Egypt 1156 B.C. - Tomb of the Pharaoh
Another point-and-click adventure game ported to the PlayStation. Another total failure. A gaming atrocity by masters of turdware Cryo Interactive. May I present Google Streetview In A Tomb.
This is -you-. This is the -good guy- in this story.
Channelling Dracula - The Resurrection (which, surprise surprise, is also a Canal+ terror), Egypt 1156 BC is a game where you move from 360-degree bitmap to 360-degree bitmap, click around for whatever tiny object or passage the game expects you to notice, wait for 3-5 seconds as your console freezes, then watch the scenery suddenly but laboriously slide into position. This sort of interface is tedious enough with a mouse; on the PlayStation controller it's a non-starter.
They couldn't even just fake it to make it look interesting like in The Mummy.
Occasionally amid your slow poking around for shimmering pixels (There are none. You just have to luck out and hover over the right thing), you are required to engage in on-the-spectrum 'conversation' with the local inhabitants (at least, the ones who don't keep their vital organs in bedside jars). The CG static images representing said folk are particularly dreadful. Everyone is represented by an animated gif of a blank pale face with mouth alternating open and shut, peering with sunken eyes into the camera as if they were Mike Myers in Halloween. Little of what they say makes too much sense either, as the presumably French original script seems to have been translated into English by a nineteenth century solicitor.
The three horsemen of 'Don't buy this game'.
There are also random deaths with little or no warning. Pick the wrong option or go somewhere the game has silently decided is dangerous and you're dead, sometimes without any reasonable opportunity to understand what it was you actually did wrong. Nothing improves a painfully slow adventure game like being forced to repeat part of it because you didn't possess clairvoyance enough to predict that taking a step forward into a room would result in death by some Rube Goldberg machine. There is a silver lining, though. There is an extremely comprehensive (for a video game) 'encyclopedia' mode on the disc which contains a seriously vast trove of information to leaf through on the ancient Egyptians. For this, it sidesteps a 1/10. Just close your eyes and pretend the 'game' bit doesn't exist.
Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10
Ehrgeiz - God Bless the Ring
Until now, I thought that Ehrgeiz was a fighting game where the quirk was that it featured a couple of Final Fantasy VII characters with which to grapple - a bit like how Soul Calibur tends to throw in one or two random guest fighters (like Heihachi Mishima or, er, Darth Vader) in each edition. I mean, I have to forgive myself for thinking this, too. If you Googleh Ehrgeiz, that is what you get - pictures of Sephiroth and Cloud fighting each other in a typical fighter game arena, with the odd appearance of an original character.
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Cloud even does the FFVII victory dance after a win, with the bloody jingle and all.
But no - the fighting bit of Ehrgeiz is actually just one part of the game. What Ehrgeiz actually is is a wild mash-up of game genres all thrown onto a disc for the player to have a spin with. It's the kind of insane stuff that Squaresoft had a habit of pulling off during their late 90s we-do-whatever-the-hell-we-want-and-still-win golden era. What you get in Ehrgeiz is:
- A 3D fighting game with quaint RPG characteristics (when you deal damage, rather than blood or phlegm, numbers pop up).
- A fully feature-complete roguelike RPG.
- An utterly bizarre 'party' game mode featuring sprinting, hurdling, and 'fight each other while running circuits' racing.
The 'final boss' of the fighter mode actually plays behind the end credits. I don't know if you can actually lose.
The fighting part has a rather loose plot tacked onto it, held together by the sort of highly sophisticated computer-generated FMV that only Square was capable of producing at this kind of quality at the time. It's largely your standard punch-kick-block-special fare, with the difference being (aside from the bleeding-numbers thing) you fight in a larger 3D environment in which you can run about, not necessarily facing your opponent at all times. A bit like Bushido Blade in that respect, except without the blood spurts and one-hit-KO lacerations.
They actually weren't messing around.
The RPG mode is pretty feature dense, but maybe not quite enough to warrant being a game in its own right - at least not for a developer like Squaresoft, so maybe that is why it's been packaged up in this way. Aside from sharing two of the characters with the fighting game (and neither of them are Cloud or Sephiroth, so that might explain why you don't see screenshots of it) it bears no resemblance to its sibling game mode. I didn't get too far with it. There's nothing particularly novel about the approach - stock up on potions and food, go into the dungeon, bash monsters on the head, gather loot, come back when you're out of supplies. Play Diablo instead.
Party minigame mode. I don't know either.
There other two modes are interesting for about a minute or two each and you'll never play again. A surprise package of a game. All sorts of different things included on the disc; ambitious, but if a FFVII character wasn't on the front cover, I don't think anyone would still be talking about Ehrgeiz.
Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: Sort of
Overall: 6/10
Epidemic
There's a hell of a lot of 'set up' to Epidemic. A long and dramatic introductory FMV sets the scene - in the far future of 2065, a killer virus has wiped out life on earth and forced humanity to live underground in a corporate dystopian prison world (why were so many sci-fi plots in the 80s and 90s basically something along these lines?), and blah blah something about the main character's woman being in danger so you must go to the surface and defeat the evil corporate overlords or whatever. Crucially, you must do it in a giant mecha armour suit that looks like one of those things from the later Matrix films where it all got a bit self-indulgent.
Early CGI was so damn creepy.
That all sounds great, and after the rather well done CG cutscenes (for 1995) and all the exposition where you get a feel for your character's turmoil...it's just a dull-as-dishwater early 3D first-person shooter. You could even call it a Doom clone. Wander around sterile, pointless environments, shoot at robots, get shot at by robots, find keys, get lost, and eventually stumble into an exit. Move to the next level and repeat.
Everything looks exactly the same, so getting lost is inevitable. The map is hopeless.
I actually gave this game a little bit longer than I otherwise would have done, because the set up was so detailed; I felt like surely given the amount of effort that went into the introduction, something interesting would happen fairly early on that would change things up a bit.
Sorry but no.
It didn't. I discovered a 'match up the symbols to open a door' puzzle, realised I'd been hoodwinked, and tapped out.
Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10
Eternal Eyes
Eternal Eyes is an RPG where you spend a while waiting for the typical RPG 'adventuring' stuff to start, and then after a while, you realise...it isn't going to. It's a 'tactical' RPG (the flavour which has you moving your chums around a chess-style grid and lining up attacks in extremely long-winded battles) where the developers built a battle system and then forgot to do any of the rest of it.
She's not wrong.
The standard 'cutesy-2D sprites in a 3D environment' ugly shtick that infected the PS1 era is once again present, though it could be worse (*cough* Breath of Fire IV *cough*). It's a game that tries very little new, and the elements which are seem to be rather lost in translation. You see, when it gets to the point that the game tells you what it's 'about', it's...er, collecting 'magical puppets', which are activated when you 'throw jewels at them' [actual description, repeated many times]. It's as if Pokemon was released as its original Pocket Monsters and in the process everything sounded a bit weird.
Expect to expend the first few turns of every battle just walking up to the enemy.
The gameplay itself is the battling parts and barely anything more. The game even goes to great lengths to encourage you to skip past all this 'role playing' rubbish and get back into 'action' - or that is to say, the turn-based waddling around a grid attempting to move within range enough to actually start fighting enemies. Locations aside from your home village are not actually 'accessible' beyond looking at bitmap image backdrop where you simply gear up and elect to go into a (usually unexplained) battle, or if you're lucky, maybe a short dialogue cutscene.
You don't even need to walk around town. Just use a menu to skip to wherever you want.
And the battles come thick and fast. In each new location you get to watch a short scene, and then you are asked to fight effectively the same battle three times over (with a quick trip to your status menu in between rounds), before a 'boss' fight, and then you get a bit more plot. Eventually you get sent back home to, er, buy some more gear or something before heading to the next JPEG to do another trio of dull fights.
The 'dungeon experience' in full.
It's not the worst RPG I've ever played. The idea is that you are supposed to raise these 'magical puppets' (it even sounds stupid in my head) into various different beasts by lobbing jewels at them that you collect on the battlefield. It could be interesting, but it's never properly explained how this is all supposed to work. The translation is a bit too ropey to really follow much of the plot either. The point of an RPG is the idea of joining up with a band of similar heroes to embark on a winding adventure of sorts, with all the diversions mundane and sublime that go with it. Eternal Eyes does none of this; not even the 'band of heroes' stuff. It's you on your lonesome with some stuffed toys. It's the adventuring equivalent of going to a driving range.
Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10