...No Kenan and Kell?
At least we have Space Cases.
Well....its replacement won't be revealed until we near 1997 but... it should be interesting.
More, or less, interesting than the movie he's making instead?
Player Two Start: An SNES-CD Timeline
- Thread starter RySenkari
- Start date
- Status
More, or less, interesting than the movie he's making instead?
More, or less, interesting than the movie he's making instead?
Much more, the Kenan Thompson/Matthew Broderick movie is a typical family comedy that does mediocre box office. Dan Schneider's alternate project is...well no spoilers but it might well be better than anything he's made IOTL.
The Return Of Commander Keen
And now... another guest post from yours truly, with a thumbs up from Nivek and Ry.
--
Commander Keen is a name familiar to any kid who played games on the family computer back in the early nineties. With the advent of the Internet we learned that the original staff of id Software developed the first trilogy on company computers they “borrowed” from their employers at Softdisk during their weekends, which appears to be a reoccurring theme of the series. Most people today remember id Software for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. After the runaway success of the latter, it appeared that the 8-year-old boy genius had hung up his battered and scorched helmet after his sixth adventure, Aliens Ate my Babysitter, but Tom Hall was not finished with him just yet.
id Software had originally committed The Universe is Toast trilogy to a Christmas 1992 release. However, the success of Wolfenstein 3D postponed it until E3 1995 when Tom Hall saw an early build of Sega’s Nights and decided that he wanted to model the next Keen games on it.
“Something clicked in my mind when I saw the demo with the freedom of movement present in the game,” recalled Hall in interview for Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2008. “That was how I wanted to make Keens 7 through 9. I had a vision in my head and it remained stuck in my mind for months afterward.”
Though he left id Software after a dispute with John Carmack over the violence and gore in Doom two years prior, Hall and Carmack reportedly came to an understanding and id released the rights to Commander Keen back to Hall. With help from John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and a few staffers from Apogee Software, Hall spent most of his off hours developing fine-tuning the three-dimensional platforming engine from scratch.
“Admittedly, Universe wasn’t technically a 3D game. Keen was still a hand-drawn sprite that moved on two planes while the backgrounds and platforms were polygons that ‘moved’ along with him.” Romero admitted, “It was kind of a cheat and looked like Keen was running up a spiral staircase at times, but it was a labor of love and I believe the fans appreciated it.”
Fans of the series did respond well to the initial installment The Universe is Toast, Into the Inferno, upon its release Christmas 1995. While the game had more than its fair share of glitches, it was not broken and its quirky sense of humor made it stand out. While it was ostensibly a “run and gun” platformer UiT also possessed puzzle elements and involved more stealth than similar titles like Mega Man. Ammunition for Keen’s neural stunner was scarce and many enemies were immune to it. There were no bosses to speak of, aside from Mortimer McMire, but many “security checkpoint” levels where Keen would need to outmaneuver a pursuing (and invincible) Robo Red Hunter and use the stage hazards to slow it down or destroy it outright via a series of buttons and switches. UiT was a difficult game and infuriatingly so at times, but it forced the player to think of ways out of tight spots.
The game itself controlled similarly to Goodbye Galaxy and Aliens Ate my Babysitter, with each action delegated to a single key on the keyboard: jump, fire, and another to activate Keen’s trademarked pogo stick. A control scheme that was easily transferable to console. Teleporters took you to four different worlds where Keen’s objective was to destroy the Universal Toaster Cannon’s secondary nodes.
The volcanic mining world, Savarrg, was the typical “Lethal Lava Land” (of which Keen is the trope namer), which took place on a molten planetoid. In addition to avoiding falling into lava pools, Keen needs to used the convection to raise platforms and avoid raining meteors. The lower gravity is another wrinkle where you must carefully execute your jumps because serrated stalagmites and stalactites are everywhere.
Meanwhile, the fauna of the jungle world, Ogonoc, is out to kill you. Many of the enemies from Keen 4, Secret of the Oracle, like Poison Slugs, Skypests, and Mad Mushrooms return; however, the Dopefish’s comeback is the most glorious. One of my favorite pleasures of this world is the underwater level where you use the stage enemies as fodder the lovable dumb guppy’s appetite.
The ice world Juttoon is the standard ice level with poor traction though it is memorable for the encounter with “Eddie the Yeti” who tries to roast Keen over a spit. Rounding out the worlds is the storm-ravaged Sakans where Keen must navigate the air currents and avoid tornadoes. Keen 7 was the biggest game in the series at the time with twenty-one levels.
While it did not light the sales charts on fire like Doom and its sequel, Into the Inferno it did warrant a jump from PC to the Sega Saturn where the game gained a champion in the form of Sega of America President and CEO Tom Kalinske.
“I remember showing the game to him in January 1996. Though it clearly was no Nights, Keen already had an installed fan base and he saw the potential of the series. He was supportive of the port and even helped us improve the game and enhance it.” Hall said of his meeting with Kalinske. “Unlike Nintendo, who said ‘no thanks’ when we showed them our smooth-scrolling graphics engine in 1990, Sega wanted to be a partner in this.”
Indeed, Sega invested considerably by assisting in rectifying the technical issues that riddled the PC version and the Saturn version of The Universe is Toast ran much smoother. Sega Technical Institute also helped in finishing the eight and ninth installments Danger in the Desert and Clash of the Intellects for the planned October 1996 release as one package.
Keen 8, Danger in the Desert, was the shortest and likely the hardest installment of UiT with only eleven levels and lacks the variety of environments present in Into the Inferno. After completing destroying the control nodes on the four worlds, Keen heads to the Universal Toaster Cannon to destroy the final one when a Shikadi warship intercepts the Bacon-with-Beans Megarocket and shoots it down over the desert world Apollus IV. Ammo is even more limited and enemies are more abundant. As with Keen 5, the Shidaki take four shots to stun and it is better to avoid them than confront them directly.
McMire also dispatched a Keendroid to commit crimes and terrorize the populace in your name, turning most of Apollus’ inhabitants against you. Thankfully, the planets’ periodic sandstorms and dark caves offer you plenty of covers to avoid your Shidaki and Apollian pursuers. Thankfully, you also enlist the help of a young Apollian, Pallo, you rescued in the first level to help you gather the parts needed to rebuild your ship, destroy the Keendroid, and restore your reputation. Pallo would later play a crucial role in later games as the first recruit of the “Commander Keen Corps” in the Multiverse Madness trilogy.
Once Keen finds the parts needed to repair his ship, he heads to the UTC for the final showdown in Clash of the Intellects. Personally, some of my favorite levels are in this part of the trilogy. As it takes place on a space station orbiting a blue supergiant, this is where Mortimer McMire keeps his most heinous experiments. Enemies from as far back as Invasion of the Vorticons return, except cybernetically enhanced and even more aggressive. There are Gargs, Vorticons, and Bloogs—oh my! Unlike the previous two installments Clash of the Intellects is more generous with the ammo. You will need it when a herd of roid-raged Gargs rush you (and another trope namer.)
The low-gravity mechanics from Into the Inferno return and some switches even flip the station’s gravity so that you can run along the walls and ceiling. This is a crucial mechanic for the battle with Mortimer McMire where you need to flip the gravity to temporarily disorient him and trick him into disabling the force fields protecting the final control node by leading his shots. McMire seemingly dies when the Universal Toaster Cannon self-destructs.
With the profits from the PC version and some money from Sega, Apogee added animated cut scenes to the Saturn version where Kath Soucie (late of the SatAM Sonic the Hedgehog) voiced Billy Blaze/Commander Keen and television’s Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright, lent her voice to Mortimer McMire. If you meet certain criteria, the came rewards you with a cut scene of a shadowed figure rescuing McMire at the last second. As most gamers know by now, said figure was Keen’s mirrorverse counterpart, Captain Khaos, who would be the primary antagonist of Multiverse Madness saga for the Sega Saturn.
Most fans of the series agree that the Saturn version of The Universe is Toast is the superior version. While Apogee developed and Sega published the Saturn version in September 1996, Apogee published a slightly truncated version for the SNES-CD the following year before the release of the Ultra Nintendo. This version was much slower and buggier than even the PC version, which Hall admits was not his finest effort.
“To be honest, I wanted to move onto the next part of the series by then. John and I were working on the engine for Keen 10 and so much of my attention went to that and thus I could not give UiT for the SNES-CD the care I gave the PC and Saturn versions. However, by that time Keen was already entering the Saturn’s orbit after everything Sega had done for us.”
Romero laughed at the mention. “Didn’t Angry Video Game Nerd guy pan that port? I wasn’t involved in it and Tom barely had any input at all. They gave that port to an inexperienced team and it showed. Poor Tom took it rather personally, but Apogee told us we needed an SNES-CD port. That was one of the main reasons why he decided to take Keen and found Ion Storm. I couldn’t join him as Commander Keen was only a side project done more for fun than profit.
“Tom and I parted on friendly terms and I am proud of my (admittedly small) contribution to the Keen 10 engine.”
Indeed, many reviewers panned the SNES-CD port of UiT for its unresponsive controls, slowdown, and horrendous graphics compared to the Saturn. It would be the only Commander Keen game to grace a Nintendo console. Sega directly invested in Ion Storm, which effectively made them a second-party developer similar to Rare and HAL Laboratories’ relationship to Nintendo. The studio would also bring in additional talent like Warren Spector who created Deus Ex, which many Sega fans consider a rival to GoldenEye when it comes to multi-player though the single-player experience is much different.
As for Keen, The Universe is Toast pulled in solid sales though far less than Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which Sega released the following month. Between those two games, Sega gained a considerable lead on Nintendo in the fifth generation—at least when it came to flagship series. Commander Keen is the only other Sega-affiliated franchise that spun off into an animated series and comic book by Archie Comics. Sadly, Commander Keen: The Animated Series lasted for one twenty-six episode season in fall 1999. As with the games, many critics and players praised its irreverent humor and cultural reference and compared it to the late Calvin and Hobbes. The comic book still continues onto this day under the pen of Dan Slott.
“I consider UiT and Multiverse Madness the height of my career,” reflects Hall, who still oversees the series to this day. “We’re not churning out Keen games like we did in the Saturn days and some complain that the gameplay has not changed that much. To them I say this: look at Mario and Sonic. Their core gameplay has not changed a great deal over the years. Sega and Nintendo didn’t waste money and time on reinventing the wheel with each new game. Sometimes you need to look under the hood and tweak the engine a little bit to see what works when you add something new. That’s my philosophy when it comes to Keen and part of the reason why he has stood the test of time.”
The world of Commander Keen is one fans keep returning to because of its charm and refined gameplay. Hall’s metaphor is a perfectly apt one. While technology progresses, consoles grow more powerful, and audience tastes change, there will always be an appreciation for the classics. Commander Keen is one the “Cadillacs” in every retrogamer’s collection and with the advent of downloadable content, the series finds a new audience every year. Not bad for a series that started out as a prank, isn’t it?
-from the blog "The Musing Platypus" by B. Ronning, March 12, 2013
--
Commander Keen is a name familiar to any kid who played games on the family computer back in the early nineties. With the advent of the Internet we learned that the original staff of id Software developed the first trilogy on company computers they “borrowed” from their employers at Softdisk during their weekends, which appears to be a reoccurring theme of the series. Most people today remember id Software for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. After the runaway success of the latter, it appeared that the 8-year-old boy genius had hung up his battered and scorched helmet after his sixth adventure, Aliens Ate my Babysitter, but Tom Hall was not finished with him just yet.
id Software had originally committed The Universe is Toast trilogy to a Christmas 1992 release. However, the success of Wolfenstein 3D postponed it until E3 1995 when Tom Hall saw an early build of Sega’s Nights and decided that he wanted to model the next Keen games on it.
“Something clicked in my mind when I saw the demo with the freedom of movement present in the game,” recalled Hall in interview for Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2008. “That was how I wanted to make Keens 7 through 9. I had a vision in my head and it remained stuck in my mind for months afterward.”
Though he left id Software after a dispute with John Carmack over the violence and gore in Doom two years prior, Hall and Carmack reportedly came to an understanding and id released the rights to Commander Keen back to Hall. With help from John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and a few staffers from Apogee Software, Hall spent most of his off hours developing fine-tuning the three-dimensional platforming engine from scratch.
“Admittedly, Universe wasn’t technically a 3D game. Keen was still a hand-drawn sprite that moved on two planes while the backgrounds and platforms were polygons that ‘moved’ along with him.” Romero admitted, “It was kind of a cheat and looked like Keen was running up a spiral staircase at times, but it was a labor of love and I believe the fans appreciated it.”
Fans of the series did respond well to the initial installment The Universe is Toast, Into the Inferno, upon its release Christmas 1995. While the game had more than its fair share of glitches, it was not broken and its quirky sense of humor made it stand out. While it was ostensibly a “run and gun” platformer UiT also possessed puzzle elements and involved more stealth than similar titles like Mega Man. Ammunition for Keen’s neural stunner was scarce and many enemies were immune to it. There were no bosses to speak of, aside from Mortimer McMire, but many “security checkpoint” levels where Keen would need to outmaneuver a pursuing (and invincible) Robo Red Hunter and use the stage hazards to slow it down or destroy it outright via a series of buttons and switches. UiT was a difficult game and infuriatingly so at times, but it forced the player to think of ways out of tight spots.
The game itself controlled similarly to Goodbye Galaxy and Aliens Ate my Babysitter, with each action delegated to a single key on the keyboard: jump, fire, and another to activate Keen’s trademarked pogo stick. A control scheme that was easily transferable to console. Teleporters took you to four different worlds where Keen’s objective was to destroy the Universal Toaster Cannon’s secondary nodes.
The volcanic mining world, Savarrg, was the typical “Lethal Lava Land” (of which Keen is the trope namer), which took place on a molten planetoid. In addition to avoiding falling into lava pools, Keen needs to used the convection to raise platforms and avoid raining meteors. The lower gravity is another wrinkle where you must carefully execute your jumps because serrated stalagmites and stalactites are everywhere.
Meanwhile, the fauna of the jungle world, Ogonoc, is out to kill you. Many of the enemies from Keen 4, Secret of the Oracle, like Poison Slugs, Skypests, and Mad Mushrooms return; however, the Dopefish’s comeback is the most glorious. One of my favorite pleasures of this world is the underwater level where you use the stage enemies as fodder the lovable dumb guppy’s appetite.
The ice world Juttoon is the standard ice level with poor traction though it is memorable for the encounter with “Eddie the Yeti” who tries to roast Keen over a spit. Rounding out the worlds is the storm-ravaged Sakans where Keen must navigate the air currents and avoid tornadoes. Keen 7 was the biggest game in the series at the time with twenty-one levels.
While it did not light the sales charts on fire like Doom and its sequel, Into the Inferno it did warrant a jump from PC to the Sega Saturn where the game gained a champion in the form of Sega of America President and CEO Tom Kalinske.
“I remember showing the game to him in January 1996. Though it clearly was no Nights, Keen already had an installed fan base and he saw the potential of the series. He was supportive of the port and even helped us improve the game and enhance it.” Hall said of his meeting with Kalinske. “Unlike Nintendo, who said ‘no thanks’ when we showed them our smooth-scrolling graphics engine in 1990, Sega wanted to be a partner in this.”
Indeed, Sega invested considerably by assisting in rectifying the technical issues that riddled the PC version and the Saturn version of The Universe is Toast ran much smoother. Sega Technical Institute also helped in finishing the eight and ninth installments Danger in the Desert and Clash of the Intellects for the planned October 1996 release as one package.
Keen 8, Danger in the Desert, was the shortest and likely the hardest installment of UiT with only eleven levels and lacks the variety of environments present in Into the Inferno. After completing destroying the control nodes on the four worlds, Keen heads to the Universal Toaster Cannon to destroy the final one when a Shikadi warship intercepts the Bacon-with-Beans Megarocket and shoots it down over the desert world Apollus IV. Ammo is even more limited and enemies are more abundant. As with Keen 5, the Shidaki take four shots to stun and it is better to avoid them than confront them directly.
McMire also dispatched a Keendroid to commit crimes and terrorize the populace in your name, turning most of Apollus’ inhabitants against you. Thankfully, the planets’ periodic sandstorms and dark caves offer you plenty of covers to avoid your Shidaki and Apollian pursuers. Thankfully, you also enlist the help of a young Apollian, Pallo, you rescued in the first level to help you gather the parts needed to rebuild your ship, destroy the Keendroid, and restore your reputation. Pallo would later play a crucial role in later games as the first recruit of the “Commander Keen Corps” in the Multiverse Madness trilogy.
Once Keen finds the parts needed to repair his ship, he heads to the UTC for the final showdown in Clash of the Intellects. Personally, some of my favorite levels are in this part of the trilogy. As it takes place on a space station orbiting a blue supergiant, this is where Mortimer McMire keeps his most heinous experiments. Enemies from as far back as Invasion of the Vorticons return, except cybernetically enhanced and even more aggressive. There are Gargs, Vorticons, and Bloogs—oh my! Unlike the previous two installments Clash of the Intellects is more generous with the ammo. You will need it when a herd of roid-raged Gargs rush you (and another trope namer.)
The low-gravity mechanics from Into the Inferno return and some switches even flip the station’s gravity so that you can run along the walls and ceiling. This is a crucial mechanic for the battle with Mortimer McMire where you need to flip the gravity to temporarily disorient him and trick him into disabling the force fields protecting the final control node by leading his shots. McMire seemingly dies when the Universal Toaster Cannon self-destructs.
With the profits from the PC version and some money from Sega, Apogee added animated cut scenes to the Saturn version where Kath Soucie (late of the SatAM Sonic the Hedgehog) voiced Billy Blaze/Commander Keen and television’s Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright, lent her voice to Mortimer McMire. If you meet certain criteria, the came rewards you with a cut scene of a shadowed figure rescuing McMire at the last second. As most gamers know by now, said figure was Keen’s mirrorverse counterpart, Captain Khaos, who would be the primary antagonist of Multiverse Madness saga for the Sega Saturn.
Most fans of the series agree that the Saturn version of The Universe is Toast is the superior version. While Apogee developed and Sega published the Saturn version in September 1996, Apogee published a slightly truncated version for the SNES-CD the following year before the release of the Ultra Nintendo. This version was much slower and buggier than even the PC version, which Hall admits was not his finest effort.
“To be honest, I wanted to move onto the next part of the series by then. John and I were working on the engine for Keen 10 and so much of my attention went to that and thus I could not give UiT for the SNES-CD the care I gave the PC and Saturn versions. However, by that time Keen was already entering the Saturn’s orbit after everything Sega had done for us.”
Romero laughed at the mention. “Didn’t Angry Video Game Nerd guy pan that port? I wasn’t involved in it and Tom barely had any input at all. They gave that port to an inexperienced team and it showed. Poor Tom took it rather personally, but Apogee told us we needed an SNES-CD port. That was one of the main reasons why he decided to take Keen and found Ion Storm. I couldn’t join him as Commander Keen was only a side project done more for fun than profit.
“Tom and I parted on friendly terms and I am proud of my (admittedly small) contribution to the Keen 10 engine.”
Indeed, many reviewers panned the SNES-CD port of UiT for its unresponsive controls, slowdown, and horrendous graphics compared to the Saturn. It would be the only Commander Keen game to grace a Nintendo console. Sega directly invested in Ion Storm, which effectively made them a second-party developer similar to Rare and HAL Laboratories’ relationship to Nintendo. The studio would also bring in additional talent like Warren Spector who created Deus Ex, which many Sega fans consider a rival to GoldenEye when it comes to multi-player though the single-player experience is much different.
As for Keen, The Universe is Toast pulled in solid sales though far less than Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which Sega released the following month. Between those two games, Sega gained a considerable lead on Nintendo in the fifth generation—at least when it came to flagship series. Commander Keen is the only other Sega-affiliated franchise that spun off into an animated series and comic book by Archie Comics. Sadly, Commander Keen: The Animated Series lasted for one twenty-six episode season in fall 1999. As with the games, many critics and players praised its irreverent humor and cultural reference and compared it to the late Calvin and Hobbes. The comic book still continues onto this day under the pen of Dan Slott.
“I consider UiT and Multiverse Madness the height of my career,” reflects Hall, who still oversees the series to this day. “We’re not churning out Keen games like we did in the Saturn days and some complain that the gameplay has not changed that much. To them I say this: look at Mario and Sonic. Their core gameplay has not changed a great deal over the years. Sega and Nintendo didn’t waste money and time on reinventing the wheel with each new game. Sometimes you need to look under the hood and tweak the engine a little bit to see what works when you add something new. That’s my philosophy when it comes to Keen and part of the reason why he has stood the test of time.”
The world of Commander Keen is one fans keep returning to because of its charm and refined gameplay. Hall’s metaphor is a perfectly apt one. While technology progresses, consoles grow more powerful, and audience tastes change, there will always be an appreciation for the classics. Commander Keen is one the “Cadillacs” in every retrogamer’s collection and with the advent of downloadable content, the series finds a new audience every year. Not bad for a series that started out as a prank, isn’t it?
-from the blog "The Musing Platypus" by B. Ronning, March 12, 2013
Very nice, very nice. I actually was about to mention the Commander Keen update but I thought perhaps it might be a bit early for it, it actually does work well right here though. That reminds me, Nevermore, your Solaris update could also work really well here if you'd like to post it, or would you like me to post it?
I guess Billy Blaze's real name isn't William Joseph Blazkowicz II this time around. Much less the possible ancestor of the "Doom guy"
nope, that would be butterflt away, meaning that wolfstein-keen-doom connection was loss, not a big loss, but that is how butterflies work.
yeah nevermore, send us a copy too,xd.
Danke. I have a question about Mega Man X3 in terms of graphics, would they be similar to OTL's X4? I am also guessing that playing as Zero is a different experience. He only had limited playability in OTL's X3 (i.e. he could only fight a few bosses and when he died, you didn't have the option of playing as him again.)
Yes, I think so, X3's graphics would be at X4 level or a bit below. And Zero is fully playable ITTL, you can use him for bosses and when he dies it's the same as if X dies, they share a pool of lives.
The Sad Tale Of Gon On The Bandai Solaris
I can, since you don't mind. Apologies I haven't commented much; been busy as of late. Excellent guest post, Pyro! Mine's not quite so extensive, but if anyone wanted a taste of what the Solaris has to offer, here's your chance to get an impression of the very first 3D platformer in the Player Two Start 'verse.
---
"If you mention the Bandai Solaris today in the West, you're likely to get a bunch of blank stares. Sometimes when I talk to my friends, if they're really nerdy, at least one might describe it as 'that one console that deep-sixed Bandai.' I'm not joking when I say that the bad ass sun logo on the hardware itself is one of the best things about it. Remember when Power Rangers was huge here in the States? Yeah, most of that cash went into keeping this piece of crap afloat in the market toilet bowl long after it should've been flushed.
To those of you who don't know why this thing even exists, I'll give you the skinny. Back in the '90s, everyone and their grandmother was trying to take down Sega and Nintendo/Sony. Philips, Trip Hawkins, SNK, NEC - all of them went into the ring and they all came back with a bloody nose for their troubles. Even Namco at one point wanted to (the TurboGrafx-16 was rushed to market because Hudson Soft didn't want NEC to be courting them). In the midst of all of this, Bandai wanted in on the action; taking a piece of the market share created by both gaming giants after Atari's collapse was just too good to pass up. In '94, Apple got approached by Bandai to produce a stripped down Macintosh that would have the capacity to play CD games. Apple, intrigued by the recent success of the video game market, agreed at the time but on the condition that it would be marketed more as a multimedia device that just happened to play games. Y'know, like the water cooler at an office where people stand around and shoot the shit? You're probably thinking to yourself, 'It's a stripped down computer - who the hell would want to buy a multimedia device that can't even do half the things a desktop can do?'
...and you'd be absolutely right. Good thing '90s-era Apple decided to stop hemorrhaging money long enough to check themselves into the psych ward so they could realize that this was an absolutely stupid idea and backed down from it. Unfortunately, that left Bandai stuck footing the bill and if you know anything about Japanese corporate culture, this sort of thing is absolutely humiliating. But they had to stand by what they'd done and scrambled to find someone to help them put it to market (not that you'd know that from their E3 1995 presence where everyone was all smiles about the next big thing in gaming, mind you). They found another weird partner to help them, Mitsubishi. Of course, it wasn't going to come cheap. Though Mitsubishi said they'd manufacture the hardware, they wanted a steep 45% of the profits from each console sold. Reluctantly, Bandai agreed.
This isn't to say that the Solaris doesn't have its place in history. Aside from being the primary reason that one of Japan's great post-WWII success stories was taken out back, put up against the wall, given a cigarette, and executed by a firing squad with Sega uniforms, it actually holds a more dubious claim to fame. A lot of people in NTSC and PAL regions think that NiGHTS into Dreams... is the first 3D platformer, but this isn't actually true. Bandai Games was responsible for releasing theirs six months shortly beforehand in early 1996. What do you know: it's a licensed title to boot.
Gon: Prehistoric Panic is based on a manga series by Masashi Tanaka, following the adventures of a Not T-rex. It's alright, I guess. I'm not personally big on silent media, but there's got to be an audience for it. It lasted a long time, too (it just ended not too long ago; '02, I think) so what do I know? Prior to its Solaris title, Bandai had actually done a previous Gon game on the Super Famicom.
The comic itself has absolutely no dialog in it and all of the humor is strictly visual; as such, it's pretty accessible to anyone who picks it up and in this regard GPP is pretty true to its source material. Most of the time, it's just Gon picking fights with animals or whatever. Some gaming purists out there might actually be interested in this. It cuts the crap and doesn't pretend to have a deep or meaningful story. I mean, no one plays Mario (hah) or (hah!) Sonic for their stories, right? You take the role of the big-headed, wide-eyed Gon and roam around a 3D world based on a vaguely prehistoric setting. You can attack enemies in three ways (each corresponding to the controller's three main buttons; the fourth is used for jumping): breathe fire (?!), tail whip, or, um, a toxic fart. The last is just as juvenile as it sounds but the enemies admittedly make some funny over-the-top facial expressions if you can use it against them.
The worlds found in game are pretty much what you'd expect. Swamp-themed, volcano-themed, tundra-themed and the like; nothing spectacular or noteworthy. Based on that, you might be thinking that Gon: Prehistoric Panic is just really middle of the road. To be fair, that's pretty much true so far as presentation is concerned. Music is serviceable and there are times when the art direction sort of works, seeing obscure animals like a giant ground sloth as a boss is pretty fun. Gon's model looks okay. That's the most charitable thing you can say about it from a creative standpoint: it's so middle of the road that it doesn't even need to exist.
You might be confused as to why this would be made a flagship title for a Mind Blowing Next Gen Console™ and the answer is... well, I have no clue, to be quite honest. Most sources I can find about it say that Bandai threw money at it after panicking when Apple backed out and figured that it would ultimately save costs by doing it in house once the hardware (hopefully) panned out. This begs the question why it wasn't a Power Rangers game or something similar; the old beat 'em up on the Super Nintendo could've been a solid basis for something, maybe a Streets of Rage sort of game. Again, nothing mind blowing, but you needed the thing to move so why wouldn't you take advantage of an insanely successful property? A property which, need I remind everyone, they had relative easy access to?
Regardless, what's the real downfall of Gon: Prehistoric Panic? Everything else.
It feels like they were trying to make a 3D version of Data East's old Joe & Mac games. Well, imagine that without any of the fun those had. Half the time in a level you're just wandering around a blank void - or at least it looks like it because the draw distances in it are so awful that you might as well be. You don't even really care about any of the good stuff I mentioned before because half the time you're so bored looking for something to do that it just kind of blends together in a drone of monotony. When you finally do encounter bad guys to fight, the enemy types can more or less be summed up as follows: sabre tooth cats, woolly mammoths, bears, rhinos, and some big prehistoric bird things. That's it. While it might be funny to see woolly mammoths bumbling around an active volcano at first, it quickly makes you realize that what you're playing must have been ridiculously rushed. It's true: the game had less than a year to be completed as the Solaris was tanking so hard after its launch that Bandai was throwing just about everything they could at it to keep its corpse propped up.
Even if it's not that great in design, it might make up for things if it at least played well, right? Oh, hopeless optimist, there's still more disappointment to come!
The controls are mutilated beyond belief. Keep in mind that for some God forsaken reason Bandai still kept the track ball from their deal with Apple; you can see it present in the prototypes for what they called the 'Pippin' then. This, rather than the controller's d-pad, is the primary way in which you move. Rather than being able to go in a straight forward line, you slide all over the place like someone spilled oil over the floor.
On.
Every.
Single.
Stage.
This wouldn't be as frustrating if you could actually get a handle for things. But you can't, at least not in any meaningful way. Soon as you think you've mastered walking in one world, it's off to the next and you have to relearn how things work all over again. Not only is this bad for trying to go around and collect the assorted precious stones you need per level, but it makes fighting against bosses nigh impossible. You'll probably throw the controller on the ground in frustration when you get to the last one, a cave man whose name I don't remember, because he's got projectile weapons that he constantly fires at you like spears and arrows.
In the end, Gon: Prehistoric Panic would've maybe been acceptable in the late '80s or early '90s. But gamers expected something more. Despite eventually being put as a pack-in for the Solaris it didn't help matters and by 1997 Bandai was filing for bankruptcy. Despite Sega now owning a big chunk of the rights to produce anime-based games and more, to this day they've never done an official re-release and it remains shelved - except to people like me, I guess, who have nothing better to do than masochistically torture themselves.
Ugh.
2/10"
- Excerpt taken from, "HiJack's 9th Circle of Gaming Hell: A Blog Dedicated to Gaming's Worst of the Worst," dated March 10, 2007
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That is a good question, PC engine die in 1994, and here thanks butterflies, NEC refrained of PC-FX, meaning a little better for them, Bonk being shared(nec hudson) is now full hudson, i can imagine a Bonk and Zonk collection for SNES-CD, and Hudson again as third party. We've plans for Hudson, don't worry about it
How does anime progress in TTL?
From the top of my memory, if all goes according to OTL, Dragon Ball Z would be coming out in '96, and Neon Genesis Evangelion would follow next year on VHS.
From the top of my memory, if all goes according to OTL, Dragon Ball Z would be coming out in '96, and Neon Genesis Evangelion would follow next year on VHS.
Right now, DBZ is still as IOTL, appearing in syndication first and dubbed by Ocean Group. It will most likely appear on Toonami starting in 1998 as IOTL.
Evangelion will probably also go as IOTL at least for the immediate future.
Any chance that the earlier larger export market and SEGA's better standing ITTL (IIRC they sponsored the series, one of the supporting characters [Hikari I think] even had a Saturn) means that the budget may not get slashed at the last second and the two/three last episodes won't get cut & shoehorned into the rushed finale of OTL?
Hmmm.....we'll see.
Bandai would pull a bigger role too, when series was lagging, they sponsored it alongside SEGA(that is why saturn cameo and wonderswan one in the movie,here would be a VENUS) and as sega was big localizing anime games(before stolar killed it), something can be done....
Does this also bode well for a U.S release of at least a couple of the Saturn Evangelion games? Or maybe a new game or two not made IOTL.
If the extra episodes do get made ITTL, that would butterfly away "Death & Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion"; could they be replaced by OVA series of one or two of the spin-off manga? I'd especially love to see NGE: Campus Apocalypse as an anime. (That series was short but sweet; it quit while it was ahead & left me wanting more.)
OOH! Since SEGA owns Bandai do we get any Cowboy Bebop game? An RPG? A glorified shooter-with-a-plot (or maybe a Starfox knockoff) where we can play as any of the three main characters in their fighters (i.e. Spike&Swordfish, Faye&Zipcraft, or Jet&Hammerhead) at least?
If the extra episodes do get made ITTL, that would butterfly away "Death & Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion"; could they be replaced by OVA series of one or two of the spin-off manga? I'd especially love to see NGE: Campus Apocalypse as an anime. (That series was short but sweet; it quit while it was ahead & left me wanting more.)
OOH! Since SEGA owns Bandai do we get any Cowboy Bebop game? An RPG? A glorified shooter-with-a-plot (or maybe a Starfox knockoff) where we can play as any of the three main characters in their fighters (i.e. Spike&Swordfish, Faye&Zipcraft, or Jet&Hammerhead) at least?
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