Playing every PS1 game - Blade, Blam!, Blast Chamber, Blast Radius, Blaze & Blade

Blade

Unsurprisingly, given I don’t carry much care for all-American superhero franchises peddled by DC Comics, I don’t care for Marvel either. But this isn’t a game based on a comic book, it’s a game based on the 1998 Wesley Snipes movie vehicle.

This kind of lighting effect was pretty cutting edge for the time.

There was a strange habit around this time of movie tie-in games (I keep having to remind myself they haven’t been a thing at all for well over a decade now) getting a release well after the film they were promoting had left cinemas and everyone had moved on with their lives. An example is Tomorrow Never Dies being released two years after the movie (and just before the next Bond was released). Fans of Batman and Robin had to wait a year to be let down (further), and The Mummy - which I haven’t got to yet - rather randomly appeared on the PlayStation 18 months after the movie release, and might have even been working as a small warm-up for the sequel (the one with the dodgy Dwayne Johnson CGI) which wasn’t that long left in the making. Blade was released in late 2000, two years after the film on which it is based, and it sort of sidesteps the crime here by actually being a prequel, though who knows whether or not it is considered canon by the Blade continuity diehards.

I preferred Demolition Man if I’m honest.

Given its release toward the end of the PS1’s lifespan, you can identify some of the lessons learned along the way being put into practice and there is a somewhat PS2-game-in-training feel to the design of this 3D action game. There are a few nice ideas, but unfortunately the game is so plagued with jank that you can’t really make the most of it. Aside from sensible-sounding functions which simply aren’t implemented well, the game, like some ill-disciplined drug addict, finds itself relapsing into stupid design decisions that we all thought had finally been agreed weren’t fun or sensible.

The environments can be pretty gruesome.

The premise of each level is quite simple - run in, kill everything and move through to the next level, picking up the odd key to unlock the odd door here and there. The hook is that as the titular daywalker you can fight enemies with firearms, a sword, or some lifted-from-the-movie vampire kung-fu, and depending on who your enemy is at a given time, one method of fighting might be a better idea than the other (e.g. humans go down to a few bullets, while vampires shrug them off and instead must be filleted by your ninja sword). The game adds a dimension of risk/reward by having a critical hit meter, which slowly rises while you aren’t attacking - though drops while you are - and when maxed out can one-shot some enemies. I never really got this to work much though.

This zombie enemy has started attacking a human enemy.

The combat controls are pretty tight, and switching between weapon types (which needs to happen a lot) is quick and easy without needing to crawl through loads of menus. The problem is movement, which is clunky and stiff. God knows why they felt the need to include platforming sections, then, which aren’t fun and just remind me of the jump lottery I had to endure in Batman & Robin. Another terrible concept shared with B&R is the adoption of tank controls and the bizarre habit of occasionally jumping to Resident Evil style fixed camera angles at seemingly random points. Is it supposed to get around the problems with a free-moving camera in tight areas? Either way, it throws you right off balance and is rubbish.

Just why?

The presentation is good but it all gets a bit samey after a while. Sometimes you play a game which you think could have been good, but is ruined by its flaws. In the case of Blade I don’t think it was ever going to be that good.

Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Blam! Machine Head

It was more or less mandatory for early PS1 games to include a terrible, horrifying 3D rendered FMV intro (preferably pre-main-menu) to set the scene. Machine Head delivers on this with a lengthy, nonsensical acid trip of exposition to set you up for a very ordinary first-person vehicle shooter.

You just don’t get PS1 uncanny valley horror anymore.

Unfortunately, either due to an emulation bug or it simply being the way the sound mastering is set up, the sound in said FMV was only coming out of one speaker, and the voiceover was too quiet, so I had barely any idea of what was going on beyond what I managed to work out - the earth has been turned to gray goo (it was a bit of a ‘thing’ in the 90s and 00s), and as one of the survivors you need to head out in your land speeder (which looks like it was borrowed from Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle), and like, gun everyone down or something.

Including what seem to be innocent people. Shoot them anyway, they drop health powerups.

The game is quite similar to Beast Wars, except a bit more fast paced. It’s up to you to navigate a freeform, maze-like level and find keys to unlock new areas, whilst fighting against constantly-respawning enemies of varying flavours. Kill everything that moves, even the stuff that isn’t trying to kill you back.

Enemies are varied and strange.

It’s not much to look at, and it’s easy to get lost, which means that thanks to the neverending stream of enemies (which are difficult to target without any sort of lock-on or auto-aim I could work out), you end up running out of ammo and health in short order. No, the only thing memorable about this game is the nightmare-fuel opening FMV. The concept is so ridiculous that I’d actually be interested in finding out what happens in the end, but I’m afraid that’ll have to be a job for YouTube.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh at the sort of stuff people got away with in the before times.

The music is pure 90s DnB bangers, though.

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

Blast Chamber

I didn’t have a clue what to expect, but Blast Chamber is a rather quaint competitive puzzle(ish) game. Compete in square shaped arenas against three others (ideally real life friends by using a multi-tap) in a pseudo capture the flag format.

“It’s morphin’ time!”

What mixes things up a bit is that the arena can be rotated on its y-axis (or would it be the z-axis?) to make what was previously the wall, the floor, and in doing so make everyone but yourself collapse downwards in the new gravity configuration. If one of those fall guys happens to be holding the ‘flag’ at the time, they drop it, so you can pinch it for yourself.

It looks chaotic, but that’s the point.

Everyone starts the game with a personal timer ticking down, and picking up the flag and taking it to your special colour-coded win zone - which may be on the wall or ceiling and require an arena rotation - boosts your timer a bit. You can also bump into your competitors to make them drop the flag, or pick up a separate power up which will give the same effect.

This is a game developed during a time when game developers were still playing Doom.

That’s about it really. There is no ‘single player campaign’ mode or anything like that; you just choose an arena, choose a colour and off you go. It’s pretty hard going against the AI bots, but it’s clear the intention is that you play this with some buddies. Would probably be worth a go if you had all the buddies and the equipment required, but as a single player game there’s not much there to do.

The game also includes a short rolling demo for a game called Time Commando. Good luck finding anywhere else on the internet that tells you that fact.

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

Blast Radius

Ho hum, another flying game, except this time it’s in spaaaaace.

Shoot this thing to continue the game.

It’s hard to say anything of note about Blast Radius. It’s just a total by-the-numbers space sim that has all the features and scenarios you’d expect:

• Shoot groups of enemy fighters in space
• Protect allied big ship X in space
• Hold off enemies for a fixed period of time in space
• Defeat enemies before the time runs out in space

Doesn’t look like any Earth I recognise.

And so on. There’s no special twist on the genre, or interesting mechanic which averts expectations. The game was released in late 1998, so it doesn’t even have the excuse of being an early 3D PS1 game where the novelty was the cool graphics. Nope, it’s just a boring game.

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

Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest

The last random anime RPG that I played actually turned out to be good, so I had high hopes for Blaze & Blade.

Have at thee.

It’s not Azure Dreams, though, unfortunately. B&B is an old-school RPG where you create a party of four adventurers in the time-honoured Dungeons & Dragons pick-a-class-and-assign-some-stats fashion, and then descend upon Highfantasyville to slay beasts, earn one’s fortune and what have you. If there’s a plot, I didn’t get far enough into the game to experience it.

The ability to choose your characters’ verbal temperament is a genuinely novel idea. Shame it doesn’t really mean anything.

You start off in a sort of adventurer hotel, with a save room to make use of and some other locals who cryptically give you the lay of the land and some pointers as to where you should be going next. When you do get out there, it’s a bit of a hack and slash melee as monsters continually come out of the ground to take a bite out of you, while you either swish back at them, or run.

Enemies just keep coming, and can be a bit of a pain to target.

Like Blast Chamber, it’s meant to be played with friends sat at the controls of the rest of your party. In this respect that could be a pretty neat way to play it - a miniature MMO experience before 3D MMOs were within the grasp of anyone but enthusiasts with an internet connection. I’m obviously playing alone, so have to rely on the AI to do the legwork of my adventuring team mates, and…it doesn’t really work.

I am controlling the chap on the far left in this screenshot. The camera is pretty poor.

I’m probably missing something, but I ventured forth with a party consisting of a warrior (whom I was controlling), an elf, a sorcerer and a priest. Anyone whose computer game knowledge extends beyond Freecell should be able to tell that the latter two of this fantasy foursome would be magic-based characters not keen on meeting enemies in hand-to-hand combat. But try as I might, all any of my computer-controlled buddies would do would be rush in and bop enemies on the head, deal piddling damage, take a hit in return and die like a dog. I had a fiddle with the menus and options and couldn’t work out how to make my sorcerer cast spells or my priest attempt to heal HP.

Rest in peace Devonius; a priest who tried to be a warrior.

This meant I didn’t get very far in this game either. The visual design and character creation functions were good, though.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10 if you have a friend, 4 otherwise