An explanation of what I’m doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time, we looked back at the misfortunes of the 3DO and Atari Jaguar in 1994.
When we were last with the Saturn, we closed out June 1996 looking at Shockwave Assault, Shining Wisdom, Golden Axe: The Duel, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and Worms.
We now pick up the baton from our past selves as we continue into July ’96 with NHL Powerplay ’96, Galaxy Fight, DecAthlete, and Legend of Oasis.
**This post was originally published on 6/25/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
NHL Powerplay ’96
Developer: Radical Entertainment
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Release Date: 7/2/1996
Time to Skating On Thin Ice: 45 Minutes
We last saw this game not too long ago in Part 036 of our PS1 series. I was pretty down on it then while correctly pegging it as the most mediocre of the three Hockey games we’ve seen so far in this project. This Saturn version is essentially the exact same as the PS1 release, except the polygons have extra vertices here, I guess. On reevaluation, I didn’t give Powerplay enough credit for being a full featured sports game for its time. It has single game, multiplayer, season, and international tournament modes which you would want from a winter-themed Soccer game. A lot of the also-ran sports games we’ve seen crapped out on these systems have only had the most barebones feature sets, so I do have to give Virgin credit for making a serious effort at this.
In addition, after spending more time with gameplay, I can say that this is still a mediocre experience. It’s still hard to visually parse what’s going on from moment to moment and the controls have some real ice physics on them, if you know what I mean. You can very quickly see the limits of the AI; though for the 90’s the quality of sports game AI can be measured in how long until you see it break, which is like 10 minutes in this case. The only other thing to note is the presence of six-player multiplayer, which seems like it would be a mess, and because it requires six Saturn controllers and a multitap, that mode has likely only been played like twice ever.
The last piece of business is a programming note. Observant readers, if they exist, will notice that I have the PS1 version of Powerplay as releasing on 9/30 and this Saturn version on 7/2. That PS1 date makes a lot of sense because that would have put the game on shelves less than a week before the start of the NHL season, while this Saturn date would have put the game out right in the doldrums of the off-season. It’s also weird for a Saturn version to be released three months before the PS1. It could have happened, but I’m not confident in these dates. So, when it comes to this game’s release schedule, I recommend choosing whatever reality makes you the happiest.
Galaxy Fight
Developer: Santaclaus
Publisher: Sunsoft
Release Date: 7/3/1996
Time to Being A Mixed Up Guy With A Mental Disease: 45 Minutes
There’s an entire universe of forgotten C+/B- tier Fighting games from the mid-to-late 90’s that I don’t have the bandwidth to find, contextualize, and understand. I feel like I’m seeing a lot of these during this project but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Galaxy Fight is an obscure game, but even then, it’s only at the waterline. This thing is a Sunsoft produced 2D Fighting game from 1995 that made a moderately small amount of money in arcades before getting basic console ports in ’96. Sunsoft isn’t particularly remembered for their fighting games, and it didn’t help they were late to the party, with their first one releasing in 1994. Of the four 2D Fighters they made in the era, Galaxy Fight might actually be the least obscure, since it had a Neo Geo CD release and has thus gotten swept up in various Neo Geo collections and re-releases over the years. Anyway, this is a video game that’s supposed to be played so let’s look at that.
And look at it we shall do, not just because of the obligatory leather dominatrix character either. The sprites and animations are as well-defined and smooth as you’d want from this era of 2D Fighters. The clean silhouettes and legible animations, along with the good-yet-occasionally-bizarre soundtrack, demonstrate a baseline artistic competence in a way that reminds me of Dark Legend. Not that the two games have any details in common, just that they inhabit the same tier of well-produced and forgettable Fighting games. For Galaxy Fight, I think the intended style is best described as “imagine if Criticom were good”, which might be meaner towards this game than I intend. Still, the audiovisual experience basically works, with any faults being its use of certain, uh, outdated character tropes that were in fashion at the time.
Then we come to the part where we must play the thing. This is a three-button fighter with a fourth dedicated taunt button. Those three buttons correspond to attack power, with punching and kicking being determined by some kind of contextual whatever when you do the inputs. It has basic combo inputs shared for all characters, none of which I got to work right. Without any meters or other such nonsense, it seems mechanically barebones for the time, which puts it pretty close to my level. If there’s one thing this game might be known for, it’s the lack of side boundaries; you can backstep or dash to the left or right of the screen forever. I don’t notice much practical effect when playing at my level, but it seems to have thrown some reviewers through a loop at the time.
This was clearly meant to be a multiplayer-first game since it does the Mortal Kombat thing of brutalizing you in the singleplayer ladder. Additionally, like MK, the difficulty settings do nothing. This also looks a lot like a straight arcade conversion with nothing else going for it, though I guess it seems to have unlimited continues. It’s a barebones package, released right on the cusp of Fighting games no longer having the leeway to get away with that. Also, there’s just something inherently perverse about a four button Fighting game getting a Saturn release, but that might just be me. Galaxy Fight further drives home the idea that publishers were finding out the hard way that the mid-90’s did not have room for 2D Fighting games not made by Capcom or SNK, regardless of any qualities they may have had.
DecAthlete
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 7/17/1996
Time to Did Not Qualify: 45 Minutes
In another reminder that this is indeed the Summer of 1996, we have a Track & Field game. The last one of these we saw was Olympic Summer Games on the PS1 in June ’96 from U.S. Gold, which is a truly abysmal video game. Now, somehow, we get the Sega Sports’ attempt at this subgenre. Well, a console port of that attempt. Earlier in 1996, one of the teams working in Sega’s arcade business had the idea of pumping out a straightforward Track and Field game to cash in on the Olympics. DecAthlete would have been a cheap production, using their lower-end ST-V board. The game didn’t need that many polygonal models and a layer of typical Sega arcade panache was all it took to make it look and sound decent for the time.
As far as being an arcade game, it only used two buttons and a joystick, was mostly easy to play, and had all the hooks it needed to get yen out of your pocket. Since the premise of the game is based around the decathlon, there are ten events, none of which take more than a couple of minutes to complete, so anyone who played the machine would have gotten about twenty minutes of entertainment and then been done. That’s a solid proposition for an arcade machine that only was supposed to have a few months lifespan. But then they ported it to the Saturn, because they gotta fill those shelves with something.
With those ten events and a small handful of game modes, there really isn’t much going on in this home version. It also comes across as a particularly lazy port, since they didn’t even change the onscreen instructions from the arcade layout. The events themselves are somewhat of a mixed bag, with the high jump and pole vault in particular being just to the left of impossible when relying only on the information given. Otherwise, this thing was positively cited in its time for being noticeably less mashy than other games in this genre, which is something. Yet, it’s still a barebones one of these and there isn’t really any reason to play it beyond Sega first-party completionism. Look, I’m not going to write a thesis on a frickin’ Track & Field game, so this is all you get.
Legend of Oasis
Developer: Ancient
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 7/31/1996
Time to The Most Boring Yuzo Koshiro Soundtrack: 55 Minutes
How does everyone feel about middling Zelda clones? I say this because I have walked onto the stage at an open mic night without any material, and now I’m just trying to do five minutes of crowd work. The bar falls dead silent. No one feels anything about middling Zelda clones. I’m dying up here.
Zelda knockoffs have never really had any periods of predominance in the decades since The Legend of Zelda in ’87, but every system has at least a handful. I want to say this was especially the case on Sega platforms, but the vast majority of these things are on Steam, with anything else being a distant second. Still, Sega consoles saw their share of games trying to be the Zelda for kids who couldn’t play Zelda, with one of the least bad being 1994’s Beyond Oasis for the Genesis. It was a relatively straightforward little game slapped together by Ancient, which is Yuzo Koshiro’s game studio, which met with moderate success among those unable to own Link to the Past.
A sequel to that game was immediately put in production, with an original target of releasing on the 32X, because, again, every system needs at least one Zelda clone. Yet, Ancient seems to have switched over to the Saturn almost immediately, which was undeniably a better choice. In the end, Sonic! Software Planning’s own Zelda clone, Shining Wisdom, wound up beating Legend of Oasis to market by about a month, which I imagine didn’t help what the sales for either. As far as comparing the two, Oasis is a much more mechanically coherent and artistically competent game, which ironically makes it far less memorable. I had a lot to say about Shining Wisdom just off of how unhinged that thing is on every level. Legend of Oasis runs fine, moves fine, has functional combat, kinda bad platforming, and mediocre dungeon puzzles. It also looks notably better than its competition, with huge, well drawn sprites. It almost reminds me of Astal in that way. This game also makes more use of CD Quality Audio™, which you would expect from a frickin’ Yuzo Koshiro game, and yet this soundtrack is sedate and basic without anything going for it.
There’s also a plot, involving going to elemental temples to unlock magic through passing spirit trials and stopping some bad guy from doing bad stuff. It’s as basic as you can get and not enough to propel anyone through a game that is otherwise kind of uninteresting. The main gimmick with the combat is the use of directional inputs with the one attack button to do combo moves, a feature brought over from the previous game. Yet, most common enemies can be easily stun-locked or juked around. The platforming and puzzles also aren’t great, which just leaves those big, beautiful sprites as the one selling point.
These 3/5 type of games give me the most anxiety, because unless there’s some compelling developer history, I end up grasping for anything to write about. In this case, like, the Revenge of Shinobi soundtrack fucks raw, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything going on here. Anyway, it looks like my five minutes are up and the crowd are throwing empty beer bottles at me. I’ll be here all week, folks.
We’re closing in on the 100th Saturn game (Creature Shock doesn’t count), which means it’s time to move this old list to a Google sheet. So, for the last time with the Giant Bomb list, let’s update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
36. Galaxy Fight
39. Legend of Oasis
44. NHL PowerPlay ’96
65. DecAthlete
…
99. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Next week we’ll leap (like a bullfrog) over to the Atari Jaguar in the early months of 1995 to look at Syndicate, Troy Aikman NFL Football, Theme Park, and Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls.
After that we’re coming back to the Saturn to look at our first batch of August ’96 releases with Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Alien Trilogy, Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge, and a little game called Nights Into Dreams.
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 and Genki racing game.
Also, I’m on Bluesky now for reasons of self-aggrandizement.
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 archive featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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