Astro Bot’s PlayStation bots feature some really deep cuts

Astro Botwhich was released on September 6th for PlayStation 5, is a wonderful platform game. It also serves as a prelude to Sony’s celebration of 30 years of PlayStation (The original console was released in Japan in December 1994). The game is full of PlayStation Easter eggs and fan service.

Notably, no fewer than 173 of the game’s 300 collectible bots are dressed up as characters from the last three decades of PlayStation gaming. But development team Asobi cheekily doesn’t name them outright, instead giving each a suggestive codename (“Aristocratic Archaeologist” for Lara Croft, “Raider Dude” for Nathan Drake) and another suggestive description. So browsing the collection is as much a guessing game as it is a test of how deep your PlayStation fandom runs.

Many of the bots are instantly recognizable. Some, however, are quite obscure. While the third-party heroes are all pretty famous (Ryu, Ken, Solid Snake), Team Asobi has dug deep into Sony’s history as a games publisher and dug up some weird and wonderful delights. During the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 eras in particular, Sony was a well-funded and fearless publisher that wasn’t afraid to throw all sorts of bizarre ideas at the wall to see what stuck, especially in the Japanese market.

Astro Bot‘s bot collection is a beautiful tribute to that era and to Team Asobi’s former home, Japan Studio – the legendary, innovative Sony studio that was dissolved in 2021. Here are some of the collection’s deepest cuts.

(Thanks to my Polygon colleagues – especially Nicole Carpenter and Michael McWhertor – for helping identify some of these, and to Ryan Gilliam for providing images of his complete bot collection!)

It is not surprising that many of the deepest cuts in Astro Bot are from the PS1 era, but here’s a PlayStation 3 game that is unfortunately forgotten just over a decade later: 2013’s Puppeteer. This little guy is Kutaro, a boy who has been transformed into a doll with a novel game mechanic that can swap heads and cut up the scenery with his scissors. This game from the Japanese studio was creative but failed to find a large audience – which was starting to become a problem for Sony in the more sophisticated world of the PS3 era. Its failure signaled the beginning of the end for the studio.

This creepy, square purple head is called Polygon Man and, believe it or not, it briefly served as the marketing mascot for the original PlayStation in North America. Intended to be an edgy promotional tool aimed at teenagers who might be put off by the toy-like PlayStation name, Polygon Man was considered a mistake by almost everyone, including PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi, and was abandoned before the PS1 even hit the market.

Dark Chroniclethe 2003 PS2 role-playing game from Level-5, which was Dark Cloud 2 in North America, is not as obscure as some of the other references on this list, but the way this bot is named and presented makes its identity particularly difficult to guess. It is Dark ChronicleThe protagonist Maximilian, or Max, broods over some toy houses because the game has a city-building mechanic built in, along with the randomly generated dungeons it inherits from its spiritual predecessor. Dark Cloud.

The Adventures of Natsuya Sumi (usually translated as My summer holidays) is a Japan-only series of open-world, nostalgic life simulations about a child’s summer vacation in 1975. The protagonist, Boku, is this bug-catching boy. In the first game, released for PlayStation in 2000, and its three sequels, there are no actual goals; aside from daily routines, it’s up to you to decide how Boku spends his 31 days of free time in the countryside. Natsu-Mon: Summer Child of the 20th Centurya spiritual sequel from original director Kaz Ayabe, was recently released on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.

One of the most unusual games ever released for PS1 – and that’s saying something – is Vib Band. It’s an ultra-minimalist, black-and-white take on the rhythm game genre that was popular at the time, in which a scratchily animated, line-drawn rabbit named Vibri hops along a line and navigates abstract dangers to the beat of shrill electronic music. The twist was that you could put your own music CDs into the PlayStation and the game would generate levels that matched the tunes.

The original PlayStation had crazy mini-game compilations. Does anyone remember them? I owe him something special? One of the craziest was Incredible crisiswhich follows four members of a working-class Japanese family who, despite all sorts of horrific and inappropriate events – bank robberies, statues crashing into offices, teddy bear kaiju, and so on – are just trying to get home for Grandma’s birthday without her stress meter blowing. This guy is the father, Taneo.

This axe-wielding sheep is Lammy, the heroine of About Jammer Lammya rocky offshoot of the more well-known rap rhythm game PaRappa the Rapper (also included in Astro Bot). Although it doesn’t quite have the lyrical charm of PaRappa, About Jammer Lammy is incredibly tough musically, conceptually and in its hectic gameplay.

This elfin adventurer is AlundraStar of a 1998 game of the same name for the PS1. Developed by Matrix Software and published in Japan by Sony itself, it was an attempt to bring a Legend of Zelda-style fantasy adventure to the PlayStation, with the interesting gimmick of Alundra being able to enter the dreams of local townspeople. But its old-fashioned 2D gameplay was overshadowed by Zelda’s move into 3D with Ocarina of Time in the same year and is largely forgotten today.

This fool is an allusion to Intelligent Qubea PS1 puzzle game released by Sony in 1997 in which a little man runs around on platforms trying not to get crushed by monolithic metal cubes. There’s something eerie and oppressive about the fragile little guy zipping around in this hostile, monochromatic void, at the mercy of the simple igamesnewsal panels that could only have been invented in the wild early days of 3D gaming.

This guy is Arc, hero of the tactical RPG Arc the Boya Japan-only release for PS1 in 1995. The game was so popular that it spawned several sequels, as well as manga and anime, well into the PS2 era. But the first three games were not released in the West, dooming it to more or less obscurity here.

Before Sony allowed him to shape racing games for a generation with his ultra-realistic motorsport opus magnum Big tourismKazunori Yamauchi was asked to earn his stripes by releasing a Mario Kart clone at Japan Studio. The game was released in 1994 Motor Toon Grand Prix (only released in Japan, although a sequel was released in the US). Yamauchi obviously went way overboard and included complex driving physics with fully simulated suspensions for the cartoon karts.

You will be forgiven for being surprised by this strange glowing dog character, even though it comes from a very recent release. It is the player character of humanitya puzzle platformer/work of art from 2023 in which your heavenly dog ​​leads huge crowds through treacherous, abstract levels (which are a bit reminiscent of Intelligent QubeStrictly speaking).

This cute little Pomeranian is actually the cover star of a particularly wild PS3-era indie game developed by Crispy’s! and hatched by Japan Studio: Tokyo Jungle. The 2012 game revolves around survival of the fittest in a destroyed Tokyo with no human inhabitants – just animals that eat, fuck, and evolve each other. The Pomeranian is one of two animal options to start with (the other is a deer; as a herbivore, survival is even harder).

Every now and then you come across a game that needs no explanation other than its title, and an example of this is the PS2 version from 2002 Mr Mückewhere you play as a mosquito. You live in a house with a family of life-sized people and you have to suck their blood to survive. That’s all. That’s the game.

This is Robbit, the robot rabbit as protagonist of the extremely early PlayStation version Jumping lightning!an introductory game for the console released in Europe and North America in 1995. Jumping lightning! was a bold, breathtaking attempt to create a 3D platform game with a first-person perspective. Super Mario 64 Although this approach was relegated to history a year later, the game was still a true pioneer.