Playing every PS1 game - D, Dance Dance Revolution, Danger Girl, Darkstalkers

D

That is correct - the first game beginning with the letter D is quite literally just named ‘D’.

Experience the full gamut of emotional acting displays with your virual avatar in D.

It’s interesting in the same way that Cyberia could still be described as ‘interesting’ despite being a poor game. I wouldn’t say D is a poor game, but it’s the offspring of a time when the ‘FMV game’ was still being considered as a potential paradigm-shifting goer rather than a doomed experiment in a world where full 3D was still difficult to produce and janky to play. It’s interesting to think that anyone thought this stuff was really ever going to work.

The whole game is in letterboxed 240p, presumably to save storage space. It was never going to happen in the CD-ROM era, but the genre had already died by the time the DVD came around.

D is a horror-adventure game with a liberal sprinkling of whacky Japanese dramatics. In a sense it is a ‘choose-your-own-FMV-adventure’ game. You don’t control a virtual avatar as such, but rather ‘move’ around a paranormal manor house environment by using the directional buttons to play short interstitial FMVs which slowly move from static JPEG to static JPEG. You can ‘interact’ sometimes by pressing the circle button, but it never really spells out when might be a good time to do this - you have to rely on a bit of gamer nous. Occasionally a ‘cutscene’ FMV will play where your mute protagonist ‘does’ something, like pick up an item, or blithely react to the dreamlike horror going on around her.

Buckle up for an exercise in faffing forever with this puzzle.

What it means is that there is a ton of FMV to store on CD-ROM. In turn, what this means is that the game is played across three discs. This might normally give a prospective player the impression that they were about to embark on something of an odyssey - they couldn’t be more wrong. Despite taking up three discs, the game is pathetically short. If you know what you’re doing (ie. you know the solutions to all the puzzles already), you can probably finish it in about 20-30 minutes. A significant proportion of that time would be spent switching discs around. It’s a bit daft.

This disc is rotated with the circle button and takes about 5-6 seconds for each animation. You need to do it around 20 times.

This isn’t to say I dislike the game. It has a a lot of 90s-terrible-CGI charm to it, and the puzzles, while a bit weird, are neither too easy nor too annoyingly obscure in their solution. The biggest problem is how sloooow it all is. You plod around with such sloth that finding oneself at a dead end, or locked door can be enough to mean you would rather just quit and come back later than turn around and try something else. I had to turn on the frameskip function on the emulator for my own sanity. All that being said, if there was an option to skip the plodding bits and teleport to your requested destination (something common in adventure games), you could probably finish the whole game in less than 10 minutes.

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

Dance Dance Revolution

This game didn’t actually release in Europe outside of arcades. By the time DDR did arrive on the PlayStation in Europe (2001, as Dancing Stage Euromix), I’m pretty sure it had already taken off in popularity as a bit of a thing that you would find in the more fancy looking arcades. I was never interested in it, but I remember the cheap plastic roll-up mats that would plug in as a ‘controller’. It used to turn up at youth clubs and the like for kids to stamp about on on while playing on the knackered old PS1 (with a broken lid that would have to be held down with something).

It’s familiar to anyone who’s ever stood in front of one of those giant arcade machines.

Obviously I don’t have one of those mats, but unlike Beatmania, the game affords you a means to play the game using a controller, where you can use both the directional buttons and face buttons to tap to the rhythm at once, allowing you to perform some of the more complicated inputs. It’s pretty intuitive. It also rather defeats the whole object of ‘dancing’ by stamping your feet in various directions. It also writes off the entire ‘fitness’ mode which rather humourously estimates the amount of calories you’re burning as you play.

It almost shames you into buying the mat rather than live with the guilt of playing the fitness mode with a PS1 controller.

There are a mountain of tracks to play with, but they’re all made up by Konami who clearly didn’t want to bother wading through licencing sewage. Some of these are catchy, most aren’t. The truth is, like most arcade games, you sort of have to be there in the noisy, neon-lit, BO-stinking palace of pound coins in order to really enjoy it. The fact you need a special control system to do it properly only exacerbates it. With the mat it would probably be worth a go, but with a normal controller, and with no real chart music, you have to wonder what the point is.

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

Dance UK

This is actually a PS2 game, which for one reason or another was also released on PS1 at the eye-wateringly late date of November 2003 - eighteen months before the PS3 was revealed. The clue in the name also reveals it didn’t make it to NTSC regions.

I don’t think I was the target audience.

It’s a DDR clone, that even came with its own mat you had to buy - this time one with eight directions to stomp on rather than four. The plus point is that it includes a rather massive array of real music. It also has the same ‘fitness’ mode as DDR; maybe they got a tax break for encouraging youth health or something. There’s also something about a kareoke mode, god forbid.

Never mind then.

Alas, I couldn’t play this game. Unlike DDR, you actually need the proprietary mat in order to play the game. It won’t even load the levels otherwise. Never mind. Rest assured I shall lose a grand total of zero minutes of sleep over this.

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

Danger Girl

Apparently this is based upon an American comic book series. All I know is that any illusions I had about its target audience being girls were dispensed with within a few moments of the opening sequence.

…Really? The stuff we got away with.

It’s a by-the-numbers third person shooter a la Tomorrow Never Dies. It’s so similar in fact that I wondered if it was the same developer; it wasn’t. It’s worth saying this is a better game than TND, though not by much. The controls are on the verge of jankiness without yet being smooth or simple - by 2000 developers were thankfully starting to figure it out. Control is still forward-backward-rotate with the directional buttons and strafe with the triggers, but it works a bit better as you can also combine the buttons to strafe diagonally forward or backward. It’s a word of difference from the suicidal goose-stepping of TND.

Save hostages by tapping circle.

That’s about it, though. There’s nothing much special about Danger Girl. The enemy AI flatters to deceive; a lot is made about their various states of alertness, Metal Gear Solid-esque cones of vision, and ability to take cover when under fire, but the biggest problem is that they are only able to see a few feet in front of them. The most effective way I found to proceed was to slowly plod through the levels, waiting until an enemy is rendered into vision at a far-enough-away point, then use first person aiming to headshot them. Rinse and repeat.

As if to try and dissuade you, first person mode is incredibly slow.

It tries to be a third-person Goldeneye with the structured environments where you get Thing A to complete Objective B and open the door to Area C, and there are some pretty novel ideas (like shooting out lights to make it harder for enemies to see you, then using NV goggles to cap them), but I was bored by the time I got to level 3. It’s not rubbish, just pretty average.

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

Darkstalkers 3

2D Japanese anime fighters aren’t particularly my jam, partly because I’ve always been a button masher and partly because I never get to grips with all the different fighting modes and terms they through at you. In Darkstalkers, much like in Capcom vs. SNK, you choose a fighter, and are then asked the question - ‘normal’, ‘auto’, ‘turbo’, or - a real curveball - ‘auto & turbo’. No idea what any of that means, mate. Choose one, and you are then instructed to select ‘D.F. Change’ or ‘D.F, Power’. OK whatever.

The pixel art is cool, I guess.

The fighting bit, once you get there, is OK. I was able to button mash my way through a few fights, unlike the humiliation ritual I undertook playing Capcom vs. SNK. Rather than having ‘round 1’, ‘round 2’ et cetera, the game gives you a series of ‘lives’ which are extinguished if your life bar reaches zero, and you pick it up again mid-fight. It makes things a little quicker I suppose, but when you’re behind it can be a pain to get back into it.

I don’t remember any of this lot in Capcom vs. SNK.

I couldn’t work out any moves, so had a go at the ‘training’ mode. Lo and behold, it doesn’t teach you any, and instead it is one of those modes where you just fop away at an immobile opponent. I guess I needed the manual.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10