Playing every PS1 game - Demolition Racer, Descent, Destrega, Destruction Derby, Detective Barbie

Demolition Racer

It’s not Destruction Derby (that’s later) - it’s Demolition Racer. It’s different. Trust me bro.

It runs well for the amount of chaos going on.

I wasn’t expecting much, but this is actually a genuinely fun game. I haven’t ever actually played Desctruction Derby (though I will shortly), so it’s hard for me to directly compare the two at this point, but if DD is better than DR, it will be a pretty damn good game. The concept is a bit Carmageddon, where you’re more than welcome to treat each stage as a genuine race to the finish line, but while in Carmageddon doing so would simply be one of many ways to win, in Demolition Racer, it is not the point at all, and would just be a fast way to ‘finish’ toward the bottom end of the final standings.

Points increase in line with how hard you smash into your hapless competitor.

In Demolition Racer, a high finishing position merely provides you with a higher ‘multiplier’ of points gained during your spin around the track. Points are gained by ramming into your competitors (15 in all, which is an impressive feat for the hardware) and trying to make them blow up. So it is quite possible to finish first (obtaining a 25x points multiplier), and yet ‘actually’ come 7th (because 100 points x 25 shakes out as far less than 400 points x 8). So you’re rewarded for combining racing chops with a psychotic blood thirst. What’s not to like?

When your car is at death’s door, the smoke gets in the way of your vision.

Of course, your opponents are trying to do this to you too. Your car has a ‘health’ meter that ticks down from 100 with each prang and can start plummeting very quickly if you treat your vehicle as little more than a wrecking ball, and if it drops to zero, you explode and are rewarded with a 0-multiplier DNF. So you have to try and be savvy with it and often the final lap can be a case of straight-up defensive racing in an effort to limp over the line on three wheels and a faceful of smoke. In a way it’s a bit like a very early precursor to Burnout, with the smooth framerate, stupid speeds and theatric crashes.

Arena death mode is a bit like the ‘Crash mode’ in Burnout.

There’s also a mode which leans into the crash stuff entirely and dispenses of any illusions about ‘racing’, where it drops all 16 of you into an arena and it’s a simple game of last man standing. A bit of a lottery but fun either way. I imagine it would have a good laugh in the 2-player mode.

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

Descent

Sometimes returning to the early-mid 90s ‘classic’ games which pioneered 3D game ideas can be a reminder of how well they got it right and the timeless nature of the concept - Doom is still fun to play over 30 years later, and while Civilisation II was always on a hiding to nothing attempting to map itself to the PlayStation, the PC game is still good. There is a core element in both that is just fun to play, regardless of context.

Shoot anything that moves (very few things move).

Descent isn’t this, unfortunately. In 1995, a fully 3D pseudo-space shooter would have rocked people’s minds. It doesn’t now. In fact, it’s all a bit pish. It no doubt would have looked better on PC - if you had one powerful enough - but the idea of navigating through what is effectively a 3D maze (that is to say, the maze can direct you up or down levels as opposed to simply left and right turns) with grainy, low res graphics and poor lighting does not a good game make.

But don’t shoot these guys.

It’s disorienting and clunky. The 2 player mode would have been fun to play, if you could ever find each other. As it is, the single player mode has degraded to nothing with age, like an old thermal paper receipt you find in your wallet where the numbers have long since worn off, leaving you with just a scruffy bit of dog-eared ply and a faint wondering of why you ever kept it.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Destrega

Destrega is Bushido Blade, except for the non-thinking man, if you excuse the inversion of the cliché. It’s not a bad thing. It takes the ‘loose story mode’ concept introduced by fighting games when they started being played on home consoles (at least, more often than in musty arcades), and runs with it straight to its logical conclusion.

Action game, quiet drama scene.

The fighting itself takes place in larger-scale environments that allow for more freeform movement a la Bushido Blade, but plays the rest of it straight with health bars, combos, fantasy moves and a scientifically loose approach to gravity. It’s not as complex as something like Tekken, but there’s enough there to keep it interesting. Being close by your opponent makes the face buttons initiate hand-to-hand combat, while being more than a few yards away changes things so that you fling bits of magic at each other to do damage instead. In this regard, it’s two very different fighting games merged into one, which can switch around half a dozen times in the space of a single round.

The camera gets in close when you’re slapping each other about, but zooms out like Super Smash Bros. when you’re flinging magic polygons around.

The gameplay is also fun enough that the rather bloated story sort of gets in the way of it. 60-70% of the game is spent sitting through pre-and-post-battle cut scenes, which get quite lengthy. There’s a highly melodramatic plot, which to be fair is not something you could say about fighting games even today, but the approach is totally shot by the addition of English voice acting of Resident Evil levels of unintended hilarity. It’s really quite terrible. The dialogue is cringey to begin with, but the lines are delivered with such wooden confusion that I actually couldn’t help but audibly snort a few times.

“So you finally learned the truth! Not that it will do you any good - [extremely long, awkward pause as the actor turns the page] - Since you will be dead, shortly.”

The soundtrack is also a distilled flagon of synth-y 90s Japanopop which doesn’t suit the deep and serious tone it’s trying to convey - think Game of Thrones meets Sailor Moon. None of this matters too much, as the game itself is a good one. In fact, if the voice acting was better, it would probably make the game worse overall, as strange as that sounds.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 6/10

Destruction Derby

Until now I thought that Destruction Derby was one of the games that were released with the launch of the PlayStation in 1995, but it turns out (according to Wikipedia truths) that it wasn’t; it actually came out a few weeks afterward. Close enough.

Some tracks deliberately have you crossing through other areas of the course, inviting you to smash into each other.

You can sort of sense that Sony were at pains to ensure that the games that launched along with their shiny new piece of hardware weren’t half arsed and met a minimum standard - despite there being 19 other racers on screen at the same time (along with the track itself), the game maintains a rate of 30 frames per second pretty flawlessly throughout, apart from when I found myself in a huge fender-bending pileup where it would sometimes drop to 23-24. That takes some doing. As time went on and it became clear that the Sega Saturn had bitten the dust and the N64 wasn’t going to threaten, this sort of standard mattered less.

A similar arena-crash-about mode to Demolition Racer. So the original one, then.

DD is an OK game. In 1995 it would have been a banger (excuse the pun), but everything it does ended up being done better by other games - see Demolition Racer within a few years. The tracks are all quite samey, and controlling the car is hard with such a wonky camera angle. There’s not much else to say. It would have been a fun for the odd quick blast with a mate, but to lift a zoomer phrase - it’s not that deep, bro.

Kept my attention for: 2 days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Detective Barbie: The Mystery Cruise

I thought the Barbie games were over back when I reached that particular letter sequence months ago, but this cheeky one turned out to be hiding amongst the letter D.

Play it again, Ken.

Much like the other games, the premise here is to take a garden-variety videogame genre, strip out all difficulty and narrative peril, change the characters to various iterations of the all-American moulded plastic leggy blonde, make the controls wonky, then print to disc. Detective Barbie in this case is actually a point-and-click adventure without the pointing and clicking (mostly), in the style of something like, er, Clock Tower. Sorry, that’s the only comparison I can make from what I’ve played so far. Though now that I think of it, a Barbie does Clock Tower game could actually be truly incredible.

I’m sorry but I shan’t be boarding any cruise ship which is captained by someone who dresses like a Captain Birdseye striptease.

Much like Explorer, deep within the code is actually something that could have been a half decent game. The graphics are OK, the concept, while stupid - Barbie rocks up uninvited on a (strangely deserted) cruise ship to pin the goon behind some art thefts - is straightforward enough, and the nature of it being an adventure game rather than a platformer means that you get much more leeway with crap controls. You strut around the giant empty boat, chatting to people, picking up items and sitting through voice clip after voice clip of Barbie dropping pretty bloody obvious ‘hints’ as to what to do next.

The game includes a jetski minigame for no reason at all.

That’s where it falls over really. It’s a kid’s game, but your hand is held through so much of it that it’s more like the adventure game equivalent of an on-rails shooter, where the enemies die anyway if you take too long to shoot them. Way too many slow loading screens, too. It’s probably the ‘least bad’ of all the Barbie games, though.

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