ThePlayStationwas Sony’s very first video game console, born out of a botched partnership with Nintendo that was supposed to lead to a hybrid cartridge-CD console. Nintendo bailed on that pursuit to makethe CD-I and its terrible Zelda gameswith Phillips, leaving Sony with exclusive ownership.
Obviously, the PlayStation ended up getting some truly excellent, monumental games, becoming a thorn in Nintendo’s side in the process, but that’s not all that was on the newborn platform.
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The bigger the audience, the better.
For whatever reason, the PlayStation was also home to a variety of exceptionally weird, wacky, and campy games, mostly from Japanese developers. I’m just hypothesizing here, but perhaps Sony wanted to take a scattershot approach with its new console’s software and opened the proverbial floodgates to anyone and everyone with an idea.
Whether you think these games are good or bad is immaterial; the fact of the matter is that they’re… distinct, to put the matter politely.
10LSD Dream Emulator
All The Trip, None Of The Drugs
They say that dreams are a portal into the human subconscious, a window through which we can glimpse our deepest, most abstract machinations.
Obviously, there’s no way to actually glimpse someone else’s dreams, but one ambitious Japanese artist sought a way to create a rough approximation of them. The result was LSD Dream Emulator. Despite what the title may imply, there are no drugs involved here. Probably.
ThisJapan-only releaseis really only a “game” in the sense that it is interacted with on a PlayStation. For all intents and purposes, it’s more of a digital art piece.
There’s no story, nor much in the way of gameplay or mechanics.All you do is boot it up and load into a random spot in a gigantic, interconnected dream world.From there, you have ten minutes to just… meander around. It’s a dream, it’s there to be experienced.
Once your ten minutes are up, the game notes how the dream went, then changes up its visuals and textures a little bit for the next one. All you do is explore and see just how off-putting and psychedelic things can get.
9Incredible Crisis
Spies, And Monsters, And Aliens, Oh My
Incredible Crisis
You’d think just arranging a basic schedule with your family on a particular day wouldn’t be that difficult, but life is rarely so accommodating.
Sometimes someone gets a parking ticket,sometimes someone forgets their lucky shirt in the dryer, and sometimes someone gets kidnapped by terroristsand forced to steal a solid-gold piggy bank from a bank vault. It happens more often than you’d think, especially in Incredible Crisis.
This silly game follows the unfortunate adventures of the Tanamatsuri family, who all need to be home early for grandma’s birthday. Unfortunately, the dad falls out of a skyscraper, the mom gets abducted by terrorists, the son gets shrunk, and the daughter has a run-in with space aliens. All of this manifests as a series of exceptionally silly mini-games, some of which are surprisingly elaborate.
The aforementioned piggy bank heist has you trying to do an Indiana Jones swap with the piggy and the mom’s bag of groceries, the dad gets stuck answering trivia questions in an ambulance, and the daughter has to play Simon with an alien mothership, to give a few examples.
8Harmful Park
A Cute ‘Em Up Classic
Following the success of shoot ‘em up games like Gradius in the late 80s, early 90s, a sub-genre called “cute ‘em ups” emerged. These games, such as Parodius, had the same basic gameplay as your average sidescrolling shoot ‘em up, but with deliberately wacky, silly visuals and unusual weapons.
One good example of this sub-genre outside of Parodius is Harmful Park, which I assume is named as such because it’s set in a theme park that is dangerous. It’s very on the nose.
Throughout the game’s six stages,you’re pitted against a variety of theme park attractions gone mad, such as swinging boat rides, clockwork puppets, inflatable mascots, and more. Your initial weapons are the usual straight-shooting laser guns, but you can acquire other, stranger implements like giant ice cream cones and boomerang jelly beans.
There are also a couple of extra mini-games bundled with the regular arcade mode, such as a two-player tennis game, a high-speed obstacle-avoiding race, and a four-player tank battle mode. Compared to the main game, the mini-games are shockingly normal.
7Bishi Bashi Special
Mini-Game Collections Can Be As Weird As They Want
Mini-game collections tend to be pretty strange games by default. After all, the point of a mini-game collection is just to give you a variety of fun little games to throw yourself into. They don’t really need to have recurring characters or be thematically consistent. Even so, there’s something about Bishi Bashi Special that’s even stranger than your usual mini-game collection.
Bishi Bashi Special is a home port collection of mini-games from the Bishi Bashi series of arcade games, including Bishi Bashi Champ, Super Bishi Bashi Champ, and Handle Champ.
Playing the game runs you through an arcade-style gauntlet of randomized mini-game selections, with games lasting from around 5 seconds to a minute. It’s kind of like WarioWare, but with longer-lasting games and somehow even less coherence.
As for what games are on tap, well, throw a dart. We’ve got shaking soda cans, mobster shooting galleries, giant monsters, circus elephants, a salaryman dodging obstacles on his walk to work, eating ramen, and much more. The games are not for you to understand; they’re to be played.
6Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman
Why Aren’t There More Samurai Cowboys?
Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman
It’s a tale as old as time: take one cool character archetype and put it with another, and you maybe might possibly get something cooler. Or, at the very least, you’ll get something interesting. For example, if you were to take a chivalrous Japanese samurai and combine that with a gunslinging cowboy of the Wild West, you’d get Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman.
This action game stars the self-proclaimed “Super Ultra Sexy Hero” Zan, formerly a Wild West sheriff named Johnny, who learned the ways of the samurai from a Japanese swordmaster. If that title didn’t tell you how full of himself he is, don’t worry, his official theme song, “Johnny No More,” will.
Zan fights off ninjas and monsters with a katana in one hand and a pistol in the other, with long, flawless combos speeding up his attacks and lengthening his attack range. It’s not particularly deep as far as action games go, but it’s got a distinctive flavor of camp that I can’t help but love. Zan is kind of likeif Dante was a huge loser, and I love him for it.
5Heart Of Darkness
Not The 1899 Novella
Heart of Darkness
I think everyone had at least one dream of flying off into space and fighting aliens when they were kids, Jimmy Neutron-style. A kid inventor, inexplicably armed with advanced technology, standing against a mysterious evil alien force; it’s classic 90s nostalgia. Though I think if I ever did end up in a situation like that, I’d rather it not be like Heart of Darkness, because I’d probably get killed.
Heart of Darkness (no relation to the Joseph Conrad novel or Apocalypse Now) is a cinematic platformer from French dev Amazing Studio. It was supervised by Eric Chahi, developer of Out of this World, and has a similar gameplay feel.
As boy genius Andy, you fly off to another planet to confront the shadowy force that’s kidnapped your dog, zapping creatures of pure darkness with a plasma rifle or banishing them with magical energy balls.
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What makes this game distinctive is that it’s quite punishing. Not only is it exceptionally easy to die, but the game doesn’t sugarcoat it when it happens. Andy gets eaten, squished, vaporized, and other unpleasant fates you wouldn’t expect a grade schooler to be subjected to.
4Evil Zone
Like An Anime You Woke Up To At 2:00 AM
Did you ever fall asleep with the TV on Cartoon Network when you were a kid, and wake up to some random no-name anime at like 2 in the morning? That’s kind of like what playing Evil Zone is like;every single bizarre late-night anime you only barely remember rolled into a single, cacophonous package.
Evil Zone is a fighting game with a cast pulled from just about every anime and TV trope you may think of. You have magical girls, space bounty hunters, sword-wielding schoolgirls, an onmyoji in a business suit, and a Metal Heroes knock-off. Each of these characters’ arcade ladders comes with “episode previews” between fights, complete with title cards and theme songs.
That’s already pretty out there, but even stranger is the gameplay. Despite being a fighting game, one of the most notoriously complex genres, Evil Zone only uses two buttons, attack and guard. It’s a constant battle of attrition between smacking and keeping yourself from getting smacked, interspersed with lengthy and elaborate special animations.
3Planet Dob
A Playable Music Video
I could probably count the number of times a band or musician produced their own game on one hand, withstrange choices like 50 Cent: Bulletproofspringing to mind. This isn’t just a western practice, though, as evidenced by the game Planet Dob, which was produced by a Japanese multi-genre band called Date of Birth. They even released an album with the same name as the game.
Planet Dob is a little difficult to quantify, but if I had to call it something, it’d be a music-centric adventure game.Every level gives you more or less free rein of a large city, in which you can explore and talk to people.Doing favors for the citizenry earns you Bits, which you need all of to open up a mini-game that needs to be cleared to get you to the next level.
Planet Dob has some exceptionally wacky visual elements, coupling pre-rendered backgrounds with wacky, wobbly character models. The game’s iconography is heavily reminiscent of music videos produced by Date of Birth, and as you collect Bits, the backing track becomes more elaborate with more instruments. It’s like a living music video you piece together yourself.
2Vib-Ribbon
Make Your Own Rhythm Platformer
Vib-Ribbon
These days, the idea of a game that can import your music to generate gameplay is cool, but not especially novel. Back in the 90s, though, such a thing was completely unheard of, especially on a console. The PlayStation could read and play music CDs, but it couldn’t do anything with them game-wise. At least, unless you were playing Vib-Ribbon, that is.
Vib-Ribbon has you guiding a rabbity creature named Vibri through a series of obstacles to the beat of a backing track. All of the game’s graphics are rendered in simple squiggly lines, almost like an old screensaver, with Vibri contorting and jumbling herself when you take damage.
What was especially cool about this game was that you could pop a music CD into your PlayStation, and it would generate a new obstacle course from it. Normally, this wouldn’t be possible, as the console’s RAM couldn’t accommodate it, butbecause the graphics are just squiggly lines, there’s enough internal memory to run the game while swapping out the disc.It’s both a nifty gameplay gimmick and an impressive showcase of technological innovation.
You Can Already Hear The Theme Song
In the mid-90s, the Japanese branch of PepsiCo launched a new mascot to hype up audiences for Pepsi Cola:Pepsiman, the mighty vanquisher of thirst, running to the scene of a hot day to deliver a cold can of the good stuff.As part of this sizable promotional campaign, a tie-in PlayStation game was made on a rather… stringent budget.
The Pepsiman game is an endless runner platformer in which the titular hero has to run across cities as quickly as he can to deliver a cold can of Pepsi, usually followed by runningawayfrom some manner of gigantic hazard. It’s a pretty hard game, but at least you get to hear that awesome theme song riff throughout it.
Between every level of the game, you’re treated to a brief live-action cutscene showing some random American dude sitting in his living room, scarfing Pepsi and chips, and watching you play the game. Despite being a Japan-only release, all the characters speak English exclusively for some reason.
Also, fun fact, the 3D character models for this game were created by a young Kotaro Uchikoshi, the guy who would go on to design, direct, and write the Zero Escape series.
