Soooooooooooooooooo..........long time, no post. Kinda lacked motivation since no one comments but I'm trying to put new stuff now.
I've been asking myself: What would be worse between being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and playing Trespasser? Reading reviews of that...."thing", I though the latter would be less painful. After all, if you're lucky, the Rex will just bite one time and kill you on the spot...or rip one of your arms like George Baselton in "The Lost World" novel (which is damn better than the movies, storywise) before finally finishing you off.
I got my hand on Trespasser, being in a Jurassic mood after finishing Michael Crichton's novels, "Jurassic Park" and "the Lost World". But I was saddened then because I still needed a boost of dinosaurs so I tried Trespasser, which, as I heard, was a crappy game. Crappy it was, indeed, at least on a technical level. But even if the graphics and the controls were poor, this game played quite a role in the videogame world. Let's see why.
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First thing I noticed, inevitably, were the graphics. It's 1998 graphics so it was ugly, but even so, in 1998, some games had great graphics, the machines were better exploited. The big problem with the graphics was that the game was worse in Hardware mode than Software mode.....I prefer using hardware but here, the results were awful. Textures would disappear on objects, in my case, trees and everything would just be ugly.
The game used some technique, using sprites for far objects and replacing said objects by their 3D counterparts, but that feature wasn't exploited in the best way. The objets were low-resolution sprites and they weren't far enough, so you had 3D trees popping around as you advanced. that feature would later be used in FarCry, albeit in a better way.
But, as I saw in a magazine, "Graphics don't make a game", so I continued.
Then, I tested the arm functions. Most people found it terrible to control and I did, but eventually got used to it. You can rotate the arm and the wrists but I found you could play fine without doing so. The only thing it's useful for is to adjust your aim, which stay constant afterward. Piling crates is the worst used of the arm, since it's hard to stack them right.
I liked how you had to manually adjust the gun to aim. No crosshair, gotta use the sight. ^^
Then, the gravity. The game had some realistic touch with the physics but most of the time it was just plain strange. Of course, when you bump a pile of barrels, they would fall but when you tried to stack crates, they wouldn't stay put, the top crate would always slide or bounce......yeah, weird.
and the way the dinosaurs moved wasn't better. The T. Rex litteraly looked like he was in a zero-gravity field! My god, a space dino! Speaking of the dinos, The raptors always took a strange position when killed and moved in an awkward way, too.
but they didn't always move ridiculously. The raptors, when wounded, would limp away. And sometimes, you'd see T.Rex eating on a fallen prey. And also there's some fights between dinos and their preys. Very realistic.
The big problem with the dinosaurs is that there's too few of them. there was supposed to be a whole fauna but most dinosaurs are encountered one by one, though sometimes there can be two or three of them trying to get you. So, the fauna's quite limited, you can't just see hadrosaurs drinking at a river and see raptors attacking them.
Also, the landscapes were quite flat, apart of a few abandonned buildings, which contained nothing but a few weapons and were more like temporary safe havens, because the dinos couldn't get in (The developpers tried too hard to avoid interpenetration). So basically, as much as exploring is an interesting feature, there's not much to do. And the player character isn't fast, even when running.
Speaking of the character, this time you play as a real character, unlike other FPS. The character has a body with limbs (you even have to look at a tatoo on the character to check your health), so there's more consistency in your avatar.
So, I'd say the game was bad. I had fun with it, most ideas were great innovations at the time, but were poorly exploited. These ideas, however, were used in other games. the three most important features were used in three great games: The sprite-to-3D technique was used in FarCry, the gravity was better exploited in Half-Life and having a virtual body was used in The Chronicles of riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.
So I'd say, although Trespasser was a failure, some very successful hits started from that game. Without Trespasser, some innovative ideas probably wouldn't have been exploited.
So, I suggest trying this game if you're a dino-fan and don't mind coping with bugs. If you're an elitist always playing Half-Life 2, keep in mind some of Half-life ideas came from this game. It's not a great game but quite entertaining, though I wouldn't pay for it if I were you. :)
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