The Fifth Element
One of those last few films where Bruce Willis still had hair.
It's rather amusing that this might remain Chris Tucker's most famous role.
Not much to say here. It's a 3D action platformer, which in the world of the PlayStation is code for 'confusing, clunky, frustrating jump-jank'. The camera is an entity which acts as a point in space where, at a given moment, the least possible visual assistance is given to the player. The 'action' is an exercise in tapping the X button and just sort of guessing as to what is happening. The 'platforming' is pressing triangle to harrumph around in fixed directions, usually off the edge of a ledge and toward your character's death.
Quick! Stand there and tank damage while hammering X!
I didn't even get far enough to be able to at least have a go playing as Mila Jovovich; a dead-end corridor on level one was all it took for me to tap out. I felt it in my bones that this engagement was a futile endeavour. There was simply no chance that this game would suddenly improve on level three.
I did something and suddenly the camera just got stuck like this. I couldn't manage to get it back to normal.
Too many games on the PlayStation suffered from this malaise - that 'just copy Tomb Raider' was a straightforward objective that could be applied to all sorts of enclosed environments which supplied no room to manoeuvre. Think: did you ever see Tomb Raider take place in an enclosed, narrow space? No, you didn't.
Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10
Fighter Maker
Games which revolve around giving you a toolbox to create your own scenarios and develop emergent gameplay have always been a bit of a niche genre, but one I've always had a bit of an interest in (When I was around 13 I was one of the masses who spent ages creating a bloody awful RPG in RPG Maker. I probably still have it on a backup drive somewhere). They're popular in the same way people like to spend forever creating their own character in an RPG; there's just something that feels intriguing about seeing what you can come up with.
The fighting bits are rendered in glorious 480p. It does look pretty good.
But part of the hook with these things is being able to show off your deformed-looking demigod with all the sliders maxed out to your mate, and try it out in a real setting. There's no Steam Workshop on the PlayStation. So what you get with something like Fighter Maker is a (admittedly pretty tricked out) fighter model editor, a ton of options, a 'Save your fighter' function...and no 'fighting game' to actually take your new hardman out in.
Jabroni beating, pie eating.
There is a regular fighting mode in Fighter Maker for you to pretend you're clubbing away at the buttons in a real arcade game, but it's pretty clear from the outset that this is little more than a test area for your creation. I mean, you can see why - it's Fighter Maker, not Tekken - but it all does end up feeling a bit thin once you've created what you inevitably feel is your perfect self-insert Fighter Dude. After a while with Fighter Maker, all you've got is a memory card full of prototype combatants, and the hope that your mate might come around one day and have a look. It would be better served as a separate module in an already-existing fighting game.
They really do let you edit every aspect of these folk.
But such is the trade-off with these sorts of Maker games before the arrival of the internet. Of course, these days you just vibe code your entire game in a few hours, with the only skills needed being the ability to write legible sentences. The age of the platform appears to be coming to an end.
Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10
Fighting Force
It's taken 250-odd games, but I've finally reached the first true blue beat-em-up. This is another game put together during the short period where Eidos liked to put adverts for its other games baked-in to another game's executable. In this case, it includes the same demo of Tomb Raider III that we got in Akuji the Heartless, as well as a game called Ninja: Shadow of Darkness - which looked bloody terrible. I'm not looking forward to that one.
Why are we beating people to death in a hotel lobby? It doesn't matter.
Fighting Force is an extremely no-nonsense game. You press the Start button, choose one of five steroid-enhanced angry scrapper folk, then the game just throws you into level one to immediately start laying the smack down. There's no five-minute introductory scene-setting FMV; no dull expository cutscene explaining the whys and wherefores of the 'meaning' behind all this ultraviolence. You're not supposed to care about that. It's deliberately all left in the manual for you to read later should your interest ever take you. You have one job - that is to beat down everything that moves until their flickering polygonal models disappear from the game area. I have time for games like this. It's refreshing, after twenty years of mocapped, over-narrated drudgery.
Why are we beating people to death in the middle of a road? It doesn't matter.
It's refreshingly simple, too. You don't need a fifteen minute tutorial level to explain the controls; each of the face buttons is mapped to a different kind of punch or kick, and the directional buttons move you about. It's not hard to understand. Lash up combos. Perform running two-footed football tackles. Find yourself pulling off suplexes by pressing random combinations which you struggle to reproduce again. Enemies start bringing along weapons to the fistfight. Beat them down and turn the weapons against them - at least for a while until the baseball bat, truncheon or flick knife breaks. You can also pinch guns and pick up and throw heavy objects - though this is admittedly a bit clunky.
Swing weapons around to deliver death even more quickly.
Rinse through the levels at a quick pace and the environments change up. At one point, there was something which you might describe as a 'cut scene'. An evil looking guy chuckled evilly at the start of a level, and then ran off. That was about it. The beat down continued after that short interlude. This game would have been good fun with a buddy to play co-op. Nothing special, nothing experientially transcendent; just a fun beat-em-up.
Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10
Fighting Force 2
My first impressions with Fighting Force 2 were that it was shaping up to be the result of one of those pendulum swings - from an extremely loose narrative and setting of the original, to something loaded to the nines with plot, exposition and 'features' in the sequel. The reasons for this thinking were sitting through the lengthy, nonsensical FMV intro, and now having to click through a boring 'mission brief' before entering the first level. Why do it?
Nobody will have ever read this stuff.
Unfortunately, my experiences didn't get much further. I quickly experienced a game-ending problem with FF2 where the emulator simply did not want to map my controller buttons properly. As such, I could only move forward or backward, or strafe left or right. Turning I found could only be done if I held down R2 (the 'run' button). After working out that no, this wasn't just some totally bloody wild design decision on the developer's side and was actually just my shoddy setup, I tried a few things to tweak it, but didn't manage to achieve much.
Why bother with enemies in your beat-em-up when there is clunky platforming to do?
So I beat up a few guys, picked up some guns, despaired mildly out how much more clunky and boring it seemed to be compared to the pick-up-and-play nature of the original, then just quit out. Once again, a game that decided that success meant just trying to be Tomb Raider, then failed to achieve anything like it. Particularly galling for these particular developers - Core Design themselves.
Kept my attention for: Fifteen minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10
Final Doom
I played the actual Doom a while back, and was rather ashamed to say that despite it being a well put-together game, it just wasnt really for me.
The same enemies are back.
Final Doom is more or less a map pack for Doom, except the levels are much larger and a bit harder. Top-tier weapons get thrown at you right from the start, and the idea is more based around methodical level-clearing than a point-A-to-point-B sort of thing (though the original Doom was not without hub-room elements). I actually cared for it less than the 'original'. The large rooms meant frame rate drops were frequent, and for some reason I found myself constantly getting stuck on the geometry when trying to strafe around.
The same weapons and everything else, too.
The levels felt different, and looking it up, it turns out that the game wasn't put together by the original Doom map developers. My spider sense was right. It really is just a collection of levels by modders which got bought by id Software and released for moolah. Whatever. It's a decent enough FPS game. For other thoughts, it's all in the previous review, because the game is exactly the same otherwise.
Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10