Warzone 2100 on PSX
Warzone 2100 was released in times when PC wasn’t a major gaming platform due to the price, in 1999. Sony PlayStation dominated the market and, as I recall it, people didn’t even think about strategies as PC exclusive genre. Because the majority of players didn’t know any better than controlling a cursor with arrows.
In other article we already discussed how innovative gameplay of Warzone 2100 was but today let’s dig into the release of the PlayStation’s version.
When I booted up DuckStation to emulate the game I was prepared to have the worst experience of playing a strategy game in the last ten years. And at least partially Warzone 2100 satisfied my expectations – even on emulator game runs at around 25 fps maximum, sometimes slower. Some huge maps like mission 6 of the first campaign run even lower.
Awkward controls
Registration of button presses is bond to FPS instead of being event based. What it means – if you press and release button fast enough during a laggy frame then the action won’t get registered and the game won’t respond. It’s especially frustrating during the intense battles where you’re trying to move away your damaged units and avoid them being destroyed.
On the flip side I was surprised that controls felt better than I expected them to be. Warzone 2100 was definitely created with consoles in mind. Especially when the frame rate at the higher side.
You definitely can’t hit the same amount of actions per minute as with mouse plus keyboard, but it’s fairly playable.
Warzone 2100 UI
The radial menu that Warzone 2100 developers implemented is easy to navigate with a gamepad. It’s better experience than with C&C series and it’s transparent. View of the game is not squeezed between UI elements.
You can give units orders through the separate units menu. It’s fairly fast to order them to stop shooting and avoid killing the last enemy unit. Since missions have timers you would prefer sometimes to finish researches first before proceeding farther.
You also can easily send your units to the transport or to the HQ. Or utilize them to reuse the experience with better tanks.
But still for some reason you can’t setup which initial settings of units will be set in the factory menu. That’s a big miss that forces you manually set the retreat option for each unit group.
Warzone 2100 PSX is easier game
Meanwhile the unit groups are restricted to ten units. On medium difficulty it was fairly enough – even ten units were crushing enemies easily allowing to complete missions twice faster than the time game developers gave you.
Old Warzone 2100 doesn’t push you so much to use different kind of weapons against different targets so playing only with machineguns plus cannons is a well working strategy.
Mixing cannons and rockets feels frustrating because to select them together you need to manually draw a selection box instead of just pressing “select similar types” button where machineguns and cannons are considered the same type.
With mouse it’s easy to separate these groups but gamepad is just pure pain especially when you want to combine artillery with a cover group. It just doesn’t work.
Game difficulty doesn’t require you to use advanced strategies. And it is not good.
Warzone 2100 on PSX has inferior visuals
Warzone 2100 is cut visually and it’s very noticeable. Buildings have less structures in them.
But even more interesting is how radar works – game draws units all the time onto it without fully updating the background. It makes moving units to have this weird tail behind them. Then the line that goes from top to down on each frame updates one horizontal line of radar pixels. It removes the units’ tails and updates ground pixels. But even such harsh optimizations don’t save the frame rate.
Gameplay
What I was even more disappointed about is that PlayStation version has some reductions in the gameplay. We talked only about visuals so far but there are more to it.
There is no active fog of war. After you open some territory you will always see the enemies over there. And in addition to this some enemy bases got removed. Like scavenger base on the top of the map in mission 6 of the first campaign. You can’t even access this place – the path over there is blocked.
Amount of units is limited by 40. And the enemy never uses big groups of units. It sounds like a small number but even this way game sometimes struggles with unit AI.
It can reliably find a path across the whole map. Other times damaged units just stay in one place instead of moving to the repair facility. Sometimes units need time to notice the enemy that is near them in clear sight.
There are also some restrictions on where you can place defenses. You can’t build towers on the nearby ground cells. They should have at least one cell in between. But walls you can build in any capacity.
I had a case where I couldn’t build a singular wall at a cell near a tower. But was allowed to build a line of walls starting in the same prohibited to build cell.
Battles overall feel awkward like both sides are drunk trying to do something when they can barely navigate their units. The player’s side because of the gamepad. Enemy’s side to compensate the player’s gamepad.
Conclusion
The only way I can imagine someone preferring to play PSX version of Warzone 2100 is while seating on a couch or floor in front of a CRT TV at night running the game on real PlayStation because of pure nostalgia reasons.
One day I think to replicate this experience.
In all other cases even the original PC version is superior. Or look at the modern one.