This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on January 12th, 2019. It has been edited slightly for formatting.
It’s the second week of 2019, this new world that we are living
in, and we’ll be taking a look at the future for odd and overlooked PS1 games.
This is PlayStation Basement, happening every Saturday in this future world,
and even in the future, as it was in the past, I’ll be using a nine-point scale
where 9-7 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad.
For our second venture into the future, I’ll be talking about
Tunnel B1, a fast-paced first-person shooter by NEON Software. The game came
out in October 1996 in Europe, Japan (as 3D Mission Shooting: Finalist), and
North America, published by Ocean, Gaga, and Acclaim respectively. It was also
released on PC in 1996 and Sega Saturn in 1997. The game’s manual is very vague
as to the plot of Tunnel B1, and the story is not presented in-game. All I
know is that there is a dictator, you control a character that pilots some type
of fast, military vehicle, and you must use this vehicle to destroy the
dictator and save the future from a superweapon.
The cover art for Tunnel B1 is like some kind of industrial,
psychedelic nightmare, a nu-metal music video by a low-budget team into 80s
B-movie hell. That’s the North American cover I’m talking about anyway with its
weird screaming man with a tunnel for a mouth. The European cover is a mess of
goggles and an explosion. I don’t understand it at all. Both of these covers
have a brown/orange/olive aesthetic that makes me feel quite uneasy. The
Japanese cover art is generic but kind of cool and dramatic, showing a pilot’s
helmet with flames around it. The title below really makes it sharp. Out of all
three, the American artwork is my favorite for its fever-dream visuals.
Too bad the graphics in-game are so poor. Tunnel B1 is all 3D,
with tons of greys and browns, steel hallways and robots. It’s hard to see
where one is going with the poor draw distance of this title, elements beyond
30-feet away being blocked by a thick coat of blackness. The game is just very
dark overall. The enemies are grey gun turrets, blue helicopters, and other
machines. There are tons of mines, barrels, crates, and other debris in the
way. Other than the similar green and orange colors, it’s not anything like the
weird cover art at all. The worst aspect of all of this is the camera angle,
turned up as if you are laying on your back. It’s really unpleasant and makes
me feel ill, especially with the vehicle bobbing all about at high speeds.
Sonically, Tunnel B1 is a mixed bag. The sound effects are cheap
and boring, thin gunshots and explosions. There’s a voice that tells you when
your health is low and about weapon/item pickups too. Nothing is particularly
memorable in this regard, though I kind of like the little sound when you
complete an objective. The music, on the other hand, is fairly well done. Chris
Huelsbeck, the composer for many Turrican and Giana Sisters games, along
with Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, gave a cinematic feel to the tracks in the
game akin to the Tim Burton Batman movies. Unfortunately, the music alone
cannot save Tunnel B1.
The gameplay is just sloppy. The controls are okay but very
sensitive. Taking a cue from racing games, you press some of the face buttons
to accelerate and brake/reverse. You can also boost, though the boost supply is
extremely limited. You have the left and right d-pad buttons to steer and have
to hold O to strafe. You move quickly and bounce off of walls. It’s easy to
brake too hard and reverse instead. I really hate when strafing requires holding
a button down; the controller has shoulder buttons that work perfectly for that
use. In Tunnel B1, shoulder buttons shoot and switch weapons. I find
switching weapons with the shoulder buttons awkward, though I see the sense
behind it. The left shoulder buttons control secondary weapons, and the right
shoulder buttons control the main weapons.
The worst part about this game is the level design and
difficulty. The developers placed every obstacle ever made in the way of your
craft. There are roadblocks, bombs, enemies, and various boxes blocking the
path every step. Missiles hit your vehicle as you try to get around it all, and
they can make short work of you in a few seconds if you are particularly
careless. Most levels require opening up doors by driving over switches,
blowing up a generator in a previously locked area, and then moving to the next
generator/locked door. Eventually, you come to a boss and then the exit.
Despite the emphasis on speed and the racing controls, Tunnel B1 is full of
combat. Since it’s so easy to die, I tried to stay away from enemies to give me
room to strafe with the awkward control scheme or to stay out of the enemy’s
sight. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to tell when you are hitting an enemy like
this; being too far away means your shots hit, appearing as small blue
explosions on the bad guy, but do no damage or you end up shooting above the
target. And though you can try to speed around, all the obstacles and enemies
and such mean that that one-time boost isn’t much help.
I have some minor gripes with the game that really point out
what I see as the poor quality of the title. There is no indicator as to where
an attack is coming from, you have to put your name in every time you save or
record a high score (why not just keep the previous one up with an option to
change it?), and there are lives in the game that decrease when you die, as in
any other game, but you can also save the game and avoid the life thing
entirely. Of course, this also means loading each time you die, requiring
quitting the level and then going to options, load, and then start game. It’s
annoying considering how many times you die in this game, and I really wish
there was just an option to continue after getting blown to bits (which has
barely any animation or sound or anything, by the way, other than a sudden
screen turning red and text of “Mission Failed”). These little things don’t
make or break the game, but they certainly help cement my thoughts on it.
Tunnel B1 is very poorly done. I was intrigued by the odd
cover, the weird name, and the odd mashup of racer and first-person shooter,
but the game has little to offer other than the skeleton of a cool idea. It’s
kind of fun to speed around , lights repeating along the dark sky like
Iggy Pop's "Mass Production" from The Idiot, if only the
level design gave you room to do so. Otherwise, the gameplay is harsh, the
story is non-existent (the manual doesn’t even name the dictator, the year, the
setting, what this deadly weapon is, or who the player character is – it seems
to think it’s clever in its ambiguity), and the game is just not fun to play. I
did not complete the game, and I really don’t have much desire to go further
with it. That is truly the mark of a bad game in my opinion. I do not think there
is any light at the end of this tunnel.
Tunnel B1 receives a Bad (3).
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