Well, it's not really ancient or anything, and it is a PC game, but over the past few days, I've been playing Jurassic Park: Trespasser, and I have decided that, as far as I'm concerned, and despite it's considerable flaws, no other game in history has been more ahead of it's own time. Certainly, no other first-person-shooter. The thinking, the design, the technology, and the developmental and experimental daring behind it is really jaw-dropping. The developers really had guts, and although the game doesn't live up to it's ambitions, they really deserve credit for all of Trespasser's innovations.
This game came out in late 1998, and had just this laundry list of things that I don't know of any game (FPS, certainly) using before it. From the design standpoint, you've got a 100% HUD-less game, using verbal clues for ammo feedback (King Kong and Condemned used the same idea recently), and this absolutely unique way of interacting with the gameworld, that, while being one of the most unique and innovative things about the game, is also one of the more flawed features. I'm talking about how you directly control the player character's right arm (her left arm is fractured in the opening cinema, rendering it useless), using it to reach out and grab and interact with objects within the game world. Again, drawing a comparison to the recent Condemned, you can use many ingame objects (rocks, sticks, chair legs, etc) as weapons. Once you've grabbed something, you can point it anywhere you want, and fine tune your aim anywhere you please (there is no crosshairs, remember, as this game is HUDless). So, if you have a gun, you can actually point it 90 degrees to your left, and run straight ahead. I can't think of any other FPS with that same degree of control. You interact with guns as you would with any other object. You pick them up, aim them, and press the use button to fire. Once you run out of ammo, you toss the gun and find another, unless you want to use it as a club (you can't well reload with just one arm). And lastly, keeping with the realistic theme, you can only carry two objects (one stowed, one held). It's really, really unique, and while flawed, I find it to be really enjoyable.
And then there are the game's technological innovations, and again, this is a regular laundry list of bleeding-edge ideas. It had normal mapping, specular lighting, 3D acceleration support (new at the time), height-mapped terrain, clever use of animated textures to draw ripples in water, some really clever sound stuff (including, I believe, surround support, and some supposed real-time sound-effect mixing, to produce unique collision sounds when two objects collide, based on size, velocity, etc), and that's just the A/V stuff. Two of the game's most memorable features are it's, for the time, jaw-dropping physics model, and it's 100% inverse-kinetics animation system. The physics were practically necessitated by the use of the arm to interact with the game world. Sadly, it is often cheaply used for obnoxious box-stacking puzzles and whatnot, and the game's physics tech is really outdated now, but still, seeing physics like Trespasser's in 1998 was really mind-blowing stuff. And the animation system, though prone to produce some really screwed-up, freaky, broken poses and whatnot, was really foward-thinking. It certainly gives the dinos more versitility in their movement than stock animation would have.
Lastly, the game had an orchestrated soundtrack by Bill Brown, pieces of which have actually enjoyed extended lives in numerous other productions. Richard Attenbourough's narration is nice, too, though I wasn't impressed by Minnie Driver as the main character.
Well, anyways, I am raving a bit here, but the game really overwhelmed me with the amazing innovation and ideas that the developers had come up with for the game. It's very flawed nature keeps it from being ranked as a truly great game, but in terms of innovation and design, I believe it deserves special recognition. Imagine if the original Star Wars movie had the same revolutionary special effects, but had woefully two-dimensional characters and story development, coupled with really dreadful acting, and I think that's a decent analogy for Trespasser. Flawed, but years ahead of it's time.
) when I rebought a used Genny a while back.
, one of the best games to play co-op on PS1, I remember playing all night with my friend and beating that game over and over again. They had a sequel on the dreamcast but they took the co-op out for some odd reason.
ing good game. Been playing this on the Genesis Collection and yeah... it's an unbelievably good game.
