The amazing five minute review.
Written: Nov 22 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wonderful graphics. Great shooter mode.
Cons: Terrible voice acting, terrible camera, terrible everything.
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| chemfet's Full Review: D2 for Dreamcast |
Don't let the title fool you, it means something entirely different. I wont clue you in, but for now: Backstory! You know you want it, don't deny yourself the pleasure of the backstory.
Four years ago I was over at some woman's house. She was a friend of my sisters, and she had a playstation hooked up. I was sorting through her games, because, well, I was a kid. Anyway, all her games were terrible. Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, uh, yeah, you get the picture. Then I pull out something that appeals to my gothic and depressed side. The cover was black, with a creepy image of a stairway behind a big bloody looking "D".
She turned to me and explained, "Oh! That game is so wacked, totally creepy, put it in." And for about four hours straight, I had the greatest gaming experience of my childlike experience. Okay, so it wasn't great, but it was good. Years later I found D in a bargain bin for the computer. I played it once, and it has stayed shelved since. Creepy, atmospheric, and genuinely weird.
All these things that D2 tries to be, but fails miserably.
Why they bothered titling this D2 is beyond me. It's not a sequel. Apparently your character in the game, Laura Parton, is used in another game by Warp, so I suppose I shouldn't be shocked. But I am. When a game is named "2" I expect it to be related to the first one, but I guess I'm just old fashioned like that, you know?
In the first game, you play as Laura, her father (the always wonderful doctor) has gone insane and has murdered a ton of people in his hospital, and then he disappeared. Your adventure ends by screaming "Sequel! Sequel! Come on, make a sequel!" Perhaps if the game was successful at all, there would have been one, but it wasn't. So, we're delivered this hack job.
D2 opens with an obscenely long and badly directed CG movie that tells you the story, rather sloppily, too. Laura is on her way, uh, somewhere. Flying over Canada, some creepy old guy mumbles some lines over and over, and suddenly some terrorists take over the plane. Just as the main terrorist is about to shoot a little girl, this guy next to you open fires and blows him away. Easy.
Suddenly, your compact (yes, like the first D) starts glowing next to him, he picks it up and opens it. Inside the mirror is is treated to an image of a meteorite heading straight from the plane. He grabs you, throws you up the plane right as the meteor hits the plane and sends it to a spiraling doom.
You wake up in a log cabin, with the ugliest CG character ever created right next to you. No one likes to wake up that way, right? Oddly, Laura never complains. Heck, she never says anything at all! She wears the same business suit in the middle of a blizzard, but that's a nitpick. The real problem is the fact that all she ever utters are hentai-like Japanese moans and pants.
Did I mention that Hentai is a recurring theme here? There was a big hoopla about the game being a little, uh, risque when they were porting it over. There were battles over censoring it. They did, a little, but you still get tentacle rape, oral sex, and all kinds of sick sexual references. But, if you're me, it actually adds a reason to play the game, right? ...Right?
All these sexual innuendoes are rendered in amazing visuals. When this game originally came out, they were stunning. All the characters are rendered beautifully. Even as their voice actors fall out of sync with their lips, which they do way too often, they still look amazing. Your surroundings, while not very creative, are rendered beautifully, also. After a while, snow and cabins does get repetitive. Darn! More snow!
Monsters are rendered in the same fare. Even better, actually. They're rather disgusting. OK, rather disgusting isn't the correct thing to say about them... They're really bloody disgusting!
Now, these pretty pictures don't come around on their own. There's three basic sets of controls. First person, third person, and first person track. Oh, that doesn't make sense, sorry. Let me explain.
You start off the game in a cabin. To navigate the cabin and interior places, you're set on a track much like D, or Myst without having to click. You are pretty much limited to turning on certain axis, and then moving forward and focusing on objects. Probably the most annoying mode at first, but it becomes the easiest. That is first person track.
When you wander out of the cabin, you're giving a third person perspective much like Tomb Raider. Minus the jumping, ease of motion, or ability to control the camera. This mode is a major pain. There is no way to move the camera around on your own, it's all kind of difficult. You basically use this mode to just run around between points. Which is nice. A stand-out problem is the fact that you're running around in snow. Which means it's slow. Very, very slow. Running between points in this game is not a quick happening.
There are, of course, monsters. And even a hunting mode. In hunting mode, you have to kill little furry animals for food. You've got a sniper rifle, which makes it wonderfully easy and fun to kill rabbits. That's what you do. But, the most important of this part is when you've got to battle monsters.
When a monster attacks you, you switch into a first person mode that is simply gorgeous. It's all so high speed, some times you can lose yourself in the beauty and strobe-like effects. It's just wonderful, the entire game is worth this mode. Except it's overly easy to die, because it happens so fast. You have to have good reflexes.
The sound effects are splendid when it comes to something grotesque. The rest of the sound effects, especially the voice acting, is horrible. As I mentioned earlier, voices fall out of sync with character's lips so often it's amazingly jarring. When you have to sit through a ten minute cinema of this stuff, it gets supremely annoying.
As for replayablity, I wouldn't bother. Sitting through the horrid cinemas over and over again is too much to bear. The manual alludes to a way to skip cinemas, but it rarely works. Usually it's turned off when you have an hour of cinema coming up. Sigh.
I really haven't got much else to say about the game. It's a very beautiful game, but it's such a chore to play it, it's not worth it at all. Once you get past the beautiful snowscapes, the game is pretty empty. It's good if you like rather sick hentai and sexual overtones. But, besides that, it's definitely not worth the price. Get it for $5 used, because that's all it's really worth. About the price of a cheap movie. Heck, you'd get more enjoyment if you rented "The Mod Squad" for the same price!
(Afterthought: Also, I found myself laughing hysterically at parts that were trying to be scary. It's just so funny, they try to make something look dramatic or funny, (Ex: Laura cutting her finger on a broken picture frame) and it just comes across as the funniest thing in the world. Maybe it's just me. At least Silent Hill is actually scary!)
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
chemfet
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Member: Brad Root
Location: Whittier, CA
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 3 members
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