Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA
Long before Andrew came to me, tears in his eyes, confessing his immense regret for not buying and exclusively playing the Saturn – which resulted in the world famous Wednesday’s with Andrew series (everyone on Neptune has read it) – we spent significant time (upwards of 3 hours) playing Sega CD games. Or more like he would come over and have an adult conversation with my wife while I would force the controller into his hands and demand he play whatever new disc I had just popped in. Whatever the case, we played a fair number of Sega CD games and even enjoyed some of them even if I deliberately focused on inflicting pain with most of my choices – as any good friend would. What follows is the chronicling of our time spent playing together, or at least some random observations and jokes.
Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory was my opening salvo. The theory was simple, if I could get him dancing with Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) then a smooth transition to Things That Make You Go Hmmm… would be inevitable. The videos may be small and grainy, but at least the game was never interesting or good, even when brand new. Basically you move little chunks of video around and apply stupid looking effects filters on them as you see fit and then repeatedly listen to one of the same three songs. This and other music video production games such as Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch are emblematic of why the market violently rejected full motion video video games (also called FMV²G). Not as violently as Mark Wahlberg brutalized two Asian men in a racially motivated attack, but then what is. Andrew gave up after messing with the two hit songs so we never got to hear Here We Go Let’s Rock and Roll and perhaps never will.
Kids on Site is another high powered, big budget FMV driven piece of software with absolutely zero mechanics or semblance of gameplay. From what we pieced together, you are a child wandering around a potentially dangerous construction zone, unlocking short clips of construction workers trying to be funny or educational along the way. These clips come quickly at first and then begin repeating while you wander around trying to uncover any you missed due to the arbitrary nature of the game flags controlling what triggers, where, and when. The company behind this, Digital Pictures, is responsible for many of the crimes against game players of the early CD era, including Corpse Killer, Ground Zero: Texas, Sewer Shark, Slam City with Scottie Pippin, and Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory. Kids on Site barely provided longer entertainment than the C+C game but what was there was more amusingly bad, and sometimes you need other forms of incompetence to break up repeat viewings of the Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective (it’s not a documentary).
I’m no electrocybertechnoscientologist but I think there are a lot of old games where the player character technically stays in one place while the world moves around them. This is usually done in a way indiscernible to the player, however. BC Racers somehow managed to make it feel utterly clear that your car, or assortment of stone wheels and logs, was completely static. The game has a large number of problems but this one really stood out to us – a racing game cannot invoke any sense of speed or dynamism when you can clearly perceive there is absolutely zero actual motion and your inputs are merely sliding the scenery around. Besides this significant flaw, the graphics are muddy, the frame rate is often in the single digits, animation choppy, and everything is entirely flat. Mario Kart got away with flat course by making a lot of other things about the game good. Developer Core Design didn’t figure out this clever method of success and decided to make it all shitty. This game was one of the more memorable titles Andrew and I played and he still brings it up to laugh about over a year later.
The only game Andrew and I played for more than a single session was Lunar: The Silver Star. I had always wanted to play it after watching a gradeschool friend Jordan play an hour before putting Willy Beamish back in the Sega CD. That experience and Lunar’s reputation, the lineage of developer Game Arts who went on to make Grandia, and its historical place in the medium as the West’s first CD based JRPG. (Far East of Eden will have to wait, we are busy not playing Lunar.) I had intended to show Andrew the game briefly and then carry on by myself but he made the insane decision that we would, in fact, play the game together. Unfortunately, about two thirds of all our Lunar based time was spent away from the Sega CD just making LUU-NAR pronunciation jokes. Apparently, fans think if you pronounce it like the English word relating to the moon you are a jerk, and we thought this mild snobbery was funny so we affectionately mocked the pronunciation standard by constantly over-pronouncing it the correct way.
After about half a year we kind of gave up, but not by coming to a conscious consensus. It was more of a fizzling out than waving a white flag. More time would lapse between every play session. The first half hour would be spent scouring walkthroughs tying to figure out what the fuck was going on and what we needed to do next. We both liked the game a bit, even if it feels a little rudimentary today, and without fail we enjoyed the intro song each play session. But now Andrew, with his inconsiderate strengthening of our friendship, has left me in a tough spot. Do I start the game over even though I am about halfway through and finally know some of what the infamous Ghaleon is up to? If I start over, do I play the fan translated Saturn remake because I’m a snob? Do I table the Saturn series and refocus Andrew on Lunar just so I can see some version of it through to the end? I haven’t spoken to him directly about any of this so after I text him a video of me reading this post out loud he will probably weigh in with an opinion.
Panic! is something of an art game. It’s debatable if it has any gameplay at all, but it uses the then new CD medium to entertain players with weird, sometimes funny animations that play when you click on different parts of the images in each scene. I could see being upset if I got this when I was 11 and wanted something meaty to play, like Kids on Site, but today it stands as one of the more interesting and likely the most experimental games on the Sega CD. If the Moby Games credits are right, Panic! was designed by Tomihiro Kondo (and some other people with no other credits on Moby Games) who also directed Panzer Dragoon Zwei (and produced both PD1 and 2 according to Wikipedia) as he was a high level member of Sega’s fabled Team Andromeda. To further strengthen his art game resume, Kondo also directed the Sega CD’s Mansion of Hidden Souls (as well as the Saturn sequel) – which is a secret favorite of mine because System Sacom makes kind of awful but great games. Perhaps we will have something to say about Lunacy at a later date. Anyway, Andrew may lack a thorough education in Sega consoles and games but he is so open minded he voluntarily listens to jazz, which is to say he appreciated the odd and arthouse vibe of Panic! and we had a good time clicking around randomly for half an hour and seeing what bizarre animations would be our rewards.
Somehow another enjoyable game slipped through, and it was surprising to both Andrew and me as it’s an animated FMV²G, ala Dragon’s Lair. Road Avenger has gameplay just like that barely playable laser disc classic but due to the speed and dynamic nature of driving and fighting and fight driving, it is actually fun to play. Originally a laser disc based arcade game named Road Blaster, Data East made Road Avenger along with animation studio Toei, who made Sailor Moon, One Piece, and some other nerd shit. We almost finished this game because it was good but it’s still ultimately a slight experience. Full animation was presumably expensive and disc space limited back then so it just wasn’t feasible to make a 5 hour Quick Time Events (QTE) game.
Finally, it’s time for everyone’s favorite villain – Borf. Space Ace is the sequel to Dragon’s Lair, but is less compelling because whatever classic medieval fantasy vein Don Bluth tapped into in Lair may not quite exist for space war stuff. On an unrelated note, I don’t care about Star Wars at all. Space Ace is another near zero gameplay, push the right button at the right time QTE fest. The highlight for Andrew was the gloriously stupid and blue character Borf, who is the game’s antagonist and heartthrob. Stupid as in ill-conceived, he may or may not be intelligent in the game’s world. Andrew is so fond of Borf he created a text sticker he likes to apply to things I message him, which is to be respected. As of yet, he has not asked why I append eBay branded stickers to messages he sends, but the truth is he is my inspiration.
Who Shot Johnny Rock? is nigh unplayable on the Sega CD. There are FMV scenes of people talking and then you need to do some gun shooting, but it controls poorly so the only way to proceed is rote memorization of who is going to pull a gun on you at each of the locations you have available to investigate. There is an interesting noir mystery premise and the killer of the titular Johnny Rock changes each play through, but it just does not work on a home console. Perhaps in its original arcade form, which has both higher quality FMV and a gun controller, the game isn’t so abysmal. Our play time was spent being baffled at why the game was so hard and unresponsive.
The Space Adventure is actually the second game in a series by Hudson based off an anime called Cobra and it put me in quite a pickle. I generally enjoy adventure games and even the more boring Japanese kind that require navigating through menus and choosing things until you are allowed to move the plot forward, but this title is just too openly ‘for the boys.’ You play a cool hero guy, who actually sounds just like the main character of Total Recall based on the Wikipedia summary, who gets to hero it up with an android babe who has a penchant for losing her clothes – not always willingly. Regardless of if Andrew and I found the blatant sexist content distasteful or if we simply felt the need to hide our erections from each other, we reluctantly decided not to return to The Space Adventure.
The Sega CD is a controversial system. Public opinion is that it was a huge failure and lacks good games and the True Gamer opinion has swung hard in the opposite direction in typical reactionary style. The truth is public opinion is closer to reality, assuming that’s something I get to define. There were a handful of impressive games on the thing but unfortunately Andrew did not have time to play 100 turn based Dark Wizard battles. Even the Shining Force entry on the console was a pale version of the great Genesis and Saturn versions, which I hope to force Andrew into playing some day soon. Ultimately, I enjoy making people play bad games and so a Virtual Hydlide on Saturn is a deliberate choice, but with the Sega CD I would have to do a lot more work to not choose a bad game to play.