NOCLIP Pocket E56 - Gorgon Conclusions - Killing Zone

Sensational 3-D Podcast! Hooooo boy, welcome back to the podcast.
This week, as part of Fanbruary, we’re talking about Killing Zone,
a PS1 fighting game starring some conspicuously public domain
monsters. You might ask, is this game good? That’s a really fair
question. No, it’s not great, for sure, but what it does provide is
nostalgia (and at least one pretty cool idea, but I’ll get to that
later). Sure, maybe your favorite games are actually good, but I
bet all of you have at least one game that gives you that warm
fuzzy feeling from remembering days in your childhood playing a
game you got as a gift, from a bargain bin, or that you rented.
This is that kind of a game: not one we’d recommend going back to
if you haven’t played it, we’ve done that for you, but one that
reminds you of the Glovers or Rascals of the world. As a bonus, the
game also includes a CPU training mode called “Auto Mode” that is
actually a cool idea, even if it fails in execution, so you’ll get
a little regular game design talk out of this episode as well. See,
we’ve kind of got a bit of everything in this one. We’re going to
talk about fighting game mechanics and balance since I suppose we
have to at least try, aesthetics and audio design done in a way
only the PS1 era could have accomplished, and we attempt to
decipher the one spoken line of dialogue and extrapolate that into
a backstory for the game’s announcer. Thank you for joining us this
week! While we don’t necessarily recommend seeking this one out, we
do recommend listening because I think there is value in looking at
things that don’t quite meet their goals. We talk a bit about the
difference between games that seem like they had aspirations,
obvious cash grabs, and those that are harder to figure out, and I
think it’s actually a pretty useful discussion to have when talking
about “bad” games. Plus if you don’t listen we won’t get that sweet
content cash. Do you have a pet favorite weird game from a bygone
era that you enjoyed as a child? Let us know down in the comments,
or come talk about it over on Discord! We sourced every one of the
games we’re playing this month from our suggestions channel over
there, so do join if you would like to be a similarly bad influence
to us in the future. Next time, we’re going to be checking out
Square’s The Bouncer, a game that has mostly been forgotten to
time, so do keep an eye out for that!