Prop Cycle (Arcade)

 There have been times in the past where I've put disclaimers at the start of arcade game reviews, because I was emulating, and the original game had some kind of specialised control scheme or gimmicky cabinet that I couldn't possibly replicate at home. Prop Cycle represents a particularly big case of this, as the original cabinet had a whole exercise bike on it, plus fans blowing wind into the player's face. But that elaborate cabinet full of moving parts is almost thirty years old now, and there are very few arcades around in the west that aren't just full of worthless garbage like coinpushers and fruit machines, so it's very unlikely most of us are ever going to encounter a functional Prop Cycle and be able to play it. So, I'm here to ask (and answer) the pertinent question: is it worth emulating, and could it have worked as a Playstation game back in the day?

 

For those who don't know what this game is, it's a game in which you pilot a pedal-powered aircraft around various stages, popping balloons for points or extra time. In easy mode, you pick one of three stages, and you're just playing for a high score in that stage. In advanced mode, you play each of the three stages, with a tighter time limit, balloons in more difficult positions, and to progress from one stage to the next, you have to hit a score quota. Advanced mode has an exclusive fourth stage, the floating continent of Solitar, but unfortunately, even through practice, turning down the difficulty, and using continues, I haven't managed to get there.

 

It might sound like scant material for a home release, but a lot of Namco's Playstation games in those early years were pretty brief. I think it wasn't until Soul Edge and Tekken 3 that they really started to pile on the extras for the home audience. Plus, it's the quality of what's in there that really matters, and that quality is very high. The game takes place in an idyllic world, obviously inspired by Laputa (as so many great videogames are), and it's all realised in some of the most beautiiful low-poly graphics you'll ever see. It's prefectly directed, too: for example, the second stage has you fly into a tunnel inhabited by (peaceful) giant worms during daylight, and as you emerge from the other side, the music changes and you're flying around a little mining village beneath a beautiful starry sky.

 

The one problem with playing through emulation is that I haven't been able to figure out a way to perfectly map the controls of the cabinet to a controller. The best I'e been able to manage (using a Dual Shock 4) is to map steering to the left analogue stick (like you'd expect), and using L2 and R2 to decrease and increase the speed of the pedals turning. It's far from perfect, but it is good enough to make playing the game an enjoyable, if slightly fiddly, experience. Of course, the theoretical Playstation port that doesn't exist would have been able to come up with something more bespoke for the game, maybe even coming up with a scheme that involed Namco's NeGcon controller. But that's just me making educated guesses on other stuff Namco did around the same time.

 

Prop Cycle is a great game, definitely worth your time to emulate, and in my opinion at least, it would also have been a worthwhile Playstation port at the time, and I think it's a shame it wasn't one. I've never been able to play it on an actual cabinet, but hopefully that'll change someday. I do know that in recent years, there's been at least one Prop Cycle-like game, complete with bike controller and fans, released by a Chinese company, but the only cabient I've encountered of that was way too small for my giant long legs to comfortably be able to pedal.