Dino Crisis

Dino Crisis is a survival horror game on Playstation/PC with a dinosaur twist. The game’s made by Capcom and it has a very strong Resident Evil feel to it. You play as Regina, a government operative. You and four other agents go to this island research laboratory in order to kidnap the head scientist guy there. Soon after landing by parachute, you lose a team mate and have to move on without him. Immediately after infiltrating the perimeter you realize that something is very wrong on account of the bullet casings and eviscerated bodies on the ground. Basically from there you’re trying to finish the mission and escape the island. Similar to Jurassic Park but a lot less interesting plotwise.

One thing I notice right away is that there’s a lot of audio dialogue. This is weird because most games from that era either had a small handful of sentences uttered or noises like gasping and laughter or just had no voice acting at all.

The other thing I notice is that the only thing I have to defend myself with is a small handgun and ten bullets. Though all of my team mates have awesome weapons. What’s with that? Am I experiencing the firearms glass ceiling or was I in the bathroom when they were handing out guns?

Gail: I call the AK-47.
Rick: I call the .50 cal sniper rifle.
*toilet flushes*
Enter Regina
Regina: What’s going on in here?
Rick: Here Regina, you get the stick with the pointy rock on the end.

When you come across your first dinosaur, (a raptor,) your first thought is probably to kill it. After all, you have a gun and some bullets. What else would they be for? You start shooting at it and then you get critically slashed across the torso. After about five bullets the raptor goes down. It’s not moving so you walk past it to leave. Then it springs to life, biting you in the leg. You shoot it about three more times and it finally dies. You’re not looking too good either at this point. At least that’s what you guess since Regina is now limping and bleeding but you don’t know how close you are to death because guess what; there’s no life indicator. Wasn’t that fun? You’re out of ammo and you just spent your first aid kit. Let’s hope that was the only dinosaur in the game.

As you progress, you find little ammo boxes with items in them. You find some health related things and some weird stuff like intensifiers and multipliers which you can mix with some items to upgrade them, (just like in Resident Evil.) But all along you’re thinking; okay, this ones going to have some ammo in it, right? But it never does. Eventually you accept that this might in fact be survival horror in it’s purest form; AKA just run away. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they give me a gun in the first place? I’m obviously not allowed to use it.

Later, you get a shotgun and a modest amount of shells. (And by “modest” I actually mean it would be almost as useful to beat the raptors to death with your shoe.) It takes a lot of bullets to kill anything, which is understandable since they‘re dinosaurs, but are you going to give me enough fucking bullets to do it or not?

Working your way through the facility involves a lot of running. The dinosaurs are all raptors which is boring but there are different ones later. In some of the halls there are these laser grids that you can turn on and off to form a gate that protect you from the raptors. When they run into the lasers they get zapped and fall over. There are various puzzles that you have to solve on your way through. They’re fun and interesting at first but then they start recycling them over and over. I had to fix about four generators, recode two keycards, operate two cranes, and crack I don’t even know how many door codes.

Those door codes are the worst. The system used to access certain doors in the building are locked by what it called the DDK lock system. Why it’s called that, I have no idea. I’ll ignore the fact that no facility would ever have their doors locked like this. First you have to get two things. One’s a key and I guess one’s a decoder or something. After you use both of them at the correct door you have to do this little puzzle where you decode a matrix of random letters with some kind of key code. It involves canceling out the wrong letters and being left with a password that you then type in and enter. They start out easy enough but eventually the rules to the decoding system changes and they become these horrible Mensa entry questions. Look at this…

Does that make any sense to you? It’s great how they put in Saturday Night Fever subliminally. That’s not distracting at all.

Around the building there are notes and documents lying out on desks that you can read. Most of them are irrelevant and a waste of time if you read them but some of them have crucial instructions, like how to use the DDK or operate the reactors or they have key codes for various locks. When you read these you either need perfect memory or a pen and paper to write shit down. Unlike Resident Evil and Silent Hill, there’s no document memo in the pause menu for you to reread something. You have to just know everything because if you come up to a lock and you find you can’t remember the code, you’re sure as hell not going to remember what room the document containing said code was in. I consider having to write stuff down for a video game a design flaw.

The items that you require to progress are always keycards, chips, disks or some other electronic device.

They all have stupid acronym names. See?

Now think, do any of those names give you the slightest clue as to what the item might be or what it’s used for? No, they don’t. They’re just a bunch of random letters. It would be easier if the names were all in Latin. But at least they give you a vague description at the bottom.

The names of the facility parts and the names of the keys and the devices are all so non-descriptive and similar that it’s really easy to get confused. And just when you think you’re getting somewhere, something bad happens and you have to do a ton of other things to fix it just to have something else happen. A common scenario in DC on the PSX and PC would be that you have a locked DDK door. You have one DDK input disk H but you also need the DDK code disk H. It’s in the level B2 main office but you can’t get in there without a C. O. pass card. So you go get the B2 key chip 1 and the B2 key chip 2 and you put them in a computer and enter in the code that was written on one of them. Then you use the F. C. device to collect someone’s fingerprint, put that into the computer and do a puzzle to rewrite the C.O. pass. Then take the C.O. pass to get into level B2 and get the DDK code disk H. Put that into the DDK door with the DDK input disc H and then do a DDK password puzzle. Then the door opens. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? Not only is that a giant hassle just to open a door but they’re like a hair’s breath away from calling the grenade gun a “GG” and a door a “D.”

About half way through the game you actually start getting ammunition. There are these glowing deposite boxes in the walls, either green, red or yellow. Green has medical stuff in it. Red has ammunition in it. Yellow can have anything. But you can’t just open the boxes. You have to get plugs which you find around and use anywhere from one to three to unlock a box. After that, you can put things in and take things out of the box and even access same-colored boxes you’ve already opened.

What’s annoying about this is that you can’t stack like items in your inventory. In the picture all I want to do is stack the 11 S&W bullets together with the 15 S&W bullets, (which would equate to less than the maximum amount allowed in a slot,) but it won’t let me. If I take out the 11 bullets they have to take up their own separate space which is bullshit.

Eventually you get to see some different enemies other than the T-rex and the raptors. There are pteranodons and compies. Then you come across these…

I don’t know what the fuck these are but I wish they were slower, weaker and smaller. They hurt you bad. Their fat asses block almost the entirety of the hallways, making it impossible to circumvent them without getting hurt. When they run into the laser grids they don’t fall over like the raptors so you don’t get a head start running past them when you deactivate the grid. Basically if they’re in the room they WILL get you somehow. And if they manage to knock you down, you’re dead.

In general the dinosaurs in this game are real assholes. Sometimes you’ll be running past a raptor and they’ll whip you with their tail, making you drop your gun. Now you have to go snatch your gun off of the floor and sometimes the raptor will be standing right on it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room and the dinosaur will be right there in mid leap at your face. You could literally walk in a door and die instantly with absolutely no chance to react.

Then there’s the shitty fixed camera. Often you can hear a raptor snorting off screen somewhere. If where you’re going happens to require you to run toward the camera, there’s no way to see what’s ahead of you because the camera isn’t going to switch positions. You just keep running and hope the raptor or whatever isn’t directly in your path.

Possibly the most annoying thing of all is that the dinosaurs respawn. At first I thought it wasn’t respawning but some kind of random thing to keep you from ever truly feeling safe, because the dinosaur doesn’t reappear when you leave the room, it actually comes in through the door. Later, when I had ammunition and was actually able to kill some of the dinosaurs, I noticed that every time I killed a dinosaur, left the room and went back in, a new dinosaur of the same species would always come in through a door. This is outrageous! Half of the game you can’t kill dinosaurs at all and then when you finally can, they just come back. THERE IS NO POINT IN KILLING DINOSAURS. You might want to to be able to explore a room without being constantly chased and there are a few times where you have to fend off the T-rex but other than that, the guns are completely superfluous. What a crock of shit. I had one expectation/goal when I started this game and it was to kill some damn dinosaurs! And for all intents and purposes it never happened! I didn't want it to be Turok but... I almost want to say it's false advertising.

The levels are boring. I mean they weren’t at first but after you’ve spent five hours running through nothing but laboratories and cargo bays, they are. I was expecting to go outside the facility at some point, maybe run through some jungle or something but you never do.

At a few points in the game you have to make decisions as to which course of action to take. Your two team mates, who are only ever present for cut scenes, always have differing opinions on what to do next. Now I know Gail is in charge so why would it even matter what Rick thinks? I don’t know. Anyway, some of the decisions will influence the ending you get. In the beginning I was going with Rick’s ideas because they involved avoiding the dinosaurs in exchange for having to deal with the facility and its shitty proclivities. Later, when I got fed up with collecting acronyms and repeating puzzles, I sided with Gail; opting to deal with the dinosaurs instead. Then I found that it really doesn’t matter which way you choose. THEY BOTH SUCK HARD.

At the end of the game you find out why there are dinosaurs on the island which, believe me, is really stupid. Lets just say I really enjoy Capcom’s quasi science. Then you escape the island. I don’t know what the other two endings are but in mine I was chased by the T-rex through a big hall while in an emergency escape helicopter. Luckily, the helicopter was carrying a bomb. Must have been the Die Hard or the Rambo emergency escape helicopter.

Chaos Legion

(on the back of the box)
“If you loved Devil May Cry, you’ll love Chaos Legion.”
--PSM Magazine

Me: Oh boy! I loved Devil May Cry! This’ll be awesome! *animated blue birds sing and the sun smiles down upon me as I skip home from the game store.*
Two hours later…
Me: What… What is this?
It’s a third person swordplay game with RPG elements made by Capcom but that’s about where the similarities end.

The main selling point of the combat and I guess the game in general is the legions. (Hence the name.) Think of them as poke’mon on PCP. You summon them and they fight next to you . There are seven different ones you can get, all with different attacks and deadly sin sounding names like Arrogance and Blasphemy.

A legion’s lifebar is powered by souls which come from enemies when you beat them. Every hit the legion takes from an enemy removes a little from the lifebar. Of course, when the bar reaches zero the legion’s crest breaks, it disappears and you can’t summon it until you regain a certain amount of souls.
Legions don’t really last too long in battle on average, which is annoying. But it’s actually a lot more beneficial in most cases to just not summon them at all. For one, you can run when they aren’t on the screen. But the second you summon them you’re forced to walk at a leisure mosey. Now it takes forever to get anywhere and you basically become a sitting duck. Second, there’s not a whole lot of difference between a legion and an enemy. You might have as many as six of the same legion on screen at the same time and really what that translates to is chaos and visual pollution. You’re no longer in control of the fight. You can’t focus on anything. It’s like trying to orchestrate a bar fight or a soccer riot.

You’re already on average fighting like thirty giant fucking spiders at a time but at least when the legions aren’t there you know who the enemy is and when they’re going to attack you. When you have them out they inevitably end up blocking your view of some enemy somewhere and then you get hit because you either had no idea they were there or you were distracted by some other asshole in the faceless crowd.
One nice thing though is that while the legions aren’t summoned you can use an assist attack which only summons the equipped legion for a couple of seconds to do a single attack at the cost of some souls.
Each legion is good for doing specific things. Some are better at fighting mechanical enemies or protecting you or shooting enemies from far away. Too bad there’s absolutely no way of knowing which ones you’ll need for a level until you play the level. You can only pick two legions to equip before the start of a level. If at some point during the level you discover that you picked the wrong two legions, well tough shit. You either have to restart the level and reselect the ones you actually need or just man up and slog through with your shitty choice, (if it’s even possible.)

The first legion you get is called Thanatos. He’s actually the strongest one of the seven, (nevermind that both it and you die constantly.) At the end of the first level it’s crest shatters into nine pieces which you can go collect if you want. And after that, the game actually asks you if you’d like to switch to easy mode to “just enjoy the story.” This struck me as funny because A: the story isn’t too compelling and B: I’m not a grandmother. Although it didn’t take me long to question my refusal to switch.

A couple of legions are pretty much useless. Arrogance is supposed to protect you but it’s nothing like what I had envisioned. Yeah, they’ll protect you if they happen to be between you and the enemy and I guess you could command them to stop and then hide behind them if you wanted to waste time but other than that, no. What they actually do is absorb attacks when they are hit, though it still does damage to them. The more hits they take, the more they charge their attack. You can command them to release their attack at any time and depending on how big of a beating they took they’ll shoot a beam that does proportional damage. There are of course several setbacks. Providing the legions survive long enough to even use their attack, their beams aren’t that long, their aim is horrible, they attack randomly if you forget to lock on something, they only travel for a short distance to get in range of the enemy and if it’s too far away they just give up and come back and the whole process of freezing the legions in place somewhere they can absorb attacks, keeping them alive, waiting for them to charge and actually getting them to successfully attack what you want them to attack is so arduous you just never want to use them. So they’re not good for protecting. They’re not good for attacking. What exactly ARE they good for?

Then there’s Blasphemy which takes the form of an orange bomb a little bigger than a soccer ball. Summoning it is about the worst thing you can do. All it does is waddle over to the enemy and explode on them. It really doesn’t do that much damage but every time it explodes it takes away from it’s life bar. So basically if you just want to waste all of your souls it’s great for that. The assist attack is decent though after a high enough level. You just throw it, (kick it,) like a grenade which seems much more effective for some reason. Still, I’m not going to ever equip this piece of shit because it doesn’t stack up to the other humanoid-shaped legions.

The attacks that your character actually gets are executed thusly; press the attack button. Press the attack button some more. Keep pressing the attack button. Swinging the sword is your one attack. As you gain experience and level up your legions, you can learn a few different moves through them. The problem with this is that you can only use the specific moves when you have the corresponding legion equipped. It really blows when you try to use a move, only to realize that you can’t because you don’t have that legion with you. Although after earning a ton of experience you can actually retain some of the moves without using the legions.

The first thing you notice when you start the game, (if you’re me anyway,) is that it’s kind of hard. In fact it’s REALLY fucking hard. Your measly life bar will sustain about three hits and then you‘re dead. The first level is an extremely boring and repetitive prologue. Everything looks the same. Actually the first five levels are all monochrome and interchangeable as far as their architecture and design. The prologue is supposed to be a learning experience but it’s way too long. I had the tutorial turned on, so every other thing you do brings up a tedious explanatory screen of text. Now that I think about it, this is the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen in a game. The explanations don’t explain anything. They’re worded badly and when they make reference to the button(s) you’re supposed to push, it says stuff like “press the assist attack button while in assault mode” or “use the shift button to switch legions.” Okay… That’s great. What the hell are you talking about? How am I supposed to know where those buttons are? You have to get out the manual to look up the function names and where the corresponding buttons are located. Now the reason I used tutorial mode in the first place was so I *wouldn’t* have to do that. If I wanted to read the stupid manual, I’d read the stupid manual. Why the hell couldn’t they just have a little picture or the default name of the button come up on the screen like every other game tutorial?

And another thing; why is the square button a confirm button? I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where square was confirm. It’s ALWAYS cancel. You really have to train yourself out of it quick too. Every time you go into the menu to use one soul or life recovery item you end up using two instead because you select it and press X to confirm and then square to leave but it’s not leave, it’s another confirm button.

Going back to the tiny life gage; there almost seems to be some kind of retarded bug with it. You rarely pick up healing potions and even when you do, you can only hold six small ones and two large ones. When you take damage and you’re about at half of your life, you wouldn’t think to use a potion because they don’t grow on trees and you still have half your life left. This is a 100% surefire way to get yourself killed. The next hit you take, no matter what monster it’s from, it WILL kill you. When you die you have to start back at the beginning or at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are usually pretty far apart, so you’ll be repeating shit a lot. Luckily the game gives you back any items you used before you died.

The whole time you’re playing, you feel drastically underlevelled because everything is so difficult. There will be parts with thirty-some enemies on screen shooting at you and ramming into you from behind. There are machines that make enemies respawn after you kill them. You can destroy the machines but the only problem is that they’re completely surrounded by the same enemies that they make respawn. How long can you last? A lot of times you find yourself pussyfooting around. You go up, hit the enemy and run away because you can’t afford to ever get hit. That’s not fun, it’s fucking stupid. You can go back and play levels you’ve already done to make yourself and your legions stronger but you only get the ability to replay levels when you’re mostly done with the game.

Just when you think you’ve figured out the game, they make you play as this gunslinging girl that kind of reminds me of Lady from DMC3, only less badass and holding Trish’s guns… If Trish’s guns looked like humongous derringers. This turns out to be a completely different ball of wax requiring a whole new set of shitty tutorials. Initially I was very annoyed but soon found that even though I had no idea what I was doing, I was still doing a lot better with her than the main character. Unfortunately you only get to do this for one level. Screw this legion crap. Why can’t I play as her?

As you play through, you occasionally pick up level-up items. There are things that will increase your shitty life bar, things that increase attack and things that increase defense. When I first got one of these upgrades, I was totally mystified as to how to use it. It was in my inventory but it wouldn’t let me select it. Later I figured out that you don’t need to do anything. Just having it increases whatever stat. I have never heard of that before. Typically to raise a stat, you equip/wear an item or you use experience points. In the Diablo 2 expansion there were charms that you could keep in your inventory that did stuff if you wanted to be extra buff but in Chaos Legion it’s the primary level-up method. So every time you look in your inventory you see things like Defense Up X12 and Life Max Up X24. I’m not sure why but this bugs the hell out of me. It looks so sloppy. Why can’t I just use them to permanently add stat points and then they go away? Or at least put them on the stat screen so I don’t have to look at them.

At the end you have to fight the main antagonist who, for reasons unknown, is Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Okay, it’s not actually him but they literally copied him verbatim. They even used the same cinematography from Advent Children.


Continuing with the Final Fantasy theme, they rape you in the ass with three consecutive bosses. Just kidding… Final Fantasy would have at least four. Anyway, it’s bullshit and if you want my advice; go get Thanatos. Or don’t play at all.

There Can Be Only One

There is currently an internet poll going on at Gamespot that will undeniably and irrefutably decide the greatest video game hero of all time. Typically I wouldn’t comment on something as trivial as an internet poll, (because everything else I write about is very serious business,) but this is an interesting insight into a weird subculture coupled with a shocking, (and hilarious,) statistical anomaly. Round one recently ended and as it turns out, the iconic Halo character Master Chief has been defeated by…

Bub and Bob. Yeah, remember them? I know you’re probably thinking, how the hell did this happen when Halo has such a rabid fanbase? Well let me explain. I first heard about this poll while browsing the video games board, (or v,) on 4chan. The point of the thread was to basically tell people to vote for B&B and destroy Master Chief. I went to the poll and saw that the two dragons were already ahead of MC, (possibly legitimately.)

It didn’t take long for everything to go south from there. 4chan users on v generally have an irrational and intense hatred for Halo. Myself, I never really played it that much. It seemed average. Also I don’t think I ever played Bubble Bobble. I have played Bust-a-Move though in many an arcade. So anyway, v starts voting for B&B, but they don’t just vote normally, they keep refreshing their IPs so that they can vote multiple times. The dragons pull away and soon they are ahead by ten percent.

Under every character match is (was) an area you can post comments, backing either character. Needless to say, this became a medium for a humongous shitstorm. The Master Chief side was full of whinny-ass Halo fanboys crying. The Bub and Bob side was full of old school gamers and trolls. It was a sight to behold; one of those special experiences only procurable through the wondrous internet. Though, as expected, that forum disappeared REAL fast. In fact all chat was turned off, period.

Most of the MC comments seemed to either say that Halo is a revolutionary art form or list reasons, (including saving the world,) why MC is the best hero, following up with “what did Bub and Bob ever do?” Well maybe their accomplishments are a bit more simplistic but there is one very important element that B&B have that Master Chief probably never will and that is… a fucking face.

As it is, a first person shooter makes you really detatched from the character because the character almost ceases to exist. YOU are the character. But on top of that, Maser Chief is a John Doe that looks exactly like every other guy in Halo . It’s really hard to care about someone completely walled off behind a bunch of regenerative armor. The helmet never comes off. He doesn’t even have a real name. He could be a robot for all I know. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what he accomplished because I have no way to connect with him.

Then you look at Bub and Bob. Daaaw, look! They’re so damn cute! I like them. They don’t even have to say or do anything. They’re already awesome.

Social sciences aside, it was quite delightful watching the pains of one of the most annoying fanbases in existence. All I need now is the Sonic and Cloud fans to cry, (both currently losing.) Also Donkey Kong should go. He sucks in Smash Bros. He sucks in sidescrollers. He sucks when he’s trying to kill you with barrels.

Yes, the poll is overly charged with animosity when all it is is a web poll. I won’t cry when everyone I care about eventually loses (like always.) I’m betting that either Link or Duke Nukem will win the whole thing, and I‘d be Okay with that. I just hope Mario doesn’t win. That would be the lamest thing ever.

Come on Dante! MOVE YOUR STUPID ASS!