, these games are the best-looking stuff of the time, and I can’t be convinced otherwise.
I’ll find something more interesting to talk about when the Saturn release comes around. For now, let’s go look at the horrors that can be wrought by misusing an SGI workstation.
Time Commando
Developer: Adeline Software
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Ravaged By A Bear: 25 Minutes
I want to set something straight right off the bat. The developer is labelled as Adeline Software, but that was just a subsidiary team of Delphine Software who seemed to have specialized in messing with pre-rendered 3D. That’s right, it’s these fuckers again. This sub-studio seems to have been set up as a kind of stopgap when Delphine was flailing from the Flashback well running dry and they were trying to figure out polygonal 3D. I’ll save why they thought this was a good idea until the end. For now, Time Commando was supposed to be a quick-and-dirty release for the 1995 holidays on PCs in Europe, which was a target they missed by several months; and this North American PS1 port looks to have been the last stop in the release timeline. Though, none of this gets into what this game even is, so I guess I have to talk about that now.
Actually, I played it for a while then watched a full playthrough and I’m still not sure what this is supposed to be. An extremely linear Bioforge? Flashback with tank controls? Pac-land with pointy sticks? Time Commando defies both easy classification and good taste, which I guess is how we know it’s French. The time travel premise is more overwrought than necessary in a way reminiscent of bottom-feeders like Criticom, Microcosm, or Defcon 5 with the gist here being that you play as a time travel man who has to travel through time to different eras of history in order to debug a sabotaged time machine.
Each level has the player move down a linear, pre-rendered path with fixed camera angles and janky tank controls. You gain weapons and fight enemies from those time periods, because everything you meet wants to kill you on sight. The way this game uses pre-rendered environments and fixed cameras doesn’t do the action any favors, though the awkward animations and hitboxes are the real fatal flaw here. The wrongness of it all is difficult to articulate. The levels are linear like a 2D Delphine game, the character moves like Alone in the Dark, and the combat janks like a Bioforge knock-off. It’s such an innately cursed combination of mechanics and technology that I must give some grudging respect for the sheer gall of releasing it on a console.
I personally made it to the boss fight for the first, caveman themed, level before losing patience, but the later levels aren’t going to escape scrutiny just because I don’t want to walk all the way back to that bear. With French media, it’s a coin flip as to whether any given work contains shockingly casual racism or active anti-racism. Since I’m still talking about Time Commando, you can take a guess which side of the coin it lands on. The Roman and Medieval Europe levels are what they are, and the “Medieval Japan” level is exactly what you’d cynically imagine. Of note are the “Conquistador” level where you slaughter both Spaniards and Aztecs indiscriminately and “Wild West” where you spend more time dealing with native Americans than anything else. The depictions of non-European peoples in those levels is dubious at best, and this game shouldn’t get away with it just because only lunatics make it past the first two levels.
I’ve been burying the main detail about this game that should explain everything. Adeline Software seems to have been established with the express purpose of being under the semi-independent direction of Frédérick Raynal, who is otherwise known as the Alone in the Dark guy. Apparently, he left Infogrames around the time of Alone in the Dark 2 and started up with Delphine to have his own team and work on his own projects, which wound up just being the Little Big Adventure games, and no I hadn’t heard of those either. Time Commando was a contractually obligated release that Raynal’s team had to crank out because they were taking too long on a game they actually cared about. Solely because of the pedigree, this thing ends up as an obscure footnote in a slightly less obscure story instead of as completely forgotten rubbish like it deserves.
Tobal No. 1
Developer: Dream Factory
Publisher: SCEA
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Getting Norked: 40 Minutes
While we’re on the note of weird, obscure footnotes, let’s talk about Tobal No. 1. I can call Tobal that, right? There isn’t some huge Tobal fan community who’ll shank me for disrespecting it? Like, I’m pretty sure no one outside of Japan cares about this series, and even then, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of people who’ll throw down for Tobal. Yet I’ve heard the name before, and if you’re the kind of person who would read this blog then you likely have as well. This feels like one of those games that’s teetering on the edge of being forgotten.
I buried the lede again. Tobal No. 1 is a 3D Fighting game from Square. It doesn’t say Squaresoft up in the game info, but Dream Factory was a subsidiary they spun up to make Fighting games. It wasn’t as bad of an idea as it seems now, since the core team looks to have been pulled from former Sega and Namco devs, which is who you would want if you were spinning up a 3D Fighting game studio. Even with that pedigree, this is still a Square game, so Tobal is also a weird dungeon crawling RPG.
The game has a standard throw-away arcade ladder mode where you can play as any of the ISO standard eight starting characters to a generic ending. The plot doesn’t matter, don’t look it up. No, stop it, I said don’t look it up, it truly does not matter. The real meat of the game is in the “Quest Mode”, which is a kind of run based mode with multiple dungeons that increase in length and complexity. This mode plays like a very simple third-person brawler with Fighting game boss interludes. Since they aren’t super combat heavy, the dungeons are filled with the kinds of traps and key puzzles you would expect from a partially baked dungeon crawler. The notable aspects are that 1) the dungeons use fully polygonal environments, with somewhat less disastrous results than the earlier King’s Field, 2) the controls are unhinged, and most importantly, 3) THIS IS A FIGHTING WHAT WERE THESE CRACKED NUTJOBS THINKING. While that last part is unanswerable without much deeper research, I should talk about the controls, because that’s where we can answer why this game is on the verge of being completely forgotten.
For the part where this is a Fighting game, it’s on the lower end. It doesn’t play with Virtua Fighter‘s technical acumen, Tekken‘s balance of depth and playability, and it didn’t have Toshinden‘s early entrant advantage. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s extremely simple, and I can’t imagine there would be any multiplayer meta that anyone would have latched onto. Maybe that was never the point, it’s a Fighting Dungeon Crawler best enjoyed alone. Though the 3rd-person movement in those dungeons feels worse than you would imagine and I’m guessing the culprit comes from the need to create an engine that could accommodate both gameplay types. I highly recommend watching someone play this thing (oh look there’s a video embed below), just so that you can see it for yourself.
Oh, also, Akira Toriyama did the initial character sketches, and a golden robo-Toriyama is an unlockable character. That might be the main selling point for Tobal these days, though back at its initial release the main selling point was the pack-in Final Fantasy VII demo…I might have buried the lede on that part as well. This game was the Crackdown of its day, selling almost a million copies in Japan mostly for the demo. It moved less than 100,000 copies in North America, because Final Fantasy VII had not yet become Final Fantasy VII in the American popular imagination. It still reviewed well enough and received a sequel in ’97 which was never localized outside Japan because of the whole less-than-100k-copies thing. We’ll eventually see Dream Factory again when they put out Ehrgeiz, which if you know, you know.
If you noticed I didn’t state much of an opinion as to the quality of this game, and that’s because I’m still completely baffled by the experience. I rate it ??/10.
Tokyo Highway Battle
Developer: Genki
Publisher: Jaleco
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Falling Before The Drift King: 6 Hours
I have a confession to make; I’m a sucker for this very specific kind of nonsense. I’m not even a huge fan of the Street Racing subgenre as a whole. The Need for Speed games never did that much for me, and there were only two genuinely great Burnout games by my estimation. Yet, for whatever reason, Genki’s brand of B-tier street racing gets to me. I’m not a complete expert on the Shutoko Battle franchise, of which Tokyo Highway Battle is either the third or fourth entry depending on how you count them, though give me some time and I’ll get there. I don’t make any claims about the quality of these games, just that they’re my thing.
Getting to the topic of Tokyo Highway Battle, it’s basically an arcade-style Racing game with three tracks and seven AI opponents, two per track with a final boss you can race across any of the tracks. You start off with three car choices and unlock three more by beating the first three opponents. What sets this apart from something like The Need for Speed is that each track is a section of busy public highway, there’s a heavy emphasis on drifting, and a whole car upgrade system. Those concepts made up the core of the Shutoko Battle games on the Super Famicom, though this is the first time one of these would have been seen outside Japan.
This amount of content should last less than two hours with a difficulty curve similar to the other arcade racers we’ve seen, but that’s where Genki’s ideas around progression come in. You start with the ability to do any of the first three races, but you’re gonna lose all of them with the initial setup. You earn upgrade currency by attempting races, a moderate amount for losing a race and a large amount for winning one. It takes some grinding for upgrades and practice to beat the first three opponents, after which you unlock the next set. You’re not going to get far with any of those until you change to one of the new cars and upgrade it from scratch with even more grinding. There are ways to be smart about interacting with the shockingly large number of upgrade options that can help speed up this process, but even then, the main campaign is several times longer than any other arcade racing game we’ve seen.
In the end, it still demands the same level of mechanical mastery as something like the final boss in Ridge Racer, with the added caveat of needing to have a fully upgraded car. Does that make it a better or worse way to go about things? I don’t know, and I’ll happily play both. Though, I can say for certain that the actual driving in Tokyo Highway Battle does not stand up to scrutiny. It’s not as janky as High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge, but it’s in the same conversation. While the car handling is playable, it errs too far into the realistic side of things, since drifting is only better than taking corners under traction for a handful of turns in the entire game. That’s not great since drifting is the whole schtick with this series, so much so that the early games in the franchise use the name and likeness of Keiichi frickin’ Tsuchiya. He’s literally the final boss in this game and if you beat him, you get an FMV video where he congratulates you before the credits. This is a drifting game where drifting is sub-optimal 95% of the time.
On top of the primary existential issue, the way collision and the AI interact is completely borked. Hitting anything slows you down by a set percentage for every unit of time you’re in contact. This does not apply to the opponent car. Any aggressive driving by you or the AI will punish you and but not the AI. Also, the civilian traffic likes to hang out in the middle of the braking line for turns, which punishes the player more than the opponent. Then there’s the odd way the game handles the difference in player and opponent car quality. If your lowest possible lap time with any given set-up is within some hidden window, the opponent AI will keep within a few seconds of you no matter what. If you somehow get ahead, they’ll rubberband back in front but won’t run away from you. If your time is above that window the opponent will just fly off into the distance, and if you’re under that window the game will let you fly off into the distance. Yet, you spend most of your time within that window, where it feels like the opponent car could leave you behind but is toying with you instead. When all of this is combined with the already high difficulty of the races, it makes the whole thing feel unfair. I imagine most people bounce off this game because of that.
Even I didn’t hit credits in my time with it. I made it all the way to the Drift King himself with a maxed-out car and realized I had no choice but to relearn the tracks to incorporate the squirrely drift mechanic, do completely immaculate runs, and get lucky with traffic placement. That’s some hidden super boss nonsense; but I guess if you go after the Drift King, you best not miss.
I can’t decide whether this game is good. It’s fucked, but also the fullest package we’ve seen from an arcade Racing game. It’s also a step back in a few ways from the first two Shutoko Battle games that were on the Super Famicom, with less of a story mode and fewer tracks. Like, this would be an unquestionable top five game if it wasn’t so hateful. But it is extremely hateful on a mechanical level, while otherwise not presenting itself as such. I don’t know, man. If you’re sick like me go play Tokyo Highway Battle, it’s an interesting oddity as a precursor to Tokyo Xtreme Racer.
And that’s it. Through strenuous effort, we’ve fought our way up from the bottom to slightly above the bottom. Let’s update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and move on to the next part of our insane misadventure.
1. Air Combat
…
14. Tokyo Highway Battle
22. Street Fighter Alpha 2
53. Tobal No. 1
111. Time Commando
…
145. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time, I’ll deliver on the long delayed 1994 Round-Up, in which we will wallow like hogs in the misguided efforts of the 3DO and Jaguar in their first year.
Afterwards, we’re switching gears over to the Sega Saturn, which still totally existed during the third quarter of 1996 and, if you believe Sega, had worthwhile experiences on offer. So, we’re winding the clock back to July by looking at the releases of NHL Powerplay ’96, Galaxy Fight, DecAthlete, and The Legend of Oasis.
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.
Also, I’m on Bluesky now because I’ve convinced myself that I need to learn self-promotion.
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, old anime, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
Leave a comment