Playing every PS1 game - Chase the Express, Chicken Run, Chocobo games, Chris Kamara

Chase the Express

Chase the Express caught my eye back in the day based on nothing more than it being in possession of a catchy name. I never actually played it, but the fact that its release garnered underwhelming reviews (and a horrible 4/10 from Official Playstation Magazine) before it faded quickly into the background of the mammoth PS1 catalogue meant that I wasn’t bothered, and I never thought about it again until now.

The scene is set with a lengthy FMV which probably looked cool at the time but now is just body horror. Also the bad guys from Killzone.

Imagine my shock in finally playing the game and discovering that I actually think it’s great. The gameplay itself is indeed rather middling, but everything else about the presentation, plot and concept is so ridiculously cheesy and overcooked that it inserts itself very deeply into ‘so bad it’s good’ territory. Particularly when all aspects of the stupidity are played 100% straight. In that sense, a title as cooky as ‘Chase the Express’ fits it rather well; certainly better than its turgid North American release title Covert Ops: Nuclear Dawn, a title that in its effort to sound - I guess - ‘cool and mature’, it just ends up sounding thoroughly dull.

The game is very stupid.

I imagine that Chase the Express is what you get if you task a Japanese developer to recreate an American 90s action film. The game has you roleplaying as NATO Hardboiled Spec Ops Guy Lt. Jack Morton (even the names are cheesy) - voiced by someone clearly trying to fake an American accent and possibly not a native English speaker - who finds himself in the middle of the plot of Steven Seagal’s Under Seige 2 - which is the bad one on the train, for those not au fait with the filmography of the Take Sensei. Terrorists have taken over an armoured train hosting the French ambassador to Russia, killed everyone apart from the diplomat and his family, and now it’s down to you to infiltrate the train, cap the goons and save the day.

Your buddies stay put in a medical carriage while you go do your Navy SEAL thing.

Common wisdom tends to say that the game is a mixture of Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, but really there is nothing MGS about this game at all and to claim there is would be a poker tell that you haven’t actually played the game. It is very much a Resident Evil clone, but without the horror aspect. Tank controls, inventory management and fixed camera angles abound, but you’re never really in any real peril and health and ammo is rather abundant. The difficulty comes from Resident Evil-lite puzzles and wonky combat controls. There is no aiming at enemies per se - you simply need to orient yourself in their general direction and wait for a Virtua Cop style coloured targeting reticule to appear over them, then press the fire button to gun them down with a classic action movie flourish. The problem is that you are beholden to this target reticule; if it doesn’t appear, you can’t hit the enemy, and it will quite often stubbornly refuse to appear, leaving you to get pumped full of lead yourself while Lt. Moron Morton stands in place wiggling about in response to your directional button presses until you get the angle ‘right’.

Jump out of cover and just pray that the targeting worked.

More on those fixed camera angles. In what is quite an inventive approach, the camera isn’t actually fixed and can turn in place to pan along a room or corridor along with your movements. So how do the pre-rendered backgrounds work? In a big-brain move, the backgrounds are actually panoramic images which allow a perspective shift when the camera is turned in order to produce a 3D effect, similarly to how Google Streetview works. It works really well and you wonder why Resident Evil never came up with it.

At first glance, the environments look high fidelity and detailed…

..but hack the camera to force a zoom-out and you see that only the doors are rendered and it’s all a JPEG perspective trick.

The game having two discs might fool you into thinking it is on the lengthy side, but in reality most of the space is taken up with highly numerous pre-rendered cutscenes and the game can be completed in an afternoon if you know what you’re doing. There are six different endings dependent on your actions during the game, and things really do diverge quite a bit in the back third or so if you’ve been sloppy with using your head properly with some puzzles. Amusingly, I ended up with the worst ending possible, and all because I didn’t think to give a NPC character an item I had picked up earlier in the game; the game never prompts you to do this, which catches you out. Unfortunately, because of that misstep I was immediately locked out of trying to save my run, and it meant you get one of the most brutal ‘You messed up’ endings in video games - your female partner-slash-love-interest (they get hitched in the good ending despite showing no interest in each other through the game) gets gunned down right in front of you, backup arrives in a helicopter, then whisks you away as NATO blow up the train killing all on board. Roll credits!

This ‘pull the plug from the bath’ skit has been shamelessly lifted directly from Resident Evil.

I actually really want to give it another go and do it properly, because I missed out on the last 45 minutes or so of the actual game. Upon completion with the best rank, you get a new game plus option which includes a few changes to the plot including a whole section not on the train where you play as your partner. Why did this game get such bad reviews? I suppose its almost-derivative closeness to Resident Evil at a time when people were getting tired of the formula didn’t help, but playing it all this time later throws off that baggage a bit (I thought the same about Alone in the Dark 4). An utter nonsense yet fun game.

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

Chicken Run

I watched Chicken Run in the cinema on release and remember absolutely nothing about it. Didn’t it get a sequel recently?

We were living in a post-Metal-Gear-Solid world.

Chicken Run the game is rubbish, but I have to give it a small bit of credit for not lazily manifesting itself as a tired token collecting platformer, in the sliplane of all the other film licence cash-ins. Instead, it actually feels a bit like a film licence cash-in you might get on PS2. That doesn’t mean it’s any good, but on PS2 the go-to cheap derivative game ceased to be the Bugs Bunny style runaround and became something a bit like Chicken Run, where you have structured gameplay with simple objectives, and the difficulty slowly turning up. It wasn’t any better, but at least at this point in time you could say that Chicken Run tried something a bit different.

Get used to it.

I didn’t exactly sit down in a comfortable chair with a stocked mini fridge ready to put some serious time into Chicken Run; I knew I would get bored in less than an hour. That was about right. The game revolves around being sent on fetch quests around the chicken coop and beyond, avoiding search lights and plasticine hounds, then running back to earn a FMV clip from the film which provides an extremely loose in-game plot driver. Occasionally play a mini-game, which is always an easy bit of filler for a developer with a boring game on their hands and no time to build the game into anything more interesting.

Fetch quest after fetch quest.

If you get caught by a dog, or the farmer, or the farmer’s wife, you…start again. You’ll also lose items you’ve already picked up, forcing you to go get them again and squeeze out a few more minutes of terrible gameplay from the hapless player. Then you can switch it off. Only serious Chicken Run anoraks need apply.

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

Chocobo Racing

Such was Squaresoft’s unstoppable juggernaut status in 1999, they were able to put out kart racer spinoffs centred around bit-part characters in their popular franchises (more on this later) and just count the money. Little did they know that in the years to come, the corporate creative void that their business would become would end up existing almost entirely on this kind of game, with market analysts squeezing every last drop of sweet-tasting nostalgia out of 30-something Final Fantasy fans to feed the market for the dozen or so passionless shovelware games a year that land with a plop on digital platforms (and maybe once every ten years we’ll get an actual Final Fantasy game). But I digress.

Exposition in the story mode is told through 3D renders of those pop-up books you used to have as a kid.

Chocobo Racing is a pretty by-the-numbers kart racing game which throws together some recognisable Final Fantasy ‘entities’ (You can’t really call them characters - apart from ‘Golem’, which after some head scratching I realised was actually a random optional summoned beast from FFV, which was not released outside of Japan until a few years later. Odd choice.), makes up half a dozen racetracks, and then anyone who has played Mario Kart - that is to say, everyone - can figure it out from there.

My God, it’s literally a rainbow road course.

The gameplay twist it puts on things is that you are able to pick a special power-up pre-race that sits apart from the various typical kart racer weapons and pickups that line up in rows on the track. These abilities can be used at periodic times in the race and are things like a speed boost, improved handling, or stealing competitor weapons. Only the speed boost is any use, so it’s a bit of an illusion of choice.

Every kart racing game MUST have a castle level.

There is a standard ‘grand prix’ game mode, some time trial and versus modes, but also a ‘story mode’, which tries to throw in a plot and narrative via the use of Final Fantasy-esque text dialogue between the characters. It’s terrible and you are forced to sit through it, at least the first time you go through the game mode. It attempts to be quirky and funny, buy wouldn’t actually be funny even if you were in the target age demographic. The story mode is the guts of the game, though, and through completing it (it doesn’t take long) over and over, you can unlock a variety of other racers, from the obvious (Squall from the then-just-released FFVIII) to the more obscure (Aya from Parasite Eve, funnily enough). If you care enough to do all that, you’ll get some mileage out of an average racing game.

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

Chocobo’s Dungeon 2

A correction - Chocobo Racing wasn’t a spinoff of Final Fantasy, it was a spinoff of Chocobo’s Dungeon, which is indeed the original FF spinoff. I suppose it just serves to underline what I was saying about the clout that Square had at the time. It didn’t take long to work this out, as it quickly became apparent that both games share all the same characters, theming and graphics. The first Chocobo’s Dungeon only saw a Japanese release, and semi-humourously, while Chocobo’s Dungeon 2 precedes Chocobo Racing by a year or so, it didn’t see release outside of Japan until a few months after Chocobo Racing’s own localisation, so for those of us outside of the far east, the spinoff of Chocobo’s Dungeon actually arrived before either of the games on which it was based ever hit English-speaking shelves. This is the sort of muddled confusion that never happens anymore but was simply just how things worked all the time at the turn of the century.

[‘My Shiroma’ joke]

I’m reminded of Azure Dreams a lot playing this game. While ‘roguelike’ tower-ascent games like this are always pretty similar, the overlap here is close enough to warrant a careful attachment of the descriptor ‘clone’. With each step you take in the tower, everyone else takes a concurrent turn, and you plod around bashing heads in, slooowly grinding your way through the levels.

Environments are very dull.

The difference between this and Azure Dreams is that Azure Dreams had a monster-catching and monster-training aspect to it which had immense depth, whereas in my time playing Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, there wasn’t anything like that. It instead put a bit more stock into narrative-building as you climb up the tower (it is a Square game, after all), but after playing Azure Dreams, it managed to do more with less in that respect.

Much time is spent managing the pathetic size of your inventory and choosing what to drop.

The music was quirky and the game was interesting for a bit, but there’s no way I’d stick with it the whole distance.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Chris Kamara’s Street Soccer

Firstly, and least importantly - this is a bad game. Right, with that out of the way, there is so much trivia to discuss with this shiny discus of computer game curiosity.

It bothers me that they left out the ‘s on the title screen of their own game.

So…why does journeyman footballer Chris Kamara of all people have a game on the original PlayStation named after him? The game was released in 2000, which was a good five years after he ended his ball-kicking career, and a year or so after he had started doing his bits on Sky Sports Soccer Saturday, but his ascendancy to super-meme stardom was still a few years away. You couldn’t claim he was really a household name to those who weren’t Bradford City or Sheffield United fans.

Essential street football attire (the women wear jeans).

It makes a little more sense when you spot the publisher - which is once again those peddlers of gaming dreck Midas Interactive. This is one of the ‘Pocket Price’ turds hashed together in a few minutes to throw onto shelves with bargain-bin prices already attached, hoping to con any clueless mums into parting with £7.99 in exchange for twenty minutes of domestic peace. By all accounts, CKSS is probably the best of the ‘Pocket Price’ collection, and if Midas’ modus operandi was to knock up cheap games that flatter to deceive, it follows that if they decided to slap a ‘famous name’ on one of them, they’d skip over Alan Shearer and Rivaldo and instead sign a random English footballer from the 80s. It could just as easily have been Iain Dowie’s Soccer Striker.

All tackles are two footed death lunges. So many football games on PS1 do this. Why?

The guy barely even features in the game aside from providing a few commentary voiceovers which are apparently from the man himself, though I remain skeptical to be honest. I’m not sure if it’s just DuckStation falling over some quirky code hacks from the developers, but the game is actually quite buggy. The ‘choose a team’ screen got itself tied in a knot more than once, and both times I quit a match to go back to the main menu, the game just crashed on the ‘Now Loading’ screen. It was probably doing me a favour.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Bonus: Extra Chase the Express curiosities

I took a lot of screenshots while going through Chase the Express, not all of which were worth slotting in above, but some I thought were interesting enough to post anyway. I haven’t bothered resizing all of them (I’ve been playing everything at a native resolution, which means tiny 320x240px screenshots).

Just to reiterate that this game is all Resident Evil and no Metal Gear Solid, this is the inventory management screen.

A cook called Casey? On a train taken over by terrorists with a lone survivor? My Seagal-sense is tingling.

As the game goes on, the pause menu shows your location as the train line weaves its way through Europe.

There’s a set piece where you gun down helicopters in a AA turret. On a train.

More Resident Evil statue-medal-slotting insanity. On a train.

My post-credits reward.

And finally…

You can stumble across some files in the game that - without any particular narrative need in-game - provide some 1999 European Union soothsaying. Plus ca change…

Bearing in mind this game is Japanese.

A ‘major power’ not joining the Eurozone, huh…

Hmm…

..really makes you think.