Playing every PS1 game - 2xtreme, 360: Three Sixty, 3D Baseball & 3xtreme

Four games that nobody remembers in a row.

2xtreme

You can often date a modern cultural artifact by its ‘aesthetic’; a wildly overused word these days, but suffice it to say that you can often tell in which decade something was created just by taking a look at it. The Beatles have a 60s look. Robocop is obviously a film from the 80s. 2xtreme is, very clearly, a 90s game.

Radical!

A sequel to ESPN Extreme Games (they lost the licence), everything about it has the MTV-style graffiti-filled ‘edgy 90s EXTREME’ look, from the menu layout, to the race announcer, to the concept in general - even choosing different options on the main menu has the camera roll up and down a half-pipe to reach the next text display.

The concept in question here is ‘compete in races on skateboards, mountain bikes, snowboards and roller blades (Remember them?)’. Extreme sports, right? I haven’t played the original game to which this is a sequel, but I imagine it’s not that different. Most objects in the game are 2D sprites, including the player, other racers and obstacles. Such was the way with many games for the Playstation until 1998-ish - either people were still working out that 2D sprites in a 3D environment looked ugly, or developers still hadn’t quite figured out creating fully 3D animated environments. Or both.

Along with Japan, tracks are set in Los Angeles, New York, and, er, ‘Africa’.

My main takeaway was that the game was hard. I played for a while and completed a full ‘season’ (playing at every track across each ‘extreme sport’), and didn’t finish better than 4th out of a field of 10. Most of the time I was in the last three. Finishing first isn’t the only goal, as you gain points for steering through coloured barriers and pulling mid-air tricks, but that isn’t particularly straightforward either. It feels like a game you could get better at with a lot of practice, and doing so might become quite satisfying. I can imagine as a kid in the 90s with a friend and a second controller you could burn away some hours playing the splitscreen mode and knocking each other over.

Get used to seeing this.

I have a level of respect for early PS-era games like this. They were made for you to kill some time with a simple loop. There’s no need for high concept stuff. The game could have mixed it up a bit more with some alternate tracks (despite there officially being twelve, it’s only really four, as each primary track has three variations which are almost identical) or more of a difference between the mechanics behind cycling/skating/snowboarding etc, but the game largely achieves what it set out to do.

Try some mid-air tricks if you want to fall over.

Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: I guess?
Overall: 6/10

360: Three Sixty

A game I had genuinely never heard of.

‘On-water racer’ is a subgenre of racing game you really don’t see anymore, but in the late 90s there were a few of them about (Wave Race and Jet Rider come to mind). It’s a change-up to the traditional ‘stay on track, manage braking and steering’ approach, where rather than the challenge being about handling the forces of friction and mass on your vehicle, you get to grips with handling the lack of both. Wipeout popularised this on the PS1.

There’s the odd interesting bit of track but it’s mostly dull.

So it’s Wipeout on water, down to the laser rocket weapons and use of the shoulder buttons to bank round corners. The hook here, though, is that you can press the L2 button to get a rear view, and so fire your weapons backwards…or, in 360 degrees.

Unfortunately, it’s a pointless mechanic. The game moves so quickly, and the tracks are so winding that looking behind you for even a moment is a ticket to smashing straight into a wall. You certainly don’t have time to aim your weapon. Take that away, and you have a very by-the-numbers hovercraft racing game.

Expect big framerate drops when the geometry gets halfway complicated.

You can rip around the tracks at quite a rapid lick, and occasionally pull off a rocket hit on a rival to pinch their position on the podium at the last moment, but it’s too full of annoyances to be much fun. The game is too fast for its own good, so frame rate drops are constant. It also has a nasty habit of respawning your craft facing the wrong way down the track, with you not even realising what’s happened until the big “WRONG WAY” warning flashes on screen a few seconds later.

The CPU players can hit you easily, but don’t count on doing it yourself.

There are a couple of game modes including an impossible ‘Battle’ mode which doesn’t work because of the lack of any real lock-on system for weaponry (and the pace at which rivals move around), and a two-player race mode, but that’s about it for a very forgettable game.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

3D Baseball

From a time when being fully 3D was such a novelty that you would put it in the name of the game.

Crystal Dynamics are still going strong.

This novelty was such that you could also get away with having a rather shallow game, leaving it to be carried primarily by how cool it felt to be playing baseball in 3D for the first time. That is this game.

There are a few different camera angles to choose from.

I have only a rough understanding of the rules of baseball so I didn’t spend particularly long playing this. What is there does seem to be put together OK - the animations are good, the commentators bombastically announce each batter who steps up and report accurately on the goings-on, and there are plenty of teams and players, but the actual gameplay is just a bit thin on the ground. As far as I can tell, you press a button to pitch, and press the same button to hit. The complexity lies in timing the hit right. You can also choose to move the fielders around. That’s it, really.

This game was released in late 1996, when the popular alternative baseball games on console still used 2D sprites, albeit in 3D arenas. So what you were buying here was a fully 3D baseball game, and that’s what you get.

Full 3D fielders running about would have been a real novelty at the time for any sports game.

Kept my attention for: About an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

3xtreme

The last of the ‘extreme sports’ series. This one does finally bin the 2D sprites (in the main) in favour of 3D animated players and competitors. It also drops the difficulty right down from 2xtreme, though that doesn’t say too much given how hard things already were.

You can now use your points to upgrade your equipment, in a foreshadowing of what basically every game would become 10 years later.

It’s funny how the cultural aesthetic of the time can change in a few years (Or could change. Our current culture halted toward the end of the 00s and hasn’t changed since). In the three years between 2xtreme and 3xtreme, the edgy 90s graffito look has been ditched for something a bit more Y2K. Really though, the look and feel of the game is all that’s really changed between the two entries. It’s still the same underneath, with the through-the-gates points system and push-your-rival-over mechanics.

You’re now in 3D, but it’s the same game, just easier.

The thing is, though, the concept of this game is decidedly at odds with the Y2K culture and aesthetic that was rapidly replacing 90s edginess. They’ve dropped the “Radical, dude” feel and the game is stuck in this halfway house between what it used to be, and somewhere where it actually doesn’t really have a place. Grunge and grime don’t map easily with sterile amorphous blobs and translucent blue colours, and it would take Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater to figure out how to get it right.

Attempting tricks is no longer a death sentence, and you can string several of them together.

People were starting to consider this sort of thing passé and cringe (to use a 2020s-ism), and efforts to ‘modernise’ it don’t really work, because when you remove the “Dude…” window dressing, you’re actually just left with a very ordinary racing game. It’s easy to see now why there wasn’t a 4xtreme.

3D still had a long way to go though.

Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10