Playing every PS1 game - B-Movie, Baby Universe, Baldies, Barbie

B-Movie

For some reason, in my head I always confused this with the other cooky alien-em-up Stupid Invaders which released on the PC. Conceptually this isn’t a million miles away, but in terms of execution it’s very very different.

Another flying ‘sim’.

In a bit of a mix of Army Men: Air Attack and Ace Combat, you swoop around shooting lasers at aliens and trying to protect some immensely oversized human citizen 2D sprites from abduction by these aforementioned extraterrestrials. The whole thing is done with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek quirkiness.

No quirky game is complete without getting chewed out when you fail.

It’s a bit too janky, though. I had a swing at the first level, but failed repeatedly to complete a simple ‘move the box from here to there’ task because (and I promise I’m not just bad at games) the controls made it too difficult to get into the right spot to put the box in the right place. What you do get is the most horrifying ‘Game Over’ screen in videogames:

Nightmare inducing.

Not very good, unfortunately.

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

Baby Universe

Is this even a game?

Far out.

No, it isn’t. Baby Universe is a ‘3D kaleidoscope’ application that runs on PlayStation hardware. You boot it up, a smooth electronic beat plays, and the 3D rendered kaleidoscope starts morphing around to the beat.

Wobble.

You have a few options to change the particular style of kaleidoscope, and move the camera around in the 3D space, and that’s all there is to Baby Universe.

Abstract.

I learned after the fact that it was possible to swap out the game CD with that of an actual music CD and watch the rendering change to match the music beat. Probably mildly interesting in the mid 90s.

Kept my attention for: Ten minutes
Did I finish it?: N/A
Overall: ?/10

Baldies

Apparently this is a PlayStation port of a Jaguar realtime strategy game.

Read the manual.

Another one of those games which assumes you’ve read the manual and gives you precisely zero instruction to its complexities within the game itself, I was never going to last very long here. I’ll say the art and sound design is quite quaint. The aim of the game is to manipulate your little bald men into defeating the team of non-bald men on a series of levels. So it’s a bit of puzzling mixed with base-building and strategy, mixed with a plan-view Lemmings.

Remember level passwords?

I tapped out after having simply no idea how to do anything in the absence of a manual. It would be much easier with a mouse.

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

Barbie - Explorer

Groan, here we go.

Visit Tibet, Egypt, and, er, ‘Africa’, which I suppose means ‘Africa minus the Egypt bit’

Barbie Explorer is one of a handful of Barbie slop games pushed out by Mattel, targeting an audience I simply don’t believe really existed. My guess is it was for parents who owned the console to buy for their kids as something to keep them occupied. It might explain why a shrill yankee Barbie voice-over painstakingly talks the player through each and every menu option as you get started.

VR Training? In my Barbie game? It’s more likely than you think.

The great shame with Barbie Explorer though is that somewhere, deep within the binaries, is actually a potentially enjoyable game. While the screenshots shout Tomb Raider Barbie, it’s actually Crash Bandicoot Barbie. Run forward through a series of platforming levels, avoiding traps, jumping on boxes and collecting gems. It even nicks the ‘collect all the shiny things (ie. boxes or crystals) on the level to unlock the special gem’ shtick from our marsupial friend.

Lara Croft she ain’t.

Unfortunately, that kernel of a good game is crushed entirely by the control system, which is absolutely terrible. Barbie can move in eight directions, but which direction any of that actually means is dependent on the camera position (which is fixed, and moves as you move), which means it might as well be a guess which way you will go whenever you press a directional button. It’s not set up for the sort of precise movement you need to execute when jumping on moving platforms and over bottomless pits.

What platforming looks like in hell.

Expect to die over and over and over as you fail to orient yourself in the right direction, fail to jump forward and instead just hop in place (but then suddenly jump forward when you didn’t mean it) fall into a pit, respawn and immediately jump into the pit again as the game interprets a button press you made way too late. Passages of play frequently become akin to some sort of death highlight reel.

Barbie about to drop into another bottomless pit.

It’s not something you can eventually get to grips with and work around, either; it totally breaks the game. Unfortunate.

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

Barbie - Race & Ride

A game obviously created with the intention of coaxing parents of children with extremely unrealistic christmas wishlists into parting with £20 for a few hours of peace and quiet, Race & Ride invites the player to choose, name, groom and ride a virtual horse - or as the annoying Barbie voice-over calls it, a “harse”. I don’t know why.

Cleaning your horse provides no meaningful benefit or difference beyond the feeling of accomplishment having done it.

The game is basically an FMV-based point-and-click simulation, which was a popular approach to game design in the 90s as we moved on from pixel art and could embed sprites built in 3DS Max. The problem with them is it actually looked really bad and we just didn’t notice it amongst all the novelty. Having to constantly load and re-load in all the backgrounds and models means the game is a turgid affair of clicking, waiting, clicking again and waiting again, all the while having to listen to the same annoying Barbie voice-over.

It’s actually just an FMV. Slowing down or speeding up your haarse is done by lowering or speeding up the framerate, which is…pretty clever really.

There’s very little to actually do. I guess if you were a kid and really wanted a haaarse, this could satiate you for a few minutes. It would probably just make you want a horse even more, though.

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Barbie - Super Sports

Super Sports borrows the same menu UI and voiceover torture as Race & Ride, but this time does include some real gameplay for the player once they’ve waded through the load screens and menus.

If you don’t have a friend, just watch Christie sit there at the start line.

You get to choose between playing a roller-blading game or a snowboarding one. The roller-blading is pants and unenjoyable. The snowboarding, however, does have the trappings of an almost serviceable arcadey racer. You need a friend, though - the game even assumes you do, given some of the game modes will just start you off in split screen whether a second controller is plugged in or not. Doing a bit of snowboard racing with a friend might have been fun for a short period.

Blast that Barbie EDM.

The real thing that I want to talk about here, though, is the option to ‘choose your music’ at a virtual stereo by choosing from a set of CDs (CDs, also known as compact disks, were used to store and play music in the old days). What is wild is that they include some genuine D&B bangers, presumably made just for the game. I was pretty shocked, but I don’t care enough to try and find out what went on there.

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

Bases Loaded ‘96: Double Header

The second baseball game in the list, and it has a very Japanese feel to it. It’s better than 3D Baseball, but such a feat isn’t too hard to achieve.

You can influence the direction of the ball with the directional buttons after throwing, but only a bit.

I still don’t fully understand baseball so I wasn’t expecting to give this one a fair go. It’s pretty simplistic - press X to pitch and press X to hit, throw the ball in to the bases and catch people out. There’s an exhibition mode and a season mode.

Unlike 3D Baseball, this entire game is 2D.

It seems tight enough to have been worth a go in 1996 if you were a baseball fan.

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

Bass Landing

Do the Japanese really enjoy lure fishing as much as it appears based on the volume of bass fishing games floating around? I honestly don’t know.

The simulation is actually pretty good.

You can really feel when playing Bass Landing this sort of raw enthusiasm for fishing. It’s quite eccentric, which I imagine a lot of die hard fishermen who will buy fishing simulations on the PlayStation might be too. Only a developer that really loved fishing would be able to convey a sense of shaking excitement about the different ways of reeling in a lure.

Good grief.

I didn’t get far though, because the tutorial is way too long for someone like myself who doesn’t have the dedicated interest to get virtual fishing. It’s probably quite fun though if that’s what you’re into, though I struggle to imagine how much more there is to fishing that you can put in a fun arcade simulator.

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