testing 3do emulator set up and this looked interesting enough from the cover. a japanese game about robots and its been subtitled. OK I will bite. a cyberpunk game on a cyberpunk console from a cyberpunk era.. (god help me.)

"The Real Gigadeath Null Golem!"

tldr. this game is awful, one of the worst i've dredged up in a while but i still liked it. (Can't really put my finger on it.) "Crash OverridE"

The game has a rather nice opening cutscene that is a heavy vibe of tetsuo the iron man (especially that clanging ending music) For that alone it rubs me right.

The player character is a tetsujin or iron angel: a robot animated with a soul, possibly human. it has the weird easten vibe to it and gets things going with a nice premise despite all kinds of datedness and janky FMV nonsense. Unfortunately for this game, it's a game, and not a weird experimental movie or OVA. So, the bad parts:

The game plays out like a strange cyberpunk feeling wolf3d. But the opening cinematic was pretty much the highlight. The rest of the game is a bit painful and pure slog. Control input is limited to a single movement key and fire (no diagonal strafing or run strafing or anything so 'fancy.').

Also the fire framerate is messed up and shots must be timed, if you try shooting too fast it will just freeze and you wont be able to shoot. These are some god awful technical limitations for any game and this makes the game very jerky. you can move forward OR side step and often get stuck on walls as well. sometimes you can see an enemy peeking out and can't hit them because the wall is still counting as cover for their hitbox some reason. and of course, some enemies can still shoot you from behind such cover. Many of these flaws almost feel like technical limitations of the platform itself, and almost feels as if the game was designed around them almost as if to feel 'in character' but it's awful stuff! however its far better than the doom port of SNES. At least in Tetsujin, some things look good and sound great (even if its some weird win95 FMV/cinematic things) and there is an actual soundtrack that complements the games atmmosphere. But, to the games credit, the videos are full screen (mostly) and smooth and not choppy. I also found the audio to sound decent. "ermagerd its so beautiful"

Like many 3do games there are weird bottlenecks and other hijinks and low quality control present here. While the game looks OK and features fully polygonal textured objects, enemies, objects and things you can pick up (something wolf games generally dont have unless you play a modern GL port of something) it shirks such benevolence be scrunching the active screen size down. Like just chops the playfield in two!

This is probably the straw that breaks the camels back for the game ultimately. its a bad shooter, it has it's flaws, but the one thing we would expect of the system is to deliver sound video experience... here we get choppy frame rate and a very small resolution while playing, therefore as a game its awful.. Heck at least in wolf 3d the screen size could be enlarged. apparently the little camera viewfield is also an aspect of being a robot. This isn't the first game i've played that was really bad that had such strange cyberpunk feature-flaws I came to appreciate in such sick way. (I'm looking at you metalheart: replicants rampage!)

after the second floor part of me pretty much lost interest in this one. but the cutscenes and videos were interesting enough to rope me in to keep going, maybe it was just that music, or the fact it was indeed "tetsuo: The iron man: The game." i really dont know. I really liked this soundtrack, and spent a ton of effort to rip it after playing. also, the game is not that hard, so it didnt raelly hit my bigger pet peeves, which include difficulty for the sake of difficulty ,and being overly drawn out. as its decent difficult and decent length. even though i did enjoy it, i could never reccomend something like this. a proper video of the cutscenes on youtube would be more than enough, and even that is tough to recocmend, its grainy, dated and lossy FMV goofinell. Still, this is a game that was heavily inspired by Tetsuo the iron man, therefore i had to play it. And there is something cool to say about it at least. Tetsuo: the game. This is pretty much it. so if thats your thing. you know what to do. :)

So far the only other games i've played on 3do was Slayer, another meh FPS that had awesome music I found worth ripping. And the Horde (a mediocre game riding on cheesy FMV) Something must be wrong with me, I enjoyed all three of these games and theh are basically trash. There is just something about the weirdness of this system in it's every facet. also every one of these games is like a chocolate in a box, you really never know what you will get. and well for me, that's kind of a plus

4do 1.3.2.4 -Screenshots reveal a lot of nasty screen tearing in cutscenes, something i'll have to keep an eye out for on future 3do games i play (is it this one, all of them or just something to blame with emulation?) -no sram readable (4do libretro or just this game?) -severe framerate drop/lag (most likely just this games internals or something else and not the emulator occured when lots of enemies or other objects were close to player) solid otherwise, no crashes. good audio (not stutter)