Playing every PS1 game - Colony Wars, Contra, Cool Boarders, Countdown Vampires, Courier Crisis

Colony Wars

Colony Wars is a space flying sim, and I’ve mentioned before on here that I think pretty much all of these sorts of games (aside from Ace Combat 2) are dull and samey. Colony Wars got near-universal acclaim in 1997. Will this change my mind?

The visual design is good…

No. No, I still don’t rate these games, for the same reasons as always. There’s just nothing to them. Point your ship in a direction in 3D space - twisting and turning your perspective so you don’t know which way you’re facing in the process - then accelerate and shoot bullets/pewpews in the direction of the enemy. Chase it around a bit and maybe fire a few rockets, blow it up and then move onto the next enemy. You could of course distil any game down to simple principles like this, but flying games never seem to have a ‘hook’ or gimmick which sets them apart from the others. The mission objectives are all the usual sort of thing - go here and shoot 5 enemies, go there and protect these five giant defenceless ships, go somewhere else and attack this big ship while being attacked by little ships. It’s all very familiar.

…but that’s all I can really be positive about.

What I will say though is that Colony Wars does look great. The orange tint and sunlight glare is attractive, and flying closely along the side of a big ship gives a suitable sense of the scale of things. It’s just a shame the gameplay is dull as dishwater. I admit I might have a bit of a negative bias here, and if you actually really enjoyed this sort of game I would expect it to be a lot of fun. I just think they already made Asteroids in the 70s.

Kept my attention for: An hour or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Contra - Legacy of War

I played stablemate C - The Contra Adventure a few months ago, which was actually released two years after Legacy of War. It wasn’t very good, and neither is this.

It looks grim.

In fact, it’s worse. The spin on the 2D Contra games they’re going for is to take the same sort of thing and put it in three dimensions. Not exactly a bad idea, given the success of the original series, but it’s executed poorly, and I’m skeptical that the approach really translates to 3D at all. The closest example I could give of this run-and-gun structure being done halfway properly is the Bruce-Willis-em-up Apocalypse, which clearly draws inspiration from Contra.

It’s the turtle boss from level 1 of Contra III!

Youn run in holding down the fire button, and spray everywhere with the occasional jump. They screwed up the ‘third dimension’ bit quite thoroughly when it comes to hitboxes, as they are far too small and often require you to be jumping in order to register a hit. You needed to do that in 2D Contra, but here you also need to be aligning yourself perfectly along two other axes if you want to hit something other than thin air. It doesn’t really matter half the time, either, as you can just run through most of the levels until you reach various impassable mini-bosses.

Bizarrely, you can shoot at a background arcade machine and unlock a hidden Pac-man style game. It really was a different age.

The two player mode may have been worth a go, though.

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

Cool Boarders 3

I’ve not played Cool Boarders 1 or 2, but I thought I’d skip them and go to the third. There’s also a Cool Boarders 4, but…I don’t know, I can’t remember why I didn’t get that one instead.

In 1998 nobody in Britain would have known what a Butterfingers chocolate was. I guess most still won’t.

This game reminds me a bit of a skateboarding game called Street Skater. It’s half racing game half trick-em-up, with you following a notional downhill snowboarding course where sometimes the objective is to just get down to the bottom quickly, and sometimes it’s about racking up points by doing physics-defying flips and whatever. As you might expect for the third entry of a series, there are lots of different “radical, dude” looking snowboarders to compete as (though I don’t know of any functional difference between them), and half a dozen game options.

Fall over and say hello to last place, as you aren’t catching up.

There’s not really much to say about Cool Boarders. The music is unremarkable, the graphics are average and the courses samey. I don’t properly know how they stretched this out to four separate games. It’s quite challenging, I suppose. But not really in the way 2xtreme was ‘fun’ challenging. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s more frustratingly difficult thanks to loose controls and unclear options. One for the snowboarding purists, which doesn’t include me; the closest I’ve even come to a snowboard is probably seeing one hung on the wall in a hipster craft beer pub.

Kept my attention for: An hour or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Countdown Vampires

Also known as “But we have Resident Evil at home!”

Countdown Vampires is an unashamed Resi clone. It also has one of the daftest titles in the console library. It’s a game about vampires, and a theme throughout the game you have to complete actions on a timer. So it’s called Countdown Vampires. That’s it. I’d have actually preferred it if it were about the titular bloodsuckers competing to rearrange anagrams against the clock.

They really go hard on the gore in, like, the first two rooms. Then it just sort of forgets about it.

In the fashion you come to expect from dodgy Japanese translations, you play a bodybuilding cop-cum-VIP-bodyguard named, er, Keith. The setting is a similarly strange choice for a survival horror game - a casino hotel. A horror-themed casino hotel at least, but it’s still not the sort of thing you’d expect. Things kick off as a few performers suddenly turn into grotesque vampire freaks and everyone bar you is killed quickly and violently. Our man Keith then takes off his JC Denton trenchcoat in order to go shirtless for absolutely no reason, pulls out a pea-shooter and the game begins.

Buckle up for some textbook survival horror senseless puzzles with arcane solutions in order to open simple doors and move furniture.

I’m not joking when I say it is a Resident Evil clone. Everything about it is so brazenly an exercise in copying Capcom’s homework that you sort of wonder how they seemed to get away with it. Tank controls, pre-rendered backgrounds and puny inventory management are a given, but it’s also the same down to the map design and the way that the ‘vampire’ stock enemies are obviously just zombies by another name. Even the animations for running and limping about are staccato-yet-wobbly in the same sort of way you won’t quite understand until you see it.

Desks with chunky CRT monitors and mousemats. It’s a forgotten time.

It tries to spin its own twist on the ‘green herb - red herb’ mixing thing by using ‘drink’ items with a ‘bottle’ item in order to stack your recovery powerups. The drinks themselves are obtained by coughing up for them at vending machines, which I guess is a novel idea. It might even start to make sense, but then you have to ask the question ‘But where do I get the money?’ - you’re in a casino, so…win at the slots! No, seriously. Cash (Helpfully abbreviated to ‘J’. I don’t know either) is earned either by defeating enemies with a barrage of tranquiliser darts and a dousing with Keith’s infinite bottle of pocket holy water (that he presumably carries at all times), or by lining up fruits on the gambler. It’s not until I actually write this stuff out that I actually realise how mad it all is.

Fruities with a blue light above them are playable. There’s also roulette, where presumably Keith sobs off-camera as he ‘loses’ and hands over all his cash to absolutely nobody.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great game. It actually made me appreciate just how much of a masterpiece Resident Evil actually is. You realise how very room and corridor in RE is designed with a meaning and (as much as it doesn’t sometimes appear so) coherence that just isn’t present anywhere in Countdown Vampires. There are long corridors that are blank and empty, and rooms that seem to serve no functional in-universe purpose for a casino, hotel, secret lair, or anywhere in particular. In RE, enemies are evenly and thoughtfully placed in order to balance tension and challenge; in CV, some rooms are crawling with the undead while whole multi-room, multi-floor sections of the map adjacent to them remain strangely empty. It reminds me in a way of how Resident Evil “1.5” famously got scrapped because the design and layout of the police station setting looked too boring and unintuitive. It’s the same sort of thing here.

I don’t think they just never finished this particular background. So many ‘rooms’ do just look like this.

It tries to be more combat-oriented than RE, but the control and maneuverability of your character just aren’t there for it. It’s possible to do that sort of game with tank controls (see Dino Crisis 2), but we had many years to go before developers figured that out. In the end it wasn’t dodgy combat that did for me, though, but just bad level design. There are a lot of pickups in this game, and your inventory space is quite difficult to manage because of the puny number of item boxes available and no ability to discard unwanted crap. There is a puzzle a while into the game which requires you to insert an item into a receptacle and (with no way of knowing beforehand) receive two items back. With only one empty space remaining, I couldn’t pick up the second item. This was also during one of the sections of the game where you’re on a timer. The nearest item box was miles away. The result was a failure and needing to reload a save from ages ago. Bad design. Pass.

Kept my attention for: A day or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Courier Crisis - The Saga of the Modern Fatalist

From how rough the graphics in Courier Crisis look and how basic the game appears to be, I assumed it must have been one of those 1995-96 early PlayStation releases where nobody really knew what to do with this exciting new 3D format, nor how to really do it if they did.

Pick up your consignment by running the guy over.

Not quite. Courier Crisis landed in late 1997 - a year which brought us Tekken 3, Goldeneye 007 and Tomb Raider II. So Courier Crisis just actually looks rubbish. The game itself is Crazy Taxi on a bicycle, but with the ability to run over pedestrians as you mount the kerb and whoosh along at high speed toward your next delivery. So you could probably make a wedge remaking it for 2026 and calling it Deliveroo Simulator. It seems to revel in this sort of cartoonish violence - the shoulder buttons allow you to throw punches left and right as you cycle, achieving…not much at all that I could work out. It does appear that angry peds can sometimes start ganging up on you, but cycling past them isn’t hard.

It looks far worse in motion.

The cycling itself is pretty shoddy, crying out for a ‘handbrake’ button to let you slide around corners; maybe there was one, but I never found it. I turned it off one evening and went to bed, planning to pick it up the next day, but the next day came and I thought…no, I can’t be bothered. And neither should you.

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

Bonus: Countdown Vampires extras

There is a healthy amount of Engrish in Countdown Vampires. Even so, I’m not fooling myself that the nonsensical plot was simply lost in translation.

This guy has a stroke in the opening FMV as the vampires swarm.

The boy scouts in Sea Rim City don’t mess around.

I like to imagine that at the Searim Police Depertment they all speak like the copper in ‘Allo ‘Allo.

They just forgot to translate this bit. Google Lens reckons it says ‘Power is off’.