Playing every PS1 game - Dino Crisis 1 & 2, Discworld

Dino Crisis

Back in 1994, Sony showcased what its upcoming grey box was going to be capable of by knocking together a tech demo of a realtime 3D-rendered (and vaguely controllable) T-Rex, with texture-mapped skin and polygonal gnashers. Looking at it now, you can spot the computational trickery being used to more than slightly oversell the sort of experience you were going to get with a PlayStation - dark lighting and the fact that nothing else aside from the big lizard were rendered on screen meant you got something that looked far tidier than what you’d eventually experience booting up Die Hard Trilogy - but you knew it would only be a matter of time before someone tried sticking said dino in a real game.

Much of the game’s set pieces involve trying to give this guy the slip.

Dino Crisis is really lazily described as “Resident Evil, but with dinosaurs”. The Capcom guys admittedly have lifted extremely liberally from the zombie-em-up, but you can tell while playing the game that they have made just as much effort to make it different. Just not too different. They certainly did a better job of differentiating it from RE than the subpar (and similarly daftly named) Countdown Vampires.

They’re fast, and room to manoeuvre is limited.

I actually really bloody like Dino Crisis. The plot is stupid - secret island science facility accidentally creates time portals to sixty-five million years ago and the local wildlife of the time wreak havoc - but the game seems aware that the sight of a red-haired special agent being chased around an underground laboratory by a velociraptor is inherently a bit silly, and never tries to make the dinosaurs frightening in quite the same way as Resident Evil’s walking corpses.

Use laser shutters to keep the dinos at bay (and then fire pot shots at them from safety if you wish).

In fact, the game isn’t really that scary at all. Shinji Mikami talked a bit at the time about how this was a genre spin-off from survival horror into what he termed ‘panic horror’. Your character isn’t a maiden trying to escape the nightmare (as much as she is a dead ringer for RE’s Jill Valentine), she’s one of three special forces commando types, all armed to the teeth and with a mission to complete; the fact everyone else at the facility is dead and there are raptors everywhere and a several-storey-high T-Rex stomping about is treated as more of an unfortunate and unforeseen hurdle to Getting The Soldiering Done. The jeopardy comes from the fact that the raptors aren’t zombies - they’re agile, hit hard and aren’t easily outrun. In Resident Evil, simply running past zombies was straightforward to do and the threat lay mainly in their numbers. In Dino Crisis, many a chase down a tight corridor ends in you just reaching the door at the end as they pounce. And then, as if to consciously throw a “This isn’t Resident Evil, loser!” curveball, they bust the door down and follow you into the next room.

Classic Resi ‘rifling through the pockets of the dead’ gameplay is present and correct.

The biggest technical departure from RE is the fact that the whole game is fully 3D rendered, rather than using static pre-rendered backgrounds. The trade-off with this design decision is usually a large loss of environmental detail (this sort of happened in RE Code Veronica), but they’ve done a really good job here. I might even go so far as saying it looks even better. The camera is free to follow you around in between the fixed angles, giving things a much more cinematic feel.

The camera’s freedom gives cutscenes a movie vibe that was missing from RE.

The rest of the differences are smaller in scale. Universal hammerspace giant item storage chests are gone, and replaced with a system of colour-coded item boxes which require the use of single-use items to activate. It’s a bit of a mix-up of the ink ribbon saving system from RE (concordantly, saving in DC is unlimited). There are fewer weapons and less ammunition kicking around the place than you would usually expect from this sort of game, but that is mainly because there actually aren’t that many dinosaurs about to shoot at.

A puzzle to try and save this guy from the gas. He dies anyway.

No, for all the talk of a ‘dino crisis’, there are probably only a little more than a dozen roaming the corridors of the facility waiting to jump out at you when you least expect it. You spend long periods exploring empty corridors, solving puzzles and reading documents without seeing anything or anyone at all. This does create a really good solitary-survivor atmosphere: the facility feels abandoned, and because dinosaur appearances aren’t constant, hearing or seeing one still gets the cortisol flowing. There’s definitely less of a focus on combat, and more on working out puzzles. I wonder how much of this was influenced by Silent Hill.

Doors are locked with card keys which come with a puzzle. Must have been an incredible place to work.

Puzzles are plenty. At several points in the game you are asked to make a choice of actions suggested by your two buddies - one is usually ‘faster but requires shooting your way through more dinosaurs’, and the other is usually ‘slower and with some difficult puzzles, but safer’. They’re not cast from the RE mould where you’re inspecting grandfather clocks and examining the private heraldry of dead aristocrats; it’s all a bit more high tech, where you have to piece together bits of information from notes lying around and then put it all together to solve a visual computer puzzle. Some of them are stupidly hard, but most aren’t. It does get a bit samey eventually though - sometimes it feels like being asked to complete a forgotten section of some aptitude test while a dinosaur waits outside.

In this empty office is a phone which you can use to page researchers. They’re all dead, so one puzzle has you calling the number of the guy you want to find and then looking around the place for a body which has a beeping pager.

I like this more cerebral approach to gameplay, though I can imagine a lot wouldn’t. The game really nails the atmosphere of picking your way through a Mary Celeste-esque set of offices where everything gives the impression that everyone was just going about their business until something suddenly went very wrong indeed, and you just missed it. Outside of one short-lived support character, you don’t bump into anyone else alive at all.

Mad skills!

Dino Crisis gets slept on too much. If you held a gun to my head, I’d say it isn’t quite as good as the Resident Evil games it grew out of. But the central idea works far better than it has any right to, the fully 3D environments moved the formula forward and the largely deserted facility gives it a strong atmosphere of its own.

Resident Evil with dinosaurs, then.

Kept my attention for: About a week
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 8/10

Dino Crisis 2

As much as I liked Dino Crisis, the reality was that by 1999, people had had enough of the formula. It’s wild to think now, in this age where people still happily play annual Call of Duty bilge which has literally remained more or less unchanged for 20 years (to say nothing of the continued popularity of stuff like Fortnite after almost a decade), but in the three years between Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil 3 (1999), the fixed-camera-angles-tank-controls-horror structure had become stale, and Dino Crisis suffered critically for it. It was ‘too derivative’. Of course they’d have to change things up.

Mr. T is back.

So with Dino Crisis 2 in 2000, it wasn’t survival horror; it was barely even horror at all. It was a third person lizard shooter with tank controls. And people loved it. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the received wisdom is that DC2 is a far superior game to the safe, RE clone original. Better combat, slicker controls, no nonsensical puzzling.

180 odd bullets. And you never need to faff about with something so action-disrupting as reloading, either.

Well, I disagree. While I can’t say that the game didn’t bring a genuinely new approach to the genre - and it was definitely a brave move - I just don’t think it’s better. I actually don’t really care for the game generally. I think people were really just fed up of RE clones and were willing to take anything that was a bit different. Dino Crisis 2 would have been very different to most games that came before it, and people would have had a lot of fun with it, probably. The problem I think is that in the time since 2000, this type of game has been done many times again, and done better.

Loading screens now also double up as somewhere where you tot your points up.

The game is a continuation of the plot of the original, and you play the same magneta-bereted SF operator (who seemingly has no interest in ever packing a change of clothes) who is once again thrust into a sticky dinosaur situation, except this time with a different partner. It’s all gone a bit young-adult-fiction, though, with your new bud just being a sort of stereotypical whiny teen with whom cringey ‘American action movie’ repartee is shared. Your partners in the first game weren’t exactly deep meaningfully-written characters, but they were better than whatever this is. In short, if DC1 was channelling Predator in its setting and characterisation, this is more like some sort of Saturday morning cartoon (with blood and gore).

20 years old? Really?

You can’t argue that the combat is indeed slicker. The combat philosophy has switched from ‘something you aim to avoid’ to ‘the entire singular point of the game’; everything on the disc that isn’t related to enabling your gunning down of waves of raptors is just set dressing. You rack up points, get combo and counter bonuses, your character can run and shoot at the same time, there are loads of different weapons, and ammunition isn’t particularly a problem. It’s cool and all, but the tank controls still make things awkward and still aren’t quite as responsive as they need to be.

Well, one thing it does get right is that skin fades would be popular in the future.

My problem is that that is about all it is. You jog from screen to screen, dishing out fully automatic death to endlessly respawning dinosaurs, then tot up your points and use them to buy more gear. The fully 3D environments have been binned, by the way - we’re back to the pre-rendered backgrounds. It’s not bad, but I didn’t find it particularly interesting to play. I reached a point, maybe a third of the way through, after I had traipsed all the way back through areas I had already visited, gunning down dinos as I went, where after picking up the item I needed I found I needed now to schlep all the way back through the same stages again to make use of my new MacGuffin. Not fun. Tapped out.

Kept my attention for: An few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Discworld II - Missing Presumed…!?

The whole Terry Pratchett thing is a phenomenon that has more or less passed me by entirely, so my only knowledge about Discworld is 1. It is a thing, and 2. I only know anything about it thanks to briefly playing a demo of Discworld Noir way back when. I didn’t know that there were actually two precursors to it. I’ve not bothered with the first as part of my made up and arbitrarily-changeable rule about not needing to play every game in a series, so here’s the second.

There’s an extremely long and self-indulgent opening credits sequence.

Point-and-click games built for PC and translated to PlayStation can be excruciating. Discworld runs close to that line. There’s a hell of a lot of nicely done artwork and cartoony animation, but when compressed to the sort of size you’d need in order to squeeze it all onto a single CD-ROM, it really looks pretty awful, which can’t really be forgiven in a world where Broken Sword did more or less the same thing that Discworld is trying to do and got things about right.

Engage in witty repartee with more or less everyone. It gets a bit stale quickly, though.

The opening sequence is ridiculously and needlessly long - if you sit through the lot you are likely to be kept waiting for about 15-20 minutes while all the exposition gets dumped. The game seems to indulge itself in this. They’ve paid for Eric Idle and Rob Brydon, and you’re going to damn well listen to them do silly voices. It also seems to think the dialogue and narration is hilarious and sardonic - it’s definitely the latter, but doesn’t quite realise it’s not actually very funny. Maybe it’s just not my kind of humour, who knows.

It doesn’t look very good.

Once you get to actually do something, the mechanics of the game let it down. It’s clunky and sluggish. There are terrible pauses in audio between each line, meaning even short conversations take an age, and you quickly resort to just tapping square to skip past each line after you’ve read its respective subtitle. Despite the plot dump, I barely understood what it was the game was asking me to be doing, plodded about for a bit, got fed up of sitting through rubbish dialogue, and quit.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Discworld Noir

The Humphrey-Bogart-adventure-game microgenre isn’t big enough if you ask me. It’s Discworld Noir and…I think that might be about it. This game is a lot better than Discworld II, but ‘better than Discworld II isn’t exactly gushing praise.

It’s really a sort of FMV game.

The main difference is the theme. Rather than following a cartoon wizard around a brightly coloured collection of Terry Pratchett references, you play a your town’s local PI, complete with fedora and trenchcoat. It’s constantly raining, everyone has something to hide, and Rob Brydon delivers the narration in classic hardboiled manner. He’s better than Eric Idle squeaking a hundred different characters.

Get used to systematically trawling through your notebook to ask every character every single possible question.

The noir thing is obviously ironic, but the game commits to it properly. Grubby streets, odd inhabitants and casual corruption are a surprisingly good fit for detective fiction, even when half the suspects are trolls and the local police force includes a talking dog. It knows the genre well enough to make fun of it without merely pointing at every cliché and shouting “Look! A cliché!”. The detective format gives the usual point-and-click routine some structure: speak to witnesses, collect clues and use your notebook to pursue new lines of enquiry.

Ha. Ha.

The problem is, I still just don’t find it very funny. Monkey Island is funny. Discworld is a game intent on hammering home that it is trying to be funny, extending every conversation just beyond the point where the joke has already landed. At least the stupid voices are gone, though.

It looks bloody terrible.

The other problem is that the conversion to PlayStation has once again murdered the visual experience. It looks truly dreadful. The background bitmaps are compressed to a point that given the scenery is always dark to begin with, the lack of colour definition means you spend much of your time interacting with browny blobs which you pass your cursor over on little more than a hope that it is actually a person, or a useful object. It gets testing. I got maybe halfway through the first act, and just got a bit tired of it. It was a promising start, though.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Next time…er, Disney.