Playing every PS1 game - The Crow, Crusaders of Might and Magic, Cubix, Cyberia, Cyber Tiger

The Crow - City of Angels

Despite all the modern folklore around The Crow, I’m still yet to meet a person who has actually seen the film (indeed, nor have I). This game, however, is actually based on its 1996 sequel, which currently sits on a rather foul 16% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I don’t think I’m particularly starving myself of a transcendent experience when I say I haven’t watched this one either.

“It was a rough place. The seediest dive on the wharf, populated with every reject and cut throat from Bombay to Calcutta. It was worse than Detroit.”

The real question one has to ask, though, is whether The Crow - The Game is actually worse than the film. 16% is a low score to beat. I have to say it’s a near run thing. This game is shockingly bad. It’s bad in so many varied and unexpected ways that you must be sure that the developers knew they were creating total garbage while they were doing it. It only just barely scrapes over the line as a game that even works at all as a piece of software.

This five second scene with a single line of dialogue (mastered too quietly to hear) is all the exposition you will get.

The game, which came out a few years after the film upon which it is based, is a beat-em-up in the same mould as Batman of the Future, which coincidentally is also one of the worst games I have ever played. There is no plot; there is no introduction beyond a short, 5-second-or-so nonsensical FMV that doesn’t explain anything in particular, before plonking you into level 1. It uses pre-rendered backgrounds with tank controls. Imagine if Resident Evil was actually meant to be played as a dynamic, fast paced zombie-close-quarters-combat game (and imagine how truly terrible that would end up being), and you’re maybe half way towards comprehending the scale of this game’s failure.

The bloke in the foreground has a gun. If you press the duck button he can’t hit you.

You slowly plod around the scruffy background JPEGs, get randomly caught on invisible objects and have to jankily (and blindly) try and work your way around them, and fight off endless streams of other janky enemies, who plod around at the same pace as you. You can punch and kick - more specifically, you can punch and kick thin air as your attacks swish pathetically either side of the enemies at which you are hoping to point yourself - and use the X button to pick up random weapons littered about, like knives, crowbars, and, er, exploding skulls. You are unable to continue through each area until all enemies have been defeated, so don’t think about just running (read: a gentle, janky jog with the triangle button) past them.

The level geometry not matching the background image is just part of life in The Crow.

Even if you did try to give them the slip, you’d just be lost in the maze of switching camera angles. Countdown Vampires suffered from this too, but not quite to the extent to which The Crow is crippled. Simple four-walled rooms turn into the Crystal Maze as you totally lose track of where you are going and which way you are facing as the camera switches from one side of the room to another, loading in another pre-rendered background (why go to the bother?) each time.

Throw barrels. Those arms. The horror…

I gave it more of a go than it deserved (and probably got further than the overwhelming majority of players if footage on YouTube is anything to go by), and got to level 2. Level 2 is just the same thing as level 1, except there is a higher concentration of enemies with guns. You can actually pick up and use the guns yourself if you want to waste a bit of time shooting to the left and right of the goons. Randomly, the sound bugs out and plays a single MIDI note on repeat until you clear the area (this could have been an emulation bug, though). Don’t expect any exposition or cutscenes, either. You just keep beating up waves of goons until you complete the level, then move onto the next.

Say what you like about modern games being all too similar and by-the-numbers (and I do), but at least you don’t get guff like this anymore.

Lore bonus: There is a rather long-standing claim with this game that if you complete it in 50 minutes or less, a tribute to the late Brandon Lee (who died on the set of the original The Crow) reveals itself. Notes about this appear in online guides, and it’s even right there on the game’s Wikipedia page. I’ve not seen any actual proof of this, though, and in fact dispute that it’s even possible to finish the game that quickly at all (speedruns of the game on YouTube seem to top out at around an hour and a quarter). So I’m going to call this another one of those ‘use STRENGTH on the truck to find Mew’ urban legends from the early days of the internet, except this one must have slipped the net (presumably as the game is so bad that nobody cared to try it).

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 1/10

Crusaders of Might and Magic

I actually own a load of the old 90s Might and Magic games on GOG, acquired through various fits of “It only costs 80p, I’ll play it eventually” seasonal sale psychosis. It means that the only one I’ve actually installed and played is Might and Magic VII, which I stumbled through for about ten minutes before realising it required far more of a time investment than the half-arsed spin I was intending to give it on a Sunday afternoon. Suffice it to say though that I understand the concept, which is a typical Dungeons and Dragons-style team-based fantasy RPG, with your usual orcs and dragons and whatever.

You just sort of face the enemy and hammer square to fight.

So it was a bit surprising to find Crusaders of Might and Magic is actually a 3D action-adventure game with RPG characteristics (think Gothic for the PC, but not as good). It was even more surprising, given how Might and Magic is usually quite a serious deep fantasy romp, to find that the main character turned out to be some sort of Bruce Campbell-ish deadpan snarker. It doesn’t wash out as anything particularly funny, but was an interesting twist on the genre. Maybe the gag is that the wisecracking hero exists at all, given that every other character seems to be played boringly straight, down to the fact that the dwarves all speak in a broad Scotch twang. Yawn.

I guess it was a time when Joss Whedon was popular.

The controls are okay for a change, so I was willing to give things a proper go, but my progression was hampered by two big problems. The first was that the game is too big for its boots graphically. The frame rate frequently - and I mean frequently - plummets to an unplayable 7-10 FPS whenever the game has to draw anything more than a dozen or so feet away, or when you cast a spell, or even just rotate the camera. It’s very annoying. My guess as to why this design flaw made it all the way to release might fall at the fact it was also released for PC, which could handle this sort of thing, but I don’t know.

You buy weapons and armour in shops by looking at them in first-person view and pressing a button.

The other problem was that the difficulty was crazy. The first level gently introduces you to the combat, spells and level progression (maybe too gently), and then it just sets you loose in a world that is totally beyond your scrub capabilities, and doesn’t particularly help you out with that. Combat is so obscenely hard against early enemies that I concluded that you are actually supposed to try and avoid it where possible until you strengthen up, but I wasn’t coming across any simpler battles either. It all unravelled when I ended up running through a dwarven base being chased by these little blokes, reached a dead end and then got pummelled into a meaty paste.

Why do so many games try and force stupid platforming where it isn’t required? Why?

It could have been good, but they messed it up.

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

Cubix Robots for Everyone - Race ‘N Robots

This was apparently a kids TV show from the early noughties - not the British, homely, Grange Hill kind, but the distinctly American/Japanese flavour which exists purely to ship mountains of expensive moulded-plastic action figures to kids’ bedrooms via their parents’ credit card. According to Wikipedia this one was actually Korean, though, so maybe I’m being unkind. It spawns from a rather curious time in 3D animation where the technology had clearly become cheap (and cool) enough to create mass-produced kids’ TV slop with it, but at the same time it wasn’t sophisticated enough to not look horrifyingly uncanny valley-esque. The only other notable thing I discovered when scanning the Wiki page was that one of the main characters in the show is called ‘Mong’.

The problem here is the camera is not able to keep up with your vehicle, so you have no idea where you’re going.

This game got absolutely hammered by Official UK PlayStation Magazine with a 1/10 that I still remember, a dressing down so bad that (again according to Wikipedia, so I don’t necessarily believe it) it pushed the actual release date back several months until the hate simmered down. I’m a bit confused, to be honest. It’s certainly not a very good game, but 1/10? Maybe I’m still recovering from The Crow-itis, but it seems a bit excessive. 1/10 for me should be reserved for something which fails utterly as a valid, working piece of entertainment media, and you can’t say that about Cubix.

Short FMVs punctuate the races that serve more as a sort of ad break than plot dump.

The experience is short. There is a totally bizarre ‘story mode’, which is actually just racing each of the tracks in sequence (nine different tracks, apparently, but it’s actually just three that are repeated three times each) interspersed with short FMVs which may or may not simply be lifted straight from the show in between. The racing itself is a bit like Micro Machines with the top-down perspective, and the controls are actually pretty smooth. The frame rate isn’t, unfortunately. There are the usual powerups to pick up and use on the fixed 3-lap races - boost, rockets and whatever, but rockets are useless when you’re in first place, which is where you will spend most of the time given the game’s pathetic difficulty.

Fall in this pit and the game will more or less instantly respawn you about 15 feet further along the track, so it actually works as a broken shortcut.

It’s just an extremely unambitious game; the sort of thing you might have found in a cereal packet back in the day when there was enough money in the economy for cereal manufacturers to be able to ship free CDs along with their corn/sugar concoctions. There are a handful of different robots to ‘race’, but none are any different to each other. If they’d have slapped Midas Interactive on the cover I’d have almost believed it.

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

Cyberia

Death highlight reel: The Game.

Cyberia is actually really interesting as a 1994 tech demo, and as a general time capsule showing how unsure developers of the time really were about what happens next now that the CD-ROM, 3D animation and (more) sophisticated video decoding tools were available. As a game, it’s pretty poor.

Cramming this much FMV onto a CD-ROM meant dropping the number of colours to piddling levels.

What it does differently is that the whole game plays like an elongated FMV. You navigate through pre-rendered environments by moving your Monotone Space Marine Guy along fixed paths which for all intents and purposes give the impression of an interactive, permanent FMV cutscene. It’s quite well done. Compare with something like Chronicles of the Sword, which did the same sort of thing, but gave you a free-roaming 2D sprite to move around over the background JPEG and looked like a dog’s arse. It’s obviously also a sprite that moves over the screen in Cyberia, but given the fixed paths of travel, they were able to make it look a lot neater.

Get used to it.

In the sections of the game that work like this, it plays like a typical adventure game but without the point-&-click bit. A typical adventure game where you die every few seconds in increasingly ridiculous ways. It’s truly quite funny. At the very beginning of the game you can approach a barrel full of weird hissing liquid, interact with it, and then die as it melts your hand off. Game over! Later, walk into a room and take a step forward, then watch the cutscene as a hitherto-unseen enemy jumps out and blows a hole in your chest. Enter a lift, and watch in first person view as the door opens and a guy is there, already pointing his Star Trek phaser gun at the door ready to blow your head off. Your character makes the same angsty death yell every time. Game over! This continues all over the place. It makes the trial-and-error gameplay of Tomb Raider seem dynamic and fast paced.

Puzzles don’t really make any sense.

The other parts of the game are effectively rail shooters. Maybe it would have worked out OK on the PC original, but it doesn’t on PlayStation, as you have to lug the cursor around the screen to shoot at the goons in the mere moments the game afford you. I didn’t find it particularly hard, but there was a sequence where these levels just kept coming, and I lost interest. Too clunky to be worth bothering with in 2026, but an interesting curio.

Surprise!

Kept my attention for: A day
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Cyber Tiger

The fates have aligned to create a reality where the final five games on the PlayStation beginning with the letter C contain not one, but three games the suffered an inglorious 1/10 score with Official UK PlayStation Magazine. It only gave out a handful of those scores in total, over 100 issues. The Crow probably deserved it. Cubix certainly didn’t. Cyber Tiger…no, this didn’t deserve it either.

Despite the name, that’s not actually Tiger Woods. I don’t know either.

It’s not a great game by any means, but it is really quite hard to find just what it is that the reviewers hated so much about Cyber Tiger. It’s obvious what it’s trying to do - in a world where the most popular golf game was the kid-friendly, arcade Everybody’s Golf, why not spin off the ‘serious’ Tiger Woods golf sims with a simplified take, including a cartoony version of the soon-to-be serial drink-driving, womanising golfing genius, along with silly power-ups, challenges and daft voicovers?

If only this existed in real life.

It’s nothing amazing. The simplified gameplay means that (as far as I could tell) there is no wind, no option to change the impact point of the ball, and it’s quite difficult to properly duff your stroke in the same way that you would on Actua Golf. But the rest of it works. It even incorporates the now-standard analog stick swing mechanism (over the three-button-press method, though that is also present), which I think might really have been one of the first times such a mechanic appeared in a golf game. Swing the stick one way to fade the ball, and another to draw it. 1/10? Really?

Putting is horrible, though.

There are a handful of courses and the powerups make things halfway interesting, but in order to really progress the ‘career mode’, you need to play round after round of limited-power golf with what I’m assuming are kid players which can only hit the ball a hundred yards or so before unlocking something better. Access to players who hit the ball a normal distance would in turn make the game easier, so…I don’t quite understand that design choice. Whatever. Not the best golf game I’ll play by any stretch, but certainly not the worst. It might even be a shade better than Actua Golf.

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