Humpday Gaming: O.N.E (PSX)
And lo it did happen that in some issue in the nineteen of nineties, the masters of endless hype, Gamefan Magazine, did publish an article of a game that was to be the second coming of Christ himself. A game in which all the planets and heavens would align to bring forth an action game of such supreme power that no one on Earth would be able to look away from it. Graphics so divine that even that jaded forty year-old guy that worked at Gamestop would bow down at their sheer power. Gameplay that redefined just what mortals thought of a 3D action game. It was all about to come together for a single game. And that game would be called: O.N.E.
And it sucked like no other.
Hype is an amazing thing, and no one did it better in the 90s than Gamefan magazine. We’ve discussed Gamefan before, so I don’t think any more needs to be said of just how good Gamefan was at getting all the kids into a orgasmic froth over some piece of shit game. O.N.E was no exception. Gamefan threw out massive spreads dedicated to it as soon as a developer so much as farted, and then went on to proclaim it as “The best action game ever made” in its final preview. Likening it to what Contra fans had been waiting for since Super Contra. Those are strong words indeed. Needless to say, being the huge Contra fan I am, I was pretty damn excited. Right to the point where O.N.E became a day one purchase down at the local Best Buy. As soon as I was home and managed to rip open the CD case in a flurry of excitement, I sat down to what was to be the action game that Contra: Shattered Soldier tried so hard to be a couple years earlier (We’ll get to that game soon enough). This was gonna be the real fucking deal. O.N.E was about ready to rock my ass through my brain and back again. Hell fuckin’ YEAH, SON.
An hour later I wondered if I had been too hard on the game about a half hour earlier when I threw my controller at the wall, kicked the Playstation across he room, and then tried my best to repackage the game so that maybe Best Buy would let me exchange it for some other game. In the time I played that game, I realized the mistake I had once again made at listening to anything Gamefan magazine published. What was supposed to be the revolutionizing of action games quickly became an unplayable mess. Full of non-stop frustration thanks to absolutely horrendous design flaws that apparently Gamefan never decided needed mention. Gamefan magazine, you are a god damn son of a bitch.
So what exactly went wrong? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
O.N.E is set in the future, and you are some random angry-looking guy that wants revenge probably. I don’t much remember the story, other than the fact that everything looked really dark all the fucking time. This was also in a time when every game developer’s pinnacle of design was to recreate the Blade Runner city in a game. So everywhere you looked you saw crazy cityscapes, hover cars, neon signs floating around, and weird retro-future styling. To its credit, they pulled it off pretty well. It was a great first impression. It’s a shame it ended as soon as you hit the start button.
The game was played in a fixed camera third-person view. Sort of like Crash Bandicoot. But really, really bad.
The first sign that O.N.E probably wasn’t gonna be so hot came from the main character himself. He was as generic as a knock-off G.I Joe from Big Lots, and always had this sneer on his face that made him look like he was always holding back a particularly large dump (if you ever get to see the box somewhere, he’s plastered all over it in all his glorious 3D MAX Pro glory). It made it seem as if he was constantly trying to get somewhere to get relief from the massive sea turtle breaching his asshole, but everyone just kept shooting at him to prevent him from getting somewhere so he could relieve himself. Perhaps in the future, no one is allowed to shit. Who knows.
One thing is for sure about the future though, and that is that no one can control worth a shit. Moving your guy around was a hit or miss kind of thing. Mostly in the way that if you ever had to do any sort of precise jumping, you were fucked in every way. The first stage’s section where you have to climb up a series of platforms from a third person view is an excellent example. He never seems to want to to jump or attach himself to the things that you point him at. It was always a constant, infuriating fight to get that bastard to go anywhere. And it never helps when you’ve got enemies and bullets flying at you like angry bees. It was just a fucking mess.
This is sort of your awesome special screen-clearing special move you could pull off.
On the bright side, one thing Gamefan did get right was the game’s visuals. The game simply looked awesome, thanks to the newfound ability to stream data straight from the disc. This allowed for far more dynamic stages and action, which really hadn’t been the case for most games that just loaded once before a stage, and that was that. O.N.E would actually continue streaming in models/textures/effects right off the disc, while flushing out the stuff it didn’t need from memory. In short, a stage could be set in several different locations, feature a ton of different enemies, and pull off some amazing effects all the way through without nary a load time. That was pretty impressive. Too bad playing the game just sort of made me want to lay down and die.
These pictures don't illustrate it well, but the game had some really impressive graphics going on for its time
Besides great graphics, this was just another example of why you should never get caught up in a game’s hype. And honestly, even if O.N.E wasn’t a steaming pile, it could have never lived up to Gamefan’s heavenly praise of it. Sure, it may have got stupid kids like me to run out and buy it no questions asked, but it only ended up hurting the developers in the end. As now not only could they not live up to the hype, they got a bunch of people to buy a game that they didn’t like, and sure as hell couldn’t take back to Best Buy to exchange because they already opened it.
Yes, I’m still bitter.
Damn you, Gamefan.
