I bought Viewpoint the other day and after playing it for about an hour,
I've determined that I'm going to take it back.  It's beautiful, but it's
not a keeper.  Here's my breakdown:

Positives:

1.    Excellent SGI-rendered graphics.  They really did a beautiful job
      on the visuals in this game.
2.    Variety.  There are 6 different levels, each with its own visual
      style and each distinct from the last.  There are power-ups and
      many different types of enemy.

Negatives:

1.    Extremely difficult on any setting but "Easy."
2.    Long load times between ships.  If you die, you may have to wait
      as much as 30 seconds while it loads from CD-ROM before you're
      back in the action again.  30 seconds doesn't sound like much, but
      sit there and count it out.  Imagine having to wait that long after
      each time you die.  It's very frustrating.
3.    Slowdown.  LOTS of slowdown when the screen fills with enemies and
      enemy shots.  The scrolling is generally smooth when nothing is on
      the screen, but performance degrades heavily very early.  Not good.
4.    Crash!  The game crashed (and reset) when I reached the stage one
      boss for the first time.  Inexcusable.

Impressions:

I like shooters, and this one LOOKS like a wonderful game.  I bought it
unawares (I'd never played the Neo-Geo version of the game from which the
PSX version is derived) and didn't necessarily have extremely high
expectations.  It was horribly disappointing, and I returned it for
full refund.

Perhaps I'm a shooter novice more than I had thought, but I found the game
to be very unforgiving and extremely frustrating on the standard difficulty
level.  Add to the fact that a single stray bullet can take out your
ship (and it's hard to dodge a screenful of them, especially while 
experiencing a whole bunch of jerky slowdown) the thirty some odd seconds
you have to wait while the game reloads the next ship, and you've got
a pretty miserable game experience.

It's apparent that a lot of work went into the graphics, but very little
went into the gameplay.  That's extremely poor design.  This is the first
PSX title I've seen from Electronic Arts, and I sincerely hope that they
spend more money on the programming for their next offerings.  All the
pretty SGI rendered graphics in the world won't save a poorly programmed
game from being banished to the pits of suckitudinousness.

Capsule Review:

Pretty but poorly implemented.  Do not buy.

- Steve Mariotti