Midnight Raiders
I’m really trying not to rewrite every old review on this site, but sometimes, I gotta step in. My original 2003 review of Midnight Raiders was exactly the same kind of “ha ha game is poo” take – without even bothering to read the manual – that I roll my eyes at YouTubers for. That review is in the first page of search results and contains too much misinformation to deserve that spot. So, here we are, with a rare total rewrite explaining more about why this game doesn’t work. Don’t worry, Where’s Waldo is still shit.
On premise alone, I should adore this game. Midnight Raiders is a self-aware homage to ’80s and ’90s action flicks. You play a hotshot Tom Cruise-a-like named Joker, manning the weapons of a state-of-the-art attack helicopter. Your pilot is a grizzled old vet, the best man they’ve got, who keeps telling you to stop being so reckless. Your rival is the lady gunner of the other chopper, wearing full makeup into combat, who continually taunts you about your aim. The mission is run by a gruff CIA guy who cares more about the mission than the men. Your CO is a kindly old Colonel, who protests how dangerously this is being handled, but is forced to cooperate by the “higher-ups.”
That mission is to raid a Middle Eastern oil refinery, where terrorists have abducted brilliant biochemist Dr. Mensch. He’s being forced to create a toxin that will (dum dum DUM) deshtroy zee vorld! You’ll battle an endless queue of surplus Soviet air and armor, who all politely attack you one at a time. After about 10 minutes, you’ll reach the refinery, where Joker will rappel out of the chopper and storm the facility – by himself, on foot – to bring the scientist home. After, of course, defeating the black-suited bad guy, planting a Tactical Nuke™, and making a dramatic escape in a Jeep to celebrate with the hot lady gunner.
It’s dumber than a sack of brass casings, but it knows exactly what it’s going for. It’s you, actively playing the hero, within a direct-to-video cornball action flick. Explosions are real, from a time when CGI would have been leagues more expensive than some gas pyrotechnics. Military stock footage shows real choppers flying around and firing missiles. Joker runs through the platforms of a real oil refinery, shooting blanks at stuntmen who tumble dramatically over railings. It’s a game that weirdly has to be FMV to pull off this movie fantasy and there’s nothing that could be considered “a product of its time” more than this title. As someone who’s been watching these exact kinds of flicks since I was 8, again, I should be all over this one.
Having the game on CD lets video clips get reshuffled and randomly drawn. As you approach the refinery, key scenes play in order to lay out the plot. In between these scenes, the game pulls from a few possible enemy encounters. This keeps you on your toes, as you never know quite what to expect next – you might come over a ridge to find a SAM battery, or find an enemy helo approaching from the distance. In all cases, you have seconds to react before they fire at you.
But it’s the way these scenes are presented that make the game unbearable. The random-access CD format makes for one of the most schizophrenic movies you’ve ever seen. Cuts are wild and erratic, with weird, quick inserts of hands on instruments (probably masking loading times). It doesn’t take long for clips to repeat, while even new ones are just a couple different ways for your pilot to yell “HIND APPROACHING!” Joker then gets way too excited about shooting rockets while the enemy explodes, often over completely different terrain than the previous clip (like forest to desert). Then someone says some variant of “Great shot! Now do it again!” with more instrument-fiddling as the next sequence loads.
I was tired of this by five minutes in, and it already felt like I’d seen all the possible clips and enemy combinations. But there’s still more time to spend before you get to the refinery. The paced-out story clips help a little (“Now open up your briefing!”) but you’re quickly back to watching the same miniature explode, or a reversed video of eyes twitching or dials spinning, because the original clip wasn’t long enough. The entire game’s about 30 minutes long, but it feels so much longer in very bad ways. You can’t save or jump ahead. If you want to shoot dudes on the ground, you’ve got to run the entire helicopter gauntlet first.
Now, all the above assumes you’re actually good at the game. It’s really, really likely that you won’t be. You must use the D-Pad to quickly drag a sluggish cursor over a shaky, stock shot of a helicopter flying toward you. You have only a few seconds to respond, pressing B (for air targets) or C (for ground ones) when the cursor crosses over the designated hitbox. If you shoot too late, you get shot down. I think how many rescues and new choppers you get is randomized, but it’s not many before the mission is scrapped and it’s Game Over.
This awful cursor really makes you feel set up to fail. It moves at one set speed, while the game’s asking for mouse precision on a kludgy D-Pad. By default, bright green brackets mark whatever enemy approaches, which definitely helps. But actually getting that cursor over to and onto the target is a huge ask. Tomcat Alley at least snapped its cursor to enemies if you got close, but you get no such help here. If you shoot early, the clip keeps playing, so you can at least keep trying. But you can’t hammer the button – per the manual, you’ve got 50 rockets on Easy and just 15 on Hard. How many remain is never shown anywhere, but you can absolutely run out (you just get a “click” sound when you try to fire).
That’s pretty much the entire gameplay. You either hit targets before they shoot back, or you miss and eventually die. I’m not sure you can really get better at it. I never got comfortable with the D-Pad and never felt like I was getting any more accurate. I would waggle between too far left and too far right, or manage to draw a square around the target while the whole video bobs and shakes. There’s few enough clips that you can probably start to memorize where your cursor should be to intercept – and that’s probably the kind of “replay value” they were going for here. To me, that’s incredibly boring. I don’t want to learn choreography, I just want to play the game.
If that’s not bad enough, the Sega CD’s video compression eats this game alive. To its credit, the video does fill the screen when many Sega CD games didn’t. There’s a reason they didn’t, though – this is one of the blurriest games on the system. Colors smear all over the place, while big pixel groups and extreme dithering destroy any hope of detail. You can make out faces and expressions in close-ups, while straining through the pixel fog of the poorly-lit command room is just annoying rather than a true problem. But when those brown helos start flying toward you over brown deserts? Now you’re struggling to find your target through the grainy stock footage. You can optionally disable the green brackets for an extra challenge, and all I can say to that is “good luck.”
Things get worse on the ground, as Joker’s assault takes place entirely at night. This is jerky, handheld video as the cameraman chases him through the refinery, or swings around sharply in fast POV shots. Meanwhile, guards in black vests and orange jumpsuits blend into the background and often can only be seen by their motion. Just like in the helicopter, that wild camera shifts suddenly under you just as you start to get a bead on someone. It’s like someone’s pulling your head around while your hand tries to aim.
Gameplay is the same as in the air – wait for baddies to jump out, have a second or less to move the cursor onto them, hit A and watch the action. Ammo is tracked more clearly here than in the helo. You have 15 shots before you have to reload, by moving the cursor to an ammo bar hidden in the lower right and pressing C. The ammo bar shows how many reloads you have left. I found myself wasting panicked shots here far more often than in the helicopter, especially in moments like shooting across a courtyard where the green brackets are just an inch high. Precision aiming really is impossible, while Joker has only one life on the ground. Get shot at any time and you’re restarting the whole game. Replay value!
The conflict between making a game and making a movie also gets in the way. You’ll be lining up the cursor on a distant helicopter, when it suddenly cuts to clips of your teammates yelling at you to hurry up and fire. Well, I’m trying to do that! On the ground, cameras flip between first-person, third-person, and other locations entirely (like the command room, or your fellow pilots flying cover). At any time, it might flip back to a shot of an enemy popping out. The cursor sometimes disappears during pure plot sections, but I still got jumped by quick cuts to bad guys. It usually turns from red to white when it’s over a target, but tanks and some ground enemies didn’t trigger this. More consistency would have definitely helped.
Sound mostly gets the job done. Voices are compressed and scratchy, but that’s usually from characters talking on radios. Music often plays too loud over the dialogue in these plot scenes. Effects recorded on set sound fine, but they’re supplemented with a lot of odd bleeps and bloops in the helicopter or the command room. Also, whenever you fire a missile or a gun, you’re shown a quick clip of the helo’s trigger being squeezed or the gun firing (again, probably masking load times). Both play some kind of squelchy sound effect. So you’ll hear a horribly loud and distorted “bang” when shooting the gun, then normal-sounding gunfire when the reaction clip plays.
I should love Midnight Raiders. A truly interactive action flick is exactly what I would have asked for since I was a pre-teen. This game just doesn’t pull it off, and a lot of that is the Sega CD’s fault. I cannot stress enough how frustrating aiming is. The game begs for mouse controls and sharper video – a PC port probably would have done better, though PC support for FMV was equally creaky back then. But it’s not just a case of “right game, wrong system” – even if you had cleaner video, the game is still a tough reaction challenge with fractions of seconds to react, over jerking video and interrupting cuts. And even if you nailed every challenge, its random-access nature makes it an awkward, erratic, and repetitive show.
The Good
I can’t fault the idea and they clearly spent money on the shoot. I do, indeed, want to control a hero in a cheesy action flick.
The Bad
Sega CD’s messy visuals, dragging a cursor with a D-Pad, and trying to aim while the video jerks around, all come together to ruin the game. Playable, but only with lots and lots of memorization.
“What’s he talking about Adams? I wanna know what’s going on! I came here for the doctor!” – Joker