The 1995 holiday season in Japan was an embarrassment of gaming riches. The Sega Saturn had Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally Championship, two ports of hugely popular arcade games that did justice to their source material, in contrast to the underwhelming ports of Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA from the previous year. The Sony PlayStation didn’t have any single game as big as Virtua Fighter 2, but it had slowly built up an impressive and diverse library over 1995, with big holiday releases like Ridge Racer Revolution and Suikoden establishing it as a platform that could handle cutting-edge polygonal arcade ports as well as deeper experiences. Even the aging Super Famicom was pumping out big RPG hits that pushed the limits of the system like Dragon Quest VI and Tales of Phantasia.
Meanwhile, the 3DO had… a “director’s cut” of D no Shokutaku and F1GP, an extraordinarily poor-looking polygonal racing game from Pony Canyon. Most of the other games featured in this issue were released simultaneously or near-simultaneously on other platforms, but a few minor 3DO exclusives are still making their way out. Studio 3DO’s Blade Force is one of the more technically impressive polygonal games for the platform. N.O.B. (Neo Organic Bioform) is a truly bizarre Japanese-exclusive first-person dungeon crawler/turn-based fighter with claymation monsters.
The 3DO would be all but dead within a few months as the Saturn and PlayStation continued to pick up steam. All hope for the 3DO was resting on the M2, and the remaining Japanese 3DO faithful looked with hope towards WARP’s flapship M2 title, D2, as its savior.
[full 600dpi scan at Internet Archive]
