Playing every PS1 game - Alien Trilogy, All Star budget games

Cheap, simple games have always been a niche for some small-time developers, and one such software house which delivered these ‘pocket price’ games for the PlayStation was Midas Interactive, which acted as publisher and sometime developer. We’re already familiar with a few (like Air Hockey), but in this post we go through the thankfully brief All Star series.

But first…

Alien Trilogy

Paired with its successor to form the twosome of Alien games on the PlayStation, Alien Trilogy released in early 1996 and serves as a sort of Doom-clone-but-not-quite (half way between that and Duke Nukem really), that on the face of it is supposed to revolve around the plot of the first three films…but it doesn’t actually. You start the game in what could be best described as a drunken mis-telling of the opening to Aliens, and then it just sort of goes from there.

Simple graphics but they do the job.

Coming before even Quake, and before soon-to-be FPS concept mainstays like weapon models appearing on the right hand side, free-look (i.e aiming) and reloading (instead you just fire until running out of ammo), it’s an FPS in its simplest of forms. And it’s pretty fun. Drop into a level, load up on ammunition, gun down aliens, and blow things up.

Not dealing with these guys quickly enough results in this jumpscare.

For 1996 on the PS1, this would have been a banger. Shame it has no multiplayer function. It looks visually terrible now, but the snappy controls and gunplay still manage to make up for it somewhat. On the other hand, the level design does get really old. Much like Alien Resurrection, your being stuck on a series of industrial-grey-brown spaceships inhibits variety.

Human enemies don’t bleed acid, so you don’t take damage if you step on their corpses.

Diverting but not very deep - the case for most games that weren’t RPGs until the late 90s.

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

All Star Action

By June 2003 the PlayStation, already rebranded and repackaged as the diminutive PSOne, was pretty much dead and buried and all that were left were EA Sports annual updates, dodgy ports of old games, and highly bizarre budget titles hoping to con thrifty Tesco mums. It is the latter of these which we find here; basically a compilation of several such budget offerings (some of which do seem to have also been released as stand-alone games at one point), spread over two discs - of which I only have one.

You boot the game up, and get a choice of 12 ‘full fledged’ games to play. This descriptor is an untruth.

Xtreme.

Of the ‘games’ (a noun to employ loosely here) that actually existed on Disc 1, we have the following:

Xtreme Boarders

No, it isn’t rollerblading around Eton College - this is a very simple surfing game. You choose from a handful of locations, pick a board, and surf’s up.

As extreme as sports get.

I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t think it’s possible to actually stand up, so you just sort of flap around in the waves for a while, try and ‘ride’ one for a bit, then fall off. There are a few modes which pit you against CPU players to ‘ride the wave’ for points, but that’s it, that’s the game.

Water Power Jet

Wait a minute, this is the same game! It’s actually exactly the same thing but with jet skis instead of surfboards. There’s nothing else to say.

It controls in much the same way too.

Surfing Paradise

…Yep. The same again, but it’s, er, windsurfing. The load times really are excessive with all of these games.

Even the menu options are the same.

Power Riders

Coming utterly out of left field, Power Riders is a Wipeout clone, which by the looks was actually released on its own as Future Racer in 1997 (six years earlier). You choose a course and an anime character, then race.

At least, I think it’s a race. You just loop around the track, bopping each other as you pass, until the timer runs out. There is some sort of points system that I was unable to fathom.

God knows.

It’s jarring that this comes right in the middle of a series of low-rent surfing games that you might have found on Miniclip.com. Production values are higher, but the game doesn’t actually offer much.

Ride The Waves

OK, we’re back to surfing again. No jet skis or paddleboards here though, it’s actually just Xtreme Boarders but with a different name this time. We’ve been had.

There’s some sort of trick system, but all you can do is spin around laterally.

Superbike GP

A surprisingly detailed racing game that looks familiar…wait, it’s 5 Star Racing! Yes, it’s our other budget friend from earlier in the year, but with motorbikes instead of cars.

At least they got some good mileage out of the (game) engine.

The bikes handle horribly, but it’s worth noting how well done the cyclist animations are - probably better than many of the full-priced motorcycling games available at the time.

The rest

The remaining games on the list invite me to insert ‘Disc 2’ to play, which I don’t have. I don’t think I’m missing much, but based on their names, I think they’re further 5 Star Racing clones. I can probably rest easy in the assumption that none of them are good.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: I guess
Overall: 1/10

All Star Boxing

After All Star Action, I was buckled up ready for more barely-playable dross. I was happily surprised to find some somewhat playable dross.

No idea what ‘rush’ is supposed to indicate.

It’s a quaint arcade boxing game which has much that you’d expect. A few different fighters (which look wildly different but don’t necessarily play very differently), a versus mode, and a ‘Championship’ campaign mode, where you work your way up the divisions, challenging increasingly harder CPU opponents.

The boxing itself is simple and rather dry. Square button to hook, X button to guard, and X + Square to jab - which actually makes sense if you think about it a bit. Combine this with the up or down button to aim for the body or head. I managed to let loose an uppercut a few times, not realising how I did it. The thing is, you can defeat opponents fairly easily by just hammering jab and keeping them more or less stunlocked. Not particularly interesting gameplay.

And then return to the main menu to do it all over again.

There is some sort of end-of-each-round points system, which I couldn’t work out. ‘Health’ bars decrease slightly with each hit, and recover up to a point at the end of each round. Occasionally you can pull off a sort of ‘super attack’ which drops your opponent for an instant K.O if their health bar isn’t particularly high. They can do the same, though, suddenly and out of nowhere. Cheers, then.

A vaguely polished yet forgettable game.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

All Star Racing

Is it? Yes it is! It’s 5 Star Racing again, except as another standalone game.

Choose your nearly-identical race scenario.

The courses and car models are slightly different, but other than that the concept is the same; choose a car, choose a course, ride a few laps versus CPU cars, then quite literally get told that it’s Game Over.

There isn’t a two-player option, or any unlockable cars or tracks. You can probably get through all there is to offer on the disc within half an hour. The gameplay itself isn’t terrible - the driving ticks along at a surprisingly high and smooth frame rate, and handling is serviceable - but there is simply nothing to the game.

No, the Mini Cooper knockoff doesn’t handle any differently to any of the other cars.

That’s it for the Midas All Star series. Googling other releases from the publisher is interesting. Not everything they put out was garbage (though most of it was). For the PS1 alone, they’re also down as publisher for Castrol Honda Superbike 2000 - very much a proper game - and the decidedly memeable Chris Kamara Street Soccer - which very much isn’t. Speaking of memeable, something I didn’t know was that they are also down as publisher for the PS2 release of Winback: Covert Operations, a favourite for lazy ‘gamer Youtuber’ takes about how it was the game which invented shooting from cover.

Next up are more games starting with All Star, but they’re unrelated.

Kept my attention for: 10 minutes
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 2/10

All Star Soccer

Oh, bloody hell, it’s more football.

A very weird one this time, though. Hard to describe. The game starts with a very long CG intro FMV that depicts an obvious caricature of Des Lynam sleeping through his alarm, rushing off late to work via car, plane, and - in a swing toward reductio ad absurdum - a spaceship, whilst an on-set TV producer becomes more and more irate.

A football game with a narrative?

Des manages to get there just in time to present what is presumably a football highlights show before the producer slumps back in his chair with relief, and accidentally knocks the power plug out of the wall in the process, sending the whole show off the air.

Is that meant to be Jimmy Hill?

Then the game starts, and what you just watched all ceases to be relevant. The menu system is ambitiously quirky, but in practice horrible to use - you hover over icon-based buttons and wait for the on-screen fake Des to tell you whether it is the option to ‘Load game’ or ‘Customise team’, or whatever else. It simply would never fly these days purely on accessibility grounds, as if you can’t hear what he’s saying then the game is entirely unplayable.

Best of luck.

The game’s hook is the ability to build your own ‘all star’ custom team from scratch, being able to give it a funny name, silly kit, and then change the players’ faces, body shape, and football skills. The aforementioned horrible UI does its best to hinder you in this endeavour, though, and setting something up without accidentally undoing it all can take an age. The other glaring problem is that you can’t actually customise that much; players don’t have names, stats don’t seem to make too much difference, and beyond choosing a funny head and making your players skinny or fat, there is no further breadth of the options made available to you.

Your fully customised All Star squad in full.

The actual gameplay is also godawful. It’s potentially worse than 4-4-2 Soccer. Graphics are 2D sprites, AI is nonexistent and controls are limited. The only way to wrestle posession away from the computer is to slide tackle straight through an opposing player. Passing and crossing is a waste of time, and the only real tactic is to run with the ball until you either get two-footed yourself, or manage to get a shot off.

Upon scoring a goal, players will hold this pose indefinitely until you press a button.

What makes things even crazier is the commentary (and maybe even all VA in the game), which is provided by soon-to-be-pretty-famous comedy bloke Alistair McGowan, doing impressions of various football pundits which range from mildly funny to groanworthy. It doesn’t really work, as the quips seem to be picked at random and replace commentary altogether, meaning what you actually have is short Alan Hansen impersonations repeating in the background while you try and negotiate your way through a rubbish football game.

Don’t expect to be able to direct your throw in any predictable way.

The only good thing I’ll say about the game is that I need to find a way to rip the atmospheric DnB soundtrack that plays on the menu screens, as it’s a cracker.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

All Star Tennis ‘99

The last of the games beginning with ‘All Star’ on PlayStation, and lo and behold, it’s not very good either.

Gameplay is simplistic with only a single button needed.

You’re offered three different game modes, which each play more or less the same. One is basically a ‘quick start’ option, one lets you choose a court and an opponent (or play a tournament), and the other lets you play tennis with comedy bombs.

Bomb mode. I don’t know either.

The bombs explode and make a noise after a few moments and have no effect beyond that which I could work out. Some of the players are real, B-list tour players from the late 90s, and others are just totally made up, as far as I can tell.

The 1998 genesis of Middle East sportswashing.

Music is bad, animations are staccato, the game is boring.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10