An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.

Last time with the PS1 we closed out August 1996 when we looked at NCAA GameBreaker, Project Horned Owl, Strike Point, and Bubble Bobble Featuring Rainbow Islands.

When we last saw the 3DO, we had a relatively family-friendly time with Pebble Beach Golf Links, Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Putt Putt's Fun Pack, Quarantine, and Real Pinball.

Now, we're looking at a true microcosm (no not that one) of the 3DO catalog, the weird, the bad, and the ugly, as we go through Seal of the Pharoah, Sesame Street: Numbers, Sewer Shark, Shadow: War of Succession, and Space Pirates.

**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**

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Seal of the Pharoah

Developer: System Sacom

Publisher: Panasonic

Release Date: 1994

Time to Avenging My Father: 5.5 Hours

This review is coming a bit late, since I streamed this game to completion during the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run XIV back in April. That means a lot of this is going to come from memory, though it's still worth going over as Seal of the Pharoah is one of the more unique experiences I've had so far in this project. Though maybe that's because this is only the second decent Dungeon Crawler I've encountered.

This is the typical story of a silent protagonist delving into a cursed pyramid to look for his father who went missing while delving into that same pyramid. The father's motivation being to turn off the curse because it had been emanating death and decay to the surrounding land. You wander through 8 floors, fight monsters, defeat 5 bosses, do some very light puzzle solving, and encounter a handful of NPCs who vary greatly in helpfulness. At the end, you discover one of the NPCs was your father's ghost all along and you whack the wizard who was causing all the commotion. There isn't a ton going on narratively, and there doesn't need to be, since this is a vibes game.

The art and graphics are extremely basic, with all environments, enemies, and objects being pre-rendered on a clear budget. This gives the game a weird, unique, and minimalistic visual style that feels slightly off. Everything seems off, with the lack of draw distance and minimal sound design conveniently creating an odd, tense atmosphere. Then there's the UI, and the game's lack of any desire to explain itself. There's just about no written text anywhere in the game itself, with icon based menuing, hieroglyphic hint book, and lack of subtitles for any of the spoken lines. If you don't read the manual, you're gonna be dying and restarting on the first floor a lot until you can suss out what anything is or how any of it works. Touching back on the voice acting, this is one of the rare cases where the abysmal voice direction positively contributes to a game, in this case by adding to the almost liminal feeling of the experience.

As for interacting with this interactive experience, if you do suss how to play the thing, or read the manual, you'll find as straightforward a Dungeon Crawler as you can get. You walk down narrow corridors and encounter one-on-one fights against a dozen or so different types of monsters, there are like three sets of upgrades for weapons and armor, a couple of accessories, healing and attack potions, and a hidden experience/levelling system. The healthbars for yourself and your current opponent are displayed, but that's about all the visual information you get or really need. Movement and combat are slow and stilted, because everything's pre-rendered, and the hallways mostly look the same, which makes it easy to get lost even on the small floors. That simplicity in itself is kinda weird, which I personally think supports the vibe, even if a five-hour run time is a bit much to ask for how little is mechanically going on.

It shouldn't be a surprise that contemporary reviewers didn't know what to do with a game that is simultaneously bizarre, esoteric, and dead simple. Most just shrugged and moved on, which would be the correct reaction if this were on any system that wasn't starved for functional video games. Yet here we are on the 3DO, where this weird little experimental thing is one of the most coherent and competent experiences available.

Then there's the System Sacom of it all, which is its own rabbit hole. I'm counting on none of you to have realized it before now, but these are the same lunatics responsible for The Mansion of Hidden Souls. Both of them! In fact, this game was produced simultaneously with the Saturn one! This studio put out the, as of now, bottom ranked Saturn game and second ranked 3DO game in the same year. To add more confusion to the mix, there is no overlap in the names that appear in the credits for this game and the Saturn Mansion of Hidden Souls, but there is one overlapping name between this and the original Sega CD Mansion of Hidden Souls, a Mr. David S. Stone who worked on one other game ever after these two. What does this mean? I have no idea, maybe the Japanese staff all used pseudonyms for these games, or maybe there was insane turnover at the studio.

In the years after Seal of the Pharoah, System Sacom would go on to keep trying at Narrative Adventure and other experimental games, none of which left Japan. It seems like something called Astronoka was their most successful original work, since it was eventually made available on the Japanese PSN store. They also did support work on all-time Sega bangers like Deep Fear and Blue Stinger, which if you know, you know. Interestingly, after that they didn't go out of business but instead seem to have divested from video games and moved to consumer electronics, I think. The company's history is as esoteric as their games.

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Sesame Street: Numbers

Developer: Viridis Corporation

Publisher: EA Kids

Release Date: 1994

Time to Counting To Ten, Ah Ah Ah: 25 Minutes

Now it's time for our first, and far from last, foray into the world of Sesame Street. The show has been around for so long that most living Americans would have been exposed to it in their early childhoods, so even the idea of explaining what it is feels weird, but there are supposedly people on the internet who are from non-America, so I might as well. I even went and read up a little on the history just for this.

In one of those rare instances of good things happening for good reasons, the advent of developmental psychology in the 1960's brought with it an examination of how children interacted with the devil's lantern, television. Even in the earliest days of color TV, very young children were spending a lot of time in front of it, and children's programming was making them measurably dumber, except maybe Captain Kangaroo but I digress. So, a bunch of educational researchers got some funding and hired a bunch of artsy hippies, including some guy named Jim Hensen, to make a high budget children's show capable of providing pre-K education in a way children would want to watch on public access television, away from corporate profit motive. First airing in 1969, that show was named Sesame Street in a direct reference to 1001 Arabian Nights, and it succeeded in exactly what it set out to do. Kids who watched it went into first grade measurably less stupid than kids who didn't.

The show is pretty much the reason why any future children's television had any redeeming value at all. That foundational altruism isn't to say the producers were above merchandising, which turned out to be a good thing when Reagan tried to kill off the show in the 80's by pulling its public funding and deregulating children's television. But I digress again, as the political impact of the show is well beyond the scope of this review. Suffice to say, the show's producers were always open to new ways to sell young kids on stuff that could positively impact their lives.

Enter the 90's edutainment boom. We've seen a bunch of Humongous' output on the 3DO, and even that one Shelley Duvall game, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the mountain of edutainment software dumped onto DOS in the early 90's. Of course, Sesame Street got in on this market early and often. One collaboration in particular was with EA*Kids, a very short-lived label at EA where they dipped their toes in the edutainment waters. That was eventually folded into a different EA edutainment label, taking the Sesame Street partnership with it, and then a bunch of poor business M&A choices led to the whole thing getting shut down by Mattel, of all companies, in '99. The upshot is that Sesame Street: Numbers was an early entry by EA in the market, released on DOS in 1991 before being ported to the 3DO in '94.

You can tell that this is a very early CD-ROM game, and also this team's first project. The interactions are overly simple and lack any kind of cohesive design, even when compared to Fatty Bear or It's a Bird's Life. You navigate a kind of overworld with Elmo and can go to five different locations, each featuring a popular character from the show. Those locations will have small effects from clicking on objects, a bad mini game, some TV clips, and a handful of songs from the show. You don't really get anything from this other than seeing a whole bunch of the first ten numbers. The clips are of animated segments that look like they're from the 70's or 80's, and I was personally surprised at the quality of those animations and songwriting, all things considered. Putting out content at the same quality level as something like Schoolhouse Rock five times a week for decades is kinda awe-inspiring. This software is a dud, but not in any egregious way so I don't feel one way or another about it. Though streaming this thing is one of the more unique ways to get DMCA'd, so there's that.

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Sewer Shark

Developer: Digital Pictures

Publisher: Hasbro

Release Date: 1994

Time to Getting Turned Into Dogmeat: 25 Minutes

This is going to be the penultimate time we see a Digital Pictures game on this blog, with the last being the 3DO release of Quarterback Attack in 1995. This is the seventh time Tom Zito has appeared in this project, and we're only now getting to the second, and second most famous, game he ever produced. Sewer Shark was made alongside Night Trap for the same abortive VHS game console in the late 80's, and the Sega CD conversions of both games were released for the Sega CD launch day in 1992. Even though Night Trap is the better remembered of the two these days, at the time Sewer Shark sold about twice as many copies, which is convenient because it cost about twice as much to make. In fact, at an estimated 3 million H.W. Bush dollars, it was one of the most expensive video games yet made. This is all to say that the game is historically significant, which is a fact that becomes mind-boggling once you get your hands on it.

The idea is that you play as some dumb undercity schmuck in a typical dystopian sci-fi city who's starting their first day on the job as a sewer shark. Said job involves piloting a speeder pod through the spacious utility tunnels under the city while zapping oversized critters. Navigating the tunnels is trickier than it probably should be, and you're guaranteed to go splat with too many wrong turns. There's also a co-pilot who doesn't do anything other than yell at you, and a conspiracy around the obvious lie that successful sewer sharks get to live in the overcity. The premise is thin, and falls apart under any scrutiny, but it doesn't need to be any more than that. The point is that everything, from cutscenes to gameplay, is done with live action footage. That was novel and technically impressive for a console action game in '92. The problem is that it doesn't work.

The game plays like a typical Rail Shooter, with the pre-rendered background consisting of physical models and the enemies being digitized sprites of real puppets/models. You move the cursor around the screen to shoot while having to pay attention to the branching paths so that you can make the turns you're supposed to. This is one of those games where you really need to read the manual, since the onscreen indicators for the game's couple of mechanics are actively wrong most of the time. The cursor also feels bad, and failure feels arbitrary. This is also basically a run-based game, so when you die you start over from the beginning. The action feels bad, the tunnels all look the same, and everything else makes very little sense.

I can personally understand the limitations of this considering where it came from, but that doesn't magically make it good. As in, the tunnels all look the same because they are the same; the original idea was to have four tracks of a VHS spinning at once showing different sections of the physical tunnel and inputs would cause the game to switch tape tracks giving the illusion of a seamless transition. That became more straightforward when dealing with CD tracks, but it's a neat concept on its face. Also, originally planned out in the late 80's, it was only supposed to have a level of interactivity one step above Dragon's Lair, which it succeeds at doing. This game would have been neat if it had come out in its original format in like 1989s, but instead it landed on CD-ROM in '92, where it was novel but bad, and even then, we're looking at the '94 port, by which point Sewer Shark would have only been a boring slog.

That last point is probably our missing piece in the story of Digital Pictures. Between this game and Night Trap, they sold well over a million copies in the first year or two of the Sega CD's lifespan. That gave Tom Zito and friends a bunch of capital they could burn and the impression that they had an audience for their shenanigans. None of that includes whatever success they had with their line of music video games, which I absolutely will not be going into. After that initial batch of software, Double Switch was an improved iteration on Night Trap and Corpse Killer was an improved Sewer Shark. They even iterated out into FMV concepts of other action genres with stuff like Supreme Warrior, Slam City, and Quarterback Attack among others. The problem is that those initial sales were based on early console adopters and novelty, and no one actually liked those games. This is why most game publishers or movie studios will try to gauge sentiment on their releases when deciding to fund a sequel, independent of sales. If everyone bought a game that they didn't like, they won't buy its sequel. Digital Pictures insisted, repeatedly, on making their janky FMV concept happen, and it very much didn't.

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Shadow: War of Succession

Developer: Tribeca Digital Studios

Publisher: Tribeca Digital Studios

Release Date: 1994

Time to Not Becoming The Shadow King: 20 Minutes

We've seen several Mortal Kombat clones during this project, ranging from the relatively good, to the bad, to the truly ugly. We now have the misfortune of encountering what has been widely considered to be one of the all-time worst MK clones, and due to technical difficulties, it's even more unplayable than it normally ought to be.

This is a Fighting game with digitized fighters that has seven characters, a basic ladder, and no options other than difficulty. It looks and feels like it should have been Flash game made as a student project in the early 2000's, though that might be an insult to student projects. The fighters have limited movesets and animations, the backgrounds are dull, and the sound design might exist but it's hard to notice. Under normal circumstances it would play terribly, but in this case my extremely legal and legitimate 3DO hardware encountered a bug that caused the game to speed up by about 5x, making it literally unplayable. I wasn't able to get it working properly, so the governor's pardon came in right as I was strapping it to the chair. I'm going to have to withhold my judgement and refrain from putting it in the rankings.

That's a turn of good fortune for Shadow, since it likely would have wound up towards the bottom of the list with Microcosm and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. Yet even though I can't pass judgement, contemporary reviewers sure did, and it isn't pretty. Next Gen called the controls "butt-awful", Videogames said "Do not buy this game under any circumstances", and even 3DO Magazine said, "three minutes of play should guarantee Shadow's swift exit from your 3DO player". When this game is remembered, it's as one of the worst Fighting games of all time. That's usually a difficult thing to get onto consoles, since most manufacturers have some kind of certification or other quality control process, but this is the 3DO we're talking about. Trip Hawkins was letting any fly-by-night dirtbags release anything on the system as long as they could fork over a few grand. That I could find literally zero information on this developer indicates that it was made by the kind ephemeral kuso team that would be pumping out Steam trash nowadays. To learn anything more than this, we'll all just have to wait for Matt McMuscles to get around to it and see if he can get it working.

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Space Pirates

Developer: American Laser Games

Publisher: American Laser Games

Release Date: 1994

Time to Saying No To Drugs: 30 Minutes

All these American Laser Games releases are the same game with different FMV footage spliced in. There's a difficulty options, two-player, reloading at the edge of the screen, and the slowest moving cursor you've ever seen. This particular entry is sci-fi themed, and it looks like they used leftover costumes and sets from some Roger Corman production or something. Still, I'm always game for B-movie sci-fi, so I'd take this setting over their other wild west or copaganda offerings in a heartbeat. In the scheme of things, this was one of ALG's first couple of games put out in the wake of Mad Dog McCree's surprise success, and it seems like they subtly messed up their formula here. The enemies pop into view slowly enough, and with large enough hitboxes that this game turns out to be barely playable on a d-pad, though I imagine it would have been much easier than they would have wanted in an arcade setting. This leads to a paradox where this is probably the worst ALG game according to their design ethos, but the best in terms of playability and content (excessive force gets fuzzy when you're a space cop). I'm not gonna spend any more time on this because I personally dislike these jerks, but if anyone ever asks you, Space Pirates is the best one of these games.

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Just as David Mamet once wrote: so that happened. We're getting close to the end of the alphabet with these 3DO games, and it looks like we'll be able to say good riddance to 1994 in a couple more entries. But for now, we need to update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games.

1. Guardian War

…

2. Seal of the Pharoah

32. Sesame Street: Numbers

46. Sewer Shark

51. Space Pirates

…

64. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Next time, it's back to the hottest PS1 games of 1996 with Crash Bandicoot, Killing Zone, Die Hard Trilogy, and Impact Racing.

When we return to the 3DO, we be in for a more action-packed entry with Space Shuttle, Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, The Incredible Machine, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

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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.

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, and sometimes sports!

These games were featured in several streams over the last several months, mainly because I'm a mess. Here's a couple of them.

Oh hey, if you enjoyed Seal of the Pharaoh, you might be interested in this obscure, forgotten gem called King's Field

Another interesting list of games.

So did Robert De Niro fund Shadows: War of Succession?

@manburger:

Now look here you little shit...

That does remind me I never finished my King's Field III write-up.

@gtxforza:

Thanks!(?)

@shindig:

No! It's a completely different Tribeca. The name similarity between this Tribeca, DeNiro's Tribeca, and the literal Tribeca would make researching this development studio really hard if any info on them actually existed.