Playing every PS1 game - Ape Escape, Apocalypse, Area 51, Armored Core, Armorines

Ape Escape

Once you learn how to ride a bike, they say unless you lose an arm or suffer from some sort of degenerative wasting disease that you will never forget how to cycle. I posit that it is the same for learning how to use the dual analog sticks on a PlayStation controller (or these days, any other type of console input device modelled on its design). It’s difficult to comprehend a time where nobody was familiar with such a control scheme, and had to awkwardly re-learn how to move about on-screen polygons without relying on a simple directional button input with a fixed eight degrees of movement.

Bagged and tagged.

But that’s what we had to do with Ape Escape. The DualShock controller had been around for a year or two by this time, but no games actually made any use of the sticks; the most support you could expect was from a few games which would allow you to use the sticks interchangeably with an already-existing control scheme mapped to the other buttons (and even then you had to manually flick on the ‘Analog’ button in the centre of the controller to enable it). For the first time, a game actually required ownership of at least one of Sony’s new type of controller - a fact that the game and its associated promotional material went to great pains to warn you about, in order to reduce the risk of an unfortunate moment where an unlucky, DualShock-less consumer loads up the game and finds themselves embarrassingly immobile.

This is all a long way of saying that, given how the control scheme introduced in 1999’s Ape Escape is now so completely ubiquitous in 3D third-person games, a newcomer loading it up in 2025 will never get to experience the frustrations everyone had getting to grips with the concept of moving a character around with a highly responsive, analogue (sort of) wiggly knob rather than the security of fixed buttons with a fixed direction and a fixed movement speed. They may not realise this was even a factor at all.

You even row (awkwardly) with the sticks.

But what of the game? It’s very good, if a wee bit short to those who only plan to play until the credits roll. A lot of thought has gone into every constituent part so as to form a greater whole. I don’t know whether it is just the visual design, but I’m reminded a lot of 40 Winks - but better (and admittedly with a totally different gameplay hook).

Use the left stick to chase around the titular, hat-and-trouser-wearing apes, and the right stick to swing whichever gadget you have mapped to the face buttons. It’s slick, and spot on. Accurately aiming your ape-catching butterfly net at targets isn’t the simplest task in the world - it was still early days for analog control, after all - but the game saves you extra frustration by providing you with very large hitboxes to swipe at.

Sneak up on monkeys before they spot you and run off.

The loop is thus - land in level, track down monkeys, outfox their attempts to flee or fight back or otherwise shake you off their tail, bag them in the net (which is flavoured with a satisfying schwoop sound and miniature light show), and get teleported away once you reach your requisite number of captures. The structure follows a format so familiar to PS1 platformers that I would go as far as calling it a bit lazy - you have a hub level with a save room, which also acts as a level select area allowing you to move on, or return to a previously completed level to capture any monkeys you may have missed the first time around (usually only reachable with a new gadget).

Get periodic plot updates between levels via satellite.

There’s nothing particularly bad you can say about Ape Escape. The soundtrack bangs, with a classic lineup of late-90s style atmospheric breakbeat bloops that I found myself looking up on YouTube. The plot and characters skew a bit too U for Universal for me now, but it’s made up for with the whacky level design, gadgets and change-up bonus levels.

Type: Forgettable.

There’s a sensation you get when playing Ape Escape that is set apart from all the other games so far in this process. Because of the control scheme, it feels so much more like playing a low-res PS2 game. Or even a modern game; in a world where half baked ‘4K remakes’ are ten a penny, this is a game where you really could just scale up the graphics and it would be otherwise the same as it was in 1999. If only we were to know then that this was the format for which all games for the next 20 years would follow.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No (almost, though)
Overall: 8/10

Apocalypse

Now, this is the sort of mad and obscure stuff you hope for when digging through a 5th generation console game library. It’s got a height-of-his-powers Bruce Willis on the cover (in a time long, long before celeb actors readily gave their likenesses to something as trivial as a video game), as if promising the player that they will get to embark on a ‘play the movie’ experience, being our boy Bruce in his latest gun-toting, goon-smoking 90s action blockbuster. At least that’s how I imagine the pitch went down.

Everyone laughed at PS1 Hagrid but nobody remembers PS1 Bruce Willis?

The lore behind Apocalypse is interesting. Developed by Neversoft and piggybacking on tooling developed to port cult PC laser-em-up MDK to PS1, it seems Bruce Willis was roped in and paid the obligatory millions originally to feature as an AI-controlled sidekick, before the idea was inevitably binned when publishers realised it would be stupid to have Bruce Willis in your game, but have the player play the role of some random guy. Eventually what we’re playing here turned into the legendary Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and equally legendary Spider-Man.

The ultraviolence is actually quite gruesome. This guy’s head exploded.

Rest assured this game is neither Tony Hawk nor Spider-Man. It’s a strange combination of rail shooter, ‘bullet hell’, and something like a 3D Contra. It’s thoroughly average. Run fast down corridors, mowing down huge amounts of enemies by constantly firing either forward, backward, right or left (or diagonally) by using the face buttons or the right analog stick - with the added challenge being doing all this while trying to avoid all the lasers being shot at you meanwhile.

Take a break from all the death to watch…a music video? This happens several times and is never explained.

What about action hero Bruce Willis? He’s jankily mo-capped in 3D in pre-level FMVs providing a very loose plot exposition, and in-game he repeats a selection of around a dozen wisecrack one-liners. His role ends there, and honestly if his face wasn’t on the cover of the game, you’d be forgiven for not noticing his presence.

You can often actually just run straight to the end of the level and not bother with the shooting bit.

The game’s challenge is a function of the number of enemies firing at you at once, which slowly increases as you go through the levels. At the end of every level is a boss with a large health bar at which you need to shoot until either it dies or you die. Leave your brain at the door, because you won’t need it; but neither does this game have any pretentions of providing a thinking man’s experience. It’s run and gun, and there’s actually something quite fun in its execution. I just don’t think I’d want to go to all the effort of taking the disc out of the box and putting it in the machine every time I wanted a few minutes of run and gun.

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

Area 51

A PlayStation port of a vaguely successful mid-90s arcade game (I swear I saw one of the cabinets once). I knew I wouldn’t get far here because it’s a lightgun game, and I’m merely using a bog standard controller. I’m sure there’ll be a way to hook up a computer mouse or the touchscreen with it, but I’m not that hard up.

Area 51 or Swansea Wind Street?

It’s a bit of a poor man’s Virtua Cop. The way the game works is by playing a sequence of 3D rendered FMVs - you can spot the short pauses as one FMV ends and the next one is loaded - to give the impression of action and movement while 2D sprites representing alien enemies dressed in terrible 80s shell suits get pasted over the top, popping up from behind other 2D sprites of barrels, ladders and the like.

Area 51 is filmed in front of a live studio audience.

Taking damage seems to be random and based around simply taking too long to shoot back at the zombie goons. The thing is, because you’re basically watching a fixed FMV, the game moves on without you anyway if you take too long, and conversely if you turn the zombie roadmen into giblets too quickly, your viewpoint will just sit there pointing at an empty area until the FMV catches up.

The curveball thrown at you is that your ‘team mates’ - mo-capped and digitised ‘special forces’ dressed like Jill in Resident Evil - randomly jump in front of your gun in a terrible demonstration of special forces weapon drills, meaning you can’t just shoot anything that moves. It’s a trick pulled often enough to keep you on your toes without things getting frustrating.

Don’t shoot this guy, as tempting as it is.

I didn’t get very far. Do things move beyond the airport level? Who knows.

Kept my attention for: 20 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Armored Core

Mech games are something I only have limited experience with - a demo of Zone of the Enders on a OPS2 disc, and a PC demo of Heavy Gear 2 that I played the hell out of back in the day, and I think that’s about it. The genre used to be a pretty big deal though.

The game throws you right in, with no tutorial, Driver style.

Going in totally blind to Armored Core, the intro FMV seems to indicate that this is a game about giant rollerblading robots. Which is sort of what it is, but it would be unfair to pretend it doesn’t have a lot more depth than that. The root of the game is based around maintaining and upgrading your ‘AC’, meaning you can mix and match segments including your ‘head’, chassis, arms, legs and weapons. You do so by earning cash to buy upgrades through completing missions - taking care not to turn your AC into a wreck in the process as repair costs are deducted in your end-of-mission sum up - and flogging off old gear.

This is actually the bulk of the game.

Gameplay is tricky to get used to but satisfying when you figure it out, but be prepared to risk RSI with the number of buttons you find yourself having to press or hold at once in order to schwing your bot sideways through the air while aiming your rocket launcher and firing off pot shots.

You can pull off some neat looking tricks, but it’s not straightforward.

There is very little explained to you in terms of plot exposition, so I assume it’s one of those old fashioned games where it assumes you’ve read the manual first on the drive home. The whole concept of big fighting mechs and building up your super-custom megazord is an intriguing one, but in this first game of what became a much longer series, it does feel like it’s weighed more to the ‘concept’ side than a matured gameplay system. I expect the multiplayer mode would have been great fun, though.

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

Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M

Honestly, you have to presuppose that a game with a title as stupid as ‘Project S.W.A.R.M’ is probably going to be something of a stinker.

Anyone else thinking Goldeneye?

It’s not terrible. In fact, there are a few things here that stand out rather starkly amongst the dense collection of console shooters that largely tried and failed until the 7th generation (and the invention of Halo) started to streamline the FPS approach into the CoD monoculture we love now.

Swarm is definitely the word.

The thing I liked the most was discovering that with a bit of fiddling you can set up to play with the dual-analog FPS control system that everyone is familiar with. The default is the painful directional-buttons-to-move-and-turn-and-shoulder-buttons-to-strafe-and-look setup that still held a firm chokehold on the genre at the time. The dual stick setup is actually pretty smooth and responsive too - it feels better than Alien Resurrection, but still isn’t quite twitchy enough and suffers from the lack of aim assist QOL tweaks that its 21st century descendants worked out - there is an automatic auto-aim, but it takes a bit of luck to get it to trigger, and trigger at the right enemy.

Picking up ‘adrenaline’ increases your power and endurance, but unfortunately you can’t see anything while it’s active, so it’s pointless.

There is enough of an obvious level of production value here to raise one to think that this was a game that the publisher was taking at least semi-seriously. Unfortunately some of the on-rails sections are too hard and the settings look a bit boring. Is it too much of a stretch to think that the snow-themed first set of levels was emulating N64’s Goldeneye? It definitely feels like that sort of game when you play it.

After the generic arctic level, there’s, er, the generic ‘Aztec’ level. Yawn.

What kills it off, unfortunately, is the concept. Gunning down endless, endless swarms (surely S.W.A.R.M.S?) of low-poly bugs gets old before you’re at the end of the second level. Maybe it changes up later down the line, but it didn’t seem to be shaping that way before I moved on from Armorines. If you swapped the leggy alien arachnids for human enemies with a half-decent AI, I think you might have had a pretty decent game. In fact, you’d probably have Timesplitters. Not this time, though.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10, if you play with dual analog, otherwise 3/10