Worst Game Ever? - Death Crimson Sega Saturn Review
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- A rail shooter seems like something that would be pretty difficult to get wrong. Even when they are bad they are playable. Well, most of the time. Enter Death Crimson, easily the worst game on the Sega Saturn.
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Opening "Sega" jingle is from Astal for the Sega Saturn.
Ending Music during the credits is from Batman for the Sega Genesis.
SLX Logo
By: Jan Neves
UA-cam Page - / jan3d
Intro by Evan S.
portfolio.tses...
Episode Notes:
1. Captured on real hardware.
2. Believe it or not Ecole is still around and is working on Death Crimson 3!
www.deathcrims...
3. The article I referenced can be found here:
www.badgamehal...
4. Ecole made a few other Saturn games. Not as bad as Death Crimson here, but still pretty poor overall.
Pappara Paoon (1995)
Death Crimson (1996)
Segata Sanshirou Shinken Yuugi (1998)
5. I see this compared to Crypt Killer at times, another rail shooter. make no mistake, Crypt Killer is 1000x better than this.
Weird enough, I love hearing about obscure bad games even more than discovering hidden gems.
Exactly - never heard of this one and I’m amped to learn.
Wow those are amazingly amateurish graphics, just gross.
@@FMDad-dm5qo This game is legendary. An absolute masterpiece of chaos from start to finish. In Japan, people love this game so much they glue the lids of their Saturns shut and hardwire the light gun to be permanently attached to the system so the console can only play this game. They call them Death Saturns. Shit is crazy
If you ever played James Pond on Sega Genesis then you know pain.
it's a hidden poop
"The game is fukcing, but the music is amazing!"
-Kunitaka Watanabe
😆 YESSS!!!
Legendary quote for a legendary game
oh yes
Death Crimson is a legendarily bad game, in Japan it's one of the kings of Kusoge and because of how bad it is, it became a expensive collectors item over the years.
There were even events where fans could gather and quote all the in jokes, they even had a giant oversized controller modeled after stuff from the game so you could play it on the Saturn
The anime Pop Team Epic parodied the opening of it and it was so notable that the cutscenes of the original game kept getting copyright striker because it kept mistakening it for the anime lol
Evolve made some sequels for it on the Dreamcast and PS2, and Ecole eventually went to work with French Bread on the arcade and PS2 ports of Melty Blood and helped them with Under Night In-Birth
LEGENDARY KUSOGE
This game is 32-bits with 27 bits not being used apparently
The game is synonymous with awful game in Japan, where the sounds and dialogue have become Internet memes.
デスクリムゾンが伝説のクソゲーｗ
COMBAT ECHIZEN
AGE: 29
BLOOD TYPE: O
FAVOURITE FOOD: FRIED VERMICELLI
COURAGE AND SENSE OF JUSTICE: ABOVE AVERAGE
@@officialFredDurstfanclub wtf just like me
@@GreenTeaViewer he’s literally me on god
@@officialFredDurstfanclub You can shut up now, I'm always on duty!
I think I love everything I see here. The dudes are like two stories tall when you look at the buildings. Nothing animates. Enemies are just suddenly... there. The explosion sound might be the greatest distorted mess I've ever heard. This is art.
😂
it would fit in with feces and urine-based modern art
Wow. You're not kidding when enemies are just suddenly "there".
This is a finished product that actually got shipped wow
The fact that they had the balls to make 2 whole sequels after this dumpster fire is honestly pretty inspiring. At least they were good at making fighting games like Melty Blood, Under Night In Birth, and the Fate tie in games.
... Wait, did Ecole chance into French Bread, the Melty Blood developers? Did he actually say this in the video and it just completely flew me by?
Those fighting games are amazing!
How the enemies just suddenly appear somewhere on screen makes it look like a shooting activity is being played on top of a totally unrelated background video.
The Japanese affection for this game is incredible. They made a ride-on version of this, you know. It's disturbing and nightmarish, just like the game itself!
I guess E. Coli went on to make the warmly received Melty Blood series, so they at least partially redeemed themselves.
This is not. video game, this is a video pain.
Genuinely might be one of my favourite Saturn games. What it lacks in good gameplay, cohesion and visuals, it makes up for in pure entertainment value. Every time I play it I’m reduced to tears and that’s probably the only game I can ever say that about. The absolute peak of Kusoge. They don’t call it “Death-sama” for nothing
I was reduced to tears as well. There was nothing entertaining about that, however.
That's a lie. Everybody knows that placing brown bricks with minecrap is the most fun you can quite possibly have.
Brown bricks > Death Crimson
@@penatio Personally I prefer Mineycrafta
I had no idea Ecole made this game! 😅 They were the original team that brought us one of the greatest anime fighters of all time - Melty Blood (the original 2003 PC doujin circle release). The last release (subtitled Actress Again Current Code) is still beautiful to see and play to this day!
They're known as French Bread these days and their 2022 Melty Blood Type Lumina fight is a great new entry! And their Fate Grand Order tie-in games are crazy successes on their own rite.
VERY humble beginnings...😆
French bread was the original dev, Ecole was more of a support developer for the arcade/console versions of Melty blood and later helped withunder night In-Birth lol
I've gotta hand it to the developers of Death Crimson, if they can out-crap Virtual Hydlide, Bubsy 3D, and LJN's entire catalogue, then that is some impressive awfulness. 😆
Honestly I know the game is awful, but man I can't help but love it. The skunky music and graphics are so insane that the fact it even got released is crazy. And I won't lie and say that its cover art is unironically cool
Same thoughts about it. And it even got sequels!
Or you subconsciously like going against popular belief. I'm like that sometimes. For instance courier crisis was my jam but playing it later in life it really is as bad as people say lol.
It's okay, I like Quest 64 despite everyone else disliking it.
*isn’t*
In the last line you should have said “isn’t” instead of “is.”
Have a good day!
@@Thor-Orion No my grammer was correct. I did not mistype
Describing the music as "the kind of stuff you might hear at an end of life clinic" is definitely one of your more poetic descriptions! What a fascinatingly bizarre game.
Good video, I appreciate the extra research done here. This game is so notorious among Japanese UA-camrs - it's like the Superman 64 of Japan - that I was going to buy it for a laugh. Except its infamy has clearly sent a lot of others to do the same thing; no lie, Japanese shops are asking $120-150 for it right now. They even released the OST back in 2018 due to its newfound fame. It's staggering that it got a sequel, but I guess when you only spent like $2000 developing your game it's easy to make your money back. But it takes a LOT to stand out as a really bad Japanese Saturn game. There are so many astoundingly amateurish titles in the lower pits of the library like Minakata Hakudou Toujou (Minakata Hakudou Appears), FIST, or Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita ("There Was a Pig in the Southern Islands") that your game needs to be something truly terrible for people to notice.
I am now off to investigate this "There Was a Pig in the Southern Islands"
@@chompythebeast It's like if someone made a terrible 2002 JAVA cell phone Castlevania game about a pig and sent it back to 1996 to release on the Saturn.
I quite don't understand Minakata, that just another FMV glory mess?
one of the reasons why I feel the 16 bit era aged better than the 32-bit era. Lots of developers still trying to figure out how to make polygon games (angles, textures, etc), while the 16 bit era refined a lot of the things from the 8-bit.
Ironically its the 2d 32 bit games that have aged wonderfully. Wish that 3d didnt talk hold in that gen because there could have been so many more.
Definitely agree with you tho
So tragic that tsunami-like consumer demand for new technology, met with a complete inability for rushed engineers to keep up, has resulted in some of the worst garbage that capitalism can offer, and in the kind of quantities that socialism could never have matched. This is the ugly side of western economies, truly, and the point where I lose the argument completely to my socialist friends without even getting a chance to open my mouth.
Enough kusoge to fertilize an industrial dairy farm! 🐖
@@MaxAbramson3 so true, ha ha, but there were plenty of gems made during this era while Sony established itself as the dominating force of the industry. It's a shame that Sony has fallen prey to the idea that games have to be AAA budget powerhouses that push graphics over gameplay now, and a part of me still misses Sega's hardware too. When the Dreamcast died, a part of the gaming industry died with it.
@@MaxAbramson3 Yes, because crap video games can totally be compared to standing in bread lines while you hope no one's stolen your cardboard box tent.
@@SpeedyGoneFroglegs Just saying that capitalism's greater achievement has been quantity rather than consistent quality.
I'd like to see you cover the "Dreamcast" version in the future.
The composer for Death Crimson has his own UA-cam channel, and he's about as eccentric a person as you've imagined. He's pretty legit, though. Always happy to see his music uploads.
Also, I unironically love the game's cover art. It's so bizarre, like a screencap from an obscure 80's OVA.
What's the channel name?
@@airthrowDBT It's his name, Kunitaka Watanabe
@@MrElbowsmash Thanks dude!
Kunitaka is legit the GOAT. Dude is so talented and kind. He is out there putting out great music almost every day, I always try to show him some love when i can.
I actually like the music at 7:57. Not too different from a lot of other Japanese stuff I listen to. There's an impressive amount of range and creativity in game music that challenges and defies most traditional genres, and I think the composers don't get nearly enough credit. A lot of people grow to like game music due to an association they have with the game itself, but I listen to a lot of soundtracks of games I've never played. The song at 12:33 is pretty interesting. I might download this soundtrack.
In the words of Kunitaka, the game composer: The geemu...is fuckingo! But the music?...is amazingu!
I love that video so much
I like how you don't have to kill everything, just don't be dead and you keep proceeding through the game.
Fun Fact: This game is made by the same companys Ecole Software and French Bread who made some great anime fighting games like Melty Blood, Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax and Under Night in Birth.
As horrifyingly bad as this game is, I can kinda see a connection between this game's theme and UNIB
You're usually so chill and relaxing, the bad word warning shocked me!
The 1st time I heard the sound effects in this game, I laughed out loud. Peak kusoge.
this game is brutal to look at but I'm always stoked to learn about these games!
I try to be fair. When dealing with early Saturn 3rd party releases, I compare them to the Jaguar/3DO/32x. Even with limited access to the Saturn hardware, they should at least offer an upgrade over that low bar...
Except.
This is one of the few games where the character models would be laughed at on Gameboy Advance. Sure, there are far worse looking 3D/Sprite hybrid GBA games, like Driver 2, and the lack of texture warping would be impressive at that resolution and background frame-rate, but...c’mon, the fact I need to break out a GBA to compare those enemy models? And not one of the best GBA games, either? Because Max Payne and Tony Hawk simply blow away this game’s animations...
It kind of speaks for itself.
I would even feel bad if this was GBA homebrew.
As a fan of the gba growing up and being impressed with sonic fighter…I think the gba could handle this….
Personally I think Virtual Hydlide and Criticom are the WORST games on Sega Saturn. Glad you mentioned Criticom lol
Criticom is awful no matter what system you play it on. One of my old friends had it on PSOne? It played like ass on there too.
@@DesertRainReads wasn't aware that it was on the PS1 as well
@@alex64gaming it was, and trust me, it was no better on PSOne. Me and my old friend collectively called it "Shiticom".
@@DesertRainReads haha shiticom! Good one! I would go ahead and say War Gods is a better game, man that's really saying something lol.
Boy oh boy does this game truly have earned one of a kind legendary status here in Japan. Basically it garnered a cult following for how utterly and mind bogglingly awful it was to the point the franchise had multiple fan-developers meet greets IIRC. Fans later found it disappointing that the sequel wasn't as horrible as the original.
>Fans later found it disappointing that the sequel wasn't as horrible as the original.
That's fucking awesome lmao. Kusoge culture is super funny, love it
Wow, this was a treat. “Worst Game” videos are often hyperbolic drivel, but this game truly does appear to be jarringly bad.
If you ever update this video, I recommend adding a bit about that bonkers aiming reticle. It’s mesmerizing. I simultaneously love and hate it.
The Devs: "Hey, let's just release the Alpha build as the full game and see how it does."
By the way! If you really feel like tormenting yourself, hunt down Jung Rhythm, also for the Saturn. It's to Parappa the Rapper what this is to House of the Dead.
The game's composer, Kunitaka Watanabe, has a UA-cam Channel and is a very cool guy. He plays the Accordion!
Are u going to do a Death Crimson OX for dreamcast video?
Just in time to cure my boredom.
There's some irony to be had here in the fact that "école" is French for "school"...
If you can get in the right mindset for this game it can be a blast. I’ve played it to the end with a proper setup and while it’s obviously jank, when you learn the game, it’s mostly fair and tense fun. I thought Crypt Killer for ps1 was similar jank and less fun. Still love me some light gunners though! Ssff did a great review of this too. A lot of Sega Lord’s points are completely valid about the faults of the game.
This brought back dark suppressed memories of death crimson ox as a kid on the Dreamcast 😂 I remember it was awful and kinda brutal.
Some interesting trivia about Ecole: The founder of the company was a nuclear physicist who got bored of his job and essentially founded Ecole just because he was bored. Ecole would later go on to make one of the first gay porn games made specifically for gay men, and also would work on Melty Blood, which they're still working on to this day!
Also, the composer of this game, Kunitaka Watanabe, has his own UA-cam channel and posts pretty regularly, doing original music, remixes of Death Crimson music, and covers of other music as well.
Oh yeah, and this game actually DOES have mouse support. Unfortunately, they forgot to map a button to reloading, so once you expend your initial six shots, you're basically screwed.
This is the kind of game that if you happened to love it and your parents saw you playing it as a kid, they would think you were an idiot and video games were a total waste of time 😆
Sometimes a game is so bad it's good. This isn't one of those.
I don't like playing really bad games...but I DO enjoy watching really bad movies, and I'd like to think that same kind of mindset is where the concept of kusoge comes from. It's just, fascinating to see how bad something can turn out...especially when you consider the type of conviction required to make something really awful and then release it to the public. I struggle with writing YT comments no one reads, much less a movie/game that potentially millions of people could experience.
will you be doing a follow-up on the sequel Death Crimson OX?
The composer is on UA-cam and even he knows the game is shit
"The game is FUCKING"
7:42 wtf HOW ARE YOU DEFENDING THE MUSIC OMG SEGA LORD
Great to see this one covered. Since there's not a huge amount of light gun games I managed to either get or burn copies of all of them since I really like light gun games for the novelty. Kind of love this one just since it's so weird. Wish it played a bit better, but it's still a fun laugh from time to time.
Someone call Derek from Stop Skeletons From Fighting, we’re talking about Death Crimson
"...like the kind of stuff you might hear at an end-of-life clinic..." Had to stop and rewind a bit after that one, nearly laughed myself off the couch!
Are any of the enemies actually polygons? They all look like bitmaps that maybe started out as 3D models. I've never seen this game before and I definitely owe my eyeballs an apology after this visual assault.
The other day I was playing Virtua Cop 2 on Dreamcast via Sega Smash Pack Vol. 1, pleased to have found a game I own that used the Starfire Lightblaster and pleasantly surprised at how fun it was. This game looks like dogshit.
I really enjoy the Saturn. 25 games to my collection thus far. You and Game Sack really sold me on the console. Expensive as hell, to be sure, but if I can figure out how to buy and play Japanese titles I'm sure to add more titles.
Do you have Death Throttle? I played it on PC as a kid where it was called Quarantine and loved it. If you did a video on that title, it would hit the nostalgia charms for me in a way unlike anything else on Saturn, as I only started collecting and giving a damn about the console in 2018.
Love the channel! Thanks if you read this.
And yet that would be the greatest Sega Master System game ever!
Zillion 4.
Kusoge is right. You learn something new every day. The real challenge of this game was watching it. I almost spit my soda onto the screen when I heard the soundtrack to this godawful mess. And to realize that these dedicated developers tries so hard to make this a great, innovative game!
Sounds like it!
I think AVGN said it best: What were they thinking?!?
The SEGA Saturn is my favourite system of all time and while I know how awful this game is, I have unironically played it and genuinely enjoyed how bad it is, many times over the years. It always makes me chuckle, every time I play it. Maybe it's Kunitaka Watanabe's bizzaro soundtrack?
They call it “EMPEROR KUSOGE” because of its legendary stank. Fun Fact! Ecole later went on to develop the Melty Blood series
Publisher: This is a cute little game your five year old put together. So where's the one we're supposed to be pressing to a master disc?
Developer: Um...about that...
I definitely like the aesthetic and music, but yeah, if the controls suck, there's no point.
The legendary "Death-Sama" as is affectionately called. You gotta love the flying squirrel! The musics remind me of Phoenix Wright. Perhaps Capcom drew inspiration from the Death-sama?
We need a full length documentary on the making of Death Crimson
A lot of people throw around the word Kusoge, especially in the FGC and it does not apply at all, like not even close.
It 100% applies to this game however. I'm sure PandaMonium would disagree with me 😊
I'm not sure what FGC is but Sega Lord X vehemently disagrees with you that it applies here!
@@phattjohnson FGC is shorthand for Fighting Game Community
@@phattjohnson Fighting Game Community.
Matt McMuscles is currently doing a series on The Worst Fighting Games to see if they're really as bad as conventional wisdom says they are, or if they're overhated.
I saw a Japanese magazine list Metal Wolf Chaos as kusoge. It's not even in the same multiverse as this mess. Kusoge translates better to "jank game" or "meme game" instead of "#2," so bad it's charming
I was wondering if you would ever cover a Saturn game that you hated more than Congo. Your review of Congo is among my favorite content on your channel.
Thanks for the kusoge review, SLX. I have seen your video on DOOM for the Sega Saturn in the past and I wanted to say that I personally consider Saturn DOOM to be THE worst port of that game out there.
My reasons:
1): Both Saturn and 3DO DOOM have bad frame rates, but after testing both on my laptop's emulators I found the 3DO to be slightly better.
2): The 3DO has a better soundtrack - in fact one of the very best soundtracks for a DOOM console port.
3): Considering it was done by one person in ten weeks with bugger all for a tech support, the 3DO is far more impressive than the Saturn port.
I'd love to know which one you'd prefer to play if you're in a masochistic mood
(BTW I am a bad movie/game Masochist)...
Kunitaka Watanabe was the only person who worked in this game seriously (he worked as the music composer).
You mentioned Criticom at the beginning. That game was so bad it almost made my father and I come to blows. One of our favorite things was playing fighting games together on the saturn. The hit detection and feed back was so awful we ended up screaming at each other to stop touching the controller so we could figure out what was going on. A year later my father thought it was a good idea to celebrate my 13th birthday by giving me a T for teen rated game. It was Dark Rift on the N64. He had unwittingly bought the sequel to Criticom.
The music is as if someone was asked to cover "Teen Town" after having only heard it once, on a keyboard on which someone else keeps randomly changing the voices.
also, I love it
Is that mean you review update version death crimson for Dreamcast soon
What's with rail shooters on Saturn? I remember that the lowest score on a Saturn game in my favorite mag in Italy was Revolution X
"the music is stuff you might hear at an end of life clinic;" you're hilarious!
I try.
@@SegaLordX if I'm ever at a place where they play this music on the speakers, just unplug me already
I never heard of this one. I was a big Saturn fan when the system was current (which meant 70% of my games for it are imports). Modding it to play Japanese games was one of the first things I did. (I have both X-men vs Street Fighter and Silver Star Story Complete (along with the MPEG card). I also have all of the Capcom collections and Panzer Dragoon Saga (US version). But wow...this game is a turd. It makes bad 32X games look good in comparison.
I imagined you struggling real hard to even pick up a controller in order to hit that start button to begin playing 💪 I guess it took a lot of effort, but afterall you realized you had to eventually do it. At least for the sake of making this review. Sir Knight, tales of your bravery will pass down for eons to come! 👍
me: "oh this doesn't look that bad for a jaguar cd game" also me: wait is saturn?
It can't be that bad.
(Watches video)
Oh...
I’m not convinced there are any polygons in this game… it looks like it’s all sprite-scaling effects, which would explain why the perspective is frequently skewed.
The way the human enemies haven’t even been scaled to match the surrounding buildings is hilarious.
That music though…😂
I have Death Crimson OX. Do you like that one any better?
Not great, but a masterpiece compared to this.
Wonder what it would have been like if Doom Saturn had been allowed to use the hardware renderer and had released with a rock solid 60fps gameplay? It would have been unique as the first and only doom to break the 35hz tic rate.
SLX has a great strong will....I would of turned it on looked at it, played it for a minute and laughed at the fact that they got me for my cash! Great review SLX!
I'm still wondering if AVGN will ever do a video on death crimson
Your pain is our entertainment 😂 I've just started the challenge of playing all the Saturn games and I'm not looking forward to this one. I've came across 1 kusoge so far: Side Pocket 2 and I just couldn't finish it...
Just like any other form of media, the worst usually means the most boring. Death Crimson is one of those types of games for sure.
Ain’t nothing boring about this. It’s a goddamn ride from start to finish
Flying squirrels are the best innocent bystander. I'd feel bad if I shot one.
I didn't think they could get acid and mushrooms in Japan back then at the time but I guess I'm wrong.
Where there is a will there is a way.
About 12:30 that high pitch sound reminds me of wolfenstien on snes's music
This looked about as polished as your typical Bethesda Softworks game 😅
A game so bad that it should’ve been in a dumpster 🔥!!! Light gun games can be fun but this one isn’t one of them!!! I wish that Target Terror had a sequel because it deserves it!!! How a game this bad get 2?!!! It makes the FMV light gun games from American Laser Games look like Game Award winners!!! I own those on DVD and I’m proud of them!!!!
I remember the sequel being kinda cool on Dreamcast. This looks absurd, I like it
ty for going through the torture of having to play this for the video. Like and comments for that
You're a hero for subjecting yourself to this for our entertainment.
Pretty damn horrible but the worst ever, not so sure.
For full price at launch it would've been pretty darn rough. Homes would've been broken.
@@phattjohnson In Japan it’s very common (or at least back then it was) for games to come with comment cards that you would fill out and send back to the devs on what you thought about the game and such and legend has it that the company that made this got loads and loads of the cards back that just said ‘DIE’ on them. Doesn’t help that this was like the second ever light gun game released for the system after Virtua Cop. Imagine laying down $40-60 for this and $60 or so for the controller. I’d be out for blood too
Since the studio made a remake and a sequel, does that mean SLX will review them?
It's on my DC to do list.
I love the Death Crimson on Dreamcast and alwayswanted to play this one but maybe not so much anymore...
This looks more like a low budget GBA game that a Saturn game
I'd probably watch someone play this for 35 seconds and walk out lol this game looks terrible! Awesome video SLX! Thanks for playing this one for us! You're a true hero bro!
I'm still scratching my head over the spinning reticule... who the hell thought that was a good idea?
Funny you should cite Criticom as one of the worst fighting games ever. Over on Matt McMuscles' channel he started a series based around trying to find something worse. It took him a year, and 19 videos, but he did it.
That's the most horrendous crosshair i've ever seen.
I haven't played Death Crimson but i did play the sequel Death Crimson ox on Dreamcast and i enjoyed it.
Movies had 'The Room'. Videogames has 'Death Crimson'.
Akklaim made bad games based on movies because they bought LJN and bad games based on movies were LJN's specialty
I know that negativity sells, but I want to thank you for being critical without being extremely angry and crass. I agree though, this game isn’t good, and once in a while in between talking about what was done when the Saturn was handled well, it’s valuable to understand just how far above the bottom those games are.
I'm certain some suit paid them to rush it out or they ran into a deadline. It looks like everything is half done, and probably wouldn't take that much time to get working/looking better, unless it was hitting hardware limitations. I don't think any dev would have sent this if they had the choice.
I enjoy a spectacular failure way more than a competent but mediocre game. This looks charming to me!
The worst games you can import from Japan aka Kusoge would be Virtual Lab on the Virtual Boy, LSD Dream Emulator and Cosmic Race on the PlayStation and this one, Death Crimson for the Saturn. Looking for quality software from Japan? It’s best you find it elsewhere and it wouldn’t be too hard to do.