Played through basically the entire game of
Dino Crisis 1 today in a 5 hour session (did the intro last night and total game time was 5:11 + some non-recorded time so probably took about 6-6:30 hours). It was fun! The game has a great pace to it and it was really hard to put down until about the 3 hour fake ending mark and at that point I figured the real end would keep the pace and not be more than another 30-45 mins so I kept playing...only to find out the final lab basement is like 40-50% of the entire game and takes 2+ hours with maze-like design, some annoying enemies, lots of enemies, and lots of puzzles.
Speaking of puzzles, the puzzles were great for the most part. Better than the weakass puzzles we get in most modern games. They weren't particularly hard (outside the memorization password game which got pretty insane by round 3), but they were fun and creative and there was a bunch of them.
Overall it just had something that a lot of modern games lack. I mean with most modern games whether indie or AAA most of the time I can't play more than 1-2 hour sessions in a day because there's just so much repetition, lots of cutscenes, tutorials, etc... in order for the game to stretch out to 10-30 hour game lengths, but games like Dino Crisis, RE, MGS1 just move at a great pace for 5-7 hours and then are done and games at that pace are just so much more engaging and easier to keep playing for hours at a time. I mean the controls on the Vita version of the PS Classic were even broken and for the entire game Regina would keep trying to turn around the wrong way (everytime I would enter a door she would immediately turn backwards to face the door) which meant I was fighting the controls consistently and took a lot of enemy hits trying to reign her in and keep her moving in the right direction. Yet despite that I couldn't stop playing. I got it for a $1.20 yesterday (I had played like an hour of it in 1999 but it got backlogged and it wasn't until someone mentioned in the gaf thread yesterday that it was a Shinji Mikami directed game, which I didn't know, and so I totally had to play it since it's the only game of his I've never finished), and it's one of the best $1.20's I've ever spent!
Now that being said, besides the awful tank controls (which were obviously way worse with my control glitches), I gotta say I didn't like the mechanic of enemies being able to knock your weapon away. There were a few times I'd get trapped by two enemies, take a hit and lose my weapon, so now not only am I trapped, but I can't even break away if there's an opening because then I'll be leaving my weapon behind so I have to get to my weapon, pick it up, then try to get out, which was just annoying at times.
And then my other issue (not really an issue, but just a thought) is that I don't think Mikami pushed originality enough with the game following his Resident Evil 1. DC is very, very heavily inspired by RE1 (even down to the Heliport scenes and spending the last 1/3rd in the SCIENCE LABS), but not as good in a few ways. Namely Dino Crisis 1 basically has no boss fights the entire game, there's some mini-game type boss parts, but no real fights imo; whereas RE1 had a bunch of classic great bosses like the Snake and scary dude with the claws at the end. Also RE1 has more story and more interesting lore/atmosphere with the mansion compared to a generic lab. It's not even like Jurassic Park, the game is just set in a boring standard lab with a million keycards (having to get 2 separate cards [card + decoder] and solve a puzzle to open a lot of doors was pretty extreme key card structuring, but it flowed well so I'm fine with it). Dino Crisis isn't a ton worse, it's just slightly worse on those categories and the only real improvement is maybe the puzzles (RE1 had some good puzzles too though so it might be a draw). In the end Dino Crisis is like a B+ Resident Evil 1 clone with dinosaurs, which is still a great play and better than 90% of the survival horror stuff these days (I'd say DC1 is more fun and a better game even today than every RE since RE4). But really, it's Mikami directed and Mikami directed games are some of the best A/A++ games out there, so it feels a bit phoned in. I'd rank Mikami's games as RE4 = God Hand = Vanquish 3 A++++ games at the top of their genre in a row (dude was on fire for 6 years), then REmake = RE1 (REmake is better today, but RE1 gets marks for its time) are A quality stuff, P.N.03 is quite good too (A-), and then I'd put Dino Crisis (B+) above The Evil Within (C+; it's got a lot of great things going for it, but there are a lot of 1/10 parts scattered throughout that really bring the experience down).
Definitely worth the 5-6 hours of time and $1.20. Looking forward to trying out Dino Crisis 2 for the first time now.
PS, as much as the final boss fight is weak as heck, it gets credit for:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
T-Rex chasing you on a FLYING SPACESHIP THROUGH A WATERWAY
That was so old-school Capcom and was great
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Also finished
Tengami on iOS tonight as I'd been playing it for about a week in short bursts. Really, really pretty game in the vein of Superbrothers Sword and Sorcery (aka, 2d walking sims x adventure game mashup), but the walking speed was really, reaaaaaally slow and that's one of the things along with not being able to skip text bubbles that grates on me a lot in games. I think they couldn't speed up the movement much because it wouldn't have flowed with the papercraft origami style, but I dunno, I wish they would've figured it out because the last stage especially has a bunch of backtracking and with slow movement it was kind of a pain in the butt and took away from the otherwise simple and pretty experience. Guess overall it was an ok 2-3 hour art appreciation time waster. I feel like you could play the first 30 mins and get everything the game has to offer honestly.
And picked up and been playing
Downfell since you guys recommended it for iOS. It's cool, I like it. I suck at it and I'd much rather be playing it with physical buttons. I'll never get used to touch controls and that's why all my favorite iOS games are point n' click or turn-based touch stuff. High speed precision action gaming is like what I absolutely do not want to do on touch controls, but for 90% of the time it works fine in this game since it's just left/right and jump. But about 10% of the time I find my fingers move off position slightly and I press left or right and go the wrong direction and take a hit or die which still slightly annoys me. But nice game for sure.
Gonna play
80 Days as my next iOS game and then
Out There.
