An explanation of what we're doing here can be found in the introduction post.

Last time, we continued our death march through the 3DO catalog with Pebble Beach Golf Links, Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Putt Putt's Fun Pack, Quarantine, and Real Pinball.

Last time with the PS1 we had a time with Adidas Power Soccer, Beyond the Beyond, The Final Round, and The King of Fighters '95.

We also stopped to carefully consider Beyond the Beyond in more detail anyone should.

Now we're closing out August and getting into September '96 with NCAA GameBreaker, Project Horned Owl, Strike Point, and Bubble Bobble Featuring Rainbow Islands.

***This entry would have marked the two-year anniversary for this project if the vagaries of life had not intervened. Still, let's go with it and count this as the two-year point. This time around I received a whopping 100% more questions (2) for the Q&A than last year, so that's growth! Those questions and answers are available at the bottom of this post.***

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

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NCAA GameBreaker

Developer: SCEA

Publisher: SCEA

Release Date: 8/31/1996

Time to Not Making The Draft: 53 Minutes

College Football games are kind of a weird subgenre. Though, the level of importance collegiate football has in America is in itself unusual, which is the ultimate cause of the weirdness. As far as my understanding goes, football originally developed as a school sport way back in the 19th century, with professional leagues following behind by 20 or 30 years. I suppose that would have been the pattern for most sports invented in the late 1800's, but the popularity of professional play wouldn't overtake college football until around the 1960's or '70's, which is unique. That's recent enough that even today there are still plenty of areas of the U.S. where NCAA football is more popular than the NFL, and even more places where they are given equal consideration. If you're making Football games, your audience is going to be split between people who care about one league or the other.

Taking all of that into consideration, there's more money to be made off NFL licensing than NCAA, but that's still a decent chunk of change to leave on the table. So, if you're a game publisher and have development capacity to support it, you would want to make separate yearly games for each league. EA came to that conclusion in the early 90's, and now Sony has decided to follow their example. Also, like EA, Sony seems to be utilizing the cost-saving measure of using their previous year's NFL game as the technical basis for the current year's NCAA title. That pattern of the college game being functionally one year behind its NFL counterpart is one that would be used by both Sony and EA up until they discontinued their NCAA franchises in 2003 and 2013 respectively. This all means that NCAA GameBreaker is basically a slightly touched up reskin of the first NFL GameDay.

When I originally encountered NFL GameDay way back in November '95, it was the first Football game released for either the PS1 or Saturn. It's an extremely barebones package, but I gave it a lot of leeway because there was nothing to compare it to. We've seen a lot of sports games since then, and in comparison it no longer holds up. I'm guessing that NFL GameDay '97 will be a sufficient improvement over the previous entry when we eventually get to it, but we're looking at GameBreaker right now, which doesn't feature any updates. There are the expected bowl teams, a limited playbook, and the physics mostly do what they're supposed to. The graphics and audio are bottom shelf compared to Madden, but that applied to every non-EA sports game. Yet, in spite of being old and crusty, it still isn't the worst one of these released in '96, which I suppose speaks well of the foundation set by GameDay.

Then there's the NCAA of it all. Because college football players are students at real institutions of (supposed) learning, their participation in the sport was covered by scholarships and they were barred from being paid or making any outside deals that would pay them for their likeness. This was extremely exploitative, as the top football schools made waaaay more money off players than their scholarships were worth and the overall conditions for everyone involved were, let's say, less than ideal. This has improved in very recent years, but back in the 90's there was no way to use the name or likeness of any college football players. The upshot is that GameBreaker and other NCAA games could only use player numbers and generic character models, though as graphics improved over time some digital players would begin to resemble their real-life unpaid counterparts. Not being able to play as or use your favorite players diminishes a lot of the appeal for a sports game, which is the final piece of explaining why these NCAA games were never as popular as their NFL counterparts.

So, morally speaking, College Football video games weren't excusable until pretty much right now. On top of that, these are all half-assed releases without a mechanical or creative reason to exist. For NCAA GameBreaker specifically, I still can't ding it too hard because at the end of the day it's functional, if completely unremarkable. This is likely the most I'm ever going to write for any single NCAA licensed game.

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Project Horned Owl

Developer: Alfa System

Publisher: SCEA

Release Date: 8/31/1996

Time to AMCAB: 47 Minutes

There aren't many Light Gun Shooters released for consoles that didn't originate in arcades. Just off the top of my head I can only think of Duck Hunt and those Wii Resident Evil games. I certainly wasn't expecting to run into one of those this early on the PS1. In fact, there's enough weird stuff with Project Horned Owl that I'm surprised it has been so thoroughly forgotten.

From the first boot it's apparent there's something is going on with this thing. You're initially greeted with an anime cutscene establishing the plot, which is basically low-rent Patlabor, and the mech cop protagonists. There are additional, cheaper-looking animated sequences after each of the game's six levels stringing together a barebones counterterrorism plot, but the fact they're there at all is surprising. The levels themselves aren't quite up to a Virtua Cop or Time Crisis tier of quality, but they're a lot better designed than any of the Light Gun games I've seen from the era not in those two series. Maybe it's because I recently had to endure a bunch of American Laser Games releases for the 3DO, but the d-pad controls in Horned Owl are completely alright. Maybe because this thing was made for consoles, the enemy layouts are much more reasonable for the controls than even ports of good arcade Light Gun games. That's mildly interesting, and combined with the cinematic aspirations of its storytelling, I would even go so far as to call this game "neat".

Now, that lukewarm positivity needs to be balanced out with some gripes. First, while there are difficulty levels, this game does the Panzer Dragoon thing of not letting you play past the first two levels unless you play on normal or higher. Hitting those "git gud if you want to see more" screens pisses me off every time I see them, like why even have lower difficulty options at that point. Second, even though it was never in arcades, it still has a limit on continues with no options to add credits. It annoys me when arcade ports give limited credits, since spending $50 in Bill Clinton dollars should rightfully buy more than a handful of continues, but when I see that in a game made for consoles it feels like antiquated Famicom nonsense. This is all old design stuff that exists to annoy me specifically, so it wouldn't be reasonable to hold it against the game too much.

All of this is to say the game is alright, even down to the corny voice acting. That's why it surprised me so much to see that it was panned on release and no one bought it. Reviewers at the time tore into it for being ugly, boring, short, and irrelevant in a world where Time Crisis exists. Now, I would say that about most PS1 games released in its first 12 months, and even about many game reviewers active in the mid-90's. So, I don't really get why that was used against Project Horned Owl specifically. Well, I suppose I'm exaggerating, since apparently the LA Times loved it. All of this already makes this game a noteworthy stop on this journey through the PS1 release catalog, but then there's the lineage the thing.

The most written about detail, and maybe the only reason anyone would remember this game at all, is that some amount of the art in the cutscenes were designed by Masanori Ota, the Ghost in the Shell guy. I'm uncertain about the extent of his involvement in the art design, but it was enough to where the developers were able to use his name in the marketing materials. While that's a fun piece of trivia, the developer itself is also worth looking at. Alfa System got their start in the late 80's as a port house adapting whatever they could to the PC Engine. They were eventually able to get into original development with Linda Cube for the PC Engine CD, followed by Project Horned Owl as their second game. The mention of Linda Cube has activated precisely five people reading this (hi, Jeff).

They would take another swing at the story-driven Light Gun Shooter concept with Elemental Gearbolt, which is slightly better remembered than this game. Alfa System would then go on to do a bunch of mercenary work with the Neon Genesis Evangelion license and the Tales of series, culminating in my only touchpoint with their work, Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines for the Vita in 2014. After that, they pivoted to the Waifu Shmup genre, which is where the real money is, before getting bought out in 2021. That's a pretty good run in the scheme of things, and I imagine most video game nerds have encountered them at least once. All of this slots Project Horned Owl into a weird blip in the wider context of everyone involved. Part of me wants to call this a hidden gem, but in truth it isn't quite good or weird enough to make it to that level, landing instead only as a mild oddity.

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Strike Point

Developer: MotiveTime Ltd.

Publisher: Technos

Release Date: 9/1/1996

Time to Out Of Time: 32 Minutes

I'm not going to beat around the bush with this one, Strike Point is as much a piece of shovelware as we've seen so far on the PS1. This is a basic helicopter action game with nine levels, few options, and arbitrary timed missions. It looks bad, plays bad, and sounds bad. It's just competent enough to not be hateful, but otherwise has nothing going for it. This has all the look and feel of a $10 CD-ROM game you could've randomly picked up at a K-Mart in the late 90's. It's almost like the developers put together a proof of concept and ran out of funding to turn it into a real game. The worst part is it doesn't even dig down into the true depths of misery, which might have been something to latch onto, it's bad in a boring way.

This is all an excuse for having nothing to say about this thing. Strike Point exists, it adds nothing, it hurts nothing, and it is rightfully forgotten. As far as I can tell, Motivetime Ltd. was a port house founded in the late 80's, and this seems to be their second attempt at original development, with their first being a series of Frankenstein themed Game Boy games that I've never heard of. None of this seems to have gone well for them, as after this game they went back to port work briefly before shutting down at the turn of the century. It's one of those mildly sad, commonplace stories that you see in pre-Steam game development. I have a bad feeling that as we get into the middle years of the PS1's catalog we're going to encounter far too many releases of this caliber.

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Bubble Bobble featuring Rainbow Islands

Developer: Probe Entertainment

Publisher: Acclaim

Release Date: 9/6/1996

Time to Bursting My Bubble: 40 Minutes

We've seen a lot of Taito over the course of this project, but it's all been their mid-90's Shoot 'Em Ups and Puzzle Bobble 2. Considering that the company is of a similar vintage to Atari or Namco, it would make sense for them to get in early on the arcade compilation business. We've already seen such compilations from Williams and Namco already, featuring their most classic games. What could Taito bring to the table in 1996 to induce nostalgia in PlayStation owners? Could it be Space Invaders, Qix, Darius, or any combination of those and some more obscure pulls? How about Bubble Bobble? Everyone likes Bub and Bob, and you could get at least half a dozen or so of those games onto a CD. You might think that would be a good idea, and that's why you wouldn't have worked at Taito in the 90's. What we actually get is the first Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands of all things, and a 32-bit remake of Rainbow Islands because we can't have nice things.

Hopefully most people reading this know about 1986's Bubble Bobble to some extent, it's a single screen Platformer where you play as these chibi dinosaur guys that shoot bubbles at enemies. Yet, if you're like me you're probably wondering what in the hell is a Rainbow Islands. Turns out, it's the direct sequel to Bubble Bobble released in 1987, where you play as Bub and Bob in their human forms, and you shoot rainbows instead of bubbles. It's not particularly good and would be replaced by other direct sequels featuring the duo in dinosaur form.

This is a double pack of two arcade games from the mid-80's, one that's a beloved classic and one that, well, isn't. This could have been a Genesis cart, so there has to be something more to justify this package, ideally in a way that takes advantage of the PlayStation's next gen hardware. We're all used to up-rezzed remakes of older games these days, but that type of thing wasn't common back in the 90's. Yet here we are with a 32-bit remake of Rainbow Islands thrown onto this disc as an enticement. That sounds like more of a threat than a selling point, and if they were going to remake either of these games, why not the one people like? I do not have an answer to that question.

The real kicker is that the graphical and audio enhancements look and sound worse than the original version, and the main problem with the game, the slippery rainbow physics, is left unaddressed. Other than the horrific opening CG cutscene, there isn't really anything else of value in this package. These compilations need a lot of added historic material or documentary work to be worth the effort. Maybe a diehard fan of the original Bubble Bobble would've found value in this back in the day, but that's a pretty narrow audience.

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That does it for this week. It's going to take us a while to get through September, so make sure you get comfy. Let's update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get on with it.

1. Air Combat

…

48. Project Horned Owl

62. NCAA GameBreaker

70. Bubble Bobble featuring Rainbow Islands

105. Strike Point

…

127. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition

Next time, we're back to the 3DO in 1994 with Seal of the Pharoah, Sesame Street: Numbers, Sewer Shark, Shadow: War of Succession, and Space Pirates.

Then next week, we'll finally look at some titles people would recognize with Crash Bandicoot, Killing Zone, Die Hard Trilogy, and Impact Racing.

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Second Anniversary Q&A

Q: "When embarking upon this quest, what has surprised you the most? Any expectations and assumptions been met or upended? Anything in particular you are looking forward to, or dreading?"

A: I went in expecting all of these games to have aged terribly, and I suppose I've been mildly surprised to have found any that I genuinely like. I hadn't expected the 3DO cast-offs to have had as much of a presence on the other systems as they had. A lot of what people remember about this era are all the licensed games from the last two or three years of the generation, but that kind of cheapo development took a while to really get going on these systems, and instead I've found myself wading through a bunch of unplayable ports of PC games. Also, I hadn't expected that I would dive so deeply into the dredges of the multimedia era, and I think games like Cyberia, Brain Dead 13, and The Mansion of Hidden Souls have broken something permanently inside of me.

Starting a year or so after Mario 64 came out, it seems like every third or fourth game was some kind of junky 3D Platformer, and I have a decently high affinity for that genre so I'm looking forward to all of that mediocre nonsense. I feel like I'm currently getting through the worst of it with these 3DO and Jaguar games, so the grass is looking a lot greener on the other side of 1996.

Q: "If you were in charge of Sega during the fifth generation, what would you have done to keep the Saturn from flopping? Let’s say hypothetically you’re in charge of both North America and Japan even though those two branches hated each other’s guts!"

A: With the powers of hindsight? Do the opposite of everything that leadership actually decided: scrap the 32X, go all in on polygonal graphics, court western developers, and find some revenue stream to rely on that wasn't arcades. Without future knowledge, having SoJ pay more attention to what SoA was saying would have helped, but to what extent I don't know.

Here's the thing, the Saturn was probably dead no matter what Sega did. Sony was dumping more money into the PlayStation than Sega or Nintendo would have been able to invest, combined. A much, much larger player in the tech industry decided to pave over the console market and there wasn't a ton Sega could've done about it. I've said before that Nintendo survived based solely on their handhelds and Pokémon, but Sega was trying to use arcades as their lifeline, and we know how that went. Even if you waved a wand and had their leadership suddenly make good decisions starting in 1994, it would have only postponed the inevitable. I don't see Sega making it past 2006 in one piece, even if they somehow sold an extra 10 or 20 million Saturns.

Now that I think about it, Sega was probably fortunate to crash when they did. Because they were bought by Sammy so early in the M&A scramble that the Japanese game industry underwent, they were able to find owners who gave a damn about Sega staying in the games industry. If they had held on for a few extra years they might have been acquired by Bandai or some other scumbags and I doubt things would have gone as well for them. Also, at least this way Yuji Naka ended up where he belongs: behind bars.

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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!

You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.