Playing every PS1 game - Battle Arena Toshinden 1&2, Beach Volleyball, Beast Wars, Beatmania

Battle Arena Toshinden

The original PlayStation launched in the UK in 1995 with nine games. One of them I’ve already played - Air Combat, one I only realised I’d missed when it was too late (3D Lemmings - I don’t think I missed much), and another was a fighting game called Battle Arena Toshinden.

You have to sit through this unskippable voice acted monologue every time you start the game. Every time.

One of the things I became aware of over time was the tendency for games released during the early life of the PlayStation to have a point or two added onto review scores which they may not have necessarily truly deserved. This is probably down to two things - the charitable explanation is that people were just ‘wowed’ by the step up in hardware from the Megadrive and SNES to a machine which quite literally added a whole new dimension to the medium, and so didn’t really know what they were expecting, or wanted.

This would have been pretty incredible to see on console in 1995.

The more cynical explanation (so naturally, the one I tend more to believe) is that Sony were just putting pressure on reviewers to inflate scores to sell units of their brand new machine. Particularly in the case of Official PlayStation Magazine, which given its role of being more or less a marketing pamphlet for the console, would have been more likely to have had its figurative arm twisted.

Rungo’s weapon is a giant comedy stone club.

This game’s OK, I suppose. Probably one of the first ‘fighting games with weapons’ before the likes of Soul Calibur took over the genre, it’s a pretty simplistic arcade-conversion-of-a-game-that-was-never-in-an-arcade, which was also the second fighting game to be in full 3D, and the first to allow you to laterally sidestep. The sidestep manoeuvre feels more useful than in other fighters, too, as a means of dodging moves from your opponent in the absence of a reliable block system (I never figured it out).

Mandatory mysterious final boss level.

The biggest problem is that it’s not very responsive and actually pretty sluggish. Fighting games need to be very unrealistically rapid in terms of attacks and movement, and maybe in this early foray to 3D they got hung up on the animations. It makes for frustration in delivering combos (not that I’m any good at this sort of thing) and trying to jump and dodge effectively. It’s also quite easy to cheese it - I got all the way to the final fight of the campaign (I’m assuming, because I couldn’t get further) by just hammering the square button and doing nothing else.

Facial expressions actually change when being hit.

On the other hand, you yourself can also easily be cheesed, by getting stunlocked as an opponent’s move might dump you to the floor, followed by you watching gormlessly as your character labours to his feet, unresponsive to input, and then gets hit with the same knockdown before the animation completes. It does look pretty good though, which is what I guess was what mattered in 1995 in the search for a ‘wow’ release title. What a lot of people won’t know is that it was also ported to MS-DOS. That version certainly does not look good, as it caught the back end of the pre-3D-acceleration era on personal computers.

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

Battle Arena Toshinden 2

People needed to wait less than a year before the sequel arrived in 1996.

Overdrive bars are the new gimmick.

It’s much the same game - particularly visually - as its predecessor, but one that thankfully fixes some of the bigger problems around speed and responsiveness. It’s now pretty slick, and feels more like a modern fighting game. There is also the introduction of an ‘Overdrive’ meter, which…I never worked out. There are a couple of new characters to scuffle as, including the big bad from the previous game (a true fighting game cliche). The more rapid gameplay means you can string some moves together and avoid the annoying stunlock problems of the previous game.

Accidentally jumping out of the ring and losing is just stupid enough for be funny rather than frustrating.

The thing is, however, that while it’s a better game than the original, Tekken had already arrived by now, and blown it out of the water - ‘weapon fighting’ niche or not. There was also a Battle Arena Toshinden 3, which released only a few months later and received mediocre reviews, before the series finally met its sad end in 2000 with its fourth edition, which was, by all accounts, rubbish (and interestingly, released in Europe but not North America).

Victory in the tournament rewards you with your character holding a victory pose indefinitely while an epilogue slowly scrolls.

Worth a look at, though.

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

Beach Volleyball

Sometimes I move onto the next game in the list and groan. You just know it’s not going to be any good.

The camera is too zoomed out to really make sense of what you’re doing.

My first thought upon seeing the cover art was ‘more Midas Interactive dreck’. In fact, it’s published by Infogrames. Does that mean it might be good?

Action replays allow an array of camera angles, for the more discerning weirdo.

It doesn’t. As someone who isn’t a die-hard beach volleyball ultra, I found it impossible to enjoy this game. There is a decent selection of players (I’m assuming real?) and the graphics are passable, but…brother, this is beach volleyball. What’s to say about it? You bop a ball back and forth a couple times, get your positioning wrong, miss, and lose the point. Repeat over and over. Could I equally say the same about tennis games? I probably could. But this is just Pong in swimsuits and chafing in delicate places.

Is there really a beach volleyball world tour? (Turns out there is)

If you were the one British person who enthusiastically turned out every week at their local beach volleyball league, it might be fun? Nah, probably not really.

Kept my attention for: 25 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Beast Wars - Transformers

At the risk of sounding like some sort of shut-in who grew up in monastic hermitude with no experience of popular culture (particularly after my admission of limited experience with Batman), I never got into Transformers, either as a child with the evil American action-figure/cartoon combo mind-rot, or when it took off as a series of increasingly ridiculous Michael Bay movies. It means that Beast Wars passed me over almost entirely.

Allegedly, if one of your transforming buddies dies, he can’t be used again in the game.

I’ll now shock you by saying I did actually play this, briefly, back in the day, but remember little about it. Which makes sense, as when playing this now it becomes apparent relatively soon that it’s not a very memorable game. Beast Wars is a 3D ‘action platformer’ allowing you to play as both the goodies and baddies (on the same levels), completing objectives and gunning down enemies in your ‘robot’ mode, then at any time transforming into your ‘beast’ mode, which…doesn’t change much particularly.

The odd level is an on-rails shooter. I don’t hate it actually.

It actually plays a bit like a third person Doom, as stupid as that sounds. Sprawling, maze-like levels where you follow the pick-up-the-red-key-to-open-the-red-door formula. I’ve never seen Beast Wars on TV so I couldn’t tell you if the level design is supposed to make any sense, but my guess is that the show didn’t involve our shapeshifting friends getting lost in a techno-themed rat-run, then giving up and roll credits (because that was the breadth of my experience with this game).

I got lost around about here.

It’s not rubbish, and I wish I could have played a bit further, but I got lost and stuck on level 3, couldn’t find a written guide online (I HATE YouTube ‘walkthroughs’), and didn’t have the patience to start over. Shrug emoji.

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

Beatmania

Beatmania is a rhythm action game, which is a genre that had a brief period basking in the sunshine of popularity in the late 90s up until 2008 or so. You still get them now, but they’re a bit more ‘specialist’ I think (apart from something like Beat Saber).

Not really playable on a PS controller.

Beatmania is also a game that basically requires usage of its dedicated controller (or really, the arcade cabinet on which it’s meant to be played), which definitely a specialist bit of kit and something I do not own. You can technically play it using a PlayStation controller, but the mappings are not intuitive and it’s very difficult. I messed about for a while trying to find a way to simplify the game (the way you might have done on Guitar Hero by reducing the number of buttons that it might ask you to press), but there isn’t such an option - it’s go in raw and learn through lots of trial and error, or nothing.

Could probably be set up with an emulator using some keyboard mappings.

I could have spent hours practicing on the one song available to you at the start of the game (a mix of Moloko’s Sing it Back, a tune which was probably top of the charts at the time of this game’s release), but I’m not that hard up. I think it is a good game, though, and it’s a shame I couldn’t have played a few more levels on an easier mode.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10