Covert Ops beat "Resident Evil on a train" by a full 2 years, and that comparison is appropriate from engine to caboose. Inventory juggling, (very) limited ammo, "bad" voice acting, a story that barely tracks, it's all here in PS1 glory. The high-espionage adventure of Jack Morton on a nuclear train speeding its way to Paris features all the standard trappings of the RE series but with an action movie wrapper, and honestly it works better than one might expect. There's no guesswork in the combat as giant crosshairs indicate both a proper lock and the amount of critical damage each shot will deal. The story moves at a rapid pace that never lets up and keeps the twists coming with branching paths. The game's game's limited physical setting also means it's genuinely one of the best-looking games from the generation, with the added flash of a rotating camera on pre-rendered backgrounds.

It's not all meal service and great scenery, though. A number of typical PS1-era issues rear their ugly heads. The aforementioned limited ammo is so limited that it can become literally impossible to finish the game. Enemies seem to drop predetermined items, meaning that every bullet fired is gone forever. This is exasperated by the fact that enemies respawn, and in a game where the nature of the story has you running back and forth between the same 10-15 rooms, you'll be doing a lot of unavoidable hallway shooting and begging the enemy corpse to flicker away to reveal a magazine (it won't). That's an even bigger bummer when you run into one of the impressively unfair boss fights. Bosses often have screen-covering attacks that tank controls are absolutely not equipped to handle, with long invincibility periods between successful hits from the player. Beating bosses is less about reactive gunplay and more about learning which loop of shoot>dodge roll>dodge back>shoot you need to employ to "outsmart" their programming. They also tend to come without warning, so God help you if you haven't saved. Lastly, on the story end, every "twist" is about as obvious as a tunnel painted on a wall and the plot holes are so big you could... well, drive some sort of large, automotive commerce vehicle through them.

Covert Ops is kind of a perfect PS1 game. It contains all the elements people associate with the generation: surprisingly impressive graphics, clunky tank control combat, a wide cast of characters with all the wrong accents. It's far from a masterpiece, but if you're looking for obscure survival "horror" games, you could choo choo choose worse.

Metal Wolf Chaos is incredible and terrible in equal measure across every element. The story concept is completely insane and hilarious, but the game feels like it's missing 80% of the cutscenes that explain how anything gets from one point to another. There's a point where you talk to a character, it fades to black, and in the next cutscene they've been kidnapped and ask if you can ever forgive them for betraying you. There is zero explanation for this series of events and it is never addressed afterwards. The voice acting is "terrible" in the best way, but the writing itself is clunky with abysmal broken English and lines of dialogue that get cut off mid-sentence. The action is completely over the top and it feels great to save America by blowing most of it up, but weapons do a seemingly random amount of damage on every shot, anything that's not a rocket launcher is effectively useless, and the bosses have unbelievably cheap attacks that tear through your health faster than an executive order. A total lack of checkpoints guarantees you'll be slogging through entire levels, bracing for the return of a boss' third-phase invisible attack.

To the outside observer, Metal Wolf Chaos is loud, obnoxious, deliriously over-the-top, with explosions and patriotism as far as the eye can see. To the player, it's a series of half-baked systems designed to undermine the entire experience and, in some ways, actively work against its enjoyment.

To put it simply: it's the perfect American game.

Disaster Report is much like the island it takes place on: shaky, uneven, full of cracks, and a man-made wonder. It's about as standard an adventure game as they come; walk around, find an item, use item on "door," repeat. Characters are all one-note, with lines of dialogue delivered in wildly different tones and volumes within a single conversation. Time is split between wandering around looking for a single key item to progress and running away from collapsing rubble, rushing waves, or tumbling trucks, and it's all achieved with not-the-jankiest-but-damn-close controls from the generation. The lack of direct camera control will kill you more than any natural disaster. You have the ability to call out to NPCs, which makes them wave at you and literally nothing else. You have to drink water to do actions and maintain health, but on Normal difficulty water is in such high supply that you will only ever die from one-hit "event" kills rather than taking damage from the world around you. Fortunately, checkpoints are frequent, so you're never losing too much progress whenever you think you're watching a cutscene but were, in fact, supposed to be running away from the random tsunami.

Despite the uneven experience of actually playing it, it all strangely works together to make a unique and charming game. The story is revealed in little chunks that are paced out pretty well, adding mystery to what was originally just a survival story. Of course for every reveal there is something that makes absolutely no sense (like villains inexplicably refusing to spend a bullet on your character because it will "take too long") that adds to the wacky tone and nature of the whole experience. There are multiple endings depending on certain actions you take, complete with a path-split decision halfway through the game to follow different characters, and they range from ridiculous to abrupt to depressing.

There is a lot of love put into Disaster Report, and as a result there is a lot to love about it. Everything moves along at a decent pace, characters are simultaneously over the top and endearing, and there's very little of the game that's outright busted so much as just unpolished. In all honesty, the game gets more of a 2.5 star rating from a gameplay perspective, but I'm awarding it a full extra star for including the most insane cutscene involving two old men on a rooftop to ever be portrayed in media.