Playing every PS1 game - Capcom vs. SNK, Cardinal Syn, Carmageddon, Carnage Heart

Capcom vs. SNK Pro

A bit difficult to work out what this fighting game actually is in the grander scheme of things given the Japanese habit of renaming the same thing but for western markets. After some google-fu, what this heady mixture of Japanese publisher IPs is is a game called Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000, which was released to arcades in the summer of that year. It ended up on the PlayStation a whole two years later, obviously needing to drop the “2000” bit from the title. It was part of the last burst of PlayStation releases before focus went entirely onto the PS2; even the Dreamcast had been dead for a year at this point.

All the old favourites are here.

I never got into Street Fighter. Outside of a few ‘mass appeal’ fighting games like Tekken and (whisper it) X-Men Mutant Academy, I never got to grips with the genre at all. Street Fighter in particular always had too many layers of gimmicks and mechanics beyond simple ‘press X to punch’ stuff for me to ever find the motivation to sit down and work out. I’ve definitely never played King of Fighters, though having now heard some of the sound effects, a lot of random 00s internet memes now suddenly make a lot of retrospective sense.

Is this actually where the GET meme came from?.

As for the game, it feels like there’s a lot to it. Mostly your expected fighting game fare - bog-standard arcade mode, 2-player, player vs CPU, and a team battle, but there are a few oddities. One is a poorly translated (in fact, the whole game is terribly translated) mode which lets you use accrued points to buy…something or other. I couldn’t work it out. What’s wilder is the ‘paint mode’, where you can fiddle with RGB knobs to change the colour schemes on any of the fighting roster. Weird, and…pretty pointless.

Thanks, I guess.

This brings me to the bit that is hard to admit. I got utterly nowhere on the arcade mode. The idea is that you have to assemble a ‘team’ of fighters and it works a bit like a low-rent Tekken Tag Tournament (which was two years old on PS2 by now), then progress through the rounds. I couldn’t get past the first round. Even on the lowest difficulty level. I’m sorry. I think part of it is the game being difficult, part is my not being versed in how to properly play Street Fighter-style games, and a final part might actually be that I am simply bad at the game. Shameful.

I was humbled.

It looks nice, though.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

Cardinal Syn

Another fighter, this time more Soul Calibur than Street Fighter, and as good as neither.

Everyone wanted a piece of the Mortal Kombat blood & guts pie at the time.

The rather morbid style reminds me a bit of the doomed Thrill Kill. It’s pretty gory by the standards of the time. It does a few things that are a bit different to your garden variety fighting game, though. In particular is the various boxes of items that are scattered around each arena, containing health potions, various buffs, and also a giant, sparkling sword, which once picked up causes your character to start flashing and I have to presume boosts your strength, though to be honest I couldn’t really say for sure what effect there was beyond the lightshow.

Touch the weird clown centrepiece and take damage.

You can run around the arena by holding down a button, which is a rare similarity to Bushido Blade. This introduces an element of variety and strategy to what you’re doing, as you can run off to grab some health boosts if you’re losing, or try and lead your opponent into some of the parts of the environment that do damage.

The theming and characterisation is a bit Dungeons and Dragons-y.

The actual combat bit though is pretty average. It’s sluggish and attacks take too long to wind up, in a manner similar to Battle Arena Toshinden, and you can also find yourself getting stunlocked, which in the Geneva Convention Of Fighting Games is the most henious crime a developer can commit. There are a few combinations and throws but really it’s a button mash fest.

Walk into the small wooden boxes to snatch items.

Not amazing, not terrible, just bang in the middle.

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 5/10

Carmageddon

Carmegeddon and its sequels are first and foremost PC games, and I remember flashing around a bit on a PC demo of Carmageddon TDR 2000 years ago in the days before I fully understood how 3D acceleration worked (read: the lack of it on that particular machine meant it limped to a screaming RAM-slurping choke-out), but I didn’t really ‘get it’.

Horrifying.

See, what I was doing was thinking that Carmageddon was actually supposed to be racing game, and it isn’t. It may have the trappings of a racer in terms of its use of a track, and laps, and checkpoints, but really you’re supposed to be wreaking havoc and committing virtual vehicular mass murder of the sort that could and did cause the likes of the Daily Mail to get breathless, and maybe doing some racing on the side, in between piledriving through hapless pedestrians.

Properly modelled car damage like this was pretty rare for the age.

Carmageddon for PlayStation is actually a port of Carmageddon 2 for PC, with the primary difference being its swapping out of human pedestrians for ‘zombies’ (or rather, humans with the skin colour hex code changed to a bluey-purple) in a fit of God-fearing censor avoidance. It actually got pretty rubbish reviews, with Official PlayStation Magazine scoring it with a pathetic 3/10. I really do beg to differ here. Carmageddon is stupid, ridiculous, and actually a great laugh.

Most of the time the ‘race’ will end simply because you’ve blown up all of your opponents and there’s nobody left.

Were they caught up in the sheer tastelessness of the endeavour? Maybe 30 years later and with a more mature view of just how unrealistic and abstract the presentation behind Carmageddon is, the ‘shock factor’ isn’t really there and in its place is just a sort of gross-out humour. There’s just something intrinsically fun about pinballing around in a fast car and smashing through barrels, other vehicles and gaggles of ‘zombies’ jumping around in panic, while your points rack up. It’s whatever the opposite of ‘sophisticated’ is.

YOU WASTED ‘EM.

There are a selection of power-ups one can pick up randomly, ranging from the useful (speed boosts, car armour) to the pointless but funny (‘instant handbrake’ and ‘bouncy car’). The most fun one is a power-up which fires electric arcs at any nearby pedestrians and makes them instantly explode in a mess of guts and body parts. You have to embrace the silliness.

How can this not be fun?

It’s not without fault. The driving mechanics are actually truly atrocious, with vehicles handling like shopping trolleys full of bricks and with turning circles roughly on a par with a cruise liner. Gravity is a will-it-won’t-it affair, with small bumps in the road being more or less a coin flip on whether you maintain control or start flying and tumble-tossing through the air. But again, it doesn’t really matter too much because the racing aspect is tertiary.

Shoot me, I like the game. Or rather, run me over at high speed.

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: No (it’s surprisingly long)
Overall: 7/10

Carnage Heart

Carnage Heart is a turn based mecha something or other game, carrying the same ‘nonsensical Japanese game title’ energy as Azure Dreams. Azure Dreams had a lot of hidden depth simmering below what looked like a straightforward dungeon crawler, and by all accounts the same could be said about Carnage Heart (apart from the dungeon crawler bit).

You don’t actually control the mechs, and are reduced to watching as your carefully hatched plans meet reality.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t particularly know. It becomes immediately apparent to a new player that there is a lot to this game, and instructional pointers on how to get going are mostly absent from the actual game disc. To quote Wikipedia:

To aid the player in learning the gameplay, Carnage Heart was packaged with an unusually large amount of materials for a console game of the time: in addition to the game disc and above-average length manual, the jewel case contained a 58-page strategy guide and a tutorial disc with a 30-minute, fully voice-guided overview of most aspects of the game due to its complexity.

Simple.

Obviously I possess neither the manual, strategy guide or the tutorial disc. I had a bash without them, but just couldn’t quite figure it out, I’m afraid. The contemporary reviews indicate that it was a ‘decent enough’ game once you got to grips with it, but it was that grip getting that would turn off a lot of players. Er, I guess they were right.

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