Playstation: Viewpoint (two original reviews from 1995)

@PS_2

Published in

Playstation

· 25 Jan 2020

Just bought Viewpoint for the PSX and here are some early thoughts...

Viewpoint is the one player isometric, 3/4 view shooter. Many remember this game in the arcade Neo Geo and on the home Neo Geo. From what I can remember of the original, this version is the same, just the graphics and sound have been enhanced. You can continue with a password you'll need to remember. Don't worry, it's only a three letter password!

The game begins with a good SGI space scene into. If you let the game sit in hope of watching it demo some of the later levels, don't. It just replays the space into screne. The into shows your mother/base ship under attack and you, the little fighter ship, luckily escaping and following your attacker into deep space.

GOOD

From what I have played so far, level one, the games graphic detail and color are very nice.

The sound is that of techno or house music - I don't know, I listen to classic rock. However, it seems to fit. I liked the Star Trekish sounds in the game intro better.

BAD

Nothing really bad, but the control seems to be a little gummy when moving in one sweep from one side of the screen to the other.

Another thing is that it takes between 5 to 10 seconds for the game to start back up after getting shot down. I'm not talking about reseting your machine or when you run out of ships and choose to continue, this wait is in between current ship stock.

There is also a little delay in the music when the game starts.

EARLY FINAL THOUGHTS

I like the game so far and hope to see more than a level or two. So I'm going in for more - cover me!

- Frank Gemignani

I bought Viewpoint the other day and after playing it for about an hour, I've determined that I'm going to take it back. It's beautiful, but it's not a keeper. Here's my breakdown:

Positives:

Excellent SGI-rendered graphics. They really did a beautiful job on the visuals in this game.
Variety. There are 6 different levels, each with its own visual style and each distinct from the last. There are power-ups and many different types of enemy.

Negatives:

Extremely difficult on any setting but "Easy."
Long load times between ships. If you die, you may have to wait as much as 30 seconds while it loads from CD-ROM before you're back in the action again. 30 seconds doesn't sound like much, but sit there and count it out. Imagine having to wait that long after each time you die. It's very frustrating.
Slowdown. LOTS of slowdown when the screen fills with enemies and enemy shots. The scrolling is generally smooth when nothing is on the screen, but performance degrades heavily very early. Not good.
Crash! The game crashed (and reset) when I reached the stage one boss for the first time. Inexcusable.

Impressions:

I like shooters, and this one LOOKS like a wonderful game. I bought it unawares (I'd never played the Neo-Geo version of the game from which the PSX version is derived) and didn't necessarily have extremely high expectations. It was horribly disappointing, and I returned it for full refund.

Perhaps I'm a shooter novice more than I had thought, but I found the game to be very unforgiving and extremely frustrating on the standard difficulty level. Add to the fact that a single stray bullet can take out your ship (and it's hard to dodge a screenful of them, especially while experiencing a whole bunch of jerky slowdown) the thirty some odd seconds you have to wait while the game reloads the next ship, and you've got a pretty miserable game experience.

It's apparent that a lot of work went into the graphics, but very little went into the gameplay. That's extremely poor design. This is the first PSX title I've seen from Electronic Arts, and I sincerely hope that they spend more money on the programming for their next offerings. All the pretty SGI rendered graphics in the world won't save a poorly programmed game from being banished to the pits of suckitudinousness.