Playing every PS1 game - Disruptor, Diver's Dream, Doom, Dracula - The Resurrection

Disruptor

1996’s Disruptor is a bit of a mish-mash of concepts and genres that are very much dead and buried in 2026. At the time, there would have been a push to prove that 3D-capable game consoles could do the whole ‘arcade thing’, but also, as 3D acceleration in PCs was picking up and we were getting our minds blown with the smooth textured polygons in stuff like Quake II, people wanted that full FPS experience on console. And we would get it…it just wouldn’t come in the shape of Disruptor (it would be a James Bond runaround on a totally different bit of hardware).

Use your -PSYIONIC FORCES- to shoot energy blobs at robot demons. Or just shoot them with your gun as it’s quicker.

No, what Disruptor is is a clone of Star Wars: Dark Forces - itself a spin on the by-now-aging-a-bit Doom. Dark Forces was a MS-DOS game which eventually was ported to PlayStation - ironically, at the exact time Disruptor was released. This may have contributed somewhat to the game being a bit of a flop, despite an obviously hefty sum of money being put into developing it.

This is a serious game, private.

In between levels, you are treated to some incredibly cringey live-action FMV clips to provide the exposition dumps (because in this new world of the PlayStation, one needed real emotional drivers in order to properly enjoy gunning down waves of 2D sprites in a loose, abstract representation of real life). I refuse to accept that anyone could have found this sort of B-movie stuff cool or exciting at the time. It is but one feature which Disruptor comes loaded with which would soon disappear never to be seen again in a game, along with the wonky, Doom-like control scheme, 2D sprite enemies and sprawling, ‘work it out yourself’ level maps.

The draw distance is about half a dozen yards.

There’s nothing particularly terrible here beyond the acting, but at the same time, nothing that Disruptor brings is particularly new at all, and we were in a time where new approaches were coming thick and fast. In a year’s time, Goldeneye 007 would be released (and Half-Life not too long after that), and we could finally put aside all this ‘Doom clone’ nonsense forever. As for the PlayStation FPS, we eventually got stuff like The World Is Not Enough and Alien Resurrection, but people eventually accepted that the console didn’t have the juice and would wait for the PS2. Unless you wanted to play a PS2 FPS on the PS1, of course.

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

Diver’s Dream

You used to get some really bloody odd stuff coming out of Japan. You still do, but more so then than now.

One of the designers was clearly flicking through a ‘Visit Santorini’ leaflet at the time.

Diver’s Dream is a foray into the to-this-day-still-unexploited ‘scuba diving simulation’ genre. It’s also a puzzle game, a pseudo-survival game, and a RPG. It’s pretty short, and pretty bizarre. It’s difficult to know where to begin. You play Some Guy™ arriving at a sunny looking European island where everyone speaks American, who is immediately accosted in the lengthy opening FMV by an old geezer with an obsession for snorkelling. You are invited to dive into the local wreck of a this-totally-isn’t-Titanic-I-swear-class early 20th century cruise liner, and loot it for treasures to make your fortune and whatever.

Find air pockets to top your air up. You won’t be able to do this inside the wreck, though.

So far, so unoriginal. The rest of the non-diving parts of the game are experienced through negotiating menus laid over static CGI bitmap images. You see, the idea is that you go out to dive in 3D levels, swim about, pick up bits of 2D sprite sea debris, come back up, then go to the local antique dealer and sell your doubloons for a more exchangeable currency. You then use this money to upgrade your gear, which allows you to search deeper into the wreck, et cetera. Along the way there is a harebrained plot variously conveyed to you via more lengthy FMVs or just text boxes between dives. You make your way through the engine room, up to third, second, and finally first class decks, using your brain to work out how to navigate through the maze-like hallways and locked doors, while keeping your eye on your air tank. It’s a bit like the sunken ship levels of Tomb Raider II, except you’re actually underwater and everything is on a rather panic-inducing time limit.

It’s all chilled out until you’re suddenly being chased by GIANT LOBSTERS.

Diver’s Dream has all the pieces to be the relaxed, sort of dreamlike game that the title describes, if it wasn’t so bloody stressful. Your air runs out at a very quick pace, and all manner of marine wildlife are out to kill you very quickly by doing little more than brush past your wetsuit. Much time is spent with the pause menu up, as you internally deliberate whether to go left or right at a fork, or whether you have enough air to search one more room before you have to make the fraught swim back to the exit before you squeak out your last and are treated with a dramatic, Resident Evil-esque “YOU DIED” screen. The soft-synth ambient background music that plays throughout serves to cement an atmosphere of nature’s ambivalence to your presence as you slowly float around a place where you can get in but not easily get out. As a kid, I expect this game would have utterly terrified me. Thalassophobics need not apply.

Now to dive twice more just to work out where the hell you’re supposed to use this key.

It’s easy, but hard at the same time. Once you know what to do, zipping straight to the objective can be done in a twinkling and a relative abundance of health items means you can mostly just tank hits from the assorted nipping fish. Until you do know what to do, though, it can be a bit of a frustrating slog of back-and-forth dives with minimal progress. The controls are too clunky for it to ever get truly that enjoyable, though. There’s probably a reason that to this day you still don’t get many diving games, and even in modern games, swimming is a mechanic quite commonly botched. The effect isn’t enough to make this game a bad one.

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

Doom

Doom is obviously one of the most important games ever made, which makes admitting that I only found it fun ‘for a bit’ feel like a I’m committing some sort of capital crime in retro gaming circles.

Few FPS weapons feel as satisfyingly chunky as the Doom shotgun, even today.

It is fun, though. The controls are about as tight as they could possibly be on the PlayStation, and strafing around enemies while firing a shotgun remains extremely satisfying - the true ‘360 no scope’ of the 90s. There’s an immediacy to how it plays which a lot of early first-person shooters lack: you move quickly, weapons respond instantly and the game doesn’t keep interrupting because it wants to explain something conceptual to you. You don’t really need to know. There are demons over there - just slot them.

The enemies are numerous and diverse.

The levels are complex enough to reward exploring, although I did occasionally find myself jogging around the same collection of brown corridors trying to remember which coloured door I’d seen fifteen minutes earlier. Doom was designed in an era when getting lost was considered a legitimate way of extending a game, and the PlayStation’s limited capacity for draw distance doesn’t always help. It looks rough as hell. Everything is dark, muddy and extremely pixelated, with enemies in the distance becoming collections of angry squares shuffling towards you. It’s still perfectly playable, and the ugliness arguably suits the game, but it isn’t exactly Medal of Honour, and historical importance can only do so much once a demon is indistinguishable from a cupboard.

Those dots in the distance are enemies.

Totally redoing the music was an interesting choice. Rather than retaining the energetic heavy-metal-ish tracks from the original, the PlayStation version uses a much darker ambient soundtrack. It changes the atmosphere considerably, turning Doom from a frantic action game into something closer to horror. I quite like it. The strange noises, low drones and long stretches without conventional music make the empty levels feel properly hostile. It’s perhaps less memorable in isolation, but it works well while playing — particularly when you can hear something moving nearby but can’t see what it is because the game is rendering the far end of the corridor as a sort of pixel-jigsaw-puzzle.

The dark ambient music makes odd powerups like this just feel a bit spookier.

There’s also link-cable multiplayer, which would probably have been a laugh with a few mates. Unfortunately, that required two PlayStations, two televisions, two copies of Doom and the link cable itself, which was a fairly serious infrastructure project for a child in the 1990s. It would have been worth it, though; Doom is still a good game. The shooting feels excellent, the controls work brilliantly and the new soundtrack gives this version an identity of its own. I can understand why people love it and why this is considered one of the better console versions. I just don’t think it’s one of the best games on the PlayStation. Sorry.

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

Dracula - The Resurrection

It’s difficult to tell with Dracula - The Resurrection - a first person point-&-click game - what exactly is worse: the ultra-compressed, grainy, low-colour bitmaps via which you attempt to navigate the game, or the truly horrifying late 90s CGI which seems to be used for virtually every interaction.

The horror…

You can tell that this is clearly a PC game. They should never have bothered with a PlayStation port. This is awful. Aside from just looking like a dog’s dinner visually, the simple mechanics of gameplay are unable to translate. Dracula is a game of waiting. Each bitmap image representing where you are currently stood (which, to be fair, rather interestingly come packaged as 360-degree images which you can freely look around) needs to be loaded for a second or two before you can continue playing. There is no laboured FMV transition between viewpoints a la D, just a sudden switch to a new image. Even Google Streetview - which is what this ‘gameplay’ really is - manages to do better than that. If you wish to interact with something, prepare to wait even longer for the FMV to load of you, er, reaching out and opening a cupboard.

That blob on the centre left is actually an interacterable character.

Sorry but games like this are garbage. I’m sure there’s a plot, but the sound is mastered too badly for me to understand what is being said, and there are no subtitles. It plays terribly, looks terrible, is terrible. We have a new leader in the ‘crap point-&-click game’ championships - proudly taking the crown away from Chronicles of the Sword.

Canal+. I should have known.

Just open Google Streetview, turn on some spooky music and drop a pin somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains instead.

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Dragon Ball Z - Ultimate Battle 22

Whatever ‘Ultimate Battle 22’ means, I guess.

When playing as the tall guy, most of your attacks just go over the short guy’s head. There doesn’t appear to be a reliable way to counteract this.

Dragon Ball Z is the latest media franchise to be tossed onto the now-rather-large ‘something that totally passed me by’ heap. So none of this makes any sense to me anyway, beyond this game being a rather simple fighting game. It’s not very pretty. Animations are rather staccato. Like some other fighting games I’ve played (Bloody Roar comes to mind), a whole face button is taken out of action for an alternate use - in this case, flying up in the air like the magic-wielding demigod that you are.

Goku® and Recoome™ in a titanic battle to the death, for the 22nd time.

That’s it, though. There doesn’t seem to be a game mode beyond a simple ‘pick a character and fight everyone else one by one’ process. Dull as dishwater.

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10