Playing every PS1 game - Brigandine, Broken Helix, Broken Sword I & II

Brigandine - The Legend of Forsena

Sometimes when you go into a game blind, you can tell from the title alone that you’re not about to have a quick in-and-out experience.

When you see anime-styled RPG characters in the pre-menu sequence, you know for certain that you’re not about to have a quick in-and-out experience.

Despite everything gearing you up for another localisation of a random JRPG, what Brigandine actually turns out to be is a turn-based strategy game that takes the military conquest elements of something like Civilisation or Total War, chucks out the settlement-building drudgery, and adds in a chosen-faction based narrative along with 3D turn-based battles. On paper, a pretty bulletproof idea.

Caerleon? The town near Newport?

It’s alright. The dialogue (There are no ‘cutscenes’, as it were. All exposition takes place via text boxes on the campaign map) is predictably cringey but it’s interesting to see how adding a plot to a turn-based strategy game actually washes out given it’s something you rarely see. Each turn consists of two phases - one to arrange your armies and engage in random events, and the other to attack or defend as you move your proverbial chess pieces around the proverbial board.

The first few turns are always spent either trying to get to your opponent or waiting for them to come to you.

Once you do rock up at an enemy castle, magic staves a-waving, the game switches to a Final Fantasy Tactics-esque hexagonal grid battlefield, where you (rather tediously) move your blokes around and shoot sparks at each other. It can get pretty deep in terms of strategy but more often than not it ends up with opposing armies blobbing together and taking it in turns to kick lumps out of each other. Take out the commanders and your victory is complete.

All you can do is chuckle.

I didn’t get terribly far. While I can see a game here that you could probably spend a lot of time with, after hauling myself through Breath of Fire I’m less in the mood for minmax timesinks. One for the ‘Come Back To Later (Maybe, Probably)’ list.

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

Broken Helix

You simply don’t get stuff like this anymore. Broken Helix can take a berth just below Batman & Robin in the microgenre of games which are crazily ambitious but only manage to stumble through to realisation of less than half of its ideas.

Shadowy limo guy gives you secret orders to infiltrate the base in a groundbreaking new narrative technique.

Broken Helix bangs on about offering ‘4D gameplay’; a promise so stupid it could only be reliably swallowed by consumers when slapped on the marketing of a new and exciting technology (In this case, 3D action games. Broken Helix was released in 1997). What ‘4D’ should be taken to mean here is that the plot advances (mostly) with or without you, based on an in-game timer, and you can ‘do whatever you want’ - in big inverted commas - with NPCs and general approaches to objectives, and see what comes out in the wash. Easier said than done.

I’ve played prettier games.

The premise for this third-person shooter is that you are a stereotypical buff marine (voiced by Evil Dead guy Bruce Campbell) sent to Area 51 with a team of other buff marines to solve a ‘madman with a bomb’ situation. Things quickly unravel and once you’ve solved the bomb problem, your buddies seek to liquidate you as well.

Control maintenance bots to sneak into areas and pick up items to bring back.

The controls are jank o’clock. It’s the typical-of-the-time system where the left and right buttons turn you and L1 and R1 strafe. Getting stuck on the geometry and having to wiggle yourself free is a fact of life in Broken Helix. Presumably in an effort to mischievously sidestep polygon count problems, the viewport is constrained to an area about 2/3 of the full size by use of a static always-on HUD. When you’re rendering at 320x240 that gives you a painfully small number of pixels to play with, and the graphics look pretty damn terrible as a result. On the flipside, it does mean that you get a long draw distance and decent frame rate, which helps with slotting faraway (and incredibly dumb) goons.

Listen to NPCs provide important exposition…

But more about the ‘4D game’ thing. Appearances can be deceiving. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking this might actually be the real deal. When the game starts, you have 20 minutes to defuse the two bombs, which are on two different floors of the complex. You can do that…or you can just not bother and skip straight ahead to what you would normally do afterward. Early on you meet a journalist (don’t ask how she managed to get in) who asks you to help her ‘uncover the conspiracy’ or whatever. You can do what she asks…or just turn her into giblets with your plasma gun, and yeah that’s a major character out of the game, leaving you to go about things in another way. Incredible player-driven narrative!

..Or just blow them up and let the game proceed without them.

Sort of. While you’re indeed given the impression of true freedom - and things really can diverge down rather different paths - there are only really four different routes through the game. It’s pretty difficult to weedle your way through the narrative and work out what to do next as well (a malaise it shares with Batman & Robin), as developments only happen through in-game conversations with NPCs. These aren’t subtitled and you need to try and hear the heavily compressed audio over the sounds of the BGM and the various aliens trying to kill you (or the NPC). If the dialog gets interrupted, tough luck; you’ll be padding about for a while in confusion until stumbling on the next objective.

The platforming sections are utterly horrid.

And you don’t want to be wasting time, either. Your marine pals-turned-enemies are clearing house floor by floor, and will catch up with you and turn you to mincemeat if you faff around too much. It encourages a turgid gameplay style where you save, figure out what you’re supposed to do, then reload so you can do it quickly.

Some sections require crawling through ventilation ducts, seemingly just to change things up a bit.

There’s a lot going on, and the concepts are interesting and I think definitely achievable on the platform, but they would have done better spending time getting the basics right. Combat is rubbish, though thankfully not as frequent as it could have been. Adding platforming sections was a stupid idea. The levels are too maze-like and it is easy to get lost.

Worth a look at, though.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

Broken Sword

Point and click games are always awkward on console, and in the days of 240p and non-analog control the awkwardness was doubly felt. Shunting a cursor around the screen with the directional buttons is slow and fiddly, so it’s funny to think that in this modern age of games being built with both mouse & keyboard and controller setups in mind, ‘point and click’ control (on menus, at least) has had a bit of a resurgence (think No Man’s Sky and Assassin’s Creed).

Do you get this cartoon style anymore?

There’s a difference though between using a highly sensitive analog stick to smoothly move a cursor around a 4K screen, and using chunky directional buttons to try and precisely move a cursor around a space that has 1.23% of the pixels of said 4K display. Yes, much like every other game of the time, Broken Sword has clunky controls.

Most puzzles revolve around trying to gain access to areas you otherwise shouldn’t be able to.

I don’t often play point & click games but I tend to have a decent time when I do. Monkey Island and Phantasmagoria are great. You would think that the ‘pixel hunt’ stupidity which plagues a lot of PC titles would be absent here, partly I think because the controls are so wonky that waving your cursor around to happen across tiny fragments of bitmapped background would make the game more or less unplayable. Unfortunately, said disease is not entirely absent, but it keeps things simple with most interact-able items being obvious enough from the artwork and with a big enough ‘hitbox’ for you to to not accidentally miss them (Mostly. More on that later).

Plus ca change.

You play as the PlayStation’s pathetic incel-in-chief George Stobbart, who takes it upon himself to solve a murder leading to the unravelling of a deep Knights Templar conspiracy, and thirsting hard after a young French heroine in the process (he gets worse in the sequel). Everything about the game feels so 90s, down to having to use the landline to contact people, and a murder happening in broad daylight in the centre of Paris which doesn’t result in an immediate TikTok melee.

The famous goat puzzle. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

The game is charming. The artwork dovetails nicely with a game which pokes fun at itself while remaining at least halfway serious. There is absolutely nothing new here for a point & click game, but it doesn’t really matter. It has to be said that without this ‘charm’ quality which /vr/ would refer to as ‘SOVL’, what this is is actually a pretty average adventure game, which sits uneasily on the eyes compared to its Windows counterpart.

Suddenly dying starts happening a lot toward the end, meaning you have to save all the time.

Everything ticks over swimmingly, with our boy George jet setting through various European destinations solving puzzles of varying arcanity, until roughly the last third of the game, where the solutions to the puzzles start to stray from ‘complicated but I guess it makes sense’ too far into the realm of absurdity and a requirement to either possess gamer clairvoyance or simply revert to the tired adventure game fallback of attempting to ‘use’ every item you hold on every interactable object on every screen until something happens. Some of the solutions are truly obtuse.

The trial and error with using items on people to work out what to do next gets pretty ridiculous.

This is also where the game suffers from the extremely low level of detail in the backgrounds (compared to the Windows version), because it is around these final sections of the game where pixel hunting rears its head, and you are required to interact with miniscule elements of the background which you won’t have even realised were there until a guide was consulted. It’s a shame. Ironically, on PS2, with a higher resolution, I think everything would have worked far better, but by that point producing a 2D game was considered something close to the gaming equivalent of a crime against humanity, and so they produced the tepid, fully 3D Broken Sword 3 instead. Guess which games in the series remain more popular.

I was stuck here for ages. You actually need to faff around with random objects on a different screen to continue.

It’s a good job then that the writing is funny, the voice acting is tidy and the non-ridiculous puzzles are genuinely fun to work out. It’s a good game, just play it on PC instead.

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

Broken Sword II

A year on from Broken Sword we were offered up the Inevitable Sequel. It’s more of the same really but with the controls tightened up a bit (you can now scroll through conversation options and items rather than have to faff about lining the cursor up), and the Knights Templar conspiracy plot binned in favour of, er, an ancient Mayan conspiracy plot. It retains the great artwork and sardonic humour of BS1 and the concept manages to be fantastical but not totally ridiculous.

You get to dump the iconic green bomber and jeans combo.

The most frustrating thing about Broken Sword was how the latter parts of the game turned into an exercise in waving your cursor all over the screen to find single-pixel-sized mundane parts of the scenery with which to interact, and mixing objects together in perplexing ‘how was I supposed to work that out?’ ways in order to proceed forward. At least it was only the back end of the game where it started doing that, though. In Broken Sword II, it throws you into this nonsense in the very first screen.

See those two tiny white dots underneath the hand icon? That’s what you need to click.

It goes from there. The game is definitely harder than its predecessor, but I don’t consider pixel hunting to be a legitimate complexity lever. There’re no ‘little grey cells’ involved in discovering that, actually, that tiny little office drawer (itself part of an interact-able office desk which doesn’t reveal anything useful) is clickable and contains the key to the exit - the only way you could find this solution is just by waving the cursor around and hammering the ‘activate’ button.

You start picking up a rather large array of totally pointless knick knacks on your journey, sighing in the knowledge that each will have a frustratingly specific use when you least expect it.

While Broken Sword II was well received at the time - and it is still a decent game on the whole - in retrospect it isn’t as good as the original. The sound quality seems to have gotten worse, with pretty horrible audio compression which surely wouldn’t have gone without notice even at the time. There is also a terrible innovation where any action you make tends to result in the activation of a short piece of incidental mood music - which plays VERY LOUDLY and usually drowns out any dialogue that may have been happening at the same time.

You do get to play as Nico this time. For a bit.

I kept wanting to enjoy Broken Sword II, because it has all the pieces there to be fun to play. The problem is that every time you start having fun, you get thrown a bone-headed puzzle where the only way to proceed is through an incoherent manipulation of inventory items and pixel sized screen details. I eventually tapped out when I discovered that in order to get past some guards I needed to combine a stone in my inventory with a box of dog biscuits I’d picked up at the start of the game. Rubbish.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 5/10