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.