Ad Army Men Per Aspera: Army Men Toys in Space (1999) | Journeying Through 3DO’s Army Men, Part IV
The Green Nation enters the final frontier, and lo is it large, empty and a bore.
The Pale Blue Dot is one of the most incredible images ever created. In 1994, astrophysicist Carl Sagan delivered a speech at Cornell University about the significance and meaning of the image, and he observes:
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Sagan’s speech is profound and the types of people he notes in this excerpt numbers around twenty (almost as many as the Army Men games in existence), but I do have one qualm with this reflection: That Pale Blue Dot also lies the aggregate of all the Army Men games, and he does not make mention of it.
But in Pale Blue Dot, Sagan further observes:
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
It is true, the Earth is a small part of a huge and growing cosmic arena, and part of that arena is the Plastic Universe through which plastic soldiers use strange portals to enter our very Earth, and now in Army Men: Toys in Space, they face the same challenges as us in their space adventure.
Army Men: Toys in Space is, quite literally, Toys in Space and not much more. I’ve speculated a lot on these games, their background, 3DO’s business, etc. extensively, but Toys in Space was the first time I’ve thought ‘Is the 3DO Company actually just a money laundering scheme?’
Toys in Space is their fourth game in eighteen months. It is another 2D isometric shooter/tactics game, using the same engine and most of the same assets Army Men II before it. The gameplay isn’t anything I haven’t written about before in great detail, so if you’re curious about that you can check my previous pieces.
It isn’t clear when Toys in Space takes place, but it’s reasonable to assume this follows the end of Army Men II and the demise of Major Mylar as well as General Plastro’s reappearance with brand new friends. However, General Plastro is nowhere to be found at the beginning, or nearly all of Army Men: Toys in Space at all. But there are aliens to fight, and a new faction of allies to fight alongside, albeit within the framework of Army Men lore, it’s a bit strange given the color of their plastic.
As Toys in Space begins, Sarge (For the viewers keeping score at home, this is not Sarge’s Heroes Sarge) is tasked by HQ to find and rescue captured Green soldiers. From the get-go there is no setup aside from an intro movie showing a UFO crash into a sandbox. As Sarge and his men roam the backyard of this suburban American home, they happen upon the UFO and encounter the people inside that UFO, who are very angry visitors let’s just say.
The aliens are menacing and quite entertaining to watch until you come upon the realization that they are mostly a larger enemy unit with more hit points, and not much more. There are no nuances to how they move, react or attack. They’re there for flavor, and the narrative pushed by Toys in Space doesn’t provide any compelling backstory for them or their motives. They’re there because, to paraphrase my friend Alice’s take on it: “When a franchise goes to space, that’s when they’re really starting to run out of ideas” 3DO is running on fumes on creating fresh takes and scenarios for Army Men, which from my observation seems to be the consequence of releasing three other games in the same vein in an 18-month span.
Though the aliens you fight are bog standard enemies that take 30 more bullets to take down, the aliens you fight with are somewhat the opposite: Toys in Space introduces the Blue Aliens, whose units in-game are led by Tina Tomorrow. While the aliens in this game have been disappointing from both a gameplay and writing standpoint, Tina and her compatriots can be distinguished from other Army Men units in that Tina carries a stasis gun that freezes enemies in place, which is quite useful when you’re swarmed by Tan vehicles, and her other friends aren’t the most mobile of units, but they carry a Gatling gun that easily shreds through the Tan and aliens when fired in unison.
There aren’t any significant changes in gameplay from the preceding isometric Army Men games, but there’s a few quality of life changes that are worth noting: Some missions carry an emphasis on dividing your units into squads and deploying them tactically. There’s additional support abilities such as helicopter strikes, a magnifying glass, artillery strikes and bug spray to deal with the ants.
These all make the game *bearable*, but not something you would describe as ‘fun’. Toys in Space is also a ridiculously hard game at points, and there were some missions where I had to use cheat codes and even then it felt like I was on the verge of failing multiple times. It’s just not a fun game, tactical improvements, fresh coat of paint and all.
At the end of Toys in Space, General Plastro once again screams in frustration as Sarge and Tina thwart his plan of world domination by allying with…aliens? Plastro — Sarge’s Joker, Green Goblin, Lex Luthor — is a non-factor for all of Toys in Space, and then it decides at the very end to M. Night Shymalan their way into the big twist of ‘It was ME behind it all along!’, which goes to show how many ideas 3DO has left in the tank, and it is not a lot.
I recently watched the first three Toy Story movies, both because I haven’t watched those movies in a very long time as well as running down the Army Men franchise, I was interested in looking at an inspiration for them.
There are not a lot of moments in Toy Story involving Sarge (voiced by R. Lee Ermey, and bears no relation to 3DO’s Sarge) and his squad of toy soldiers, but those scenes are funny and make use of clever visual gags: Sarge and his soldiers carry a small kid’s walkie talkie to report on Andy’s birthday gifts back to Woody. The soldiers are inadvertently kicked around by Andy’s mom and one of them become injured. Sid performs Frankenstein experiments on his plastic soldiers, combining them with different toys and creating a very horrific but fascinating sight.
It is unfair to compare the capabilities of a multi-million dollar animation company creating cutting edge 3D backed by Steve Jobs and Disney to a video game company coming off of a commercially disappointing 32-bit console and its canceled follow-up, but it is difficult not to come away feeling disappointed that they never borrowed from it. Maybe 3DO felt gun-shy about doing so, but this wouldn’t have been uncommon of the video game industry in that era. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms sold gangbusters aping Steven Spielberg’s war dramas, and people loved it and even referenced them in writing about it.
Maybe the portals were a way for 3DO to pass off their franchise as being similar to Toy Story, but not directly borrowing from it (or, as I’ve outlined in my 3DO M2 conspiracy theory: a result of having to convert a bog standard tactical game into a game involving plastic soldiers). But that in turn resulted in a tangled web of confusing lore and a myriad of questions:
Why are the aliens literally from space? Why are we fighting on the actual Moon? Is Tina Tomorrow literally an alien or from a different line of toys? If she’s an alien, why does she look very similar to the other plastic soldiers on Earth? What are the aliens’ motives? Who is their leader and what is his driving force?
Admittedly, I’m overthinking this a little as an adult that and that a ten year old me would’ve enjoyed Toys in Space to some extent, but playing through it it was the first time it looked and felt very blatant that The 3DO Company was seeking to milk as much as they could from the franchise. Toys in Space had a team of exactly 27 people, not counting the people in the ‘Special Thanks’ section. One of the game’s artists (Scott Ruggels) voiced Sarge, and the woman heading administration for 3DO at the time (Maria Toepfer) voices Tina Tomorrow. Contrast that with something like Sarge’s Heroes, where Sarge is voiced by Jim Cummings and Vikki Grimm is voiced by Susan Blu. Both those people have prolific careers in the voiceover industry.
Toys in Space was likely made on a shoestring budget, where a small team of people were told to — judging from the time between the release of Army Men II and Toys in Space — ship a game in a span of six to seven months and given the other games 3DO was releasing in the Army Men franchise during that period, that seems like a rough time to be working for the company.
While I have found the Army Men games that preceded Toys in Space to not be good, I always came away with optimism that at some point they turn it around and refine the ideas they present in those games.
Human exploration of outer space is usually a curious and optimistic venture. Toys in Space, however, only made me come away feeling dispirited and cynical about the games in the series to follow.
