This year the buzz at E3 was predictably the next generation console lineup. The Xbox360 actually had playable demos, Sony showed some pre-rendered movies about the PS3, and Nintendo talked about hardcore backwards compatibility. The conversations in front of the $8 pretzel stand were invariably about whether or not Sony had out-hyped Microsoft, and whether the next gen was going to be “motherfucking awesome” or just “totally sweet.”

But despite all the buzz, this year’s E3 was conspicuously lacking in a major area: compelling games. There were games on the show floor, of course, but they were fewer in number than I have ever seen. Furthermore, the games themselves were pretty bland; every other game was a racing title or third person shooter, and all of them seemed to sort of blend together in mediocrity. Microsoft and Sony’s booths had lots of graphically-amazing games that we’ve all played a million times before: first person shooters that came out on the PC a year and a half ago, Lovable Platform Character Sequel #17, generic drive-around-and-hit-stuff games, and a plethora of games requiring that all generic enemies be shot by the generic protagonist.

Most surprising was how little content some of the booths had. Capcom’s showing was weaker this year than it has been in the past, but Konami and Tecmo’s booths were practically nonexistent. Konami’s “big game” of E3 was the next Dance Dance Revolution (which is surely a great game, though no longer much of a revolution). Tecmo didn’t even have a big game to display; instead they paraded scantily-clad women around their large raised stage and showed videos of Fatal Frame 3, a new Ninja Gaiden, and a new Dead or Alive. I suspect that these companies are working on next gen content that is too early to show, but it was still lame.

Fortunately, there were pockets of coolness stashed away between the three exhibit halls that house E3. Nintendo’s booth was full of high-quality highly original titles, most of them for the Nintendo DS. The best things I saw there was Nintendogs, followed closely by Viewtiful Joe DS, Under the Knife, and Gunstar Heros GBA. Though Capcom’s booth was a little thin on games, what they did have showing was pretty cool. Killer 7 was probably the best game I saw at the entire show; it’s really weird and hard to describe, but it was extremely fun to play and looks like it’ll pack quite a surreal experience into its cell-shaded depths. Okami is just amazing as well, and I can’t wait for it to come out. Capcom also showed a trailer for Dead Rising, which looked really, really, really cool. Imagine a “kill all the zombies with whatever is available” game where they can put 1000 zombies on the screen at once. Looked great. Though Sony’s booth was pretty lame (especially the PSP content–ugh!), they did have Shadow of the Colossus running, which is going to rock. Burnout PSP looked pretty nice, and I know I’ll buy Katamari Damacy 2 on the day that it comes out. Over at Microsoft, Stubbs the Zombie on Xbox was pretty high quality. Condemned was playable, but I was pretty disappointed. I looks like it is not really going to be much of a horror game after all. Speaking of horror games, there were fewer on display this year. The Suffering 2 was pretty fun to play, though it looked extremely similar to the first game. Siren 2 was unfortunately not on display.

So E3 2005 was a bit of a let down for me. The promise of new hardware isn’t really enough to make me get excited (I ranted about this topic before I left), and the games that were showing seemed either very derivative or just not my cup of tea. The number of booth babes this year seemed to have increased dramatically from last year (which I take to be a bad sign–companies are running out of compelling content and thus turn to sex appeal to draw in customers), but on the other hand the amount of gratuitous T&A in the games themselves was far lower than last year (perhaps this is because all the games were racing games). All and all, I’m glad I went for just one day–there just wasn’t enough to hold my interest for any longer.

In Summary

Show Highlights: The interesting games were quite fresh and innovative.
Show Lowlights: The interesting titles made up less than 10% of the whole.
Most Confusing: GameBoy Micro

Best of Show: Killer7
Runner Up: Shadow of the Colossus

PS3 vs Xbox360: IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER!! THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME UNLESS THE GAMES ARE GOOD!! CHOOSE BASED ON GAME QUALITY, NOT ON HYPE!!

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The Show

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo made it clear that the current generation of console hardware has been conquered. The graphical quality of almost everything at the show was excellent: Devil May Cry 3, Prince of Persia 2, DOOM 3, Metal Gear Solid 3, even the new Crash Bandicoot game had some pretty awesome visuals. All three platforms had an extremely strong show in terms of graphical quality.

The expo also made it clear that the industry is becoming increasingly conservative in terms of game design. Almost every single game on display was a sequel, license, or both. Some companies are trying to cross-bread their licenses (Crash and Spyro appear together in their next outing, Namco is repurposing a Tekken character for Death By Degrees, etc), but very, very few wholly original titles were on display. Notable exceptions included Fable, Second Sight, Notorious, Under The Skin, and Red Ninja.

The big event of the show was the competitive unveiling of Sony’s PSP handheld and Nintendo’s DS handheld. The design of these two systems is a good example of the way the two companies work: Sony’s system is sleek and powerful, but it is basically designed to provide the games we currently play on our TVs in a mobile form. Nintendo’s system is less powerful and much less sexy-looking, but the stylus-driven dual screen already shows amazing potential for new types of game designs. While Sony had technology demos displaying the power of the PSP’s 3D hardware, Nintendo’s demos are almost entirely centered on game design. Both systems are going to be great, but both are also going to target totally different audiences. Personally, I am more interested in the DS, as it is clear that Nintendo is trying to create a system that promotes original game designs.

Apart from their handheld systems, both Nintendo and Sony had a pretty strong showing. Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was by far the most fun title I played at the show: if you have not heard of it already, it is a deep sidescroller that uses the Donkey Konga drum controller as its input device. Sony was also showing Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, and Silent Hill 4, all of which looked promising. The highlight of the show, however, was Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube. Not only was it just about the most beautiful game on the floor, it was amazingly fun to play.

The Microsoft booth was disappointing. All the games showing had excellent graphics, but very few of them actually looked interesting to play. Capcom had an excellent booth, including Viewtiful Joe 2, Onimusha 3, the aforementioned Resident Evil 4, and a couple of other really nice titles. Bandai’s Ghost in the Shell game looks really cool, but the control scheme is very weird. Half-Life 2 looked pretty much the same as last year, and STILL wasn’t playable. Vivendi-Universal were showing a cool Tenchu-style game called Red Ninja, which looks like fun but is also cheapened by some gratuitous panty shots.

Speaking of panty shots, there was more digital T&A this year than ever before. Games like Namco’s Death By Degrees seem to have simply given up on compelling game design and decided that the only way they can sell units is to include a lot of shots of the protagonist’s ass. I find this trend is disappointing, but not because some of these games are morally questionable; rather, it is disappointing because sex is not a replacement for quality game design. Death By Degrees is not an original title; it’s Rise To Honor with Jet Li replaced with Tekken’s Nina. The trend of simply taking an established formula and sticking some women in skimpy clothing on it was alarmingly prevalent.

Game Impressions

Silent Hill 4: The Room. Silent Hill 4 is something of an enigma. The game looks like Silent Hill, and most of it plays like Silent Hill, but there is something very different about the latest game in this creepy series. First of all, the game progression has been dramatically altered: instead of wandering around a deserted town as in previous games, each of The Room’s levels are connected by, well, a room. Even odder, the game play shifts from third person to first person when the player is in his room, a first for the series.

When in third person, Silent Hill 4 plays almost like previous games in the series. The first immediate change is that weapon and item selection must occur in real-time: you can no longer pause the game to change weapons. This plays into the second major change: the enemies (which, as always, are scary as hell) have been designed such that it is much more difficult to simply run past them. In the small section I played, simply trying to avoid the enemies did not really work. It is clear that the development team wants Silent Hill 4’s monsters to pose much more of a challenge than enemies in previous games.

However, the single largest change to the series is the lack of a real-time light source. The original Silent Hill pioneered the use of realtime flashlights in horror games, a mechanic that is now almost universally accepted. The series has made a name for itself with its excellent real-time lighting systems, but the sections we saw of Silent Hill 4 had only ambient lighting. Removing the flashlight from the protagonist’s hands has had an enormous effect on the look and feel of the game; instead of everything being very dark, many of the rooms feature muted and foggy lights. Though this change may seem simple, it changed the feel of the game entirely.

Ghost Hunter: Though Ghost Hunter is already out in Europe, it has not quite reached American shores yet. The game is an interesting approach to horror because it revolves around a Ghostbusters-like “trap the monster” mechanic. When you encounter a monster the first thing you must do is shoot it with a special trap. Once the trap is active, you can shoot the monster to try to force it into the trap. This mechanic might be cool, but it seemed fairly lame at the expo. The graphics were nice, however, and control seemed pretty good. I am sure this title will be worth checking out when it eventually arrives in the States.

Resident Evil 4: I have already mentioned that Resident Evil 4 was probably the best-looking game at E3. A simple report cannot really do the game justice. Suffice to say that the game controls very well, feels very different from earlier RE games, and is just a blast to play.

In Summary

Show Highlights: The high polish of many of the titles on display.
Show Lowlights: The almost complete absence of new game design ideas.
Most Disappointing: The increasing amount of energy being spent on digital breasts instead of fun game design.

Best of Show: Resident Evil 4
Runner Up: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

PSP vs DS: DS for game design

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NOTE: I originally wrote this for my friends and co-workers. It is consequently much rougher than subsequent reports. Also, some of my predictions were wrong; TMNT was NOT a good game, and Rise to Honor turned out better than I gave it credit for.

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Here is some cool stuff I saw at E3. Almost all the pictures came out poorly as a result of those stupid interlaced monitors and my less-than-steady hand. I’ve cleaned up some of the pictures so that you can tell what is going on.

Table of Contents:

1. Games that looked awesome
2. Games that might be cool, but it’s still hard to tell
3. Games that looked bad.

Games that looked awesome

• I-Ninja. Namco’s ninja platformer looks awesome. He can run up and across walls (a common theme in lots of games this year), roll on barrels filled with gunpowder, grind on rails, and box with giant robots. It is sort of Jak & Daxter platforming + some elements of Sonic thrown in. Lots of fun. Pict 1 is mr. ninja on a barrel, Pict 2 is in the middle of a giant robot boxing match.
• Prince of Persia 3. This 3rd person platformer from Ubi-soft is amazing. It looks better than almost every other PS2 game on the floor, and it plays pretty well too. The Prince can run, double jump, climb, swing on poles a’la Jak & Daxter, etc. He can also run up and along walls. Combat looks pretty neat (though I didn’t get to try it), and the enemies dissolve into sand when defeated.

  By far the coolest feature is the “time rewind” power that the Prince has. By collecting special sand, the prince has the ability to rewind time for a certain duration… something like 30 seconds max. If you miss a fall, for example, you can lean on the L2 trigger and rewind time back the point where you messed up. If you die, you have two seconds to rewind time and undo your death. During the time rewind, the screen distorts like Photoshop’s Pinch filter, which looks pretty cool.

  Another cool visual effect that Ubi Soft uses is motion blurring for fast camera movements. Whenever the camera has to make a quick turn or movement, the entire screen is blurred. Sometimes, when a particularly large turn is made (such as the 180 degree pivot that happens when you crawl down hang on a ledge), a swoop sound effect also plays. Very very neat.

  This Pict is very blurry, but it shows the prince running along a wall. Just behind him is a switch that he has hit, and just in front of him is a platform that has been activated by the switch.

  In sharp contrast to the PS2 version of the game, Prince of Persia 3 GBA looked horrible. I cannot understand why they didn’t just port the original game, but for some reason they’ve decided to make an yet another action platformer that looks and plays like every other game ever. Sigh.

• Broken Sword. THQ has taken the old point-and-click Broken Sword adventure game license and created a whole new 3D adventure game. The graphics are very good, and the game play is classic adventure puzzle solving. Think Resident Evil without guns or zombies. In the first part of the game (which was playable), your character must get out of a plane that has crashed in the jungle and is teetering over a vast reviene. The only exit is through the windshield, but crawling through will cause the plane to fall into the valley below. To get out, you must counter balance the plane by moving heavy stuff to the back. The pilots weight is also needed for the balance to be correct, but before he can be moved he must be woken from unconsciousness. Looks and plays very well, though apparently the game is still in pre-alpha stages. This Picture shows two characters standing on a cliff face. Though you probably can’t see them very well in the shot, the shadows look particularly good.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Remember the old beat-em-up arcade game? It’s back in glorious toon-shaded 3D. Looks great. The GBA title isn’t bad either, though not as good as the seminal NES version. Go Konami! Check out a Picture of the PS2 version.
• Silent Hill 3. Ok, so there was never really any question about this game–it is basically guaranteed to kick ass. The graphics are very similar (though better) than SH 2, and the play mechanics are almost exactly the same. The story locations and monster designs are even more creepy than before (which is saying something), and the new character seems to work pretty well. Here is a very dark Picture.
• Chibirobo. Bandai makes weird games. Chibirobo is about this small robot with a power plug for a tail who runs around his creator’s lab. You can direct Chibirobo to specific locations and points of interest, but you do not control him directly. As Chibirobo interacts with things, he learns new skills that allow him to access new areas of the lab. While I was playing, the robot learned how to sing a melody and was thus able to gain access to a high bookshelf. As Chibirobo runs around his battery power decreases, and you must keep finding batteries for him to survive. Pict 1 shows Chibirobo looking at the camera, and Pict 2 shows a display for the game.
• Resident Evil Outbreak. Capcom had this online cooperative Resident Evil game running at E3, and it was very, very cool. Each player selects a character, and each character has different attributes, items, and skills. I chose a large bouncer dude who started with a gun but was also good at hand-to-hand combat. Once each character has been selected, the game plays an intro sequence personalized for that character. The game begins with all the players sitting around in a bar. Before long zombies burst in and start eating people and the game gets underway. The control scheme is the classic RE “pivot and move” system, and it works fine if you are used to it. Your inventory displays the items that every person on the team owns, so if someone else has a key you need you can go find them and get it. Part of the game requires you to save fallen comrades and NPCs, though we didn’t do any of that as we played. Also, if you die and your infection meter is full, you will come back to life as a zombie and may attack your former team mates. Though none of us survived very long, the game looks like it will be very very neat when it comes out. This dark and blurry picture shows the first area, the bar.
• Sonic Heroes. I think everyone universally hated the Knuckles and Tails levels in Sonic Adventure 2. Sega is addressing the problem while still managing to keep all the players playable in Sonic Heroes. In Heroes, Tails, Sonic, and Knuckles are all visible at the same time. You can swap out the leader at will, and each character has their own ability. When Sonic is in the lead, for instance, the team can move very quickly through some insane levels. When tails is the leader, the group can form a chain and fly to higher locations. With Knuckles in the lead, the team gets increased attack skills and the ability to break certain walls.

  Besides the character swapping part, the game plays exactly like the cool parts of Sonic Adventure 1 and 2–the fast-as-hell Sonic levels. The game also looks excellent on GameCube and PS2. Here is an amazingly blurry picture.

• Syphon Filter Online. It looks just like syphon filter… but some of the other people are real players. Neat! Plays pretty good, though I am not totally convinced that the control setup will work. This picture shows that you can still set people on fire with the taser.
• Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Ok, so Silicon Knights is working with Konami and Nintendo to remake the original Metal Gear Solid for GameCube. While they are at it, they’ve gone ahead and added some of Snake’s moves from MGS2, like the first-person shooting interface and the ability to shoot from the prone position. The game looks exactly like the original MGS, except everything is all smooth now. The cut scenes promise to be slightly different and more dramatic, but the game is mostly the same. Snake now starts out with a dart gun, which is sorta cool.
• F-Zero. Move over Wipeout. Very very fast, extraordinarily nice looking, very easy to control.
• WarioWorld. I didn’t get the chance to play this, but it looks like some awesome 3D platforming goodness. Not to mention that Wario makes evil wisecracks every now and then.
• Viewtiful Joe. Oh man this game is as fun to play as it looks. The control is very, very tight, the style is great, and the time speed up/slow down effects are awesome. Reason enough to get a GameCube. Check out my crappy Picture.
• XIII. You’ve probably seen the screenshots for this cell shaded FPS. The designers have taken the “cartoon look” idea to its logical conclusion: the game looks like a comic book. As you play, cells sometimes pop up in the corners of the window, showing you an event happening near your location. Sometimes when you kill an enemy in a particularly cool way, a series of still shots will appear over the regular view showing the progression of the dude’s death. And every sound effect has a visual cue with it; guns say “bam,” foot falls appear as “tak tak,” and every explosion has “boom” written on it somewhere. The visual presentation alone make this game amazingly cool.
• Guilty Gear X2 and Metal Slug 5. Two great 2D games are back… and thankfully are still 2D. Both look great, though there are few surprises. Check out Picture 1 and Picture 2 of Guilty Gear, and this Picture of Metal Slug.

Games that might be cool, but it’s still hard to tell

• Jak & Daxter 2. Ok, so Jak & Daxter 1 was a great game, right? The second game features all the same moves and an even better looking engine, so it should be even better right? Well… in theory. Jak does have all his old moves, plus a few new ones. He can pull out a hover board at will and race across the landscape, for example. But there is another addition that significantly alters the way the game is played: Jak has access to various firearms. Not only that, but Jak is now being presented as an “eXtreme badass” instead of an inexperienced young man as before: he has guns and a goatee. I played Jak 2 for a few minutes and got annoyed with hauling around a large laser cannon. What the hell? Check out this Picture if you do not believe me.
• Gregory Horror Show. This game looks like it could be awesome, but there wasn’t enough to do in the demo I played to really tell. Gregory Horror Show is apparently a survival horror game for kids (and, if that weren’t surprising enough, it wasn’t the only one at E3 this year). The art and graphics are awesome: Gregory himself is shaped like a rectangle. Gregory has (apparently) three moves: “first person look,” “knock on door,” and “open door.” The “open door” move also doubles as a context-sensitive action button, but I am not sure what sort of actions he’ll be able to perform. The portion of the demo I played had Gregory walking around a hotel and exploring the rooms. Each room had names posted next to them like “Mummy Mommy, Mummy Daddy, Mummy Son.” Looks like it might be a (albeit weird) riot, but since I couldn’t really figure out how to do anything it is hard to tell. Check out this dark picture. Gregory is the box thing in the center of the frame.
• Fable. Peter Molyneux’s latest creation is an RPG that offers a living world that the player may permanently change. The game, previously known as Project EGO, follows the player’s character throughout his lifetime. The player is free to go on quests, get married, cheat on his wife, make friends and enemies, start bar fights, or do whatever else he feels like. However, each action has a consequence, and the game is built up around such interactions. Molyneux demoed a bar fight and what happens if you go out in public naked, but we haven’t really seen any concrete game play yet. I am not yet sure if this game will really be cool or if it will be more of a gimmick. Here is Picture 1 and Picture 2.
• Resident Evil Dead Aim. What do you get when you take Resident Evil and throw out the fixed camera angles and the third person combat system? Add in a mix of Silent Hill-style flashlight exploring and you might have an idea of what Resident Evil Dead Aim looks like. Game play consists of moving around in a 3D real time world with a standard “over the shoulder” camera. When a zombie is encountered you must switch to combat mode, which is inexplicably first person. The game apparently supports the GunCon2 accessory, but I am not sure how you would use it. Unlike the previous Resident Evil gun games, you must use the control pad to navigate your character around.

  This game might be cool, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Resident Evil. Check out this Picture of game play, and this Picture of the combat mode.

• The Suffering. Another survival horror game, this time set in a prison. The controls are ok and there is a lot of gore (and swearing!), but there wasn’t enough demo to tell if the game will really be any good or not. The intro was pretty neat. This game is different because in The Suffering, zombies are invisible.
• Castlevannia. Looked to me like the Nintendo 64 version… maybe it will be good, maybe not. Here is a picture.
• Seven Samurai. 3D third-person beat-em-up in a cybernetic future or something. Noteworthy because the beating looks pretty cool, and your dude can move very very fast.

Games that looked bad.

• Rise To Honor. This game looks cool from far away but plays very badly up close. The idea is that you play Jet Lee in this third-person brawler game, and that fighting is accomplished with nothing but the two analog sticks. When you tap the right stick in a direction, Lee attempts to lay the smack down in that direction. His moves are sensitive to context, similar to the way that fighting in Mark of Kri works. However, in practice it is really hard to get him to attack in the right place, as the analog stick has far too much granularity. The first demo room was almost unbeatable.
• True Crime: Streets of LA. Not only is this game a GTA3 rip off, it doesn’t even manage to build on the GTA concept. The graphics look worse than GTA (for the most part), and the only new feature I could find was a hand-to-hand combat system. Ugh.
• Everything that Majesco was showing. There isn’t really much more to say.
• Spawn. Why do they keep making these things? This game is Devil May Cry, with all instances of “Dante” replaced with “Spawn.” Even the “displacement after slice with bladed weapon” effect is the same. Sheesh.

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Developer: WARP
Publisher: Sega
Released: 2000
Platform: Sega Dreamcast
Region: America

D2 is a very odd game. On one hand, Kenji Eno and WARP have masterfully grafted classic RPG game elements on to a 3D third-person survival horror adventure game. On the other hand, their creation suffers from several fundamental design flaws that prove both aggravating and tiresome.

D2 is technically the sequel to D, a pre-rendered Myst-style horror game for the 3DO, Saturn, and PSX circa 1995. D no Shokutaku (lit. “D’s Dining Table”), as it was originally titled in Japan, told the bizarre story of a young woman’s psychedelic journey through a hospital to stop her insane father. Though each game area was entirely pre-rendered and required the player to do a lot of puzzle solving, D’s compelling story and presentation were far more adult than most other pre-rendered adventures. D ended up selling over a million copies in Japan, though it was not as well received in the States.

D2 began as a haunted mansion romp for Matsushita’s ill-fated M2 console, but the entire game concept was ditched when the team switched to the Dreamcast. The new D2, which is set in Canada’s arctic tundra, was the first game officially announced for the Dreamcast console.

D2 is a 3rd-person 3D adventure/RPG. While comparisons to Shenmue are inevitable, it is important to note that D2 is not a Shenmue derivative. D2 was released in Japan on December 23, 1999, just four days before Shenmue.

Regardless, there are all kinds of superficial similarities between D2 and Shenmue. Both feature a 3rd person mode for movement, a first person mode for indoor exploration, and a separate mode for fighting. Both have excellent (and similar looking) graphics and texture work. Both games develop complex characters and rely heavily on recorded voice for speech. Both model time and weather cycles, and both games are primarily story-driven.

Unfortunately, Shenmue is a better game by several orders of magnitude. D2 tries hard to merge 3rd person action elements with RPG mechanics, but several serious design flaws ultimately keep the game from being successful.

Gameplay
Like every other WARP game to date, D2’s main character is a blonde woman named Laura. The game is comprised of three basic modes: the indoor exploration mode, the outdoor exploration mode, and the combat mode. The majority of the game is spent outdoors fighting monsters, while the indoor mode serves as device for puzzles and plot development.

Indoors, Laura is given a chance to speak with NPCs and explore. This mode works like the original D: the first person view can be guided to specific points in the room, but free movement is not allowed. At each waypoint, Laura can examine her surroundings and pick up objects. Dead-end waypoints become inaccessible after their usefulness has been exhausted. For example, in the first room Laura must explore there is a path leading from a bed to a small closet. Once Laura has examined the closet, retrieved all the items from it, and returned to the bed, the closet can no longer be approached. This is a nice touch, as it lets the player know when they have sufficiently ransacked an area.

Indoor environments are linked together as rooms. While moving within each room simply results in the camera floating over to the next waypoint, inter-room transitions cause a 3rd-person FMV sequence to play. In fact, FMV sequences (generated within the engine) appear for almost every indoor action Laura can take. Every time Laura opens a door, collects an item, or examines an object, a unique FMV sequence plays. While this might sound tedious (and is sure to turn off some players), the extreme use of such sequences serves to heighten the tension of the environment; several times over the course of the game, a transitional animation is interrupted by a surprising story event. The impact of such events is compounded because the player has been lulled into a sense of security by the shear abundance of FMV sequences. While the pace is slow, the indoor mode is quite well done.

Once Laura steps outside, the camera switches to a standard third person over-the-shoulder point of view. Most of the game is spent in this mode, as Laura must traverse the huge levels on foot. The outdoor mode is beautiful, sporting some of the best graphics I’ve seen on the Dreamcast. Moving around is fairly easy with the D-Pad, but the analog stick control is so bad that is basically unusable.

As Laura explores the outdoor environment, she is given the opportunity to hunt local wildlife for food. Laura carries a rifle (which inexplicably cannot be used in battle) that she can use to shoot at the occasional rabbit, bird, caribou, or moose. Equipping the rifle causes the view to change to that of a first person sniper reticle. As Laura zooms in on a target, the view becomes increasingly shaky, just like every other sniper view in video game history. At the highest level of zoom, the crosshairs are so shaky that you’ll wish Laura had some of Solid Snake’s Diazepam lying around. Successfully shooting an animal will give Laura “meats,” which can be used to regain health. The main purpose of the hunting mode seems to be the collection of meat, and to break up the monotony of the time consuming traversals across D2’s landscape.

As Laura moves around outside, monsters will frequently burst out of the snow and attack her, causing the game to switch to combat mode. Combat mode looks like a first person shooter, except that Laura cannot actually move around. As enemies advance, the player must use the analog stick to point their targeting reticle at the enemy and fire. Each enemy has a weak spot, and targeting this spot will cause the monster to take more damage. If an enemy gets close enough to Laura to attack her, the view will swing wildly and become spattered with blood. When more than one enemy attacks Laura at once, buttons allowing her to swivel left or right will appear. Once all the enemies have been defeated, Laura is awarded experience points. As Laura levels up, her max hit points also increase.

Story
Stuck in a snowy wilderness, Laura must stop a sorcerer from awakening Shadow (“The Final Destroyer”), an evil entity bent on world destruction. Throughout the course of the four-disc adventure, Laura will meet and converse with a large cast of characters.

Do not let this simple premise fool you though: this game’s story has everything. Sub-plots include drug use, the fall of the dinosaurs, cloning, cannibalism, patricide, aliens, emotional scaring, and time travel. The story goes in so many directions that it becomes a tangled mess of incidental events and unnecessary character interaction. Parts of the story are undeniably cool, but most of the time (especially towards the end), the cut scenes will simply have you scratching your head.

Even worse, many of the story elements are never resolved, nor do they directly affect the game. A good example of this is the drug use sub-plot: a particular drug called “Linda” is introduced to the player early on in the game. One of the main supporting characters is an addict, it is revealed that some of the bad guys are addicts, you visit (and ultimately destroy) the research facility where the drug is produced, and another major character turns out to be the son of the man responsible for the drug. A significant portion of the play time of the game is devoted to the drug theme, but sub-plot ends up having no bearing on the main story. With the exception of the mission that requires you to destroy the Linda plant, the entire sub-plot could be removed without affecting the game. Yet an incredible amount of time is spent developing the story behind Linda and its effects on the addicts. Odd.

The plot is further weakened by the fact that the main theme seems to have been lifted almost verbatim from the movie John Carpenter’s The Thing. Though the source of the conflict in D2 is not aliens, the basic premise is the same: trapped in the arctic, people begin to change into horrific monsters with lots of tentacles and extra appendages. The monsters often try to pass as human, and the only way to tell a real person apart from a doppelganger is by observing the color of their blood.

The final blow against the story is the character’s dialog. While not Resident Evil bad, the dialog is bland and unnatural, and the delivery is not helped by the awful lip synching. However, since this game has been translated from Japanese, I am willing to chalk up the conversations to poor localization.

A final note on the story: the content of the story is surprisingly adult. In addition to some in-game nudity, there are several weird phallic references throughout the game. One boss monster looks like a naked woman with a Little Shop of Horrors plant monster extending from her vagina. Though the inclusion such adult content is in poor taste, it is not as bad as some other less-explicit games, as the content is never presented as pornography. Nonetheless, the game was censored slightly (some cameras were moved) for its American release. Compare the Japanese and American versions of the introductory movie.

Design Flaws
Even though the story may be all over the place, D2 has all the components necessary to make a fun game. Unfortunately, the game is marred by a few dubious design choices that severally lower the quality of the experience.

The single largest problem with D2 is lack of direction. Short term goals are almost always vague, cryptic, or nonexistent. The size of each outdoor area is huge, and an incredible amount of time is spent traveling between locations.

For example, one of your first tasks in the game is to “look around outside” for a missing young girl. The problem is that outside is huge. You can spend an hour running around to the various locations on the map, and none of them will have anything of interest or value. Nothing at all happens (besides innumerable random monster encounters) until you return to the hut where you started (without the missing girl). When you go back inside, a story event will occur and you’ll be given a new goal. The designers of the game expected you to step out side, walk around briefly, and then promptly return to the hut. However, since nothing has been done to enforce that expectation, you can waste an incredible amount of time perusing a girl who cannot be found.

Given that you always have a choice of at least three places to explore, you might think that D2 has “open ended” game play, or that story events can be viewed out of order. This is not the case, and despite the open nature of D2’s world maps, the game is excruciatingly linear.

Each of the four discs contains a different area, and all of them are fairly large. Each area has a “safe house” location that you can always return to. The major NPC characters usually hang out at the safe house, and you can restore your health there by sleeping. When the player leaves the safe house to go exploring, they are usually given three obvious destinations to explore. However, only one of these locations will ever be useful, and the player is almost always required to immediately return to the safe house for the story to progress.

Because of this “always return to the safe house between exploring locations” philosophy, an inordinate amount of time is spent traversing the same parts of the map. In order for the story to progress, a typical D2 map might require to explore in an order like this: safe house, location 1, safe house, location 2, safe house, location 1, safe house, location 2, safe house, location 3, et cetera. While keeping the story linear is fine, this degree of game play linearity is annoying to the extreme, especially when there is nothing stopping the player from wasting time exploring a location that is not yet meant to be explored.

The annoyance caused by traversing the same area approximately 2000 times is further compounded by the combat system. Of the game’s three modes, the combat mode is by far the weakest. The first-person shooter system holds up ok when there is only a single enemy, but it quickly becomes a chore when multiple monsters attack. There is no way to defend against attacks and Laura can only shoot at one monster at a time, meaning that the player is often forced to take a hit. With the exception of the “G-bomb” grenades, none of Laura’s weapons can hit multiple targets at once, so the player is forced to choose which enemy will be destroyed while the others are allowed to advance. Though pivoting controls are provided to switch between monsters, they are not always available and do not help against monsters that move. Even worse, Laura cannot pivot without said controls, so sometimes she ends up staring at the ground waiting for a pivot button to appear. Finally, the idea that shooting monsters should cause the screen to become speckled with blood sounds cool, but in practice it simply obscures the player’s view and makes combat more difficult. These flaws, combined with the fact that monster encounters are random and frequent, make the combat system one of the most aggravating parts of the game.

The hunting mode was obviously included to ease the monotony of traveling between locations, but it has its own share of problems. The most obvious issue is with the zooming sight. The game acts as if an invisible dowel extends from the gun sight into the world. When zooming in and out, the length of the dowel changes. If the dowel passes through a solid object (like a tree or the ground), the sight automatically zooms back to free the dowel from the object. This means that as you are panning around in the hunting view, your zoom level may automatically adjust itself to keep you from looking through a tree or boulder. This is annoying and absurd, and it makes tracking an animal that is a fair distance away very difficult. Furthermore, the animal AI seem to be sensitive to the touch of the invisible dowel, and will often start running only when you focus the targeting reticle on them.

Even worse, the animals have the ability to vanish into thin air. When a creature has been running for a certain amount of time, it will often just blink out of the world. The AI are also aware of their visibility from the player’s perspective, and will often use background cover as an excuse to completely vanish. If you attempt to follow an AI around a corner, for example, it will almost never be there when you arrive.

The last nail in the hunting mode’s coffin is the frequency at which different types of animals appear. Over the course of the game, I shot about 30 rabbits, 10 grouse, and one moose. I never even saw a caribou, though the manual tells me that they exist. In a mode designed to relieve boredom, the lack of variety makes the experience annoyingly bland.

Implementation Details
In general, the execution of sound, music, art, and animation in D2 is excellent. There are very few problems in the actual implementation of the game, and (excepting the control and aforementioned design issues) the presentation is spot-on. The UI simple, original, and easy to use, the music is minimalist and haunting, the voice acting is decent, and the graphics are spectacular. As with the first D, the FMV sequences have been executed with a degree of flair lacking in most video games, though I personally found the decision to mix 3D pre-rendered graphics with live action footage to be a poor one. The character animation is a mixed bag, but overall the production quality is very high. As with any title that features recorded voice, I would have preferred an option for on-screen subtitles so that the game can be played with the sound turned down. Overall, however, D2 looks and sounds great.

Wrap Up and Final Notes
This article has turned out to be considerably longer than I had expected. Given the original concept and high quality production behind D2, I was quite disappointed to see the game blemished by significant design flaws. It is obvious that a lot of thought was put into the game, and it is too bad that the end result was not a more satisfying experience. D2 is by no means a bad game, but with a few changes it could have been an excellent game.

D2 has taught me the following lessons:

• Always give the player clear goals.
• Give the player hints about which areas require exploring and which are not yet (or no longer) meaningful. Restrict access to areas which have no value. The way D2 closes off useless passages in the indoor mode is a perfect example, while the openness of the outdoor mode horrendously violates this rule.
• Original stories are appreciated, but so are comprehensible ones. Side quests are ok, but they should have some minor bearing on the main story arc.
• Combat and other situations where the player may be killed need to have tight, responsive control. An above average player should be able to get through a difficult melee without much trouble. Never put the player in a situation where he is forced to take a hit.
• In a game about exploration, traversing the game world should not be a chore.
• Using copious amounts of transitional cut scenes can effectively lull the player into a sense of security, making them more vulnerable to surprise.
• Obstructing the players view–even for a cool ‘blood on the camera’ effect–can be annoying and detrimental to the experience. This is especially true when the view is obscured in “high stakes” situations, such as combat.
• Though the validity of random encounters in general is debatable, the player should always have some mechanism that allows them to choose their battles. Most RPGs use an “attempt to run” mechanic, which is fine.
• If monsters encounters are intended to surprise the player, it is probably a good idea to make sure that they are not preceded by five seconds of CD loading sounds.

If you have a Dreamcast and some time to spare, pick up D2 and play it through. Though the game drags at times, the overall experience is, with a few significant exceptions, good. Most importantly, the mistakes made by Warp can serve as valuable lessons to the rest of us. As the 3D exploratory RPG genre gains momentum, my hope is that developers pay attention to games like D2 and avoid making similar mistakes.