Playing every PS1 game - Advanced D&D, Agent Armstrong, Agile Warrior, Air Combat, Air Hockey

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Iron and Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft

Going into this totally blind, I just took it as a given that a game based on Dungeons & Dragons would be some sort of RPG. At the very least a game involving dungeon crawling and/or bashing things with a sword.

CHOOSE YOUR CHAMP-EE-ON!

Well, Iron and Blood is actually a fighting game. And a pretty below average one at that. Outside of Tekken (and a bit of X-Men Mutant Academy, which I almost certainly won’t reach in the list), I’ve never really got into fighting games, I feel because the process of getting halfway good at them (read: beyond just button-mashing) involves lots of practice and tedious repetition, and I already play darts in real life.

You start the game with a mammoth, nonsensical CG cutscene, something more or less mandatory for the era.

So what’s the deal with Iron and Blood? I can tell you it’s one of the shortest games out there to ‘complete’ in terms of seeing the game credits roll, which can be done in a cool five minutes. The concept is picking a team of four fighters, defeating an opposing team of four fighters in sequential rounds of single combat bloodletting, and then giving yourself a pat on the back, as that’s the game over!

That’s all, folks!

Despite actually looking pretty damn good for 1996, the execution is poor. The biggest problem is that in the developers’ rush to take advantage of 3D arenas by letting you sidestep your fighter along the z-axis, they didn’t provision enough time to keep the poor chaps facing each other. Much of the player’s own time is spent trying to make their guy turn around while their attacks hit thin air, as your opponent is stood at 90 degrees giving you a kicking.

Getting stuck at this angle is common and makes control (which still acts as if you are sideways-on) very difficult.

Detail and animations were tidily done for early PS1.

Combinations seem sparse and difficult to pull off given the unresponsive and slow controls, though it’s obvious when it does happen, as the disembodied announcer roars out “COMBINATION”, with it not being altogether too clear whether it was your opponent or yourself who delivered it.

‘Fighting game with weapons’ is an interesting concept, which Soul Blade (and if you want, Bushido Blade) would do better. The fun fact about this one is that it is the only D&D game on PlayStation (Baldur’s Gate did get a port, but it was never released).

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 3/10

Agent Armstrong

The PlayStation spent a long time in the early days trying to secure a console ‘mascot’, in the style of Mario or Sonic. They never quite managed it, with the characters who came closest being Crash Bandicoot (a bit of a relic these days) and Lara Croft (whose profile became something bigger than just a well-endowed 3D action platformer heroine). It doesn’t sound like a big deal so much now, but at the time it was considered that the only way to break Nintendo/Sega hegemony was to introduce a competitor to the aforementioned plumber and hedgehog combination.

This sort of thing might have been in mind when the designers came up with the nightmare-inducing visage of Agent Armstrong. God knows what they were thinking. I guess in the mid-90s the buff action hero concept was still peaking, and Mr. Armstrong’s features tick a lot of these boxes.

The horror…

What we have here is a semi-3D Streets of Rage-meets-Metal Slug where as the titular Agent you move from left to right, gunning down goons, throwing bombs and picking up gun powerups. The difference being that in this new era of three dimensions, you can move a few yards toward or away from the camera in the process - but not that much. Most objects are 2D sprites, and trying to shoot enemies not quite on your z-axis is tricky. There are also some ludicrous platforming sections where you have to land yourself across-axis onto small positions over water, which just doesn’t work. The developers knew this it seems, as dunking into the drink simply respawns you back on the edge - no lives lost; you don’t even take damage.

There is absolutely nothing new here.

It gets old quite quickly. What is interesting is how it handles the ‘main menu’ and credits - it is a level in itself, where you run around a building with rooms serving as abstract delivery systems for the Options menu, next mission and so on. The ‘credits’ are found in a picture gallery.

It still didn’t mean anyone would have bothered reading them.

After falling in the water for the millionth time, I got fed up with it.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Agile Warrior: F111-X

I said before I was never big on flying games, but here’s another one.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Think Ace Combat, but more arcadey. It’s the usual fare - swoosh your viewpoint around following the red arrows, trying to to point yourself in the direction of an enemy so you can spam it with rockets. Rinse repeat.

Libya and Myanmar, but also…Las Vegas and the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug?

The draw distance is extremely short, and the frame rate is so low to make it genuinely unplayable. I had no idea what I was doing and the frame rate was making me sick so I tapped out. The live action cutscenes were humourously low budget though.

That’s it. That’s the draw distance.

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

Air Combat

The original Ace Combat, which was one of the PS1 launch games.

An unserious Star Wars intro.

I’m realising at this point that one of the occupational hazards of playing each game in alphabetical order is the high likelihood of playing the same genre of game repeatedly in succession.

It definitely feels like Ace Combat.

The game has more in common with Ace Combat 2 than 3, which in releases outside of Japan accidentally binned off the Top Gun-esque narrative elements which the series was all about. That’s not to say the yarn the original does weave makes any sense. A ‘terrorist group’…with an air force? At least some effort is made to paint the motives of the pilots within the jets you’re blowing up as ill-intentioned and dangerous, as opposed to Ace Combat 2 which disconcertingly has them described as no more than ‘the enemy’ as you carpet bomb civilian areas.

Please, no more flight sims.

It definitely seems harder than its sequels (and obviously doesn’t look as good). I destroyed what I was sure was all my targets on level 1 but the level didn’t complete; I found myself pootling around the map for a good few minutes, finding nothing but bare landscape, before getting bored and cannoning myself with some force into the ground. I don’t like flying games!

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Air Hockey

Another one of these budget £10 games spat out toward the end of the PlayStation’s life.

There’s nothing much to say about it. It’s air hockey, as you would find kicking around your local arcade or bowling alley, minus the discs going missing and getting shaken down for £2.50 a go or whatever it costs these days.

I live for games which use japanese unicode font styles.

The game makes a big song and dance about picking your ‘character’ - a choice of stock anime goons, and you exchange some trash talk with your opponent before throwing down in a high stakes game of, er, air hockey. There is the odd ‘powerup’ which introduces extra conditions like miniature tornados that change the puck’s direction randomly, but I don’t know if this particular bonus is supposed to help or hinder you.

It doesn’t get more exciting than this.

Either I wasn’t figuring out the controls correctly, or the CPU manoeuvres their little paddle with far more agility than you can. The result was losing several times. That’s it.

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