Daikatana

N64, Daikatana (2000) game

The main reason I chose to play this was because the 20th Anniversary of when I got my N64 was approaching and I wanted to get back into playing games on that machine. The other reason was that this is one of a handful of games that had a high enough resolution that I could play it on the Dell screen I use for gaming, rather than having to hook it up through a VGA adaptor which does not do justice to the graphics of the machine. It was time to play a first person shooter, and I'd bought this some time ago as a game I'd never played before on the system. I didn't expect much from it, and I didn't get much from it, being a resolutely average game in every respect. Well, perhaps it was below average in some respects! The graphics for one, emphasised the primitive nature of the coding - it looks like a release from the opening days of the N64's launch, and 'Turok: Dinosaur Hunter' was actually better looking, faster, smoother, larger and much more dynamic in every way, even with its incessant fogging. So it's with astonishment you realise this came out in the year 2000. That's the same year as 'Perfect Dark,' 'The World Is Not Enough,' 'Banjo-Tooie'… I mean it's staggering how poor it looks in comparison with other games of the time, but then that's probably due to it being a multi-platform release, a port from a PC game, but even so you'd think they could have done a better job than this!

It's not that the textures are terrible, they're actually okay, and after the gloomy brown and grey Marsh level that opens proceedings to underwhelming effect, you get some variety in the locales and architecture: Ancient Greece, Medieval villages (complete with obligatory monk), future America. They all have some nice environments at times, but they're so empty! There are hardly any enemies to fight, with liberal splashes of HP recovery and extra ammo to pick up, so that it was very rare to actually die from foes. The landscape was barren, few things could be shot up for the fun of it, so there's little sense of immersion and interactivity. It's basically trundling down corridors occasionally shooting someone. I don't think there were ever more than three enemies in any given area, and when you think how much 'Goldeneye 007' had changed the first person gaming landscape, and even the 'Turok' series had brought massive guns and tension, it's sad that this, a game I seem to remember was in development for many years, turned out to be so backward. I suppose there was some inevitability since this was John Romero's follow-up to the famous 'Doom,' and one popular game doesn't mean the next will be equally successful. It's also been the case with many famous 'name' programmers that their cherished project gets cancelled or is revealed to be a lot less impressive and dramatic than expected after a long development struggle.

There's no excuse for the kind of faults in this game, however: things like the cutscenes playing out at a snail's pace with huge, blocky type beneath the images for the dialogue. It's not that the game should have had speech (although both 'TWINE' and 'PD' certainly did), but to have such ugly presentation, and awful pacing like that… you could fall asleep waiting for the next line of dialogue to come up, and even the layout was badly designed as a sentence would be cut off in the middle…

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…to be completed on the next 'page,' rather than giving you the option to cycle through it. Confusingly, there were times in the game when you did need to press the 'A' button to advance the text, but if you pressed 'A' during a standard cutscene you'd skip it, and if you'd just played through a level you weren't going to want to go back through it just to see that bit of text again! To add to the shabby design ethic, there were stupid flaws in the controls, too. For example, if you wanted to select a different weapon you'd pull up a weapon wheel which you'd cycle through to choose, but you always kept every new weapon from each era, even if you no longer had ammo for it, so this wheel ends up being clogged with useless hardware, and if you're under attack when needing to change weapons, you can stand there cycling through and losing health like nobody's business! A similarly poor choice was that when plunging into water you automatically switch to the spiked gauntlet, or whatever it was called, but when you emerge from the deep, you don't automatically flip back to the weapon you had previously, and have to go through the weapons wheel again - no fun if you have enemies waiting for you on dry land!

I was very surprised how short the game is: there are four missions, split into four chapters or episodes, then you confront the villain and it's as easy as crouching down before him and hacking at his knees to beat him! Sure, there's a twist in the tale, but the story was so laboriously told that any atmosphere or shock value was lost in the dull pacing. They try to create an impression that you're part of a trio of adventurers who only occasionally split up, but you almost never see them in-game, it's always in cutscenes - if they'd managed to make it so you had a couple of CPU teammates that actually ran along with you, it would have been something different, but it's just you on your own. The other thing is, although they aren't too frequent, you have annoying platform bits, much like 'Turok' where it's all about timing and jumping, or running around to get to a bridge you've activated for a short time, before it retracts again, the height of frustration. Even the music is pretty repetitive and bleak, so there doesn't seem to be anything to recommend it. In spite of all these criticisms, I did find some enjoyment in it. Whether it's because I haven't played an FPS for a while, especially one I'd never encountered before, I don't know, but I liked the 'Metroid'-like feeling of isolation, the time travelling storyline wasn't bad, and it was fun to try out the variety of weapons, even if none of them really constituted a favourite.

The dialogue was bad, but in a fun, cheesy sort of way, and while the puzzles were basic, occasionally there would be a sign of intelligence, such as the chimes in the chapel. But the controls were not well explained - I didn't have the manual so had to make do with finding things out from the game itself and it took many fruitless tries on the first level to get beyond a half-raised door because I didn't know I could crouch. I only found out when studying the control config option. I was foxed because there was no option to crouch, until I noticed the rolling text at the bottom of the screen which gave the useful info of the need to press the Action button and the Jump button at the same time! Thanks for that! The same with swimming: I didn't realise that by repeatedly tapping 'R' I would rise to the surface, so got stuck for a short while in a watery channel in which I couldn't work out how to get out. These things are partly my fault, because a manual is there to provide such info, and no one really wants a tutorial level to go through, but hints and suggestions along the way would have been useful. At the same time, this was a game that was way too easy, with few deaths, and one that I thought would run for a while. I almost wondered if you'd have to go back through time changing things, but no, nothing as inventive as that.

It wasn't bad as a reintroduction into the world of the N64 as I hadn't tackled a new game on the system since winter 2017's 'Starshot: Space Circus Fever' which was a truly bad game. This wasn't bad, it was merely mediocre, and it still held some delight to see those blocky N64 environments that I could reminisce about as being like so many other great games I played. And that's the thing, it's a game I wanted to end so I could get onto playing something I knew was good. And that's never a strong recommendation.

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