Forgotten PlayStation Exclusives Nobody Played

Forgotten PlayStation Exclusives

Every big name in the console game needs a few big games that can only be played under their big name — well, at least for a bit or also on PC — and Sony PlayStation is no different. In fact, PlayStation’s bombastic, cinematic experiences are really a large part of the reason why they had such a stellar eighth generation, and they’ve had a good but not spectacular ninth gen so far off the back of games that you can’t play anywhere else — uh, for a while. But for every Kratos, Ellie, and Astro Bot, there’s a bloke called Riley Vaughan.

 

C-12: Final Resistance – PlayStation

As much as my ten year old brain might have thought C-12: Final Resistance was the coolest thing since Street Sharks, there was a big, rectangle-sized reason why it was never going to work out for Riley Vaughan or the same guys who made Medievil 1 and 2.

You see, SCE Studio Cambridge’s C-12 was released in Europe when the PS2 had already been out worldwide for about 8 months. This might not seem a big deal now, especially when we’re still getting PS4 and PS5 games that look pretty similar, but the generational leap back then made C:12 feel a bit… quaint? Absolutely no disrespect to a game that I’m fairly sure I was indoctrinated into loving by British gaming magazines, but compare C:12 to any PS2 games that were releasing at the end of 2001, games that would genuinely shift the industry and yeah, it does not compare. What’s wilder still? It took over a year for the game to finally reach the United States all the way in July 2002, just a couple of months after GTA 3 and Morrowind.

Reviews, as you might guess from just this footage, weren’t exactly incredible, with them even saying at the time that it felt old. I’m pretty sure it was a big financial failure too, as the game has basically never been mentioned by Sony once. It has had zero cultural impact either really, barring this um one Fallout 4 mod? Respect it. I’ll be honest, though: I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this game. Always.

This tale of a cybersoldier saving his planet from alien invaders undeniably very heavily applied the Syphon Filter, um, filter, and even though it has some pretty cool animations for the PlayStation, particularly when it comes to climbing about, it does just look more Runescape than Farscape.

But, I dunno man, it has this kind of dread-inducing, fantastic atmosphere, a protagonist who’s got a robot arm and eye, and you also get to swing a laser sword around a bit.

Yeah, that’ll do me.

C:12 would be more or less the final big name first-party game released for the PS1, and Studio Cambridge then went on to develop Ghosthunter and another forgotten banger for the PS2 that I will get to shortly, but for now I want to go back a bit to the start of the PS1.

 

Hermie Hopperhead: Scrap Panic – PlayStation

As well as sounding like some kind of insult for a homeless person, Hermie Hopperhead: Scrap Panic is instead a bright, vivacious 2D platformer that was released in 1995 for the original PlayStation.

If you’ve never heard of it, it’s because Hermie Hopperhead was never released outside of Japan. They kept Hermie Hopperhead, we never subjected them to Rascal.

In Hermie Hopperhead, players are able to collect stars to hatch eggs so that they can become turtles and chickens do your bidding, and also turn them into platforms. All this after he is cajoled into a bin and transported to the Egg Planet, and yes you probably are already realising why this never officially came to the west.

The ginger rasta Hermie must save his girlfriend Trish from the evil Mad Migo, who’s a few eggs short of an omelette, across 70 levels of pretty challenging but not brutal platforming. Hermie Hopperhead is a little like a mix between Sonic the Hedgehog and Yoshi’s Island, but if the same ragtime song kept playing over and over again. It is a bopper, though.

For me, Hermie Hopperhead is visually reminiscent of Tomba, or Tombi for those of us in Europe, but just a little bit flatter, if that makes sense? It doesn’t pop quite as much, which is probably due to it being a pretty early PS1 game, but funnily enough the game did prove to naysayers very early on that the PlayStation could do 2D just as well as its mind-boggling effects. It’s pretty easily playable as there’s basically no Japanese text to translate, and is very easily accessible from…certain websites.

Hermie Hopperhead is also remarkable for being the second game from Yuke’s, who would later develop the SmackDown series and even later WWE 2K all the way up until WWE 2K19. Sadly, though, Hermie has never been officially ported or even really recognised since the earliest PlayStation days, but I think it’s primed for a comeback.

 

Primal – PlayStation 2

We now return to our friends at Studio Cambridge, see I told you it wouldn’t be too long, for the game that followed C-12: Primal. Interestingly, Primal was going to be called Fable at one time, according to creative director Chris Sorrell. You can even have a primal alignment in Fable 3. Is that anything? I dunno, anyway:

Released in 2003, I think the best way I can describe Primal is Legacy of Kain meets The Crow meets Ratchet & Clank. You play as Jen, a young woman looking for her boyfriend who quickly discovers that she has to save the universe, as you do. You’re accompanied by Scree, a chatterbox gargoyle who you can also play as in some light platforming sections to help you solve puzzles and provide some certified banter moments with Jen.

The pair’s dynamic is ultimately the heart of Primal, and while Scree does love to ramble on and on while giving you more exposition than the first 55 minutes of an eight hour video essay on icebergs or whatever, Jen and Scree’s back and forth is always fun.

The combat is also pretty solid, real slow but hefty, with some cool finishing moves. The real marquee attraction for Primal though is the fact that Jen can change form as she progresses, with you able to switch styles to suit the enemy you’re facing.

The camera may feel a bit wobblier than the replay timeline on our list videos, I see you, skippers, we’re all busy, I get it, but Primal kinda feels a little like a precursor to the cinematic third-person action games we get from Sony these days. It looks and sounds great even today, and you can even play it on your PS5 through backwards compatibility for the PS4 remaster.

Studio Cambridge, meanwhile, would go on to make the equally peak (translation: heavily flawed but my Digimon addled mind at the time didn’t care) Ghosthunter, 24: The Game, and even Killzone Mercenary in 2013 for the Vita before being shuttered in 2017. It was a pretty good rise while it lasted.

 

Jet Li: Rise to Honor – PS2

Quick question: where are all our martial arts stars these days? I remember you couldn’t move in the 2000s without bumping into a movie starring Jackie Chan, Chow-Yun Fat, or Jet Li. All three of those names had their own starring roles in video games, with the latter even headlining a pretty forgotten PS2 exclusive by the name of Jet Li: Rise to Honor.

From the name, you’re probably thinking that this is some kind of biopic about how Jet Li rose to prominence, but it isn’t. It’s kind of weird. Imagine if it was called Keanu Reeves: John Wick, or Steven Seagal: Belly of the Beast. It doesn’t make sense. Well, maybe that last one does.

Developed by primarily a support studio who would later become known as San Mateo Studio, Rise to Honor was another one of those really early attempts from Sony to bring the box office to PlayStation. I mean, it has a chapter selection sequence like you’re watching The Matrix Reloaded on DVD for when you want to avoid all the Zion stuff, which is every time.

Rise to Honor also comes from that experimental era of action games where, for reasons I can only imagine were inspired by the HF Blade in MGS2, you could use melee attacks by flicking the right stick, which was pretty polarising at the time, but I dunno, I thought it was cool . The game’s story, which follows an undercover cop fulfilling his mob boss friend’s final wish something something documents something something. Sony may have wanted to become basically video game Hollywood, but their writing still had a ways to go here.

To its credit, Rise to Honor did have some incredible motion capture stuff going on for 2004 with Jet Li himself pitching in a lot behind the scenes, and there are a lot of cool things going on with environmental interaction, and how often it changes things up from simply punching guys stops it from getting too stale. It’s basically the perfect rental game. You can also turn into a roast duck.

San Mateo Studio would eventually splinter off and become Pixelopus, the developers behind the amazing Concrete Genie that just about missed making it into this video. Now here’s a game that somehow missed the land of chippy chips.

 

Rise of the Kasai – PS2 (America only)

From the rising of the honor to the rising of the kasai, this one is bonkers to me. You see, The Mark of Kri was a pretty big deal on my playground back in 2002. The exaggerated visuals, the completely new setting, and what every young boy loves once he puts down the Street Sharks figures for the final time: wanton acts of violence.

A bloody third-person action adventure, The Mark of Kri was unlike much else I’d seen at the time, with a Dreamworks style before Dreamworks had even really nailed down their style, a unique combat system that let you target diffe rent enemies with different button presses, and a big focus on stealth during a golden era for the genre. My friends and I were obsessed with it.

So you can imagine my surprise, then, when about ten or so years later, I discovered it had a North American exclusive sequel by the name of Rise of Kasai.

Released in 2005, three years on from the original game, Kasai is a bit more ambitious than its predecessor in that it lets you team up with and play as multiple characters across different time periods as you try and stop that titular evil rabble known as the Kasai.

However, while the sequel still looks absolutely lovely and the combat is pretty fun, it just doesn’t have that same…sauce, reflected in its critical rating tumbling quite a bit. It doesn’t help that the friendly AI may as well be fighting for the other team with how dumb they are at times. But the game ultimately just didn’t really innovate enough in a year that saw the release of other third-person action games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadow of the Colossus.

I think that might have something to do with the fact that a lot of the innovation was probably going to be found in the online co-op that was sadly canceled.

Add in the fact that the game skipped a pretty big market, and there’s little wonder why some people with pretty bad knees these days get a huge surprise when they see this on the PlayStation Store.

Americans, if you’re feeling pretty smug about getting a game nobody else did, India has just activated the ultimate trap card.

 

RA. ONE: The Game – PS2 and PS3

Alright, this one. This is a…something. Allegedly.

So basically, RA. ONE is a Bollywood movie released in 2011 starring Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan, that follows a video game developer whose evil creation is accidentally released to the real world, who then hunts down the developer’s son for defeating him. In the game. Don’t worry about it. RA. ONE was at one point the most expensive Bollywood movie ever produced. And that’s clearly why they gave absolutely no budget to these games.

Red Chillies Entertainment, owned by Shah Rukh Khan, teamed with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe to release two different adaptations of Ra-One, one for PS2 that was exclusive to India, and a PS3 version that came to India and parts of Europe, as part of a wider effort to get Indian players invested in console gaming and also to promote the upcoming movie. Shah Rukh Khan himself wrote the story for the game, which is a strange thing to admit out loud

Developed by Trine Games of, um, Learn Geography: Ages 2-8 on the Nintendo DS fame, RA. ONE: The Game retailed for around £5, $7 or so on PS2, and £10, $12 or so on PS3. And, well, it shows because it takes half an hour to beat.

Basically, this is a really quite rudimentary arena fighter. And everyone knows that rudimentary actually means “a bit shit”. It’s a much bigger bit shitter on PS2 than it is on PS3, with it basically looking like a slideshow version of Power Stone made on a calculator for the former, but the PS3 really isn’t much better, with some awful voice acting on top of the combat which feels as satisfying as fighting someone in a dream.

Ra.One: The Game was pretty unsuccessful in Europe on PS3, meaning that copies of the game are now going for money that really could be better spent on finally getting me my copy of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on PS1, yes I’m back to that obsession this week please don’t try to stop me,  and Bollywood basically agreed to never try this sort of thing again.

Okay, they tried it one more time with another Shah Rukh Khan adaptation, the PS2 version of the movie Don 2 that released exclusively in India in 2013. I think it’d be super fun to do a video covering PlayStation in India, so give the comments a Rub a Dub if you’d like to see that.

 

Super Rub ‘a’ Dub – PS3

Genuinely, you could make a whole video like this just on forgotten exclusives Sony published on the fledgling PlayStation Store. How about Calling All Cars, a cel-shaded Hot Wheels from one of the minds behind God of War? Okay, if that doesn’t get your ointment oinking, how about Ape Quest, a PSP exclusive Ape Escape RPG? But instead let’s focus on Super Rub a Dub.

Based on the demo that was first displayed at E3 2005 to showcase the power of the PlayStation 3 and multiple memory card slots, Super Rub ‘a’ Dub is basically the digital version of those weird old bath foam Game Boy things, do you remember, with the nubs?

Developed by Sumo Digital, who you may know as the developers behind Sackboy on PS5 and also the whipper that is Outrun 2006, your job in Super Rub ‘a’ Dub is pretty simple: tilt your SixAxis or DualShock 3 and move the ducks around the pools while being careful to make sure they don’t rub their final dubs, either from falling out or getting gobbled up by sharks. And that’s about it.

It’s a completely inoffensive puzzle game that could be fun for an hour. A simple, totally earnest little video game with neat physics. So obviously, someone at IGN gave it a 2.9/10 and likened it to George Clooney getting tortured. Now, if this was 2014, I’d say the game clearly had too much water for them, but it’s 202…5, what, ok, and that joke has aged about as well as buying a website and then pretty much immediately shutting them down.

Why did you do that, IGN?

So yeah, Super Rub a Dub is nothing too substantial, but you know, not every game needs to be — Placid Plastic Duck Simulator on Steam, for instance, where you become a rubber duck in a pool, is just about bobbing about. And people love it.

 

The Punisher: No Mercy – PS3

When I say the words “The Punisher” to you, what are the first words you give back to me? If they are “first-person multiplayer shooter exclusive to the PS3 PlayStation Store developed by a pinball company” then clearly you never watched John Travolta just eating up Thomas Jane’s oxygen in 2004 for 123 glorious minutes.

Released 5 years after that underrated movie and also the brutal pseudo-sequel 6th gen video game that’s still one of the great comic book games ever, The Punisher: No Mercy came out to even less fanfare than the newer Punisher movie reboot from the year prior.  The game only managed a meager 49 on Metacritic with a single positive review to its name.

We really don’t appreciate that Netflix series enough for turning The Punisher ship around, because we were all Punished for a while there.

I think the fact that its developer, Zen Studios, had only really made Xbox Live pinball games, the DS version of Ghostbusters, and uhhh the Rocky and Bullwinkle version of WarioWare before this may go some ways towards explaining how they struggled to make a decent FPS game. Not only does controlling No Mercy feel about as responsive as Kevin Nash’s chest, but its single player content is just laughable.

It’s basically just the multiplayer aspect of the game,  but instead of getting teabagged by xXYerNan69Xx, you’re just running around arenas and making number-based objectives go up. We call this the Brink Stink. The story is a joke too, with barely animated comic panels your only real way of following the narrative surrounding Frank Castle squabbling with Jigsaw once again — for all of its 30 minutes of playtime.

Yeah, you can play as multiple characters and fiddle around with your weapons a bit, and there’s a few pints of blood flying about like you’d expect from something connected to The Punisher, but the shooting feels awful, the writing is bad, and it’s just the exact kind of mess of a game you’d expect from a studio who hadn’t yet developed their magnum opus.

Mercifully, The Punisher: No Mercy was delisted in 2011, and it’s not been seen since. Marvel might have been right to second guess licensing Spider-Man to Sony after this. But No Mercy actually outlived this next game that Sony outright owned.

 

Kill Strain – PS4

I don’t know why, but I can just kind of sense that I will be firing up some long dormant neurons for some of you when I say “Kill Strain”. While Concord is by far the single biggest failure in Sony’s PlayStation history, this is another multiplayer game chasing trends that was just…an absolute weird mess, but also kinda cool?

Released digitally for PS4 in mid-2016, Kill Strain is one of those really cool ideas on paper that just doesn’t really work in reality. Imagine the asymmetrical portion Dead By Daylight mixed with a MOBA mixed with Stubbs the Zombie, and that does sound cool, but again, it just didn’t come together for San Diego Studio, whose first game was The Mark of Kri.

So, let me break this down as simply as I can: Kill Strain was a top-down free to play multiplayer twin-stick shooter in which two teams of human mercenaries face off against each other and also a third team consisting of mutants, who can eventually turn humans into more mutants.

I’ve not even mentioned the MOBA elements of the game yet. Okay, so the mutants are able to expand their territory by spreading the strain, and then as the humans you have to capture and hold zones in order to spawn resources. Oh, and there are also multiple classes of character, levelling systems, and each match is like 20 minutes long.

I do remember enjoying Kill Strain for the first couple of days, but I also do remember a lot of people dropping out constantly every match, maybe just because they didn’t quite get it. Kill Strain was just trying to do a bit too much of everything while not being particularly amazing at any one thing, and it barely clicked with anyone.

Kill Strain was delisted and taken offline in December 2017, a year and a half after launch. Hey, that’s not too bad, really? But I’m surprised this last game has lasted as long as it has.

 

Destruction AllStars – PS5

Ah, Twisted Metal Fortnite.

One of the PS5’s first true exclusives, and likely only exclusive right alongside Astro’s Playroom when this generation wraps up, Destruction AllStars dropped in early 2021 when we were all still trying to figure out exactly where game folders went on our shiny new PlayStation 5s.

You kinda got the sense that Destruction AllStars was already in trouble when it went from being a $70 launch title for the console to a PlayStation Plus day 1 title following a delay. It’s clear that Sony was trying to recapture some of that Rocket League boom through its Plus launch, but AllStars just never caught on, and yeah, it’s easy to see why.

While not a bad game, and it’s certainly quite the looker at times, there really was not a lot to keep people hooked in a post-Fortnite multiplayer world, where every six minutes Epic releases a new, I dunno,   skin to keep their fans happy. The vehicular combat core, with you trying to mow down other players when they have to skedaddle on foot, was pretty fun and fluid, but the post-launch content roadmap was absolutely languid at best, and the formula never really changed. One day of Destruction AllStars was all you needed to see all of AllStars.

What makes this crazier is that the game with not that much content, is also still asking players to pay more money to unlock extra single player story missions to actually connect more with its characters that it wants you to buy skins for. Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can’t buy the standard version of the game on its own anymore? You can only get it by subscribing to PlayStation Plus Extra? Why not just make it free to play, like, two years ago? Make it make sense, people.

So yeah, Destruction AllStars was fun and I personally got my uh PS Plus sub’s value out of it, but it feels like PlayStation just used it as a bit of a weird, fairly low stakes experiment to figure out the multiplayer market, but it seems that market has kinda long forgotten it in the four years since. Do you think we’ll be getting Destruction AllStars 2 on PS6? You know what, we’ll probably get a remake of this instead.

Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.

Editor-in-Chief