Howdy all, it’s that time again: time for a new monthly game club pick! This month’s pick is…
Team Buddies for the Playstation as selected by @hellomrkearns who had this to say:
a really interesting cute combat game that doesn’t get talked about that much, probably because it’s fairly uncommon. It has a single player campaign as well as up to 4-player split screen (deathmatch, domination, capture, bomball), which was fairly uncommon on PS1. Grab the crates, place them on your pad to create weapons, then blow up your opponent’s base.
Shiieeoot this is on my current notepad doc of “PSX rts-ish games I wanna track down”. Haven’t actually started the search yet as it’s not in Japan but just now looked on ebay and holy moly. Sounds like I’ll have to visit download dot com sometime.
As @MDS-02 has discovered, this is a notoriously expensive game 2nd hand, so keep that in mind when you steal it. Never even got a digital release.
It’s a fun one multiplayer if you can organize it, otherwise, the single player campaign is pretty good. I should really figure how to play multiplayer games on Duckstation.
I’m excited to get to play a Psygnosis game!!! I adore Lemmings (having only discovered that it’s actually a truly special game in 2022 or so), I’ve done a good bit of research on Brataccas (for a project that’s hopefully coming out… sometime), and I’ve long been intrigued by Shadow of the Beast and Puggsy. (I think I may be a euro-platformer apologist. I’m sure I’m not the only one.)
Psygnosis is one of those names I’d see on all manner of retro games growing up, and somehow registered as a “big deal” – but never actually interacted with much. Very glad to take a step toward changing that.
One of those times when the European version might be considered the “canon” version! (Unless you’re the sort of person that always plays the version that was released in your own region, which I respect, salute, and bow down to.)
I think it might’ve been Psygnosis that pulled some Europe-exclusive tricks – I seem to recall them using the extra time in the vertical blanking period (owed to the slower pace of 50 FPS vs. 60) to improve performance or dazzlitude or some such, in… Lemmings for the SNES, was it? The developers spoke about it on an episode of Retronauts.
The PAL version of this game is foul-mouthed, laced with profanity. As a result I will, of course, be unable to join in with your fun, being fiercely opposed to such effing and jeffing.
Sorry, are you telling me, hand over heart, that the PAL version of Team Buddies blimeys and buggers it up, and the North American version censored it!?
I downloaded the PAL version last night because that’s the only version I could come across. @rejj 's mysterious purple text hadn’t mysteriously appeared yet and I didn’t yet have the forewarning on the language. That threw me for a big ole loop hearing cutesy characters in a PS1 game dropping F bombs.
I Googled PEGI and saw that it wasn’t a thing until 2003. The ESRB was 1994. Was most of Europe just going hog wild without any form of games ratings for nearly a whole decade after the United States?
This has always been a game I’ve been vaguely aware of as “that one party game.” Was about what I expected, seems to have Bomberman-like qualities. In that it’s an okay-ish and simple single-player game, but seems like it grows exponentially more fun the more people you are able to corral together to play it.
(just wanted to point out there’s a new tag category for clubs so people can find these posts easier in the future! I noticed this one was currently using general, so it’d be nice if this one got changed at some point to match the others)
I’ve been chipping away at the campaign in this game throughout the month - I’m on world 7 now. Took me a while to get to grips with it, but my most successful strategy in most situations has been to make a strong guy with a big gun and just rambo the whole level.
This game (the PAL version ofc) gives me a ton of nostalgia for the UK in the 90s, everything about it: the language, the music, the humour. The story is barebones but there are some decent jokes - like you are tasked with kidnapping an enemy scientist, who convinces your command to sneak him back into the enemy base where he promises he’ll do some sabotage. Instead he promptly goes radio silent and the enemies ramp up their scientific activities - shocker! Command assumes he must have died and plans to honour him as a hero.
The game is buggy and quite random, the enemy AI will start levels differently so sometimes you’ll get to a base and they’re armed to the teeth but when you restart it’s just one guy with nothing. Some of the bugs have been infuriating - one I had to escort a guy to an enemy base, but every time we got close he would just stop following me and freeze in place. Eventually I even tried blasting him with rockets toward the drop off point hoping he didn’t die - amazingly it worked! So in the end that was a bit of a highlight.
So I did finish this in the end! The end of the campaign abandons the RTS elements of the game, mostly the final missions just give you a single buddy and it’s either impractical or impossible to make more. These last few missions are pretty cool, but some of them are really tough. I had to retry them over and over before I finally got in a good run and beat them. I don’t really mind that, but it takes a really long time to restart the mission upon death… and some of the missions you can die very fast. I’d say in a couple cases I was at like a higher than 50:50 ratio of waiting vs playing, which gets annoying.
It was satisfying to finally conquer this one, though. I’m glad I persevered through the difficult stages!
The ending is on brand...
This dude just walks on screen and says something like “So you beat the game, what do you want a medal? Get outta here!”
