From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love Basketball (Saturn)

 I saw some gifs of this game on Bsky a few months ago, and it immediately made its way on my to-play list. You can see from the screenshots that it looks pretty good, but it looks even better in motion! Big, well-drawn sprites that were it not for the concessions made for the purposes of being in a game, could feasibly have been taken straight from animation cels, with animation to match. But, of course: there are many anime tie-ins that look great and don't have much else going for them, so is this game any good?

 

Before answering that question, there are some other things I really need to address. The main one being my lack of interest in basketball, and by extension, my ignorance regarding things like tactics and team positions and so on. Because even though this game is a tie-in to an anime about basketball rather than a real basketball league, it still takes a pretty in-depth approach to the game. Between selecting a team and starting a match, you'll be asked to assign team members to positions, and to select formations for your team to take when they're on the offence and when they're defending. So I can't really speak to how well the game handles these things, beyond saying that it's pretty funny that if you pick Shohoku High School's team, and just go with everyone in default positions, Sakuragi is left on the bench

 

Actually in-game, it all seems to work pretty well. There's a lot of sprite scaling going on as players run towards or away from the camera, which looks great. You use the d-pad for moving around like you'd expect, and the A, B, and C buttons do different things depending on whether or not you've got the ball. With the ball, A dribbles, B passes, and C shoots (I think, but I'm not sure, that shooting relies on some kind of probability equation involving your player's stats, their distance from the basket, and how long they've had the ball with them.). While if you don't have it, A gets in the way of the guy with the ball, B jumps to try and block their shots, and C tries to take the ball off of them. 

 

The camera always looks in one direction, with the court stretching off into the distance, one basket all the way at the back, one right at the front. It keeps things simple, and it always being at the same angle allows for the aforementioned detailed, well-animated sprites. I think there might have been an arcade basketball game that used a similar set up, but I'm not sure about that. It works, and like I keep mentioning: it looks great! The menus look a little less great, but in a very charming, very nineties kind of way: lots of multi-coloured WordArt on display, for example.

 

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love BasketBall is a pretty decent little game. I can't play it well at all, and haven't won a single match yet, but I've come close a few times! One thing I should also mention is that not only does it allow you to play matches with twenty minute long halves, but if you want to play story mode, you don't get a choice, and you'll have to play these insanely long matches, presumably racking up massive scores over time, too. For as much as I've praised the game, I haven't been able to get through even half of one of these real time matches. But there is a versus CPU mode (and a two player versus mode, of course) that lets you play with more reasonable settings. I think it's at least worth giving a try if you're curious, or if like any other normal person with good taste, you love sprite scaling.

Arcana Strikes (Saturn)

 Because of how terribly managed the Saturn was outside Japan, very few of its RPGs ever got official English translations, and some of the ones that did were just used for some talentless hack's stupid comedy routines. But thanks to the brave and noble efforts of fan translators in the modern age, we're finally able to see some of the interesting exclusives the Saturn got in Japan, and Arcana Strikes is definitely one that's unique and worthy of note!

 

There's a few things that make Arcana Strikes unique, and at the core of a lot of them are the things the game doesn't have. Most important are the things it deliberately doesn't have: there's no items, equipment, no spells in the way that you might usually think of them, and strangest of all, there's no attack option in battle! All of these things are replaced with cards. You have a deck of up to twenty-four cards (and if you have fewer than twelve, the difference will be made up with useless spam cards), and they come in various categories. There's cards that just inflict an elemental attack on an enemy, cards that can buff an ally or debuff an enemy, and most important of all: cards that summon monsters to fight alongside you!

 

Every fight in the game will be against a main enemy who stands opposite your character. You both have a space at either side of you, into each of which you can summon a monster. Monsters will always attack straight in front of them: the monster on your left will attack the monster on your opponent's right (which is the left side of the screen, since you're facing each other), and vice versa. If a monster doesn't have a monster in front of it, they'll attack the main opponent directly. You have more freedom, and can attack anyone on your opponent's side, or use other cards for other effects. A battle goes on until the main fighter on one side is killed. Monster cards can be bought from shops, and there are also capture cards that let you steal them from opponents! 

 

Monsters also have elements assigned to them (though there are some neutral monsters), and of course, each element is strong against one other and weak against one other. Your attack cards are mostly also elemental, and if you have more than one of the same card in your hand, you can play them at the same time for more powerful attacks. To explain further, you have your deck of cards, and in battle, you'll have a hand of four of them. You have the option to play a card from you hand (or more than one if you've got multiples), recall a monster from battle, discard one or more card from your hand (you'll draw back up to four on your next turn), or play an arcana card. There are twenty-two arcana cards in the game, any you only get them on special occasions, like completing dungeons. You can play each one once per battle, and they have big effects like healing your whole team, damaging everyone one the playing field, and so on. Finally, each battle happens pretty much in isolation, as your HP and that of your monsters is restored after each one, and all cards (except the single-use disposables) are returned to your deck.

 

The arcana are what the plot revolves around, too: you're some random guy who was brought into the dream world to find and reclaim these twenty-two arcana who are meant to keep things balanced in the world, but have been stolen by monsters and other evil-doers. It's a pretty bare-bones, generic plot, and it's clear that the developer's focus was on the mechanics. While you do navigate the dungeons in a fairly traditional top-down manner, you don't get to do so in either the overworld or towns. The over world is a series of static map screens with dots on them representing towns and dungeons, and the towns are each just a single screen with a few characters stood in a row waiting to be addressed. 

 

The game's presentation is something worth talking about, too. First, it's clear that the artists were having a lot of fun with their computers: there's lots of very charming 90s 3DCG renders for things like the map screens, and the establishing shots you see before entering a location. Furthermore, the dungeons and the background for the towns are just full of every effect they could think of: garish translucent cloud effects, big shiny lens flares, and more! It's ugly, but in a very charming way. What's not ugly, though, is the spritework use in the battle screens! All of the monsters are detailed and all have their own attack animations, and on top of that, because of how the battles work, they all also have front and back versions of all of their sprites! Another really nice detail is that even when it does the traditional RPG thing of recolouring enemies, there'll be some slight other edits done to each variant. For example, there's a series of enemies that are like little elemental spirits. There's a bunch of them in different colour palettes representing each element, but they also have the element they represent growing from the top of their heads, so they're not completely identical palette swaps.

 

Unfortunately, for all its charm and originality, there was a very specific point where Arcana Strikes wrecked all the goodwill it had built up. That point is the start of the fifth dungeon. It's off to a bad start already, as the first four were a dungeon for each of the four elements, and this fifth is just another water dungeon like the first one was. Then, to make things worse, the jester character, who appears every now and then to introduce new concepts to you, turns up and tells you that from now on, you'll have to maintain two seperate decks, and to make sure you actually do it, you'll now have to fight every boss twice, once with each of your decks. I tried to persevere, but this knowledge weighed heavy on my mind, and I just had no more interest in playing the game, realising that it was going to continue gradually becoming more and more labourious as it went on. If you've got the patience for this kind of thing, maybe you'll find Arcana Strikes to be a rewarding game in its ever-increasing complexity. But for me, it was just too much hassle.

Fire Pro Wrestling Gaiden: Burning Tornado (Saturn)

 So, you probably already know about Fire Pro Wrestling, the best series of wrestling videogames that there's ever been, right? Well, in 1994, Human, the then-makers of the series, released a wrestling game to arcades entitled Burning Tornado. Fire Pro Wrestling Gaiden: Burning Tornado released for Saturn a year later isn't a simple port, however, but a game that takes elements from the main series and from the arcade game to create a satisfying middle ground between the two.

 

The problem with the original arcade version of Burning Tornado was that it eschewed the Fire Pro series' trademark timing and skill-based playstyle in favour of a system that relied on hammering the attack buttons as fast as possible, as was the style of various arcade wrestling games that preceded it. The Saturn game brings back the Fire Pro style, with a few little changes to make for a faster, more arcadey experience than the main series' simulation style. And from this point on, you can assume that I'm only going to be talking about the Saturn game, not the arcade one.

 

In case you don't know how Fire Pro plays, the basics go thusly: when wrestlers walk into each other, they go into a lock up animation, and to perform a wrestling move, you press a direction and a button on the final frame of this animation. Furthermore, there's a few (typically three) different strengths of moves, and you have to wear your opponent down with weaker moves before moving up to the bigger, flashier attacks, lest you get countered like a fool. Blazing Tornado changes it up through simplification: there's only two strengths of move, and there's a health bar. You know you can start using your more powerful moves when you've got your opponent down to half health. You can win by pinfall or submission when your opponent's health is completely depleted.

 

With this mechanical simplification in mind, along with the drastically shrunken roster of characters, does Blazing Tornado have anything to offer fans of the main Fire Pro series? Yes! The smaller roster of characters means that instead of being constructed from parts in the series' trademark editor, they're all fully drawn sprites with bespoke animations and a ton of personality. There's actually a fair bit of variety in the tiny roster, too. There's a ruebenesque american wrestler, who's trademark move is repeatedly licking his opponent until they submit, but he's also a devout christian who prays for his post-match taunt. There's also a kung fu guy with very few actual throws, a couple of luchadors who differentiate from each other by working in rudo and technico styles respectively, and an androgynous bishonen from Sweden.

 

If you're a fan of wrestling in general and/or the Fire Pro games in particular, I think Blazing Tornado is definitely a worthwhile game to track down. It's got the satisfying gameplay of the Fire Pro games, with the big flashy presentation you might expect from the WWF games that were around at the time. On top of that, the simplification of the mechanics might even make it a nice little gateway game to introduce new fans to the series, so they can enjoy downloading hundreds of CAWs on 2017's Fire Pro Wrestling World and spending countless hours booking their fantasy promotions.

Gale Racer (Saturn)

 Though it wasn't exactly a launch title for the Saturn, coming about a week later, Gale Racer still feels like a title that was made purely to experiment with the hardware, then released just to boost the fledgling system's early library. It's a port of the 1991 arcade game Rad Mobile, whose main claim to fame is being technically the first game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog, as a decoration dangling from the rear view mirror.

 

It's not an exact port of Rad Mobile, having some changes and additions made, not all of which are positive, like how there are now loading screens between stages. Most of the changes are small and not worth noting, but a big one is that while the stages themselves are still made using sprite scaling as in the arcade, all the cars are now polygonal models. This mostly looks fine, though there are occasional moments where it looks like the cars and the road exist in completely different worlds to each other. 

 

In fact, sprite scaling is, more than most forms of videogame graphics, an optical illusion. Two dimensional sprites are shown changing size very quickly so that they look like they're moving in a three dimensional space. The illusion frequntly breaks down in Gale Racer, though. It looks fine when there's a lot of stuf at the side of the road, but when there isn't, it starts to look a lot like you're driving down a rollercoaster track suspended in a strange empty void.

 

As for how it plays, it's kind of a mixed bag. Mostly a bag filled with bad stuff, but there's some good in there. For a start, the car feels very strange to steer. I think it was a mistake giving a sprite scaling racing game a first person viewpoint, as it really feels like the car doesn't steer as much as it does swivel on a central point underneath it. It's something that takes a lot of getting used to. Collisions are another problem, in that they're incredibly inconsistent. If you hit another vehicle, you might pass through it, you might lose a bit of speed, or you might come to a complete stop for several seconds. There doesn't seem to be any solid determining factor as to which of the three things might happen.

 

There's a couple of weird things, too. Like how you have buttons for activating your headlights and windscreen wipers. They can only be used on certain stages, and you have to use them for those entire stages or you won't be able to see anything. Since you have no choice in the matter, why aren't these functions automatic? Very strange. Also, though you're overtaking cars the whole time, this seems to mainly be an aesthetic thing, as you're really racing against the time limit, and it doesn't seem possible to finish the game within that limit without also passing every car. Furthermore, there's times where the logic of the race takes some time off. 

 

The biggest example of this is one stage that's conceptally very cool, though it's also very frustrating to get through. Basically, there's an entire stage where the only other racer is the homicidally agressive driver of an articulated lorry, who you race against along a long winding mountain road with a sheer drop off of one side. There's no chance of seeing this guy on any earlier or later stages, and he always appears in this one, no matter what position you hold in the the race.

 

I actually own a copy of Gale Racer, or at least I did at some point. Maybe I still do? Either way, the only reason I bought it is because it was dirt cheap, and I wanted more import Saturn games with no language barrier. This was also in those ancient times before Saturn emulation was as reliable as it is now, of course. In this day and age, though, you probably are going to be playing your Saturn games through emulation, and there's many much, much better racing games on there. Some with fan translations, even! So don't bother playing this one.

Blast Wind (Saturn)

 I went into this game with high expectations, coming as it does from Technosoft, makers of Thunder Force IV, a strong candidate for the title of best shooting game on the Mega Drive, a system with an absurd amount of high quality shooting games. While it doesn't live up to its legendary forebear, it's still an excellent game.

 

It's a vertically scrolling shooter that's surprisingly simple for the time it came out: there's no elaborate scoring system like you'd see in Cave's contemporary output, nore are there the many different playable craft with multiple attack options like you'd see in Psikyo's games. You just get one ship, with two kinds of normal shot (a powerful straight-ahead weapon, and a weaker, more spread out one), and the customary screen-clearing bombs. I wonder if this simplicity in an age when shooting games were going through a lot of sudden evolution is why the location tests for the unreleased arcade version failed? (Of course, I was emulating this game, and its arcade origins are so obvious that on more than one occasion I instinctively pressed the 5 key on my laptop, as if I was playing in MAME and needed to insert another virtual coin!)

 

That's not to say that Blast Wing doesn't have any new ideas, though. There's two big ones, the most noticable of which is the way every stage splits into two paths, chosen by pressing a button by nudging it with your ship. Though you go through the same stages no matter which way you go, there are two different boss fights for each stage, and the paths do vary in difficulty enough that beginner players would do well to learn what effect pressing the button or not has on their chances of survival. (And of course, advanced players will want to try their hand at playing through both versions of each stage no matter what).

 

The other big idea is one that seems inconsequential when you first encounter it, but turns out to be both interesting and important as you play the game more. When you collect a power up, as well as the usual effect, you also get a couple of seconds of invincibility, as well as a big powerful lightning attack that extends from your ship horizontally and cancels enemy bullets, as well as one-shotting most regular foes and dealing massive damage to bosses. It not only encourages players to chase power ups further up the screen to where the enemies are (as opposed to timidly waiting near the bottom for the power ups to come to them), but it also introduces a strategic element regarding when to collect them: if a couple of power ups appear on an empty screen, do you collect them there and then while the coast is clear, or wait until enemies appear so you can quickly wipe them out with the lightning?

 

It would be remiss to talk about a Technosoft game without mentioning how it looks and sounds, and luckily, their reputation is untarnished in Blast Wind. The backgrounds are really nice, full of cool little details. I really love stage two in particular, which takes place high above a huge city, which is far below in the background, with a much closer layer showing various industrial-looking platforms and walkways of some kind, and there's tiny little pixel people walking around them! There's lots of little details like that that make it feel more like you're flying over an actual world and add a lot to the atmosphere. The soundtrack is also really cool. Not as good as the one in TFIV, but again, that's one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time, and an absurdly high bar to clear. But yeah, the music's good. (I'm not good at talking about music though!)

 

Obviously, this is yet another Saturn game that had a low print run and fetches ludicrously high prices online. Hopefully someday, SEGA will start rereleasing Saturn games on modern consoles, but until they do, Blast Wind is definitely one that deserves a permanent place in you SSF/YabaSanshiro disc images folder.

Hang On GP (Saturn)

 There's a couple of things I need to say to start this review off. The first is that you'll probably notice from the screenshots that the emulation for it is far from perfect, and there's a fair bit of graphical glitching. However, it does seem to run at full speed, and plays totally fine, as far as I can tell. The other thing is that it's also known as Hang On GP 95 and Hang On GP 96. Yes, they are all the same game.

 

When I remembered recently that there was a 3D Hang On game for the Saturn that I'd never played, I was excited. I'm a big fan of Hang On, Super Hang On, and even the minor oddity Hang On Jr., a port of the original to lower-powered hardware, presumably for arcade operators on a tight budget, and Was interested to see a version with some nice mid-90s low poly graphics. I was pretty disappointed, then, when I loaded up Hang On GP and rather than the old formula of racing against the clock to reach checkpoints on long, linear road tracks, you are instead in a more standard racing scenario, racing laps around looped tracks against other riders.

 

It's not a bad game, though. It's fast and it plays fine (though considering that it's a Saturn original rather than an arcade port, you'd think they would have made it control a little better with a D-pad), and it looks great, especially considering how early a release it is. There's a lot of pop-up, especially on the city stage, but that's forgivable. The aesthetics are really nice: it takes the stereotypse of "SEGA blue skies" and really runs with it. The stages take place on a tropical island (complete with a row of moai heads!), the Great Wall of China, and a generic modern city, and they all look great, and like places you'd really want to go to.

 

Hang On GP isn't a great game, and I'd even go as far as to say it was a disappointment. But it's not a bad game, either. I do vaguely remember it being universally panned in magazines at the time, but that's definitely understandable: the early days of the Saturn had a lot of similar racing games, a lot of which were first party like this one, and almost all of them were not only better than Hang On GP, but they also had the allure of being arcade ports in their favour.

Hissatsu! (Saturn)

 Based on an incredibly long-running perod drama, Hissatsu! sees you taking control of a group of four assassins (or rather, picking two of them out of the group) and traversing platform stages that have their targets at the end. Each of the four fights with a different weapon: sword, fists, poisoned acupuncture needles, and a specially-treated shamisen string. Interestingly, I found that the last two, despite having the least conventional weapons, were also the easiest to use. The needles guy throws them for his special attack, and it uses so little of his special meter that he's basically a long range one hit kill character most of the time, and the string guy's normal atack is weaker than all the others, but it's also slightly longer range. And since a lot of the enemies are "activated" by you coming close to them, range is pretty important.

 

The game istelf seems a little anachronistic: other than the CD audio, the large colour pallete, and the big pieces of pixel art used for cutscenes, there's not really anything on display here that couldn't have been done on the Mega Drive, and even those three things could have been done when you bring the Mega CD into the picture. I remember this being said as a criticism for various Saturn and Playstation games in some of the lower quality magazines of the nineties, but it was always in reference to games that would have been impossible on the Mega Drive, like Guardian Heroes or Street Fighter ALpha 3. But Hissatsu! really does look and feel like a game that's a few years older than it is. I'm not saying this as a negative, though, that's just how it is. It even uses the same control layout as a lot of first party Mega Drive games: A for special attacks, B for normal attacks, and C for jump!

 

It's a pretty traditional 2D platformer all round, you go from left to right killing enemies, avoiding traps, and so on, until you get to the boss, then you kill them. An interesting little stylistic twist is that because the player characters are assassins, the people they're out to kill might be politically powerful, but that doesn't mean that they're formidable combatants. As a result, the first stage ends with you killing a defenceless old rich guy with no problems at all, and subsquent stages end with a fight against each target's personal bodyguard, before you do the final deed yourself to end the stage.

 

At the most basic level, it's a fun game that also looks and sounds pretty nice, but it's also got a lot of flaws. There's little annoying things like how it really feels like you should be able to drop down to lower levels from thin platforms, like in Revenge of Shinobi, but you can't. That's only a little one, but it's annoying every time I forget and try to do it. And there's worse things, like how the game quickly ramps up the difficulty, and does so in ways that feel unfair.

 

 For example, there are enemies that split into three enemies of equal power if you don't kill them before they get close to you, and even worse, in a Rick Dangerous-style display of hatefulness, a few stages in, certain kinds of enemy gain the ability to just suddenly appear right next to you out of nowhere. So you either meticulously memorise the exact pixels that summon them when you step past them, or you spend tedious extra time slowly shuffling along step-by-step so that you don't accidently just run into an attack out of nowhere. There's even an element of randomness to contend with, as there's a chance that enemies will drop a caltrop when you kill them. Most of the time, this is fine: just pay attention and jump over them when they appear. But sometimes it happens in a tight corridor with no room overhead, and you have no choice but to walk into the caltrop and take damage.

 

Despite its flaws, Hissatsu! isn't a bad game, and I think a patient player who can get into the right mood to appreciate the game's atmosphere will have a pretty good time with it. The only problem is that they'd have to be very patient, a lot more patient than I am, unfortunately.

Dragonball Z: Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu (Saturn)

 Back around the turn of the century, when Dragonball Z was just starting to air on British TV, me and my friends were a bunh of teenagers with no money, so we mostly relied on the various software pirates in our vilage to supply us with videogames. Unfortunately, the only Dragonball game any of them had available was Dragonball GT Final Bout on the Playstation. Despite having great-looking gouraud-shaded graphics, Final Bout was almost unplayable garbage. Still, we played a ton of it anyway, and I even remember one weekend we didn't see one of our group because he'd decided to stay home and try unlocking a whole bunch of characters by completing it on hard mode nine consecutive times without losing a round. The method he was following turned out to be an April Fools joke from a popular fansite. Anyway, we longed for better DBZ games, and in the ads for importers that were printed in magazines at the time, the title "Dragonball Z Legends" always stood out. We had no other details on this game other than that it existed, it was too expensive for any of us to buy, and it had to be better than what we had.

 

Cut to about a decade later, and I've recently gotten a 4-in-1 cartridge for my Saturn, and I'm shopping around online for cheap imports that I can actually play. Amazingly, I find a copy of that mysterious Dragonball Z game for less than ten pounds, so I buy it straight away! I wasn't sure what to expect, but nonetheless, what I got was a pretty big surprise. Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a fighting game, though it's unlike any other fighting game I've ever played. For a start, most of your attacks don't damage your opponent at all. Instead, there's a momentum meter at the bottom of the screen, and attack moves it in your favour. When it goes all the way to one side, a member of the team that has the advantage will perform a super move, doing significant damage (usually about a third of their total health) to one of the members of the opposing team.

 

I should clarify the basic structure of the fights before I go any further. The fights are two-sided, with up to three combatants on each team, and they take place in a massive 3D space. You only control one team member at a time, though you can switch between them whenever you like with the left shoulder button, and you're always facing one of your opponents, among whom you can switch with the right shoulder button. You don't really control your movement in a traditional manner, instead up and down move you towards or away from your opponent. Your teammates you're not controlling will be controlled by AI. As well as just winning the fights, you can also unlock secret characters for the two player versus mode by re-enacting specific events from the show: having characters die in the right order, or having them be killed by specific moves, and so on. 

 

The whole re-enacting thing is a little too fiddly for me to have bothered with, to be honest, and I wasn't planning on playing versus mode anyway. However, of all the Dragonball Z games to do it in, this is probably the right one. The very unusual way it plays is probably the most faithful attempt I've ever seen of emulating the very specific way in which Dragonball Z fights play out. It even goes so far as having every attack deplete your ki meter, so you have to charge it up pretty often, just like what happens in the show! Despite how that sounds, it really does work in the game's favour, honest.

 

Dragonball Z Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a game I definitely recommend to anyone who's ever been a fan of Dragonball Z, and who doesn't mind playing something that's a little out of the ordinary and takes some getting used to. I guess the Xenoverse games and Battle of Z are the closest modern equivalent, but for all their graphical splendor, they don't capture the feel of the show in the way that this game does.

Off-World Interceptor Extreme (Saturn)

This is a game that got a lot of coverage around the time of the Saturn's European launch, though I don't remember ever hearing of anyone actually owning or even playing it. There's a few reviews on GameFAQs, that are all well over a decade old and incredibly poorly written, even by GameFAQs standards, and they all absolutely hate the game and everything about it. Which strikes me as odd, since the game isn't terrible by any degree, nor is it even well-known enough for any supposed low quality to be received opinion, either. But one review even went as far as to say that Off-World Interceptor Extreme was so bad that Superman 64 looked good next to it.

It's not like this is some great forgotten classic, either, of course. But it is pretty good. You play as a "trash man", which is a kind of futuristic bounty hunter, employed by some military-looking people to chase down and kill space-criminals, and if you happen to also kill tons of space-cops along the way, that's fine too. Yeah, I'm not sure what kind of organisation is employing you, except maybe some kind of incredibly well-funded space-anarchist vigilante group? But anyway, you go to various planets in your futuristic gun-car and kill lots of space-cops and occasionally a space criminal, then spending your bounty on new cars and upgrades.

"Pretty good" is a perfect assessment of this game, in fact: driving isn't perfect but it's fun enough and goes at a decent speed. Shooting enemies and seeing them explode is kind of satisfying, et cetera. It wouldn't have been a wise purchase at full price even in 1995, but if you pick up a copy cheap in 2019, you'll get an hour or two's worth of fun out of it. (I did check ebay, and the prices for this game vary wildly: from £2 up to £50!)

Of course, it's a western-developed game from the early days of CD consoles, so there's the obligatory live action cutscenes between each stage, during which you're given your missions and the higher-ranked officers gradually warm up to you and so on. It all looks like a very low budget TV show, like most live action FMV did, bet there is one small difference that makes OWIE's cutscenes stand out: self-awareness. I don't know if it was the intention to do this from the start, or if the developers saw the footage and took and instant dislike to it, but all the cutscenes has imposed onto them the silhouettes of two guys in armchairs, watching the proceedings and making jokes at the game's expense, in a manner obviously inspired by Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Occasionally, they do even get some actual funny lines, too!

Off-World Interceptor Extreme is really the kind of game that natually gravitates towards being forgotten: it's nothing special, but it's not really a bad game, either. It feels a lot older than it is, too, despite the stages being made of texture-mapped polygons, too (though all the things in the stages are sprites): replace them with a good-old stripey road like you'd see in a typical sprite scaling game and take out the cutscenes, and this is a game that could totally have appeared on consoles five years prior, or in arcades ten years prior. That's not to say it's bad, but at the launch of a shiny new console generation, it probably got buried under all the games that were offering something genuiniely new.