About A Game: Simple 1500 Series Vol. 100 - The Astronaut (PSX)
The Simple 1500 series was a line of budget titles for PS1, each selling for 1500 yen, published by D3 Publisher. It consisted partially of rereleases (including Densha de Go, Puzzle Bobble and Power Shovel), but most of its titles were specifically made for the Simple series and are very obviously simple budget titles, with great names like THE MAHJONG, THE RACE, THE SHOOTING or THE GUN SHOOTING. They're often very barebones and limited experiences, but for 1500 yen you can't really ask for much.
A few of these games are more fleshed out, offering a story mode and unique gameplay, like the more well-known THE SNIPER, or this game right here, Simple 1500 Series Vol. 100 - The Astronaut (SIMPLE1500シリーズ Vol.100 THE 宇宙飛行士), created by one of the more frequently seen Simple series devs, Amedio. I'd like to think that for their 100th game, D3 wanted to offer something more special than usual. It's also one of the final few games in the series, which stopped at Vol. 104, and a rather late PS1 release in the year 2002.
In this game, you play as the captain of the Prime Dog crew, some kind of private company taking on various odd jobs in space, including exploration, repairs and rescue missions. You control your character from a third person view with tank controls as he slowly and clunkily walks around in his space suit. The clunkiness makes sense, since you are wearing a big suit, and movement is generally the main challenge of the game. To move faster or take to the air (more like the "not ground" since you're usually outside of any atmosphere), you can use your suit's thrusters, but you move with a lot of inertia and have to maneuver carefully to avoid overshooting your target or bumping into walls and other hazards. The thrusters also overheat on continuous use, which will disable them while they cool down again. You also have to pay attention to your oxygen and power supplies; oxygen drains over time, and power represents your "health" which drains when bumping into things or otherwise taking damage.
In the story mode there are eight missions, some of them fairly lengthy. They take place in various environments with different gravity, or even no gravity at all, with hazards like electricity, toxic pools, lava, or even actual enemies. The mission goals are usually some variety of "go to these places and press a button or collect an item". Completing the missions earns you money, which can be spent in the shop to upgrade your thrusters, oxygen tanks, or even buy weapons for your suit. Later missions definitely need these upgrades to keep you from running out of oxygen on a long exploration, and some mission briefings even start recommending that you equip weapons. Near the end of the game, you can buy a whole new suit in the shop, which improves on most aspects of the regular suit, and has some similarity to Samus Aran's suit.
The story missions start out fairly mundane, asking you to find some broken drones on the Moon and push their buttons to fix them or pick up some valuable resources from a lava-filled mine on Mars. Then you have to help a spaceship stranded in space, by flying around it to push buttons on its broken shield units. The outer space missions are particularly interesting because of the lack of gravity, so you can only navigate with your thrusters and have to stop yourself to avoid drifting off.
The story starts to ramp up as we find some alien critters on the Moon, and then explore a huge, seemingly derelict alien mothership on the moon Europa to investigate a mysterious radio signal. This first mothership mission is pretty substantial, having you explore long maze-like corridors of the ship to push some buttons, and fight a few ceiling aliens if you like. The mission is long enough that you will definitely need an oxygen upgrade unless you're speedrunning it. It also features the only genuine puzzle in the game, where you have to follow a glowing orb between two rooms and activate the correct pillars.
After this kind of turning point, we return to Mars to now explore some ancient ruins beyond the mine from earlier. A research team got lost in the ruins and we have to find them, but some of the people we find are actually alien impostors. Then there's an intermission without any aliens where we have to collect some lost cargo containers out in space. And finally, we go back to the mothership, which turns out to be full of incubation pods that we have to destroy. This final mission suddenly features quite a bit of combat, as the later pods are guarded by powerful new aliens, and it took me quite a few attempts to beat it. After destroying all the pods, we have to get out in a timed escape sequence before the ship blows up, and then we can finally rest with our well-earned wages.
The story always stays very vague and in the background. Sure, there are aliens, there are research companies that seem to be keeping things secret from us, but nothing ever connects into a cohesive storyline about what's going on. It's just a bit of flavor text to accompany your mostly mundane space adventures.
After completing the final mission, the game unlocks an additional "challenge mode", but it only has four time attack-style missions with simple tasks for your thruster and shooting skills. You can also try going after the game's "secrets". There's a separate menu for them, making you aware from the start that there are secrets of some kind. As it turns out, these secrets are simply items you can find in each mission, which earn you some more money. They apparently only appear when replaying a mission, and can be pretty difficult to locate. The secrets do appear on your radar occasionally, but even with that I was only able to find very few of them. They are categorized as either normal or rare secrets, and I was not able to find any rare items at all. I'm not sure if "rare" here refers to the spawn rate, or if they're just much more hidden. Either way, it seems that collecting them would only get you more money, which is mostly irrelevant in the post-game.
An interesting aspect that somewhat adds to the atmosphere, although most likely unintentionally, is that the graphics suffer from severe texture warping. It's a common issue for PS1 games, but here it seems especially bad. The textures on the floor and the walls near you always warp, morph and stretch, seeming almost liquid. It gives the game an eerie appearance, although I suppose it could give some people motion sickness.
This game was the first full playthrough in my current streaming project, where I'm playing a whole bunch of obscure PS1 games. Here's the archived vod of the twitch streams. Sadly somehow I managed to not record the game audio for the first stream, which has most of the story mode missions.