Playing every PS1 game - Dave Mirra BMX, David Beckham Soccer, Dead or Alive, Deception III, Delta Force

Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX

I had to take a moment to think, but I’m unable to name any modern game that is licenced by a famous sports personality. Which is interesting, given how back in the day it seemed to be more or less a requirement to have some guy lend their name to the title - in exchange for a hefty cash payment - in order for a game to carry any credibility. It was usually coupled with some photo ops and magazine interviews where it usually became quite clear that (for example) Ronaldo ‘R9’ Nazario had never actually played Ronaldo V-Football, nor did he know the first thing about his game, but was happy to be involved nonetheless. I took a look and found we haven’t had Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf since 2013, incredibly.

BMXing is still cool, trust me bro.

Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX is a pretty blatant clone of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which was released a year prior and was one of those games which pretty much everyone you knew had played. And to be honest, fair enough. Tony Hawk’s stumbled upon a winning formula which invited the developers into the exclusive club of game series that was allowed to just release a new version of the same game every year (for the next four years, at least) and it would keep getting great reviews. Why not just copy it?

Manlets, when will they learn?

I’m not a skateboarding guy though unfortunately, and certainly no BMXer (is there a proper word for it?). The game is well polished and has a few different modes, and the ragdoll physics when you crash and burn (or get run over by a train) are quite funny, but there’s not much for me here really. I can tell it’s a decent enough game. There was a Dave Mirra 2 the following year, but for PS2 only.

DAVE MIRRA’s defense fell!

The interesting addendum to all this is that Dave Mirra 3 actually became BMX XXX, infamous for its lad-mag humour and topless women (All of which resulted in the man dropping his endorsement. Not very dudebro.). That game’s subsequent failure was a major factor in Acclaim going bust in 2004.

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

David Beckham Soccer

The second of the pair of PlayStation games named after a man called Dave, David Beckham Soccer released fairly late on in the lifespan of the little grey box in November 2001. The timing couldn’t have been any more perfect either, given it was a month or so after the man himself hermetically sealed his name in the vault of British cultural myth by scoring that free kick against Greece to take England to the World Cup, completing his zero-to-hero redemption arc which started with that sending off against Argentina three years earlier. The Beckham hype was probably at its zenith. Oh, what’s that? A video game that is literally titled David Beckham Soccer? Sit back and count the money.

Legendary United centre half Jaap er… Stamp. I don’t really know why, as all the other players seem to be correct.

I’ve been discovering in this process that actually, early football games were pretty much all guff. I don’t know whether there was something I was doing back then which I’m forgetting to do now, or whether maybe the game itself was played in such a different way before Pep Guardiola single handedly killed football that the games just fail to simulate what I’m trying to do properly, but I find almost all of these games to be janky, unrealistic and difficult. DBS’ nearest contemporary which I have played already is 2002 FIFA World Cup, which offered an experience akin to having my teeth drilled. The only one I’ve actually enjoyed has been Actua Soccer 2.

Flares can be set off in the crowd, which I have to say is quite unique even today. I don’t really know why in this case the smoke is red, given the game is France vs Brazil.

David Beckham Soccer isn’t terrible, though. It does come across a bit unfinished, particularly in the audio department, which is quite sparse. There’s definitely no ‘atmosphere’ as you ostensibly play football in front of tens of thousands. Jonathan Pearce and Ron Atkinson provide a few limited lines that get repeated often within moments of each other but it’s not close to the depths plumbed in Cricket 2000.

You can aim the arrow, but it doesn’t do anything, as you have to press one of the face buttons to deliver the ball - to one of the marked blokes. Bizarre.

In fact, the ‘playing football’ bit is actually one of the better simulations I’ve played so far (though that isn’t saying a terrible amount). Most games suffer from a disease of poor AI and dodgy controls rendering any attempt to play a passing game utterly futile, and you are railroaded into simply running straight for the opposing keeper every time you get the ball. You can just about pull it off in David Beckham Soccer, and it was also pleasing to finally play a football game where crosses and corners provided genuine goalscoring opportunities, rather than the floaty rubbish you’d get everywhere else (even in FIFA).

For its time, the football simulation is decent enough.

It’s all just a bit basic. The ‘Train With Beckham’ mode is actually quite fun; a bit like those training levels you get on modern FIFA games yet dreamt up 20 years earlier. Speaking of Beckham - where is he? The man’s presence in his own game is limited to a static CGI headshot which pops up from time to time in the practice levels alongside some textual instructions. I thought that you might at least have got his voice, though on second thoughts maybe we dodged a bullet there. Finish the training mode, though, and what you’re left with is a serviceable but pretty bare bones football game.

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

Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive is one of those games which I feel is as much of a ‘household name’ as you tend to get amongst the sort of enthusiasts who write game-by-game blog posts about the PlayStation. But it’s also one where I tend not to meet many who’ve ever actually played it very much. In Britain we really only played Tekken, and maybe Mortal Kombat.

This stage of the Dead or Alive tournament will be held at extreme altitude thousands of miles from any civilisation.

I think my experience with DoA starts and ends with having a crack at it once or twice at the sort of arcade you find at a bowling alley, maybe mainly out of a teenager’s interest in discovering just how noticeable those boob physics actually are. Well, in Dead or Alive 1, released in 1998, they are definitely noticeable and actually quite ridiculous.

It’s obviously hard to capture in a screenshot.

It’s almost off-putting. The boob jiggle is gravity-defying in uncanny way you might have got in those ‘ragdoll simulator’ flash games that were catnip for schoolkids in the 00s, flopping around indifferent to the forces of friction or fitted clothing. As a purely technical feat it’s fairly interesting in a world with fixed character models, but really it’s just a bit of a risque joke, that doesn’t really land 30 years later (when boob physics are actually both fairly ubiquitous and accurate).

The high score name-entry screen involves running around and activating letters, which is quite cool. They would have needed to animate running just for this tiny segment of the game.

Oh, sorry, was there a game in amongst all this? It’s actually pretty decent. A bit like Bloody Roar, one face button is reserved for blocks and throws, which makes button mashing a bit harder as one runs the risk of having your fighter pointlessly flap at air every fourth input. This is made up for, though, with the way blocking actually works. Unlike in Tekken where you can take the edge off an opponent’s move by simply stepping backward at the right moment, pressing square in DoA allows you to either parry an attack, or totally counter it and hit back in one fluid parry-riposte move. It’s tricky to time right, yet very satisfying to pull off. Other than that, it plays quite similarly to Tekken with an emphasis on short combos and ‘air juggling’.

Once again, don’t expect the training mode to teach you any moves.

The main ‘story mode’ campaign is a let down; you couldn’t even really call it story mode (if fact, the game doesn’t, preferring to call it ‘Tournament’) as there is no plot, no Street Fighter-esque inter-fight repartee, no special ending FMV to speak of either. It’s just a straight one-by-one enemy conveyor belt followed by a boss character, then roll credits and return to the main menu to go again. There are a few other game modes, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary. There’s not even that much to unlock. It actually made me think - am I actually just playing a boob jiggle physics tech demo?

Kept my attention for: Not very long
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 6/10

Deception III - Dark Delusion

I need to start keeping a tally of dumb titles for PlayStation games. A few points for alliteration, though, I suppose.

In this serious game, you run away from a guy with a giant comedy mallet.

With Azure Dreams, I went in with low expectations for a game whose name didn’t ring any bells for me, and found myself surprisingly gripped. I had exactly the same experience with Deception III; the name made no sense, there were anime people on the cover, I thought it was going to be obtuse and cringey, but then out of nowhere an involving and fun game popped out instead. I really wasn’t expecting it.

The graphics are pretty good and Vagrant Story-esque, if a bit low res.

To put Deception III (there are two earlier entries, but I only picked up this one) into simple terms - imagine if you took Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone, removed the ‘Christmassy family comedy’ bit and swapped it for ‘ultra-serious renaissance-era violent drama’ (and where Joe Pesci getting his face ironed would have realistic medical outcomes), then threw in a bit of Dungeon Keeper, and…maybe you’d get the vibe I’m talking about, I don’t know. Suffice it to say, the point behind Deception III is to scamper away from enemies seeking to kidnap you, and lure them into variously vicious booby traps.

Each level ends with a morbid roundup of the creativity of your traps.

So there is no combat per se. Instead, before each level you set your character up with three ‘traps’ matched to the face buttons, and apply them to places in whichever room you’re in using a grid system. Lure an enemy over one of the traps, press the face button to activate it, and boom, your pursuer is punished. Defeat all pursuers in a given level to complete it. In between all this there is a vertiable mountain of plot development and exposition to sit through, as your character, her pals and her enemies discuss whatever it is that is going on in very long cutscenes, like something from Game of Thrones. It’s not really all that interesting.

There’s a rather involved ‘trap creation’ function where you spend your end-of-level points.

The good bit is the core game functionality. It takes quite a simple concept, and then adds layers of complexity on top for you to work out to your benefit. Traps can ‘stack’, so one trap can be followed up with another for increased damage, so what that encourages is rather slapstick rube goldberg machines where you can, for example, allow your enemy to chase you up some stairs, activate a trap to turn the stairs into a Looney Tunes-esque flat slope, so they slide to the bottom, land on a ‘spring floor’ trap which throws them across the room into a fire pit, then you activate a final trap which lands a giant comedy boulder on their head. If Keystone Cops is your thing, it’s satisfying to pull off.

Chortle as you lead this renaissance-era Wet Bandit on a merry dance of physical punishment.

But Deception III doesn’t want to be Keystone Cops, or Home Alone; it wants you to take it seriously, and think about the characters’ angsty dillemas and whatever. It doesn’t really work, though, when you’re there dropping giant vases over peoples’ heads so they stagger blindly into a bottomless pit. The developers can’t quite decide how to play it when it comes to the way the traps themselves are potrayed, too. Alongside the falling chandeliers and slippy stairways, there are iron maidens and electrocutions; each enemy dies with a pathetic scream cut-scene in a pool of their blood. The story concept (and art design) wouldn’t really work if they leaned all the way into the slapstick, so it’s a bit stuck in this halfway house.

YOU did this.

It doesn’t really matter, though. Deception III is definitely worth a go with. According to GameFAQs there are 24 levels, and I imagine it might get a bit samey after a while, unless you get super engaged in the story, which I didn’t.

Kept my attention for: 2 days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10

Delta Force: Urban Warfare

By the summer of 2002, we were knee deep in the next generation of consoles, the Dreamcast had come and gone, and Sony were looking for a few last gasps to shift some units of the diminutive and ghostly-grey PSOne. One of these final, mortal gurgles was a rather leftfield edition of the Delta Force series, which until now was a fairly popular series of PC-only shooters.

But this time it’s “Urban”. You can tell by the stairs and stuff.

What’s rather fascinating about playing Urban Warfare is seeing how it works and plays in the context of where FPS games ‘were’ more generally at the time. Timesplitters had already been out for a couple of years on PS2, and the Xbox already had Halo. While The World is Not Enough in 2000 was still trying to emulate the feel of Goldeneye 007 on the N64, the world had moved on a bit and what we have with Urban Warfare is much more like a PS2 FPS game which has been retrofitted to squeeze onto the PS1.

The outdoor sections are always set at night in order to try and cover up the horrendous draw distance.

It’s definitely a squeeze. The game spends a lot of time chugging away at 18-20 frames per second, which is probably right on the cusps of making it unplayable if it wasn’t for the fact it manages to float around 30fps most of the time. The graphics are definitely about as good as you were going to get on the hardware, which, to be honest, isn’t really good enough for the game it is trying to be. The control system is actually the modern dual-analog-stick setup, and unlike Armorines or Alien Resurrection it’s actually done pretty well. It’s not perfect, for the same reasons I discussed with Alien, but it’s probably as close as you were going to get to PS2 smoothness on the PS1.

Take out the horror hand and what this is is genuine PS2-standard face rendering. It’s not a flat texture - his teeth are actually modelled. It manages it presumably by rendering barely anything else on screen at the same time.

It’s a shame the game itself is nothing special. The plot is by-the-numbers, the shooting - while handily providing an auto-aim as a sort of meek acknowledgement that the controls are still fiddly - doesn’t do anything new and the levels are mostly the sort of thing you’d already be used to if you’d played any PC Delta Force game. The enemy AI is good though, with goons running for cover and hiding rather than just standing out in the open waiting for you to efficiently gun them down. If you didn’t have a PS2 you could probably pretend to your mates that you could ‘play shooters too’, but you’d be doing it with a tiny tear in the corner of your eye.

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