The PS1 era is enjoying a nostalgia resurgence, with one of the most anticipated games of the near future being Final Fantasy VII Remake and Sony surprising us this week with a new take on cult classic platformer MediEvil. We’re not sure what’s behind this trend, the smash success of the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro remasters surely played a part, but as old farts who can clearly remember buying Sony’s first crack at a console back in the 1990s it feels good. If you never had a chance to explore the vast and somewhat bizarre library the OG PlayStation had to offer, here are our picks for eleven other games that we’d like to see brought back for another chance.
Bushido Blade
The runaway success of Final Fantasy VII gave Square unprecedented freedom – and cash – and they used it in super interesting ways on the PlayStation. 1997’s Bushido Blade was their take on the one-on-one fighting genre, but it dispensed with tropes like life bars and time limits to create a tense, compelling experience where a single strike could mean death. In Bushido Blade, players freely roamed 3-D arenas and could target individual body parts, chain together attacks, and even violate the code of the samurai by throwing dirt in a foe’s eyes or striking while their back was turned.
Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
Originally released as part of the Japanese Metal Gear Solid: Integral package and then as a stand-alone disc in Europe and the States, VR Missions took the training elements of Hideo Kojima’s massive next-generation hit and transformed them into bite-sized chunks of stealth action goodness. The game shipped with a staggering 300 different stages that tested Solid Snake’s infiltration abilities to the max against a variety of foes, including giant-sized guards and more. Imagine if Konami cashed in on Mario Maker mania with a modern-day upgrade that let you design your own VR missions for other FoxHound recruits to test themselves against? It’s like printing money.
Colony Wars
British development studio Psygnosis had a hit on the PS1 with the WipeOut franchise, but some of their lesser-known titles were equally great. Colony Wars, the first installment of which was released in 1997, was the pre-eminent space combat simulator of its era. As a pilot for the League of Free Worlds, you engaged in 3D dogfights in deep space, using a panoply of unique weapons to take down enemy crafts. A unique branching narrative system meant that you could fail individual missions and be brought down different storyline paths, giving it and its sequels (which could certainly be bundled together into one title) tons of replayability.
No One Can Stop Mr. Domino
Japanese developers Artdink are well known for the absurd themes they bring to their games, and they enjoyed a brief resurgence on the PlayStation with some quirky entries. One of the best-known is 1998’s No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, a puzzle game unlike anything we’ve ever played. You control an anthropomorphic domino as he traipses through a stage, leaving a trail of dominoes behind him. The goal is to create an unbroken path that hits as many special “trick tiles” as possible before your stamina runs out. It’s remarkably tough, as hordes of obstacles block your way and trigger zany effects on your poor domino pal.
Fluid
As we’ve seen, video game consoles have grown beyond simple game platforms to host all kinds of software. The PSX shipped with a built-in media player that would create polygonal visualizations based on music it played, but developers experimented with other interesting non-game concepts. Fluid, developed by Opus and released only in Japan and Europe, was part Ecco the Dolphin and part Ableton Live. In Cruise mode, you guided your dolphin avatar around the ocean picking up beats and loops, which you could then assemble in the Groove Editor to create audio environments to swim through, adjusting volume and tempo based on your behavior. Super cool, very weird, and deserves another chance at life.
Jumping Flash
One of the oddest first-wave PSX games, Jumping Flash was a platformer like nothing we’d ever seen before. As the pilot of a robotic rabbit – a “Rabbot” if you will – you vault around Crater Planet collecting jet pods to defeat the malevolent Baron Aloha. Unlike other platformers of its generation, Jumping Flash played out in strict first-person, requiring you to use your shadow to line up your triple jumps and end up on safe ground. Widely regarded as the first true 3D platformer, it inspired a pair of sequels but would shine with some visual updates and new content on the PS4.
Jade Cocoon
One of the things that made the original PlayStation such a hot piece of hardware for the hardcore was the massive number of Japanese RPGs available on it. Coming from the 16 bit era when only a fraction were localized for American audiences, PSX owners had nearly more games than they could handle. Genki’s unusual Jade Cocoon can be seen as a precursor to monster catching hits like Pokemon, as protagonist Levant travels through dense forests to capture bug-like Minions that fight for him and can be bred and fused into even more powerful forms.
LSD: Dream Emulator
One of the most notoriously weird video games ever released, Osamu Sato’s LSD: Dream Emulator still feels unique and distinctive twenty years after it hit stores. Based on dream journals recorded by game designer Hiroko Nishikawa, each session drops you into a surreal world of exploration. Sessions last about ten minutes, and players are limited in their ability to interact with the different environments. After you finish a “dream,” it’s plotted on an emotional graph along axes of “Upper”, “Downer”, “Static” and “Dynamic.” It’s nearly impossible to find on the resale market and a modern version would be a dream come true.
Carnage Heart
Another Artdink joint, this one takes a common premise of video games – piloting a giant murder robot – and makes it truly unusual. The Overkill Engines of Carnage Heart can’t be controlled directly by the player. Instead, you create programs using a visual flowchart editor that determine how they behave in different situations, then let them loose on the battlefield to see how good your programming skills are. This system was so complex that the game shipped with a 30 minute video tutorial! It was a very left-field concept for the late 1990s, but gamers today have more tolerance for indirect controls and a modern-looking remake with some quality of life improvements could be very cool.
Incredible Crisis
Developers Polygon Magic have a wild portfolio that includes racing games, 3D brawlers, and football simulators. But the weirdest thing they ever had a hand in was 1999’s Incredible Crisis, which follows the four hapless members of a Japanese family as they try to get birthday presents for their grandmother. Each storyline plays out in a sequence of absurd mini-games that have you snowboarding, dancing, giving erotic massages, and being abducted by aliens, linked together with ridiculous cutscenes. An awesome soundtrack by the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra ties the whole thing together.
Tail Of The Sun
One of the most polarizing titles in PlayStation history, 1997’s Tail Of The Sun was a bold experiment in emergent storytelling that was decades ahead of its time. In the game, players control a caveman who wakes up in their village. From there, it’s entirely up to you – the game delivers no directions or tutorials at all. You quickly find that you need to eat and sleep, and you can forage for cookies (with appearances licensed from a Japanese bakery) and hunt animals to do so. The unstated goal of Tail Of The Sun is to kill enough woolly mammoths that you can build a tower of their tusks that reaches all the way to the sun. Spoiler: easier said than done. Modern survival games owe a huge debt to this oddity.
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