I'm finding it hard to write an introduction to Space Station Silicon Valley. My reactions to it have been mixed, bordering on the negative, yet I'm intrigued enough about it to stop and question myself. Am I judging it too harshly, like the consumers did back in the late 1990s by not buying it?
It is the future, and you are a microchip taking over robotic animal host bodies in an attempt to navigate three-dimensional levels full of objectives to complete and points to score. If that doesn't sound gripping enough, its sense of humour and style of plot delivery might sway you, but I should really explain what I mean by that with some images.
Fun Times
Space Station Silicon Valley starts with a voiceless newsflash to set the scene. I completely missed the plot at this point, and so I assume those guys are bad and these guys are good.
We can safely assume that because we follow them through space on their mission to save Earth, only it doesn't quite go so well.
Already you can see that the plot is a bit bonkers, and the style it's presented in stands out compared to other games from recent memory. We've seen a dog fall in love with a sheep, and then a spaceship piloted by heroes for hire crash land into the dog... I still don't even know what the gameplay is going to be like at this point.
Okay... so. We're playing as Evo, who was a robot until the ejector seat smashed us into bits, and now we're a microchip scurrying around the place looking for a body. And this dog happens to be vacant right about now, and we can hop into his body - which is apparently robotic, and not at all weird - in order to run around and bark and bite and stuff, which is handy.
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| Always. |
This whole body swap mechanic is the core of the game, as each animal is useful in various situations, but not very useful in others. They'll each have their own ways of moving, their own attacks and so on, and making them work together so you can get an objective complete can be a challenge in itself.
Frustrations
Ugh, what the heck have I got myself into?
It's amazing how much meaningless rubbish I'll find myself doing if you frame it in a good enough way, or if you present it well, or if it's a vaguely enjoyable task. Here, I'm running around as a robot dog herding robot sheep because of reasons.
You can (rightly) say that the controls for Space Station Silicon Valley are intuitive and simple, and you can get to grips with the gameplay right away, even if you have to fight with the camera sometimes (which is kind of movable on the C-stick, with a first-person look available too), but when you're tasked with herding sheep, you're probably not going to attract my attention.
Yes, the story is going into unexpected places, but no, I don't want to start a game that supposedly has steam-powered hippos by running around pretty green fields chasing fluffy white sheep, seemingly for no reason other than 'here, do something'.
Final Word
I ended up finding another dog and fighting it to the death, and that was because I wasn't interested in finding the last sheep, or the mouse with wheels - though that one I would have at least liked to see, thinking back to it.
Very shortly after getting bored with dog fighting, I got bored with having an emulator running at all, and quit out of Space Station Silicon Valley, likely never to play it again.
And yet, as I mentioned back at the start, I'm not quite sure whether I made the right decision. The 1001 entry says that it was ahead of its time, and the Internet says that for all its positives in terms of humour and gameplay ideas, the big negative was 'poor commercial performance', and it's that that sticks in the mind and, arguably, gets in the way of mine right now.
It's easy enough to control, it's simple to get into (though apparently rather hard later on), and it does stand out... but not well enough. I'm herding sheep. I could have been a funny robot with a goofy bald bloke for a sidekick. I'd have played the hell out of that. But instead, I'm blown to bits, reduced to a microchip, and find myself diving into dogs in order to be useful.
I don't know. I'm missing something, but I still think I'll be watching Space Station Silicon Valley before I ever think about playing it again. It's not bad, really. It's not my cup of tea, either. Especially when I don't drink tea.
Fun Facts
Because of the way the Nintendo hardware rendered all the models, the developers saw similarities between their creations and the plasticine models from Aardman Animations' Wallace and Gromit and would continue to push towards that kind of look in order for Space Station Silicon Valley to stand out.
Space Station Silicon Valley, developed by DMA Design, first released in 1998.
Version played: Nintendo 64, 1998, via emulation.