Microreview [video game]: John Romero's Daikatana by Ion Storm

The Time-hopping Classic

Daikatana is mediocre at its very best. There is simply no better way to put it. The level design is uninspired. The sounds are mostly weak and inappropriate. The flow of the game is choppy. The texture work is busy and looks as though entirely too much detail was crammed into resolutions far too small.

For a good indicator of how the entire game plays out, look no further than the very first level. It stands out as an example of almost everything wrong with this game. It takes place in a futuristic swamp, not exactly the most exciting place ever. It is painted in primarily two colors; green and gray. The first enemies you fight are (and I'm not joking) robotic mosquitoes, robotic frogs, and robotic alligators. They all behave in the same manner; hop, fly, or crawl directly at you and attempt to make a melee attack. Your first weapon is the ion blaster; an ugly green and gray pistol that looks like it's a bundle of tubes and wires all taped together. Shots from the ion blaster ricochet off of walls and explode in water for no particular purpose. Since you spend some time in the water because you are in a swamp, it is quite a surprise to be burned by your own weapon when you attempt to fight something there. You are left to fight alligators and frogs in water with your fists. There is one path through the level from beginning to end and it is not particularly interesting or exciting. This tepid start is how the entire game plays out.

Off to a great start here. The whole first episode looks like this.

Early in the game you are cursed with two AI companions. Had these companions any semblance of intelligence, they may have been useful. As they stand, they are walking liabilities. They get stuck in terrain, they get stuck in doors, they fall way behind so that when you are trying to exit a level, you waste time waiting on them to catch up. They can wield weapons but since they are often far behind you, they either do not get to the firefight in time to contribute in any meaningful capacity, or they end up shooting you in the back. Babysitting them is a miserable experience.

Is that supposed to be a minotaur?

There is an experience point system in which you can level up your amount of damage per attack, speed of fire, speed of movement, jumping ability, and total health. Of these, the only one of any real use is increasing jumping ability. It is the only one that has any tangible benefits as it allows you to access some secret areas that you would not otherwise be able to reach. If you use the Daikatana, it takes your experience points to level itself up. Increasing the level of the Daikatana is not really useful. It attacks faster and does more damage, but it begins to glow and spark and these effects end up taking up more screen real estate than they're worth. The Daikatana is useless in any ranged fight and most of the enemies in the game are melee focused, so you can put yourself at a tactical advantage by using whatever your period specific pistol is and leaving the Daikatana alone.

As I described the ion blaster, so many of the other weapons in the game tend to bite you just as often as they do your enemies. The C4 launcher in the first episode is absolutely crippling to yourself more than Mishima's forces. It fires sticky proximity mines that explode in a large radius if anything comes near them, including yourself and other prox mines. Since enemies are often too dumb to follow you once you're out of sight, it is impossible to use this weapon to set any traps and it becomes a dangerously unhelpful grenade launcher. In the second episode, you get the hammer of Hades. It does healthy amounts of damage when charged, but places that damage right below your feet so you feel its power also. It'll even nuke your AI sidekicks if they get too close, which send you straight to the game over screen. The weapons in episode three are not particularly good or bad, and, in a surprising turn, the guns in episode four are actually fun to use. Episode four, however, contains one of the most personally dangerous weapons in the entire game; the metamaser. It is a thrown proximity turret that shoots out lasers at anything that comes near it, including you! However, its range is so great, and there are basically no encounters with anything more than one or two enemies at a time, and it explodes violently after a short period of time. It is far more dangerous than useful.

The writing is worse than most video games, which is saying a lot.

The level design can only be described as painful. As in the first level, there is typically only one path and it is rarely an interesting one. Platforming abounds and it is about as fun as pulling teeth. In episode two, there is an inordinately large area through which five runes are hidden. The player is rarely pointed in the direction of each rune and it becomes a long and boring game of hide and seek. While most levels took me only twenty minutes at most to complete, I spent over an hour on this area alone, and that does not include time lost due to deaths. At the end of episode four, there is a series of instant death platforming sections that serve only to drive the player insane. It is unfathomable to believe that someone at some point in time thought that these areas were a good idea, or even fun.

Story in this game comes only through long and boring cutscenes. Even though you carry two AI companions with you through most of the game, they rarely speak to each other or contribute anything to say about what is going on in the game. All meaningful dialog is contained within cutscenes that run too long. Thankfully they are skippable at any time.

If you skip all of the cutscenes, you miss gold like this.

There is no avoiding it; Daikatana was not a good game when it was released, and it does not get better with age. If you are feeling nostalgic, as I was, watch a playthrough on Youtube. Do not play it. This game is far more trouble than it is worth.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 2/10

Bonuses: +1 there's a lot to play!

Penalties: -1 none of it is good

Nerd Coefficient: 2/10 (really really bad)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Ion Storm. John Romero's Daikatana [Eidos Interactive, 2000] 

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Deus Ex by Ion Storm

Dossier: Ion Storm. Deus Ex (2000)

Filetype: Video Game.

File Under: Cyberpunk Derivative

Executive Summary: J.C. Denton is a newly trained United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition (UNATCO) agent. He is tasked with retrieving a stolen shipment of the ‘Ambrosia’ vaccine, the cure for the Gray Death, from National Secessionist Forces (NSF). However, J.C. learns that the Gray Death is a man made virus, and someone is controlling Ambrosia shipments to shape world governments. This is only the tip of the conspiracy as J.C. travels around the world to find who is pulling the strings.

High-Tech: J.C. is one of the first nano augmented people in the world. His body is full of nanites that give him superhuman strength, regenerating health, the ability to see in the dark, and cloak, among other augmentations that make J.C. more than human. J.C., however, is preceded by a whole class of people who were mechanically augmented, like your typical cyborg. Still superhuman, but not the future that J.C. represents.

Computer hacking is also a big part of Deus Ex. Though gameplay, J.C. gains experience that he can put towards his hacking skills. There’s no minigame involved, but hacking can be augmented with items such as ICE Breakers, and often reveal story elements as well as useful information such as lock codes.

Sentient artificial intelligences also figure heavily in Deus Ex. Some are allies of J.C. and aid him throughout the game, and others are not. These AI have their own motivations and goals in the context of the game.

Low-Life: The common person in Deus Ex lives in fear of the Gray Death. It leads to a short, painful death as the victim’s body is consumed by the virus. The distribution of Ambrosia is controlled by FEMA and it is a temporary cure. Without a steady supply, the infected can expect to die shortly after it runs out. This makes anyone without a stable source extremely susceptible to control by forces that can interrupt the flow of Ambrosia.

Dark Times: Deus Ex is dense with social conflict. The most obvious is that which is dictated by the Ambrosia vaccine; the haves versus the have nots. The wealthy and those in power seem to have no problem getting a hold of the Ambrosia vaccine, but the poor suffer and die on the streets from Gray Death. This is largely what leads the NSF to steal the vaccine shipments, though not their only motivation. Then there is conflict between the nano-augmented (J.C. and his brother Paul) against the mechanically augmented. Recognizing the nano-augmentation is more operationally flexible and less physically obvious, the mechanically augmented feel like their future is limited. The AIs in the game are also an oppressed class, controlled by their creators but yearning for freedom.

Above all of this, the shadow organizations that seek to control the world are winning. The world governments are still there, but more or less helpless against the power of extragovernmental agencies that exert their control.

Legacy: Deus Ex was a big deal when it came out. It was Ion Storm’s biggest success and won many ‘game of the year’ awards for combining first person action, huge levels with an enormous array of options to complete them, RPGlike progression and a narrative far deeper than most video games, even today. It’s arguably one of the best video games ever made.

In Retrospect: Believe it or not, I finished Deus Ex for the first time not that long ago. I’ve owned it since 2000, but it was too much for me back then. As you might be able to tell, there is a lot to Deus Ex and it’s almost overwhelming. The first level alone allows for so many options and very little direction that it is often a huge turn-off for most people who expect to be spoonfed the gameplay systems slowly until the training wheels come off. There are no training wheels in Deus Ex.

Even if you get past the first level of the game, there is so much going on in the background and the foreground of the game, that it’s easy for completionists (as I’m sometimes compelled to be) to get frustrated. You have to learn to accept that you’re not going to read every line of dialog, open every door, hack every computer, or solve every mystery on your first time through Deus Ex. When I first bought Deus Ex, I was not ready for that game.

However, as I grew older, I came to accept some of my completionist tendencies didn’t need to be satisfied, and I just sat down and played the game. It is an extremely rewarding experience. Play the game however you like, and Deus Ex will probably accommodate you. Are you stealthy? You can play it that way. Do you like to shoot everyone? You can play it that way. Do you want to spend a lot of time underwater or in environmental suits? It kind of works!

This same manner of engagement applies to the story and lore of the game. There is a lot of it, hidden in books, encrypted on hard drives, stored on datapads, and these things are littered all over the levels. It’s a game that relishes in secrets and rewards those who seek them out.

The game does suffer a bit technically. It’s early Unreal engine, and it shows. The game has never been a looker, but you can improve it with a user made renderer that brings some newer Unreal engine improvements. It probably still runs fine without them, but they do improve the experience.

All told, there is a lot of things that other games have copied from Deus Ex, and many of them have done them better, but the number of games that succeed at doing so much is extremely small. Though successes in their own ways, not even the sequels to Deus Ex come close to its scope. In an industry that thrives on iterating to increasing improvements, it is as close as video games gets to a timeless classic.

 
Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read/watched/played today: 5/5
Cybercoefficient: 10/10