Playing every PS1 game - Akuji the Heartless, Alex Ferguson's Player Manager 2002, Alfred Chicken, Alien Resurrection

Akuji the Heartless

One of those interesting concepts that ultimately went nowhere, Akuji the Heartless is a third person half-platformer-half-action game built by Crystal Dynamics - the same developer which came up with Gex and Soul Reaver, and the similarities can be felt. Interestingly, these are also the guys who picked up Tomb Raider (and threw it into a wall with Angel of Darkness). Despite that happening a year or two later, there are definitely a couple of mechanics plagiarised from the popular adventures of our buxom Brit - in particular, wall climbing and monkey bar swinging. No dual magnums, though.

All that isn’t even some sort of chin-stroking critical inference either - loading up the game itself first prompts you to have a go at built-in demos for both Tomb Raider III and Soul Reaver, despite TR not being a Crystal Dynamics product yet (though they share a publisher).

Gex 3 too, with which this game shares an engine.

The TR3 demo is of the High Security Compound level midway through the game. It is VERY different to what was actually released.

What’s striking about Akuji is how bloody violently morbid it all is. Released a few months before 1999’s other voodoo-em-up - Shadow Man, it shares the same blood-and-bones ‘fight your way through grotesque creatures in the underworld’ theme, and it’s laid on thick. Classic PS1-era CG cutscenes paint the exposition - you play a voodoo shaman gruesomely murdered and condemned to doing the devils’ work down below in order to gain redemption for his (pretty evil-sounding, it has to be said) bloodline. Much like every other action-platformer of the time, it’s an exercise in dropping into a level, collecting a load of items, then heading for the exit, engaging in many a scrap along the way.

It’s a cold day in hell.

It does a lot of things OK, a few things well and a few things badly. The combat feels snappy despite being rather one dimensional; hammer the circle button to wave around your strange sharp bone appendages, or hammer square to cast ‘spells’. In my playthrough I couldn’t quite work out the utility of the spells - they tend to just fire off in straight lines and will always miss unless you’re within touching distance - in which case you might as well use physical attacks. There is a first-person view mode to allow you to fire with precision, but you’re vulnerable while doing so, so it only really serves to help you see around the area and fire spells at buttons and levers.

All rather macabre.

The levels and puzzles are interesting and cerebral enough to make you manage your health and occasionally stop and think about how to progress. You’re hindered by the camera, as is the case for every third-person 3D game of the time, and are quite reliant on the handy ‘recentre the camera behind you’ R2 button. It’s annoying but you feel like it could be a lot worse.

The sound design, though, is great. The BGM tracks are bangers and the game employs some early-era dynamic musical changes - for example, when starting a level, the music may be quite sedate, before picking up the tempo as you move through the level and then breaking into a frenetic variation on the tune as you get into more combat.

Occasionally you get to transform into an even stronger beast and clean house.

The loop continues as you head deeper through the circles of hell (or something), fight the odd boss and face progressively tougher enemies. An interesting mechanic is where collecting 100 of the ‘collectible thing’ gives you not the usual extra life, but actually permanently increases your health bar.

In all, a fun if not particularly memorable game. There’s not too much here that was brand new, but with the ability to replay levels to collect missed items you could get some extra mileage out of it. I didn’t finish it, but probably could have if I really wanted to.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10

Alex Ferguson’s Player Manager 2002

Speaking of Voodoo death cults, the next game in the list is proudly endorsed by Manchester United FC’s rednosed footballing savant.

We were still at least 10 years away from United’s descent into comedy club.

If I asked you to name three football management simulators in 2025, you’d probably reply with Football Manager, then scratch your head for a moment, look sternly into the middle distance and say something like “…is Championship Manager still going?” (It isn’t). Well, in the 90s and 00s, management sims were ten a penny. Despite being a truly horrible medium to carry the genre, the PlayStation had iterations of Premier Manager, LMA Manager and FA Manager, as well as oddball personally-endorsed games like Sven-Göran Eriksson’s World Manager, and…this.

How did anyone manage to read all this on tiny CRT televisions?

There was actually a 2001 edition of Alex Ferguson’s, but it was basically the same game. We were on the back straight of the PlayStation’s lifespan at this time and developer focus for ‘annual update’ games was aimed toward PS2.

It’s everything you expect. Staring at names and numbers, and sitting through loading screen after loading screen as the 33MHz/2MB RAM little machine groans its way through all the number crunching needed to simulate seasons of football. Even the little mouse pointer you control with the directional buttons chugs its way across the screen.

Not much changes for the Swansea squad over the years.

I started off a season knowing I wasn’t going to get very far. There’s just too much waiting. Change screen? Wait 3 seconds. Alter the filter on the player search so you can scout players? Wait 3 seconds. Increment the transfer fee offer for a player by plus or minus £100? Wait a second each time. There is an option to progress the game by a single day rather than a week, which is a cruel trap as even simulating a single day gives you enough time to nip out for a cigarette and a flick through your work emails before coming back to the game (to find that nothing meaningful happened in the preceding 24 virtual hours and you’ve made a big mistake).

You get the occasional informational update as you stare dimly at the loading bar in the top right.

How did we cope with this back in the day? I do remember enjoying Premier Manager 98 and can’t remember it playing like this. The one point of difference is the 3D game engine which lets you watch your games in (four minutes per half) ‘real time’. It’s alright, I suppose, and the different camera options make things interesting. Making tactical changes still requires much chugging through screens, though.

Watch in 3D…

..or a very FM2005-looking overhead view.

You have to think that as home computers became less expensive, people moved to PC and Championship Manager and the age of console management sims started to reach its end.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Alfred Chicken

Where to start?

Alfred Chicken is a game where you control the titular flightless bird around surrealist platforming levels, scoring points and collecting balloons. It’s actually a ‘remake’ of an original which came out for the Game Boy, NES, SNES and even the Amiga in 1993.

Of all the games to remake.

It’s a bit like Sonic the Hedgehog with its freeform-ish level design. You bounce on springs to reach higher levels, ride floating platforms, avoid spikes and the odd touch-it-and-you-die enemy. I called time on it on level 2 (primarily because I knew what was up next) but I expect the environments continue in the same ‘blocks of edam’ vein. It’s interesting seeing a pre-3D-cards PC game be redeveloped for a more modern console. Why would you do it? You’d never see Commander Keen being remade for PlayStation.

Levels are navigated vertically as well as horizontally, so falling off the edge doesn’t necessarily mean game over.

Playing it gives the feeling that you’re merely playing a high-resolution Game Boy game. And…you are. Cue an existential dialogue in your mind about the relative qualities of older versus newer video games.

It’s not a bad game, really. Just file under ‘strange’.

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

Alien Resurrection

Famously the game that - according to modern folklore - got thoroughly rinsed by unenlightened turn-of-the-millennium games journo hacks for its control system, as it introduced the now ubiquitous dual analog stick movement setup.

Cheeky take on the Resident Evil pre-menu warning.

The truth is more complicated. While familiarity borne from years of playing modern games means the approach in Alien Resurrection feels better than the pre-analog-stick directional button controls (see previous comments on TWINE), that’s not to say that we were shown a butter-smooth, intuitive control system and just didn’t know it. The controls are still clunky. The issue is mainly a result of the low resolution (roughly 240p in 4:3) meaning that it’s difficult to make precise changes to your view, and once you account for your gun, HUD and targeting reticule, the space left for actually seeing what you’re doing is rather small.

Aliens can appear from nowhere, can climb walls, and move incredibly fast.

The game gives you plenty of scope to fiddle with the sensitivity of the sticks though, so after a fashion you can get something which works ‘OK’, though certainly not satisfactory by modern standards. I recommend turning off the head bobble effect though unless you really don’t want to hit anything.

Occasionally you will get ganked by 3-4 aliens at once, which unless you get lucky tends to be a guaranteed game over.

The game is both scarier and harder than you’d expect. Ammunition is in limited supply, and enemy aliens (which certainly aren’t limited) are fast, tank hits, and do a lot of damage. Virtually everything that moves is out to kill you. If it doesn’t move, it is likely to already be dead (in remarkably explicit displays of gore for a PS1-era game). In the main, your enemies are the familiar xenomorph monstrosities, but you’re also hunted by human marines (for reasons that aren’t clear, but I’ve never seen the film either), and most annoyingly, the ‘facehuggers’. Fighting facehuggers with the imprecise controls available is a frustrating endeavour, as they move too quickly and aiming is slow and inaccurate. When they do get you, you become impregnated with an alien embryo and a countdown begins, until you either die violently, or find a single-use embryo removal tool to allow yourself to keep going. It adds an extra dimension to things, but is poorly executed thanks to the controls. You soon come to fear facehugger pods more than any other enemy type.

If you didn’t see it coming, this will make you jump.

Yet more death.

It’s probably one of the better looking games on the platform, so it’s a shame you’re stuck on a grey-brown spaceship for the whole game, as you will tire of the identikit doors and corridors quickly. It being so difficult only means more time spent retrying the same old areas. On the other hand the lack of voice acting or any particularly noticeable narrative does actually work to increase the spookiness.

He’s only half the man he used to be.

I got about half way through and realised I’d seen mostly everything there was to see. A bit too much backtracking (and movement is sloooow) for my limited patience, but a decent effort. This would have had me terrified back in 2000.

Kept my attention for: A couple of days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10