Playing every PS1 game - Creatures, Cricket 2000, Crime Killer, Croc 1 & 2

Creatures

There are a few games around that were interesting ideas on PC but were a bust when ported to console, either because of a dodgy port, underbaked console hardware, or the game just not suiting a console game playing context. Creatures is probably a mix of the three. The story behind the PC game is quite interesting to read about in an age of modern AI - basically a tamagochi game built around what sound like some rather rudimentary genetic algorithms - but I’m not convinced the PlayStation would have had the juice to really do much of what it was attempting.

Don’t accidentally murder your defenceless wards when they spill the milk.

The idea is that you shepherd a collection of ugly-looking alien bipeds through the generations by feeding them, patting them on the head and teaching them simple words. If they don’t follow instructions, you give them a furious bollocking until they do. The algorithm then passes down certain traits through the generations so that everyone’s collection of ‘creatures’ is slighty different.

As far as I got.

At least, that’s what I think the idea is. I couldn’t get past something like the fifth instruction in the tutorial and the game had basically softlocked. I was supposed to give some food to one of the droogs and then instruct it to eat, followed by giving it a pat on the head. I did that, but the game didn’t seem to recognise that I was doing it. No further progression possible. Nevermind!

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Cricket 2000

This is the second - as as far as I know, final - cricket game relased on the PlayStation, after the GOAT-contender Brian Lara Cricket, which was released eighteen months prior.

T20 cricket didn’t exist in 2000, but these sorts of scores were probably fairly genuine representations of what you’d have got at the time (reference: these days 180+ tends to be par).

What an utter turd of a game. I feel sorry for anyone who suffered the misfortune of being conned into handing over 30 notes thinking they were about to be treated to a game which, one might be led to believe, might use EA Sports’ industry clout to fill in some of the gaps left by BLC, only to find a broken, ugly, nonsensical cricket simulation inside the box. It really is horrid.

Only true cricket fans will understand the insanity of batsman Inzimam-ul-Haq opening the bowling as a seamer. This is what the CPU does, though.

For starters, the game is really meant to be the game of the 1999 Cricket World Cup, but given the game was released in mid-2000, the publishers knew that it would be a bit late to call it that. What it means is the only game options are one-day internationals between the dozen competitors from that year’s World Cup, albeit with slightly updated rosters. No test matches to be found here, it’s one-day pyjama parties or nothing. Not that the inclusion of the longer form of the game would change anything; on the contrary, the game is so shoddy that everything falls apart if you were to play a game longer than 20 overs a side (and even then it still goes wrong).

Don’t be deceived into thinking that aiming your shot in a sensible direction will have any impact on its success.

I played a few 20-over games on ‘normal’ difficulty and found myself bowling in the first innings each time. The bowling in this game just flat out doesn’t work. On the face of things, it uses the tried and true ‘move the cursor to where you would like to pitch the ball’ system and then offers you a few tools to add swing (I guess?) to the ball in one direction or another, but as far as I could tell it didn’t make any difference. The ball doesn’t move in the air or off the pitch, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because the CPU player will play the same shots and score runs one way or another, independent of where you aim the ball or the field which you set. Occasionally they stuff it up and pop a catch to a close fielder, but you can rest assured it will have had nothing to do with any decision or input you made. I didn’t once see a catch in the outfield, or a batsman being bowled. Bowling short deliveries and bouncers isn’t even possible in this game - the best you can do is coax your bowler into bowling a half-tracker pie, but again, it isn’t any different to a full toss in practice.

You can just bowl half trackers directed off the pitch itself. Nothing happens - it’s actually a great tactic.

Batting is similarly inane. You try and time your stroke by hitting X at the right time, but you can seemingly only ever hit the ball into one of about half a dozen fixed directions. This may make you worry that run scoring can be nixed via simple placement of a few fielders, but you needn’t bother, as the ball will either just phase through them or they will simply run out of the way. Sometimes you will randomly get ‘stumped’ as the wicketkeeper chooses to throw the stumps down after gathering the ball, while your batsman slopes around outside of his crease like a chump. Nothing you can do about it. Eventually I worked out that you can simply bowl massive leg-side wides which are impossible for the batsman to hit, and the umpire will just ignore it. The CPU will be unable to score runs, and you can just wait for the lot of them to be bowled out by getting randomly stumped as I just mentioned.

The outcome.

The commentary, phoned in by silver-haired duo David Gower and the late Richie Benaud is also terrible and provides an experience close to what you might expect if a game of cricket was receiving play-by-play commentary from two men with dementia. They have a puny set of lines which are repeated over and over and often don’t partner at all with what is happening on screen. If you ever do something as stupid as decide to try and block the ball, expect a tongue-lashing from Lord Gower for your poor decisionmaking. A batsman can score 150 (without it ever being noted by the pair), get out, and all you might hear is a dim “He’s got him”, followed by a minute of total silence as the next batsman strolls to the middle. It’s so bad. I’ll end things with one particular nonsensical event - I was starting a batting innings after bowling the CPU out, and all David Gower had to say as the new innings began was a dull “That was an expensive over”. Cheers.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Crime Killer

Bit of a weird one, this. Probably a product of a trend for vehicular combat games along the lines of Carmageddon, Twisted Metal and Rock & Roll Racing (which happened to be created by the same developer), Crime Killer is a - pretty ordinary - spin on things which places you as a inner city cop in an industrial, dystopian future where crime is rampant and blah blah blah it’s not exactly a novel concept.

Murderous diet-Judge-Dredd cop has a quiet drama moment with a family snap in between gunning down civilian vehicles.

There’s a heck of a lot of ropey-3D-animated FMV. You get a short clip of your cop car whizzing through the streets at the start of a level, after a level, and before you get a game over. Maybe it was cool at the time. The opening FMV sets a narrative setting so melodramatic I thought I might actually be in for something more involved than I had bargained for with a name like Crime Killer - the exposition even goes as far as showing off your character’s origin story as a playful young scamp who enjoys playing with his dad’s police badge; I actually had to chuckle when seconds later it shows his dad being theatrically blown up in front of him by vicious criminals in janky 90s 3D. What was the point in that? There isn’t actually any real further plot to speak of, either, which just makes it sillier.

In the future, wheels are only available for those on official police business.

The gameplay itself is a bit like the driving bits in Batman & Robin, and to be fair, is pretty well presented for a game from 1998. You drive your patrol car (which in the future, more resembles a Lambo with gun attachments) around sections of the city in a manner as close to GTA-esque freeform driving as you were going to get at the time, and get given assignments to chase down crims and deliver instant violent justice for petty crimes. Driving erratically? You get blown up. Parked on double yellows? You get blown up. The future is an unforgiving place.

Breaking the new 20mph limit? A squad car equipped with rockets is headed to your location to kill you.

It’s all a bit samey, though. You pootle about for a bit, see a new crim on the map, chase him down (while firing your cannons all over the place into private and public property as you go), blow him up, then wait for the next. The whole thing runs at a smooth FPS, which is a great achievement, and the controls are tight enough that swooshing around town at high speeds with the blue-and-whites flashing is enjoyable enough. What can be a bit annoying is the civilian cars having hitboxes that are way too large, meaning it is difficult to tear down a street for more than a few moments before pinballing around (and surely killing dozens of civilians in the process as you go). A game that probably looked great at the concept stage but fizzled out when it came to the actual ‘make the game’ bit.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Croc - Legend of the Gobbos

What do you get if you create a 3D platformer with a freeform camera and mix in tank controls?

Jump on jelly to bounce in the air. You have to admit it is sort of intuitive.

Croc is a cracking reminder that in the early days of 3D, there was no ‘formula’. Nobody really knew how best to do it. As a result, you get games like this, which are definitely good and fun to play, but include truly confusing design decisions. A modern parallel would probably be control schemes in VR, where for years we did a bit of a merry-go-round of methods for moving your body around in a 3D space in a way that felt intuitive while also avoided making the player violently nauseous. Doom VFR in particular I remember having a particularly arthritis-inducing system of waggle and button-holding to move through the environment while trying to shoot at goons. The fact I don’t think it ever truly solved that problem might be a factor in the medium’s slow decline.

Level names are all puns of some sort. Not sure Prodigy fans were the target audience though.

Sorry, back to Croc. Tank controls. It wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the camera was dynamic enough to keep track directly behind our backpacked, bipedal reptilian avatar. It does for the most part, but sometimes gets itself stuck and confused, and that’s where control gets a bit tricky. The other - and arguably worse - control issue is that the tank controls switch off while you are jumping, and instead the left and right buttons move Croc laterally while facing forward (rather like a strafe) rather than turn him in space. In a platforming game where jumping around accurately is a key component, this gets annoying and I don’t really understand the thinking.

The level theming is actually well done.

It’s not game-breaking though. Croc is a bit too kid-oriented to interest me these days but I got a lot of mileage out of this disc back at the time. It was too hard for me to ever complete, though, so I’ve done it now instead. The environments are interesting and the platforming never gets old, with the developers coming up with more and more elaborate schemes to make you fall into a bottomless pit as you progress (the last few levels dispense with realism and common understanding of physics altogether and just go wild with the death traps).

Boss battles are way too easy but it’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

The soundtrack is also absolute quality. There with Ape Escape as the best so far.

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

Croc 2

Coming a year after Crash Bandicoot 3 and Spyro the Dragon, Argonaut probably had a bit of time to refine what made Croc good and mix in some ideas lifted from the game’s cheeky-animal-platformer cousins.

Adding stupid dialogue was not needed.

It didn’t really. Croc 2 is pretty limp. The only real improvement is the binning of tank controls, which I don’t particularly award a mark for as it was so obviously a bad design call in Croc; it should have been picked up in QA. I’m not sure, but the controls generally don’t feel as tight; tapping X to jump, then running lemming-like over the edge of a cliff because the game didn’t register it quickly enough seemed to happen far more often. The camera also manages to be worse. It was 1999 by this point - this stuff should have been getting solved by now.

Mine carts. Yawn.

Again, much like Crash, gone is the straightforward level-by-level selector from Croc, which is replaced with…another ‘hub world’ in which you trot around and select the next level you want to play. This was clearly a huge fad. I find it to be annoying padding. Why are you forcing the player to wade through boring environments to start playing the game? Another bit of homework copied from Crash is the inclusion of some ‘novelty’ levels, like riding mine carts, and racing er, speedboats. Cool, I guess.

Buy tat off this guy.

Something a bit new is the inclusion of a character with which you can trade your collection of gems, which in honesty did seem to serve little purpose level-to-level in the original. Rather funnily named ‘Swap Meet Pete’ (a name a never understood at all until I started listening to Dr. Dre in my teens), you check in in between levels to empty your pockets of shiny stones in return for…something? I didn’t really figure it out. The game is an all-round let down and too big a departure from what was good in the first game. There were obviously big ambitions behind Croc 2, but to quote the philosopher H.E. Styles - “It’s not the same as it was”.

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