Playing every PS1 game - Bloody Roar 1/2, Bomberman

Festive greetings. Time for some decidedly non-festive forgotten PlayStation games.

Bloody Roar: Hyper Beast Duel

I’ve gone through a handful of fighting games so far on this journey, and they’ve ranged from the bad to the almost good. I think I would slot Bloody Roar into a category named ‘decent enough’, which I place one step up from ‘almost good’ on my totally-arbitrary-and-made-up-just-now ratchet of quality. It’s a fighting game where the gimmick is being able to press circle at any time to transform - with flashing lights, neon effects and a shwoop rather than in a Transformers body horror sense - into jacked-up anthropomorphic animal form in order to deliver what is presumably a more powerful beat down.

Man versus beast.

It certainly looks the part; an improvement on the slightly drab sheen of Battle Arena Toshinden and it takes advantage of its definitely-not-reality setting to make use of all sorts of wild special effects. We’re deep into the Tekken era at this point, and 3D fighting game development had been more or less worked out.

Unfortunately the battle arenas are all pretty dull, and there aren’t many of them.

It’s not quite Tekken, though. The gameplay is fluid, but it’s not as straightforward as its Namco counterpart to throw together combinations, or button mash in such a way that it looks like you’re a genius. There’s no option in the obligatory ‘training’ mode to have it teach you any combinations - for that you need the manual, so I was a bit stuck.

This image is a spoiler for Bloody Roar (released 1998).

Taking a whole face button out of the equation to map to your animal transformation also feels a bit limiting. You’re left with a punch button, a kick button, and a block/dodge button, which invites comparison with the more common button-per-limb setup. It also means if you’re a terrible button masher like myself, you find yourself accidentally transforming.

Practice mode.

This is offset by the fact that you’re effectively able to play as two characters at once, with different movesets, which changes things up a bit. Once you’re transformed, a separate timer bar starts depleting, which when emptied returns you to your puny human form. Hitting triangle while in beast mode activates the ridiculously-translated ‘Rave’ mode, which powers up your moves even further, at the expense of your beast timer depleting more quickly (I think). It introduces a few layers of complexity to things, but really the battles are over too quickly for it to matter too much.

Quiet introspective moment for our guy who fist-fights everyone he meets.

What’s interesting is the level of customisation the game allows you. Aside from ten levels of CPU difficulty and being able to let yourself win in one round while your opponent has to down you two or three times, there’s the (obligatory on PS1) big head mode, and a ‘kid mode’, where you batter each other with miniature versions of your fighters.

You can make the game pathetically easy for yourself if you like. Tsk.

The fun stuff needs to be unlocked first in arcade mode, which is a rather basic journey. I ran through it as ‘Gado’, and was treated to a CGI slideshow epilogue which I’m sure sounded poignant or something in the original Japanese. Here, though, given the lack of any sort of front-loaded exposition to the characters (presumably it was all in the manual), all that stood out in my mind was that I was getting maybe two or three seconds to read the caption to each slide. A reminder of the sort of half baked localisation struggles you used to get in those days.

It’s decent enough.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 6/10

Bloody Roar 2: Bringer of the New Age

A year later, the satisfyingly Engrish subtitle Bringer of the New Age arrived in Europe - though the in-game voiceover still refers to it as The New Breed. A demo of BR2 was actually one of the first things I ever played on my PlayStation back in Christmas 1999 - it came on the disc bundled with that month’s issue of Official UK Playstation Magazine. Issue 41, if you’re interested. It’s still on my shelf.

It’s subtle in a static image, but there is an improvement in visual quality.

There are the usual fighter sequel changes that everyone expects - a few new fighters added to the roster, a few new moves, some new modes, but interestingly, the whole ‘beast rave’ malarkey from the original game has been binned. It’s no big loss. You now get to transform without having the option to flash in funny colours. It’s not particularly replaced with anything, though. Which is fine, as the core of the game is still solid.

Boxing bunnies are now canon.

What strikes me the most, particularly in comparison with the games I’ve been playing so far, is how good it looks. Now it has to be said that by the time this game was released, Tekken 3 had already arrived and set a cosmetic standard for 5th gen console fighters that would never be topped, but it does look great, and the animation is top notch too. There is even an out-of-the-box 16:9 widescreen display option, which I tried out, and (in the emulator, at least), it was pushing out widescreen 480i at a rock solid 60 FPS. The vast majority of PlayStation games ran at a 4:3 320x240px, and as we’ve seen, many games struggled to get 30fps even with that, so it’s a good effort.

Shame none of us had widescreen TVs in 1999.

As a test, I scaled the graphics up to something around HD at 16:9, and you get something that looks a generation beyond (though of course, the PS2 couldn’t do HD either):

It wouldn’t be long before Tekken Tag Tournament.

A ‘story’ mode has been added, which I guess tries to piece together some sort of narrative for each character that would come off as trite and farfetched even it they didn’t live in a world where the outcome of seemingly every interaction between two people is engaging in several rounds of beating the shit out of each other. I was hoping for at least some sort of FMV payoff for completing a run but nope, more slideshows.

“Now let’s fight!”

The main criticism stands from the last game - you’re losing one of the face buttons to transforming, so the actual fighting bit feels a bit hamstrung. Only a bit though; this is actually a well done, fun fighting game.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10

Bomberman

I’ve gone away and looked some things up here, as there are some facts that are in dire need of being faced. By 1998, when Bomberman (known as Bomberman Party Edition in the US) was released, there were - at the very least - 20 or so sibling, sequel, prequel and spin-off Bomberman titles which had been released before it. I’ve not gone and played every one of them but I can be pretty certain that they are all basically exactly the same game, which nothing more than window dressing being the difference between titles. Nintendo games are the biggest offenders with this sort of cynicism, but Bomberman seemingly got a release on every device that could be plugged into a display.

A truly earth-shaking leap in fidelity.

It’s all the more offensive, then, that Bomberman is actually explicitly supposed to be a re-release of the original 1983 arcade game, but on PlayStation, and with fancier graphics. But…what’s the difference? They could have said the same thing about the previous 20 versions.

The 1983 version is included, just to hit home to the player that you’re getting nothing new.

Oh, it’s rubbish. Moreover, I feel that after being subjected to this, I may now carry a permanent hatred for the ‘franchise’.

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

Bomberman World

Bomberman World was actually released before Bomberman on the PlayStation. You could have fooled me.

Making it work at a slight diagonal angle would have been considered a great jump forward for the series.

It’s not quite as terrible as the other one, but it’s still not worth bothering with. Maybe the multiplayer option would be interesting for about five minutes. Again, it’s just the same game but with some different bitmapped backgrounds. Only Bomberman freaks may apply.

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