Playing every PS1 game - Contra, C-12, C3, Cabela's Big Game Hunt

C - The Contra Adventure

When writing about Bugs Bunny & Taz, I mentioned how some games found success on one console but struggled to find a place on the next generation of bleep bloop machines, for varying reasons. In the case of Bugs, it was a game format that didn’t carry over to the PS2. Arcade shooters like Timesplitters died a death on PS3. Contra - called Probotector in my yoot to appease violence-in-videogames types - is a NES and SNES game, which had a swing at ‘evolving’ into the new 3D shooter thing on PlayStation but never really managed it.

The 2D levels are wholesale lifted from classic Contra. But they manage to look worse.

What they’ve tried to do here is a mixture of the old fashioned 2D sidescroller (but turned into 2.5D) along with third-person 3D shooter. For reasons that are hard to articulate, the sidescrolling bits just don’t work as well as they used to, despite being functionally lifted wholly from the classic games. I think what people didn’t realise, and wouldn’t realise for a long, long time, was that the old 2D graphics actually just looked better in every way, and the gameplay went hand in hand with it. What we ended up with here just looks scratchy and dull.

LET’S ATTACK AGGRESSIVELY!

The other half of the gameplay is the third-person shooter aspect, where they’ve turned it into a mazelike run-and-gun affair with enemies that respawn every few seconds and you get continually lost. It all gets old quickly.

For reasons unexplainable, half the game takes place in ancient Mayan ruins (yes. that’s what it’s supposed to be)

The only curiosity to experience is seeing sort of what it might look like if you took the exact same weapons, enemies (down to the big walls with guns), mini-bosses and ‘kill everything’ gameplay from the 2D Contra and made it 3D. The result, as it turns out, is something below average.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

C-12 - Final Resistance

There’s a certain ‘loveable loser’ quality to some of the stuff Sony put together in the last few years of the PlayStation in order to keep a bit of interest alive in the miniature PSOne and entertain the last remnants of the market who had yet to invest in a PS2. C-12 was made by their Cambridge studio, who were also responsible for developing MediEvil, and would go on to make Primal and later Little Big Planet, before eventually getting shut down with the stroke of a pen in 2017 because a spreadsheet somewhere at SCE dictated it must be so.

The enemies are creepy but not really explored as a concept.

It would have been very easy to produce some cheap guff, but while C-12 isn’t anything particularly special, it’s still an interesting game that almost certainly would have ended up being followed by a C-13 or whatever, potentially on PS2, if it had been released a few years prior. It’s a bit of a PS1.5 game, which makes use of the now-ubiquitous system of using the right analog stick to control the camera (except inverted), while at the same time retaining the janky PS1 format of directional buttons to move in 8 directions and shoulder buttons to strafe (sort of). I’ve played much jankier, but the controls are still the biggest hurdle to having fun with the game.

In the grim darkness of the far future, CRT monitors are back in vogue.

The concept behind C-12 isn’t winning any awards for originality - aliens have conquered earth and the remnants of humanity are fighting back by putting alien technology in the hands (or, er, eyes) of a lone, square jawed, taciturn soldier. The main character is as forgettable and one-dimensional as it is possible to get without risking the player falling into goldfish-like blackouts and needing constant reminding who they are controlling. You’re just a Guy With a Big Gun and you’re out to Gun Down All The Aliens. It’s all a bit weird; such a fuss is made at the beginning about Our Guy undergoing all this terrible surgery to replace his eye with a laser and other cybernetic enhancements, but absolutely nothing is done with it other than offering a fancy first-person-view HUD.

The stuff they got away with.

The plot is a missed opportunity. Nothing is made about the fact that the aliens’ modus operandi is to ‘turn’ captured human soldiers into grotesque monsters with robotic bits and pieces spliced onto their bodies while at the same time making you aware that this is exactly what you are, or really provide any information on the hows and whys of what is happening or how things came to be - the missions are pretty much all straightforward ‘get to point A and kill aliens’ affairs. I do enjoy the fact that everyone is portrayed in a true over-the-top 1950s British public schoolboy effect, though. If you haven’t played it, picture watching the ‘in the future’ parts of The Terminator except everyone sounds like a stereotypical “Pip pip, old boy” World War II RAF pilot. I don’t think it was deliberate.

There’s a touch of Tomb Raider about it. The platforming stuff could and should have been left on the cutting room floor.

The game has six levels, which sounds a bit short but it feels about right. There are no unlockables or other modes, though, so when you finish it you can pack the game away and not bother coming back for a while. A problem which third-person shooters can find themselves coming up against very easily is things getting repetitive, with levels just becoming shooting galleries and corridors with the same old enemies and the same old objectives. C-12 sidesteps this though and keeps things fresh enough throughout, with enough ways to approach combat to allow you to find out what works best in whichever situation. For example, most enemies can be one-shotted with a headshot, but you have to use the first-person aim mode to do so, which opens you up to getting pasted yourself if you’re not slick with the controls. Ammo is limited so the trade-off is a common decision to make.

Yes, the alien leader final boss actually speaks perfect English (in an English accent).

There’s a sensation with C-12 where you wonder if the reason it feels like a decent game is really just because by 2001, developers had learned everything there was to know about putting PlayStation action games together. They did the paint-by-numbers design, put the programmers to work, and then just sort of half arsed it. The game ends with you killing the alien leader, and then the player is treated to a final cutscene - Our Guy literally says “Let’s get the hell out of here” and walks out of the alien base. Roll credits.

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

C3 Racing - Car Constructors Championship

I’m not familiar with C3 Racing, but I’ve since realised that in Britain it was sold as Max Power Racing, in a tie in with a 90s boy racer magazine. I played a demo of Max Power Racing in an old issue of Official PlayStation Magazine and all I remembered was the track being sparse and the cars very loud.

There are a multitude of ‘tuning’ options available. None of them do anything 👍

What I forgot, though, was how if you drove your car off the edge of a cliff and into the water, it was an IMMEDIATE game over. No respawning your vehicle, no restart option, just a GAME OVER message and a return to the menu, as if offended that you could do something so terrible. It’s actually quite funny.

The 1997 Peugeot 306 might be one of the most iconic turded-up boy racer go-karts.

The water thing is probably the most striking thing about Max Power Racing, which otherwise is an incredibly understated game. OPM’s review said it felt unfinished, which is about right. The menu and HUD design is very rudimentary, and while there are unlockable cars and tracks in the usual way for this sort of videogame fare, it all feels a bit like a cardboard cutout of a proper racing game. Doubly weird is that, actually, this is pretty fun to play. None of it really makes any sense. It’s a rallying game, really, with the driving system based around sliding around long corners and kicking gravel up - yet the vehicles are all just regular road cars. None of them control any differently (and look dull as hell), but the experience is a good one nonetheless. It’s very fast and keeps a decent frame rate.

The Rome tracks are actually excellent and amongst the best on the platform.

Maybe it really was unfinished. Maybe it’s not aimed at me and is instead designed to be sold to the sort of weirdos who trick out Vauxhall Astras with giant exhausts and LEDs and park them up outside schools at home time. The thumping electronic music soundtrack certainly seems to indicate that might be the case. Who knows, but it didn’t seem to have much success and ended up becoming another forgotten racing game.

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

Cabela’s Big Game Hunter

Having never played a hunting game before (unless you count fishing as hunting, and I don’t), I wasn’t sure what I was in for with Big Game Hunter.

Get used to staring at it.

I didn’t expect much, and my experience met my expectations. The load times in this game are criminal. I couldn’t really figure out what to do, either. After creating a character by selecting between (in a rather odd choose-your-warrior style) a teenager, adult, or pensioner with varying hunting chops KPIs, you’re thrown into the country with a gun and some random bits of inventory. The graphics are dreadful. Moving forward is inexplicably performed with the L1 button, while left and right turn your character.

00s flash game aura.

I figured I needed to run around a bit and hunt down some defenceless prey animals. I also assumed that the conspicuous translucent red dots which were floating around the horizon were meant to be handy pointers toward where Paddington Bear or his friends might be found so that I may track down and shoot them.

I spent about 10 minutes padding around with a rifle in hand, catching up with red dots only for them to suddenly disappear, before I realised I was about to die of thirst. I ‘used’ some food and drink items to restore my health, in the fashion every good hunter surely must, and continued the hunt.

The closest I got to ever seeing a wild beast.

After running out of food and water, and still having not seen sight nor sound of any living creature, I quit.

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

Ceasars Palace

Gambling never translates well to computer games, because of the inherent virtual nature of it removing any sense of jeopardy or risk. In fact, they don’t translate at all. The best you can hope is by implementing a card game as a minigame within a game, where you can at least play for in-game currency that has a use elsewhere within the game’s context. In Ceasars Palace, the money is just a number that you can tick up or down.

That ‘amazing immersive casino experience’ in full:

So it’s all just pointless. Caesars Palace (fun fact - there is no possessive apostrophe in ‘Caesars’, because the idea is everyone at the hotel is a Caesar) is a low-rent collection of virtualised card and dice games that are separated by extensive loading screens. Of the games on offer, I know the rules of roulette, blackjack, and a bit of craps (and the slot machines aren’t really a ‘game’), but baccarat was just guesswork.

As someone who has actually been to Caesars Palace, this is not the sight you are greeted with when rocking up.

You’d think they might have made use of the Caesars Palace branding to at least include some backgrounds or imagery that might give the impression that this is what the casino actually looks like for those who haven’t been to Vegas…but there’s nothing like that. What a waste of time.

Crap.

The only interesting thing to say is that by abusing save states I was able to get up to a million dollars in my ‘wallet’. I thought it might unlock something, or give some sort of bonus, or even a celebratory jingle. Nothing happened.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 1/10