Nightmare in 1998 - the year games peaked

[Jerzy Bondov]

Of course I like Wagner; I voted for Corbyn after all. I've added Ring to the list and I have a couple of obscure adventure games I want to try if possible.

NoSleep, did you know there's a recent HD remaster of Constructor?

[NoSleep]

I bumped into it while I was looking up the game before posting. The original PC game runs on DOSBox (but has probably been lifted from all the abandonware sites if there's an HD version out now) , whilst the PSX version has issues with some emulators, so the HD version is probably the way to go.

Just looked and found the (non HD) game is available on GOG ("powered by DOSBox") for £4.79.

[Chedney Honks]

Ocarina, MGS and HL2 sound like an amazing year but it's not really one in remember as much as 96-97. Probably pissed.

[NoSleep]

Half Life 2 came out in 2004.

I wouldn't have gone for only 1998, '96-'99 being the golden era for me. That way you could fit in FFVII, VIII & IX, Suikoden 1 & 2, Gran Turismo 2, Vandal Hearts 1 & 2, Silent Hill and Vagrant Story.

[Chedney Honks]

A genuine autocorrect on the HL2. Shows how much I must have banged on about it over the years.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I'm mostly playing games that look shit, to be clear. I'm trying a few classic games I missed out on at the time but generally I want to find stuff off the beaten track and hopefully see something worthwhile in them. If not I will do Epic Flame Review

[NoSleep]

That makes sense; we can collectively destroy any belief that 1998 was the greatest year for gaming.

[boki]

FIFA '98 - Road to World Cup is still the definitive edition in my view, not least because it has:

a) a button where you can push over other players
b) every country in the world as playable teams. Vanuatu v Central African Republic? WHY THE FUCK NOT.

Made the mistake of buying* the Saturn version of that.  Terrible even by the standards of Saturn footie games. Brrrrr.


*a second-hand copy for an absolute pittance, but still

[evilcommiedictator]

For bad games, quickly using IMDB, you've got
South Park (that wot Lemming just played)
Dune 2000 (the Red Alert reskin)
Sabrina The Teenage Witch - Spellbound
Gex: Enter the Gecko
Mission: Impossible
Glover
(Pretty much most N64 games)
Barbie Riding Club
Spice World: The Game
SimSafari
The Blob Job

But then again, you also have Mechcommander, Myth II: Soulblighter and No One Can Stop Mr. Domino! :)

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Made the mistake of buying* the Saturn version of that.  Terrible even by the standards of Saturn footie games. Brrrrr.


*a second-hand copy for an absolute pittance, but still

Also it came out in 1997 as I remember getting it for Christmas (pc version).

So it may be disqualified by the ombudsman of this competition.

[Jerzy Bondov]

For bad games, quickly using IMDB, you've got
South Park (that wot Lemming just played)
Dune 2000 (the Red Alert reskin)
Sabrina The Teenage Witch - Spellbound
Gex: Enter the Gecko
Mission: Impossible
Glover
(Pretty much most N64 games)
Barbie Riding Club
Spice World: The Game
SimSafari
The Blob Job

All these games are excellent, what are you talking about

[Jerzy Bondov]

Right about now it's time to rock with the biggity
Buck Bumble


Platform: Nintendo 64
Developer: Argonaut Games
(also made: Starglider, Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, Croc, Bionicle: Matoran Adventures)
Publisher: Ubi Soft
(also made: Rayman, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, sexual misconduct)

In 1998, I was 12. I worried constantly about having no friends and I was in love with Buffy from off of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Jez San was 12, he was given a TRS-80 by his dad and immediately taught himself assembly language. Four years later he founded Argonaut Software and two years after that he released Starglider, a technically brilliant 3D wireframe shooter, on the Atari ST. He was 18. By that point in my own life I was still trying to pass my driving test.

Argonaut made a prototype port of Starglider for the NES, and managed to get it in front of Shigeru Miyamoto. This led to the creation of the Super FX chip for the SNES, and the game Star Fox. You know, from 'do a barrel roll'. Their first game of the 32 bit generation was Croc (shit year 1997), and Buck Bumble is their second (holy blessed year of best games 1998).

Buck Bumble is a 3D shoot em up where you're a bee with a gun. As it's an N64 game, it's set in a world beset by fog, but it looks quite nice and controls really well. You hold A to fly forwards and can steer in all directions with the analogue stick. You can also do a flip if you want. Why not do a flip? You can get a good bit of speed going and Buck himself is fairly nimble when you realise you can turn quickly by braking in the air.



The environments are mostly great. You buzz around gardens which are filled with giant benches, flowers, trees, all that shit you get in a garden. The dogfighting gameplay among giant scenery reminds me of Toy Commander on the Dreamcast (shit year 1999). Later levels send you into sewers, which is never a very exciting prospect in real life or in games, and then into graveyards, which is more my scene.

I originally ended up with the Japanese version. I thought it would be fine as it's a stupid bee game, but quickly realised I didn't know what I was meant to do. Switching to the English language version revealed that there are actually quite varied objectives and challenges as you go through the game. Sometimes you need to fight and other times it's best to just dodge enemies and get on with your mission. I was surprised by the variety of missions in this. Some levels are linear and others have you hunting larger spaces for keys and switches. There's a mission where you have to stun and capture grubs, one where you have to disarm a nuke, even an escort mission of sorts. It doesn't sound so varied now I've written that out, but each level offers something fresh.

There's also a good selection of weapons to use. The basic gun never runs out of ammo, but is laughably weak. Luckily weapon pickups get more and more common as the game goes on, and you eventually have access to homing missiles, grenade launchers, a pilotable missile (like in Unreal Tournament) and various weird things I didn't get to grips with but appreciated anyway.




Honestly I added this to the list thinking it looked like a stupid bollocks game I could pretend to like for the thread's gimmick. But I actually really like this game and find it very addictive. The missions are short and snappy, the controls are great, when you shoot down a wasp it makes a noise like a plane going down, and there's a good variety of weapons and enemies to use them on. The framerate got a bit choppy in busier areas, but I'm putting that down to the emulator. Most of the levels (aside from boss fights) have the same music, which gets annoying before long. But, and I'm sorry for putting this at the end of the review, when you start the game up, you get to hear this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0DDY299Ly4. Please name one other game about a bee with a garage theme song. You can't do it. The song is now a very minor meme. Here's a good remix. Well done.

Is it good? Yes! It's really good!

NEXT TIME: Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon

[ImmaculateClump]

Ha! I had that! I got it second hand in some game shop in town when I was buying something else, just grabbed it because the screenshots looked nice and it was impulse buy cheap so I wasn't expecting much and was really surprised when I got it home. It was really good fun! I'd totally forgotten about that game.

There was like a 7 out of 10 motorbike game I had for the n64 as well which I'd play aaaall the time, it really got it's hooks into me.
Extreme-G, that was it. Aaaaw, 1997, one year out, you could have tried that.

[Lemming]

Oh Christ, Deathtrap Dungeon. Controls made it unplayable on PC, wonder if the console version will hold up any better.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Spoiler: not really

[lazarou]

Oh Christ, Deathtrap Dungeon. Controls made it unplayable on PC, wonder if the console version will hold up any better.

The PC version manages to be worse in almost every respect. Despite running 3d accelerated at a much higher resolution, for whatever reason the psx version has much nicer, grungy texture work and lighting where the pc has flat tiling textures everywhere and no real atmosphere to speak of. Either way it's not worth sticking with, even at the time I remember feeling like it was one of the worst attempts at a 3d action game I'd played (bear in mind I was really enjoying Nightmare Creatures around this time so I didn't have a terribly high bar here) and I can't even begin to imagine how badly it's aged.

[ImmaculateClump]

Deathtrap Dungeon

I remember buying that in HMV for cheap! I was wet behind the lugs when it came to pc gaming and didn't really know what I was doing. My dad brought home this absolute knacker job from work, ended up having to buy a graphics card so I could play it (I didn't know you needed one of those!).
The other cd that I bought, a speccy emulator with loads of speccy roms with lots of duplicates just thrown into a folder saved the day. Had loads of fun with that :D
All I can remember about deathtrap dungeon is finally getting it running really badly and feeling that it just wasn't worth it. My friend lent me his copy of gta london though and I played that so much!

[Jerzy Bondov]

That's really interesting about the PC version. I'll have to have a look into that. I'm making steady progress with the PlayStation version. It's not as terrible as I was expecting it to be.

[thelittlemango]

The PC version manages to be worse in almost every respect. Despite running 3d accelerated at a much higher resolution, for whatever reason the psx version has much nicer, grungy texture work and lighting where the pc has flat tiling textures everywhere and no real atmosphere to speak of. Either way it's not worth sticking with, even at the time I remember feeling like it was one of the worst attempts at a 3d action game I'd played (bear in mind I was really enjoying Nightmare Creatures around this time so I didn't have a terribly high bar here) and I can't even begin to imagine how badly it's aged.

Nightmare Creatures was the first game I looked up when I saw this thread (1997 so doesn't count), rinsed the demo so many times that I bought it and spent many an hour duffing up werewolves in Highgate Cemetery (all the locations looked the same, it could have been any level) and enjoying the repetitive gameplay.

[Huxleys Babkins]

There was like a 7 out of 10 motorbike game I had for the n64 as well which I'd play aaaall the time, it really got it's hooks into me.
Extreme-G, that was it. Aaaaw, 1997, one year out, you could have tried that.

No need. 1998 gave us the sequel, Wipeout 64 and F-Zero X. What a year for futuristic N64 racers.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon


Platform: PlayStation
Developer: Asylum Studios
(also made: Bob the Builder, Play with the Teletubbies)
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
(also made: Tomb Raider, Gex, Legacy of Kain. Now part of Square Enix, so this is for NoSleep)

Let's get into some fuckin LITERATURE. Deathtrap Dungeon is the sixth in the Fighting Fantasy series of adventure game books. I never played these, or the simpler Choose Your Own Adventure titles, when I was a kid. I did have a few Sonic game books though, and like everyone else I cheated like fuck to get through them. I had multiple bookmarks and infinite dice rolls. Failed a task? No I didn't. Made a mistake? No I didn't. You might as well just read them front to back like a normal book if you're going to cheat as much as I did.

What's the equivalent for the video game version? Playing it on an emulator and save scumming your way through it. I played Mulan and Buck Bumble properly and I intended to play this the same way, but I gave up quite quickly. This is a hard game. Hard because it delights in tricking you, in throwing unkillable monsters at you from blind corners, in dropping you onto spikes, in wasting your time. But also hard because the camera swims drunkenly in circles around your character, who can barely walk in a straight line.

You know when you see those videos of people completing Dark Souls III using a dance mat or the drums from Rock Band? Playing Deathtrap Dungeon with a normal controller is like that.


Welcome to the dungeon, we got fucken gates

Combat is always either pathetically easy or close to impossible. The dividing line between these two states is usually whether you are fighting one or more enemies. Anyone who attacks you on their own is essentially committing suicide. I found a comment thread on a YouTube playthrough where one of the developers popped up. He said that the levels were being designed at the same time as the controls and camera, so the level designers put in lots of tight spaces without realising how badly suited the controls would be. That explains everything. The game is constantly throwing you into scenarios which would be pretty fun if you could actually control what was happening. When you get into larger spaces, the controls are actually fine. They're still a bit fiddly, but there are better regarded games with worse controls.

The look of this game is heavily influenced by the art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, particularly his Carceri d'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons):



And, in a PS1 sort of way, you can really tell. It looks great. Not technically great, but artistically very cool. It's also quite lurid in a really entertaining and adolescent kind of way. Blood sprays everywhere when you dismember monsters, and the player characters can be subjected to some horrible fates.

One of these characters, you may be interested to learn, is a woman in a metal thong. The other is a cross hulking barbarian. There are skulls absolutely everywhere. It's like they knew Grim Fandango was coming out in the same year and were determined to be known as the game with loads of skulls from 1998. The box art is a skull. The save points are skulls. The menu is some skulls. You want skulls? Come and get your fucking skulls right here you prick.


Enjoying some enjoyable combat

The best thing about this game is the atmosphere. The music is great, ambient spooky stuff, and the creepy, abstract levels loom at you out of pitch darkness. This effect is lost in the PC version, which has much clearer graphics. My PS1 emulator has a high-definition rendering mode and even this ruins the look of the game. It's like a ghost train with a broken smoke machine. It needs to be dark and wobbly or it just doesn't work. When it does work, you feel utterly alone and intimidated in these strange and gloomy places.

At the start of each level you get a little description of what's coming up. These are exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to read in the book, and they do a great job of contributing to the foreboding atmosphere. Here's a great example from an early level:

The Alchemists of Chaos have conducted evil experiments on the people of Fang, transforming many of them into mindless Minotaurs. You must battle your way through the labyrinth to find the Alchemists' lair. Imps and fiendish pits and traps dog your path. Time is your greatest enemy, for the Minotaurs will soon be released.....

I immediately went into this level in a massive rush and got roasted to death by a flame trap. A bell starts tolling and you just know some big minotaur cunts are going to hop out and push your shit in, and sure enough they do. Scary stuff.


You can't see what's happening but this bit scared fuck out me

This is the scrappiest, hardest to like game I've played so far, but there is a lot to like. I think the disconnect between the level designers and the engine designers is responsible for everything that doesn't work, but in their own way they both did a good job. As the levels become more maze like it does become steadily less enjoyable, but the early going is worth a look in my opinion. Then again, if you only play the first few levels, you miss out on some absolutely insane shit. There's a circus in this dungeon, with all scary clowns. There's a flying turtle. Later on you get guns. It's worth putting some cheats on to see this stuff because frankly life is too short to do this game properly.

As a final note, there's now a new Deathtrap Dungeon video game with the terrific actor and disappointing centrist Twitter guff-head Eddie Marsan as Falconhoof. It's much more in the spirit of the book, but honestly if someone could mod the original with better controls that would be ideal for me.

Is it good? It's a tough game to love, but there's plenty to enjoy here. Just don't expect to make it to the end.

NEXT TIME: Spice World

[Mister Six]

Great review, but I'm distracted by the promise of a Spice World review. The Spice Girls game was an FPS?!

[Jerzy Bondov]

The FPS thread is thataway man. Spice World is... a disc with some content on it, at the very least.

[Mister Six]

Oh! I'm barely awake these days due to work, didn't even register that Deathtrap Dungeon isn't an FPS.

Still, smashing thread.

[Thursday]

No One Can Stop Mr. Domino! came out in 98. Proof it was the best year.

[purlieu]

I had a demo of this featuring one of the arena levels and absolutely played it to death

I had the full game on some pirate disc, and my favourite thing was setting up one of the arenas without my player, and just throwing in a bunch of those huge stone giant things and watching them beat the shit out of each other for ages. I'd put on some dramatic music and it was really cinematic.
I remember the main game was a nightmare, I got to a bit with a stream and spent hours looking around before totally giving up. I was probably about 2% through the game and REALLY wanted to know what else was in the game. Might have to watch one of those YouTube playthroughs.


1998? Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft. i.e. the one where Core Design lost the fucking plot.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Fighting Fantasy weren't that well treated in that era were they? It was a pretty popular set of books that you'd think lent themselves well to turn based RPGs or 3rd person adventures like the above. Also some of the ideas seem clearly ripped off so they'd do it on the cheap too.

Anyway, is this the first ever game where the player gets to look at some pixelated female arsecheeks the whole way through?

[Mister Six]

1998? Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft. i.e. the one where Core Design lost the fucking plot.

Barely played that one. What was bad about it? Didn't it introduce vehicles or something? And was that the one that started with a weird bit where you're sliding down the side of a jungle pyramid or something?

[Bazooka]

Barely played that one. What was bad about it? Didn't it introduce vehicles or something? And was that the one that started with a weird bit where you're sliding down the side of a jungle pyramid or something?

A jungle pyramid?  You couldn't make it up. Introduced vehicles? !!! Stop getting Tomb Raider wrong. TR3 is fine as is TR Revelations after that.  Don't listen to freak talk.

[Jerzy Bondov]

TR3 introduced crawling through vents I believe