fails to take action soon enough, Kantaris escapes and the mission is aborted (canonically, the spin-off game Time Crisis: Project Titan takes place after the mission's failure). Development Though both the arcade and PlayStation versions were developed internally at Namco, none of the arcade development team had any direct involvement with the PlayStation version. Since the PlayStation's CPU speed is much lower than that of the System 22 arcade hardware, the team reduced demands on the PlayStation CPU by cutting the game's frame rate in half, reducing the number of polygons used, emulating the real-time lighting by coloring the polygons one-by-one, and delaying the appearance of enemies so that only a certain number of enemies could appear on-screen at any time. The development team took photos of hotels and factories in the Tokyo area as reference for the PlayStation mode's hotel design. To make the large areas in the hotel work on the hardware, the team left the portions of these areas not visible to the player unrendered. Three planned sequences - an outdoor restaurant, a missile room explosion, and a boat race - were left out because the team eventually realized that creating them was not practical, at least not within the time they had to complete the PlayStation version. New music was recorded for the Special Mission mode by Tatsuro Tani and Tomoko Tat2, using a "synthesized orchestra" of 50 individually synthesized instruments. Soundtrack A soundtrack Time Crisis Arcade Soundtrack was released in 1997. Another soundtrack Time Crisis 3D Sound Ensemble was released later. It contains audio dramas that depict events during and before the first game, such as Miller's battle against Sherudo from the game. Reception The Japanese arcade magazine Game Machine listed Time Crisis as being the most-successful arcade game of the month in April 1996. Next Generation hailed the game as being superior even to competitor Sega's Virtua Cop 2, primarily due to the unique foot pedal maneuver. The reviewer remarked that "By creating this innovative maneuvering technique, in addition to time-based, predetermined path running, providing Story or Attack mode and challenging end-level bosses, Time Crisis thrusts the light-gun genre into a brand-new territory - and develops a whole new way of looking at, and playing, the classic light-gun game." The PlayStation version received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. Critics applauded the close conversion of the arcade game, and said the