By Alec Meer on February 4th, 2009 at 2:35 pm.
Two days ago, I built a mutant snow-panda. Whee! Sadly, I then suffered a phone call announcing that broadband installation in my new house, already long-delayed due to Virgin losing my application, had been pushed back a further eight days because of crystals of cold water on the road. Honestly, what a pathetic country this can be.
So I’ve spent the last week, and will spend the next one, on a miserable wi-fi tour through Burger Kings, friends’ lounges and the 10 square centimetre patch of my kitchen that can access an incredibly flaky paid hotspot. Worse, Steam’s reliably unreliable offline mode pulled a whiny fit, denying me access to all the games I’d cannily downloaded a couple of weeks back. With most of my boxed games in storage, my WSADing options have been strictly limited. In frustration, I pawed to the very bottom of dusty junk-boxes I’ve left unpacked for years. That’s when I saw it.
Daikatana.
Daikatana! I had no idea I owned it, and even less idea why it was lurking in a box containing photos of my trip to Australia in 1998, one of those horrific belt things that are supposed to make you lose weight by bombarding your stomach with electrical pulses and a broken toy TIE Fighter. John Romero’s infamous post-id Ozymandias moment was a beacon of ludicrousness in my offline darkness – a challenge I could not resist.
I’ve never played Daikatana: it arrived during my penniless student days, and the word of mouth was so bad that I steered well clear. Presumably I picked up this budget copy during my days working on PC Format. What I can say in its favour is that it installs and plays just fine on a modern PC running Windows 7. So there’s that. In every other respect, it lives up to its sour legend. For a 1996 game, it would have been fine. For a 2000 one, it’s entirely without note or merit.
From the clunky, ugly menus to the puerile, mocking quit messages and vaguely nauseating movement, it’s a game lost in time, with the sense that Romero and company had learned precisely nothing in the years since Quake. The interminable mumbo-jumbo exposition and adolescent posturing of the introduction certainly suggests Half-Life, two years old by this point, hadn’t crossed their radar.
Once it finally finishes jabbering on about mystical swords and corrupted timelines and allows play, it’s instantly about as forgettable as any no-budget FPS you care to name from the last decade. It is not a game of note, in either its quality or its awfulness. Except, of course, this is an FPS that enjoyed a vast moneypot and three years of development – we would not remember it otherwise. So the shock is not that Daikatana is so tiresome, but rather that it ever got released at all: there is surely no way that its creators were unconscious of it being such a failure.
No doubt it’s a spectre that hangs over 3D Realms with Duke Nukem Forever: the problem of living up to impossible levels of expectation and hype. No wonder it’s stalled so often: no-one would want to be another Daikatana. It’s oddly noble that 3DR have resisted just getting something out. The history of pop-culture has far too many examples of big projects so submerged in money and arrogance that their original purpose, ambition and invention is fatally confused: file Daiktana alongside Waterworld and Be Here Now.
That such a self-proclaimed messiah of first-person shooters would commence with an hour of shooting tiny frogs and flies along garish, bleary rock-corridors sets a precedent for its failure. There is simply no reason why such a particularly and deliberately pompous and silly game shouldn’t kick off with you attacking 12-foot deathbots with an electro-sword, escalating to attacking 120-foot deathbots in a star destroyer. For all the cyberpunk-meets-ancient-myths posturing, it’s a game desperately short on visual imagination.
While obviously Daikatana pre-dates the sort of endless playtesting and ludology that goes into the games of Valve and Bungie these days, that an FPS with its profile would opt to make its players feel so puny and wretched is an unforgivable mistake. It’s the one area in which Daikatana really does feel significantly worse than its turn-of-the-century peers, most of which were at least generous with the aliens or burly men from the off. Especially oily targeting means picking off these minute pests is irritating in the extreme, especially when it hurls waves of the little bastards at you at once. They’re not fun to fight, so why are they there?
John Romero wasn’t lying when he announced he’d make us his bitch: it’s just that really he meant he’d turn us into humiliated oafs desperately flailing at insects in the sky rather than that we’d fall at his feet in awe. The occasional insta-death turret makes it a game of cheerless trial and error rather than one of wits and reflex, exacerbated by the witless decision to employ infrequent ‘save crystals’ rather than the quicksave system such an unforgiving game demands. While there is an option/cheat to restore quicksave, it’s just a drop of logic in an ocean of screw-ups. Daikatana is a confusing, clumsy chore long before the legendarily braindead AI buddies arrive.
To think that Deus Ex and Anachranox were being worked on in other arms of the Ion Storm studio at the same time is startling. While their graphical technology has aged no better than this, both retain an obvious desire to be something more than the norm, in both their mechanics and their visuals, and that lends them a certain timelessness. In its bizarre contentment to be so ordinary, there is no reason why Daikatana should be remembered past its week of release. I’m fully aware of the irony of my bringing it up again here, but hey – no broadband makes for desperate times.
I’d told myself I’d play Daiktana to the end, a self-torment I’d thought would be funny but, tragically, was indeed simply torment. Its ambition, imagination and quality are bewilderingly absent: it is an empty game, without purpose or charm. I didn’t get far into it: the sense of futility was oppressive. I’d hoped to find a curious document of a past era of game-making, one rammed with ideas and pride but unable to express itself clearly. I’d hoped, even, to find a way to celebrate the reviled.
So it’s been oddly deflating to find that, after all these years, that Daikatana, this great anti-legend of PC gaming, is no more than another boring 3D world with a cursor hovering over it and a meagre understanding of entertainment. It didn’t deserve Romero’s three years of public bombast, and it doesn’t even deserve its uncomfortable place in history. Daiktana is nothing, and we should treat it as such. Woosh! Forgotten.
04/02/2009 at 14:47 Jay says:
All I have is a massive ‘haha’ at your expense
04/02/2009 at 14:49 Paul Moloney says:
“Steam’s reliably unreliable offline mode pulled a whiny fit”
Ugh. They really need to fix two things about Steam; that, and the requirements that after you download a game, you subsequently need to run it once before going offline in order to activate it. The activation step should just happen automatically at the end of the download.
P.
04/02/2009 at 15:01 shinygerbil says:
I bought Daikatana for a quid off a mate who had a whole box of them, while I was still in school. Played it for about 15 minutes.
04/02/2009 at 15:01 clive dunn says:
My laptop blew up last week so i spent a day downloading all my Steam games onto my desktop computer in preparation for the two to three weeks i would have to wait for my laptop to be fixed. Anyway, those bastards at Dell sent an engineer to my house in LESS THAN 24 hours, laptop motherboard and heatsink replaced, all up and running. Unfortunatly i had gone way over my ISP download cap and i now i have a horribly throttled connection for the rest of the month. Can’t win sometimes.
The longest i went without t’internet was three weeks. Truly horrible experience. I had to read sodding books!
04/02/2009 at 15:02 Senethro says:
I potentially gleaned something useful from this article. Is Anachronox worth playing?
04/02/2009 at 15:08 Heliocentric says:
Yes, but use cheats as the game wants you to grind, and the combat can get rather terrible. But its certainly noteworthy.
04/02/2009 at 15:09 GamerV says:
I once thought the same, “yeah, I’ll just finish it” but I don’t think I made it further than 10 minutes in.
“Daiktana is nothing, and we should treat it as such. Woosh! Forgotten.”
Now now. Let’s not be too harsh. The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana was surprisingly good. I’d even call it cool! Of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with Romero and company, but still. Great game.
04/02/2009 at 15:10 Turin Turambar says:
Yep. Annachronox is worth playing. Gameplay wise it didn’t advance anything from an already stale JRPG genre, but otherwise is gold.
04/02/2009 at 15:10 Heliocentric says:
Virgin internet throttles you for 4 hours, at half speed. So, its not really that bad. Generally I’m perpetually throttled, but the mistreatment other ISP’s deal out is very confusing.
04/02/2009 at 15:11 Little Green Man says:
And you didn’t see this coming?
04/02/2009 at 15:12 PHeMoX says:
“No doubt it’s a spectre that hangs over 3D Realms with Duke Nukem Forever: the problem of living up to impossible levels of expectation and hype. No wonder it’s stalled so often: no-one would want to be another Daikatana.”
Romero should have had the guts to just invest in a massive team getting things up to date and especially get rid of the Tekken machines in their HQ that obviously interfered with work. Having said that, I really don’t think Daikatana was that bad! The one thing I disliked was it’s art direction in that it sort of cloned the Quake-vibe.
Whatever Duke Nukem Forever is going to be, I hope 3DRealms learned from Daikatana and doesn’t try to make it look like the next Doom. I don’t think hype will ruin Duke Nukem Forever…
04/02/2009 at 15:13 Heliocentric says:
Somewhere the hairs on Romero’s neck stood up and he didnt know why.
04/02/2009 at 15:14 Tei says:
In some ways, Quake is a horrible failure.
The original concept of Quake was about a RPG-ish game, with a important mele weapon (a hammer) and hub levels, some free exploration.
Everything was removed to make a simpler game. And the game was a giganteous sucess, because of this change of concept.
Why Quake1 failed? is because a mele weapon is hard to make on a First Person Shotter. Even today most good games with mele weapons are Third Person Shotters. Is hard to notice if your weapon has hit. So you “scan” blindly with your weapon. It make the mele weapons feel lame. And you want your weapons to feel powerfull, letal, etc..
Quake1 also failed because the technology was not ready to make a multilevel RPG. Part of the design was too limiting to make a RPG. Mostly the modeling animation thing. And bits of the QCVM. Is doable, FrikaC did a great RPG with Quake.
All this thing started to work years before, with games like Deus Ex.
QuakeWorld and Half-Life1 where also a failure. The original design for QuakeWorld was more like a Steam service or XBox Live service. With a worldwide roster, so you know you are the #441 better player of the world. Technology, time, money… not enough, was imposible. Years before the features where comming, in the form of Steam.
In some ways, having good ideas mean nothing. John Carmack did commented the right ideas (basically XBox Live) in 1996, but he was unable to make then real. Even If you hare a genius, your ideas worth nothing. Is the code, time and money what mean something. If you can’t code your ideas, worth nothing.
John Romero failed because was a “ideas guy”. And that is a lame thing to me. Everybody and my dog have really good ideas to make nice games. Is other stuff that is important, not ideas. You can have ideas, and be a genius (like John Carmack) and this mean nothing.
04/02/2009 at 15:16 dhex says:
though i liked the writing, the combat in anachronox was bad enough to put me off playing it.
04/02/2009 at 15:17 FunkyB says:
I like ‘Be Here Now’…
04/02/2009 at 15:18 Tei says:
Ooops… I did again. I sould stop talking like talk. I sounds like a boring pedant old guy, or something.
04/02/2009 at 15:21 Radiant says:
DON’T GET VIRGIN BROADBAND!
Sweet jesus they are shocking.
Yes you may have got it via your cable but BE broadband are much better and don’t throttle you.
04/02/2009 at 15:22 Radiant says:
https://www.bethere.co.uk/
Phone an dtech support are gorgeous too.
04/02/2009 at 15:25 Heliocentric says:
Shocking.. Seriously?
In what way? Sure not throttling you is fine, but the speeds are based on distance so unthrottled might be worse than virgins throttling.
04/02/2009 at 15:26 NotaFan says:
I hope everyone noticed that massive failure of the much-vaunted Steam there… :P
Anachronox is worth playing if you like JRPGs. Yes, the story is brilliant. Yes, the characters are fantastic, but the play mechanics – random battle after random battle after randohforgodsake – stopped me from completing it.
04/02/2009 at 15:28 Heliocentric says:
NotaFan… Cheats! Win buttons!
04/02/2009 at 15:30 Mo says:
I too tried playing Daikatana a couple of years ago to see how terrible it was. After spending (literally) half an hour patching it, I got through the first level and then it consistently crashed at the one spot. Blessing in disguise?
@FunkyB: That isn’t possible.
04/02/2009 at 15:31 Feet says:
I’ve been using Virgin Media for a few years for my TV, Phone and broadband, and I have no complaints what so ever, if anything I’ve been exceptionally pleased with the service. Once they have it installed I’m sure you’ll be fine.
04/02/2009 at 15:32 Gap Gen says:
It’s worth completing Anachronox. You can watch the machinima they made by splicing together FMV, but you miss a lot of the in-game jokes and it’s not quite the same.
It’s a massive shame that Ion Storm folded when they produced Deus Ex and Anachronox. Such is life, I guess.
04/02/2009 at 15:32 Bobsy says:
Damn! That Quake bastard works fast!
04/02/2009 at 15:37 Mman says:
I played Daikatana for curiousity purposes about a year ago and it really was about as terrible as I heard; quite possibly worse. There’s a few half-way interesting levels that preserved my sanity but mostly it’s either dull or outright bad, and pretty much every “innovotive” idea is half-baked at best (the RPG system really doesn’t add anything at all) or horribly implemented (do I even need to mention the “sidekicks”?). I at least found it a great crash course on how to fail at game design in almost every way possible.
04/02/2009 at 15:38 mrrobsa says:
Poor Alec. Tell Virgin to get on their bikes, Be broadband is the shiznit, no download caps :D !
And Valve really need to get Offline mode working properly, ALWAYS been a problem for me, couldn’t play many of my games at Uni! I’ve bloody paid for them! etc. *rants…*
04/02/2009 at 15:41 Radiant says:
Helio not to get too into it but Virgin tech support wouldn’t know what the words ‘line attenuation’ even mean let alone how to tweak my line on their end to get me better connection and speeds.
BE, based on the info my router was giving out, told me the speed I am capable of getting and actively worked to get me their.
Even explaining how to adjust the wiring in my plug socket *fnar fnar*.
Honestly I can’t recommend them enough.
04/02/2009 at 15:42 Radiant says:
*there* obviously
04/02/2009 at 15:45 StalinsGhost says:
Virgin? Good luck Alec! I’ve had nothing but trouble with them. I knew I should have taken control of the internet when we moved into this house instead of leaving it to my house mate again.
And yes. I do always find it funny that Deus Ex and Arachnarox were made by the same development house. Mad.
04/02/2009 at 15:55 NotaFan says:
@Helio: “Win buttons”? That seems to vaguely spring from the same silliness Anachronox reveled in, but then again my memory of this game is so bad you may just be making fun of me.
Oh, and thx for the tip about Be, everyone. I work in the UK’s LLU industry and only know them as a pile of half-baked idiots who can’t place an order to save themselves – WE (meaning I) usually end up telling them how may cables they have on their own equpiment, Who knew their actual broadband service might actually be one of the best out there? Def’ worth looking into…
04/02/2009 at 15:59 Switch625 says:
Another +1 for Be and a -1 for Virgin from me too, though it’s likely that Alec is so far along the ordering process now that we’re all just making him feel bad.
Sorry Alec.
04/02/2009 at 15:59 Paul Moloney says:
“The one thing I disliked was it’s art direction in that it sort of cloned the Quake-vibe. ”
One amusing bit in the story of Daikatana over on Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/) is how the artists, from a comics background, weren’t used to working within the limitations of computer games; one, when asked to skin a small arrow in the game, produced a texture 1300 pixels wide.
P.
04/02/2009 at 16:02 madTinkerer says:
I remember buying Daikatana on launch day because “surely Romero wouldn’t screw up his magnum opus”. I returned it because of a glitch in the drivers that screwed up the gamma correction on my PC and couldn’t be fixed at the time. I used the store credit to get Diablo 2, which came out the following week, and instantly knew I had made the right choice.
04/02/2009 at 16:09 Radiant says:
Did any of you guys ever play “Requiem: Avenging Angel” ?
I seem to be the only person to play it but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
You play an Angel, complete with angelic powers, battling demons and other angels.
A great game with a real sense of vision behind it.
Although there are unintentionally comic moments where you are trying to get over a fence in the usual late 90′s FPS style and then you look around and realise all the NPCs are shitting themselves because you’re 8 feet tall with wings and a machine gun that’s literally from hell.
04/02/2009 at 16:09 Dominic White says:
N’thing the sentiment that Anachronox had remarkably good writing, but while I DO like JRPGs, I found the combat that made up about 90% of Anachronox to be one of the most painful grinds I’ve ever encountered.
It’s not that it didn’t improve on JRPG combat – it regressed, and ended up playing worse than most SNES-era offerings. People give it a free pass because of the writing, though, but the gameplay was pretty wretched.
If only they’d copied a nice and snappy combat engine like Chrono Triggers.
As for Daikatana, it actually gets slightly better after the first terrible world (Green Robo Frog Land), but then it somehow gets worse again. I think it was the Greek episode that gives you a melee weapon (a huge magic hammer) that kills YOU unless you jump while swinging it.
04/02/2009 at 16:11 Radiant says:
“no no it’s all right, I’m just trying to get over this fence”
04/02/2009 at 16:14 hydra9 says:
Daikatana really is bad, isn’t it? I bought it out of curiosity last year, almost certain that it would have some redeeming value, that it would at least be an average shooter… but no.
The opening cutscene is dreadful (and goes on forever) and voice-acting makes use of the ancient ‘Japanese people talk funny!’ joke. In-game, textures are shamefully ugly and the opening levels in the swamp are about as bad as can be imagined. I actually laughed my ass off when I made it through the swamp and got to chapter 2 – ‘The Sewers!’
Like Alec, I had every intention of finishing the game, but I didn’t get much further before I gave up. Then I checked out YouTube videos just to see how poor the ending was (How poor? Very).
On a brighter note, I went back and played through Quake 1 (and all its expansion packs) and really enjoyed it. Back in the day, I found the single-player mode boring, but now I think it has a lot of variety and some surprisingly good level design. And to Mr. Romero’s credit, some of the best levels are his.
Also: Yay for Anachronox! Play it, it’s fun!
04/02/2009 at 16:15 Jim Rossignol says:
The early machinegun in Requiem remains one of the best weapons in any FPS.
04/02/2009 at 16:18 MartinX says:
Daikatana.
Nostalgia.
I must have been one of the first Europeans to download the demo. I was totally suckered by the hype and all kinds of enthused as I refreshed the download page in the small hours of the morning. Then it went live, on schedule, and the slow download began.
I kept vigil in the seldom used chat section of the old PCGamer Delphi forum page, if I recall correctly there was even a PCG UK staffer loitering out of interest, possibly Trevor Witt.
When it finished downloading I installed it with the breathless energy of an eight year old approaching a pile of gifts on christmas morning, and jumped in … to a swarm of fucking robot mosquitos and unusually aggressive amphibians.
“This…is…shit…, what the fuck have they been doing for the last three years?” I think I squeezed out in the chat channel.
Daikatana marked an important milestone in my life, it was the death of hype. Never again have I allowed myself to care that much about an upcoming game. Probably for the best.
04/02/2009 at 16:18 NotaFan says:
I played the demo of Requiem and thoroughly enjoyed it. Never did get around to getting the game, tho’. Perfect GOG-fodder, methinks. :P
04/02/2009 at 16:27 Jim Rossignol says:
GoG-men, are you reading this?
04/02/2009 at 16:30 Man Raised By Puffins says:
I guess how long people persevere with Anachronox depends on how much they’re willing to put up with the weak combat and repeated backtracking in order to enjoy the games manifold charms. I can’t say I blame the people who have given up on it, but it’s still a shame they haven’t seen all that the game has to offer as it’s crammed to the gills with neat little touches from start to finish.
04/02/2009 at 17:11 Markoff Chaney says:
Daikatana was also the game that taught me a great lesson about hype. I was there Day 1 and very excited when it dropped. Load it up, fire it up, skip story crap, and immediately feel ripped off. I still have it somewhere, but I won’t do that to myself again. This game almost deserves a post in the “Games that Make me Cry” thread or what not.
Also, what’s the hate with Ram Dass? I loved that book. Oh. You’re talking about the Oasis album. :)
04/02/2009 at 17:12 Hypocee says:
Huh! I loved the Anachronox demo way back when, and had been meaning to play through it someday. What I remember of the combat is this sort of hybrid shooting-percentages VATS thing that I liked a lot… most be misremembering.
04/02/2009 at 17:17 Heliocentric says:
@NotaFan
I simply mean, play the game with cheats, its much more pleasent.
04/02/2009 at 17:20 Downloads_Plz says:
The history of pop-culture has far too many examples of big projects so submerged in money and arrogance that their original purpose, ambition and invention is fatally confused: file Daiktana alongside Waterworld and Be Here Now.
I still have yet to figure out why everyone seems to think this album was THAT bad. Not as good as their first two, granted, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.
04/02/2009 at 17:23 matthew says:
A little while after Daikatana came out I met someone who’d worked on it and, in my usual way, began to rib him a little, but he got very defensive. He claimed that the negative press had been wildly blown out of proportion and that at its core it was a rather decent game.
When you invest a lot something and stake your reputation on it, it’s hard to accept it may not have worked out the way you wanted it to. Sometimes, denial is easier.
That’s how games like Daikatana can be released with completely serious intent, and how, years later, at least one person on the team thought of the game as a victim of the media more than anything else.
04/02/2009 at 17:28 Pete says:
I reviewed this back in the day and hit a show stopper bug on the fourth (and least shit) timezone.
It was, to put it mildly, a relief.
04/02/2009 at 17:41 Hypocee says:
Oh, and I do own a physical copy of Daikatana. My little brother’s friend had got a gaming PC but was not yet a ‘gamer’ at the time, and bought it at full price off the shelf because the box looked OK. Even at the time, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard about its history. It very rapidly passed from him to my brother and thence to my archive.
04/02/2009 at 17:49 phuzz says:
(Be now have a button marked “Gaming Mode” that you can activate. It did drop our speeds from 16/2.5 d/u down to 12/2 but the pings dropped from 60 something ms to less than 20 for a uk server. You makes your choice…)
04/02/2009 at 18:41 Nero says:
I have never played this game (but I remember reading about it when I was young) but I recently watched video playthrough of the entire game. It was coop play with 2-3 players every level. It was both fun and not fun to watch. The commentary in the video made it more exciting though. What a game.
04/02/2009 at 18:57 matte_k says:
Would be fantastic for someone to do to Anachronox what they’re doing with Chronicles of Riddick: An upgrade to the first game, and the next game in one package. I seem to recall Anachronox had an ending that pretty much said “sequel”…
04/02/2009 at 19:13 eyemessiah says:
BE are much, much better than Daikatana.
04/02/2009 at 19:18 Adam T says:
Clearly, Daikatana deserves a sequel. If it were well done and fun to play it would be a satisfying in-joke. And think of all those people afterword, picking up the first one from a bargain bin! HAHAHA, SUCKERS!
Oh, and I continue to rail against Steam. Friends and associates are bored of hearing my bitch about it. However, at times like this I take great pleasure in pointing out that my middle finger remains unfurled in its honor. F-U, STEAM!
04/02/2009 at 19:38 Sören Höglund says:
Anachronox is well worth playing. Make sure to get the unofficial patches though, they fix a ton of bugs and add a fast-forward key that’s extremely useful. Makes the battles much snappier, and speeds up a ton of elevator rides.
04/02/2009 at 19:45 I am beginning to understand this comment system says:
Not to defend Daikatana too much but most FPS games from that era have not held up well at all, especially in single player.
I recently tried playing through Quake 2. Then I realized it was in no way shape or form fun anymore.
Doom’s gameplay, on the other hand, never gets old for me.
04/02/2009 at 20:15 hydra9 says:
I disagree. Quake 1 is really good. Also Kingpin. And what about Half-Life? Probably some others I’ve forgotten about as well…
04/02/2009 at 20:55 Taillefer says:
“So, this three year gap in your CV…how do you explain that?”
“Oh, uh D…Drugs.”
04/02/2009 at 21:07 Larington says:
Anachronox is one of my favourite games, I mean top 10 material here alongside The Longest Journey: Dreamfall, Planetside, Baldurs Gate 1 & 2, Deus Ex 1, System Shock 2 and Half-Life – Thats some pretty good company. Sadly, the combat system, low poly/detail character models and relatively slow start put a lot of people off the game.
04/02/2009 at 21:24 Robin says:
I always thought Daikatana looked quite good, in screenshots. (I hazard a guess that Ken Scott was working on the textures at some point?) A shame that it sounds like it’s too flawed to play even out of curiosity then.
I would quite like to be on Be, but when I asked they seemed to be adamant that there was no room at the exchange. Still, at least I’m not on NewNet any more, whose business model (“1. Entice customers with promise of no throttling, 2. Introduce hard caps, 3. Charge extortionate fees for top-up bandwidth that doesn’t even roll over, 4. Twirl moustaches and cackle”) is perhaps the most shameless scam ever perpertrated by a UK ISP.
04/02/2009 at 22:02 undead dolphin hacker says:
Anachronox would have been good, were it not for the godawful game attached to it.
Just watch the machinima mashup.
04/02/2009 at 22:15 drewski says:
I’ve finished both Requiem: Avenging Angel and Anchronox, which I went to the extent of ebaying from the UK to Australia to get a copy of.
The first game I loved; the second I loved too but finishing it was a chore.
There was nothing about Daikatana that ever attracted me, but I think it’s a watermark in game design nonetheless – a mark of what not to do when making games. What on earth is Romero doing now?
04/02/2009 at 22:40 Hypocee says:
BTW, Tei, I think you mean the other John from id. ;) I wonder how much misaimed flak Carmack’s caught since Daikatana…
04/02/2009 at 22:44 Hypocee says:
Oops, me wrong. Missed one of the switches in those last few sentences.
04/02/2009 at 22:49 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
First Kieron, now Alec. I’m being sent to the Wikipedia to pick up on the reference again.
Though in your position, I would’ve mentioned Ishtar.
04/02/2009 at 22:55 Larington says:
I never realised during my play throughs that the combat system in Anachronox was ‘bad’ could folks enlighten me as to how it was bad, and even better still how they think it could be improved?
Oh, and its spelt Anachronox, An-ach-ron-ox. Hmm, I’m turning into a spelling elitist.
04/02/2009 at 22:58 Nick says:
Constant random battles are bad. That’s about it.
04/02/2009 at 22:59 Cycle says:
I loved Anachronox. I’m surprised to see the combat being ragged on so much. The battles were not random, since you could see enemies and avoid them, plus the combat was always so easy that it was never really a problem. Plus, for the most part, there is only combat in the “dungeon” areas. Half the gameplay is LucasArts-style adventuring and puzzling solving (without inventory item crap). I mean, the final battle was basically one big puzzle. FURTHERMORE, if you actually bothered using the crazy shell thing you’re given early in the game, it acts as yet another puzzle and once you’re good at it, it will help you plow through any enemies. If you ignore it, (which you can do as I did on my first play and still managed to get by fine apart from a few tough boss battles), then yeah, the combat is rather ordinary, but still.
Requiem: Avenging Angel was mostly medicore. They really didn’t take advantage of their unique concept and it ended up coming off as pretty much any other sci-fi shooter at the time. It was fun turning people into pillars of salt, though.
04/02/2009 at 23:08 Larington says:
The battles didn’t seem random to me, I’m going to try digging deeper, what do you mean by random?
04/02/2009 at 23:11 drewski says:
Most of the time you couldn’t avoid combat in Anachronox, unless you sat at the edge of the aggro zone which triggered the battle and sulked.
I only found one boss particularly difficult though, and he wasn’t compulsory. Still, any enemy that has a power that instantly kills your entire party is no way to design a game.
The combat was boring, which I think is a greater error.
04/02/2009 at 23:15 Larington says:
“I only found one boss particularly difficult though, and he wasn’t compulsory. Still, any enemy that has a power that instantly kills your entire party is no way to design a game.”
Don’t remember that ever happening to me.
I would agree the pacing of the combat seems a tad off, its too slow and takes away the players ability to make decisions quickly and efficiently but it didn’t make the game unplayable for me.
04/02/2009 at 23:16 Larington says:
Well, except for the super hero villian and thats a plot device, so I let that one slide.
04/02/2009 at 23:17 jaguth says:
I remember when I bought Daikatana for $5. I played through half of the first level, and the it crashed with a DirectX error. I downloaded and ran a huge patch, and the patch froze; i had to kill the processes. The README file said its normal for the patch to freeze, and just let it sit. I tried again and let it sit for 2 hours, and it still did nothing. I eventually gave up. Felt bad paying for broken software. Worst $5 I ever spent.
05/02/2009 at 00:05 Tomo says:
I never got round to playing Daikatana. It sits in the history books, recently joined by Haze in the section designated: “Crimes against FPS games.” Games built up so much that their spectacular fall is something that really needs to be experienced to be understood.
05/02/2009 at 01:05 Tom Camfield says:
That was neat.
05/02/2009 at 01:07 Phil H says:
I saw (a new copy of) Daikatana at Gamestop once for $5, thought about it for half a second, and realized that no, you’d have to pay me at least that much to take it off your hands.
05/02/2009 at 01:23 MetalCircus says:
I’m glad you mentioned Anachronox, Alec, it reamins a faveourite of mine. Ion Storm were really not a bad company, it’s just a shame about Daikatana really.
Oh blast, you’ve got me all teary eyed and reminiscent over Anarchonox now. Guys; if any of you haven’t played it, you owe it to yourself to do so. Great acting, a well thought out, believable setting, loveable characters, and just plain funny. What a great game.
*weeps gently*
05/02/2009 at 01:40 Max says:
I tried out Daikatana a few years back. I figured that since I’d missed out on all of the hype and had literally no expectations of the game, I couldn’t be let down. Boy was I wrong.
I don’t think I even finished the first level. The enemies were plain irritating, the game lacked any purpose or motivation, the art design was hideous, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t enjoy it. What a cock up.
05/02/2009 at 01:52 Idle Threats & Bad Poetry says:
Great news Anachronox fans! Especially those who don’t have time to play or mess around with combat:
Jake Strider Hughes (the game’s cinematic director and producer) independently spliced together the game’s cutscenes into an award-winning machinima movie.”
http://www.archive.org/details/JakeHughesAnachronoxTheMovie
I’m elated! I remember the demo and I really dug it, especially the dramatic opening with the David Bowie music. I never played the full game, and I don’t really have time, but there’s always time for a movie! \o/
05/02/2009 at 01:53 Idle Threats & Bad Poetry says:
Correction: The sentence starting “Jack Strider Hughes” should be part of the quote, which I tried to cite as from Wikipedia.
05/02/2009 at 02:09 Rath says:
Thank you Meer, I am now listening to Be Here Now, which I had completely forgotten I owned, and am finding it a refreshing break from my usual playlist of nihilism.
05/02/2009 at 02:23 Michael says:
Makes me wonder why GOG doesn’t sell this… wait, it’s not good.
05/02/2009 at 03:05 Oak says:
D’You Know What I Mean is a great song, though.
05/02/2009 at 03:36 Erlam says:
“So, this three year gap in your CV…how do you explain that?”
“Oh, uh D…Drugs.”
This made me laugh way more than is likely healthy.
I tried playing Daikatana a few years ago, and got about 2 levels in. I just.. it was so ugly! When I cheated or something to get to the greek stage, I just stopped playing. I recall a hole, and either me or the NPC ‘sidekick’ stuck in it, and being unable to proceed.
These vague memories do not remind me of good times.
05/02/2009 at 04:09 Kevin says:
Whenever I heard “Diakatana” mentioned among the PC nerds, I didn’t know what to think. If anything this work serves as an excellent (and funny) history lesson to all the young guns out there.
05/02/2009 at 04:12 thefanciestofpants says:
John Romero’s infamous post-id Ozymandias moment
THIS
05/02/2009 at 04:17 SofS says:
The link in my name is to the Scratchware Manifesto. About halfway through, the writer starts going off about the development of Daikatana. It’s funny and sad to think of the sweat and blood and by-all-rights-illegal working conditions that went into creating such a monumentally terrible game.
05/02/2009 at 04:57 Freakoftheuniverse says:
If anyone has the sudden urge to destroy themselves, utterly, they can always watch a video playthrough (with commentary) of the aforementioned horror.
Enjoy?
05/02/2009 at 05:50 Mo says:
The original article the Scratchware Manifesto quotes from:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/03/07/romero/index.html
It’s a good read. Written by David Kushner, the guy who wrote “Masters of Doom”, which by the way, is also a really good read.
05/02/2009 at 08:36 monchberter says:
Steam release?
Surely this is the qunitessential dl and play once game, and then have it haunt your games list for all eternity. ;)
05/02/2009 at 09:37 Bobsy says:
I bought Daikatana for a quid once, just for the hell of it. I intended to do some sort of live-blogging playthrough, but a couple of minutes in I just gave up in disgust. About an hour later I stopped playing altogether. It wasn’t even bad in a funny way, it was just dreary old wank.
05/02/2009 at 10:08 solipsistnation says:
Ah, Daikatana. It was SO SO BROKEN. I finally turned on god mode just so the damn AI buddies wouldn’t constantly kill me by shooting me in the back with the ancient-Greek-era poison staff thing. As it turned out, there were other nasty instant-death traps later. Yes, it would have been a pretty decent game in 1996, but to release it in 2000 implied that Romero and co. had really no idea what was going on outside their offices.
Anachronox was decent and is worth playing, but there are some places where combat gets tedious. The rest of the game is worth it, though. At least combat gets pretty fast after a while… It’s kind of silly, though, in that you have to talk to EVERYONE IN THE CITY before you can leave town. Every single NPC has something you need in order to leave.
05/02/2009 at 12:19 Pod says:
“Virgin are rubbish”
You’ll be saying that a lot. I really, really recommend you to ditch their service within the 30-day money-back period. Give it a try. I bet it’s shit and you’ll think “oh, it’ll get better”.
IT WON’T. DITCH THEM NOW.
05/02/2009 at 12:43 Hypocee says:
BTW,
It does. I just checked on four games, two I’d downloaded long ago but not yet played and two that I downloaded immediately before going offline.
05/02/2009 at 12:46 Robin says:
Oh god, the Scratchware Manifesto. Greg Costikyan wasn’t it? I’d rather have clever people subverting the fantastic opportunities and resources that “the system” offers than have them fritter away their talent for the sake of not “selling out”. An artistically pure game that nobody plays is a failure.
05/02/2009 at 13:10 Man Raised By Puffins says:
@ Idle Threats & Bad Poetry: It’s worth reiterating that, as Gap Gen typed way up the comment thread, you’ll be missing out on a lot of the jokes if you just watch the machinima. Still, if you haven’t got the time (I think Anachronox clocks in around 30+ hours) then fair enough.
Re Anachronox combat: It’s less that it’s horrendously bad/broken, which it isn’t, more that it isn’t really fun or compelling. As much as they’ve tried to enliven it with swanky particle effects (which remain rather pretty, albeit less so after you’ve seen them for the fiftieth time) and a swooping camera it does become a grind to push through, particularly in areas where it isn’t broken up with puzzles or dialogue. There are some neat ideas with regards to positioning and experimenting with Mystech, but in practice the former amounts to ensuring your combatants are in range of their targets, have line of sight and little else while the latter doesn’t do enough to redeem the combat.
06/02/2009 at 06:47 SofS says:
Robin: Appropriately enough, they have a bit in there about failure and how it should be embraced as a learning experience when it happens.
This is a non-PC reference, but consider: a team at Sony makes Ico. It is well-received, but sells poorly. Normally, this would mean that Fumito Ueda would have ended up heading up Crash Team Explosive Bicycle Derby or something. Instead, they got to make another, more expensive game, Sony actually marketed it this time, and Shadow of the Colossus did well critically and financially. Did “nobody playing” Ico at the beginning doom it to irrelevance? Should that “failure” have scuttled the team’s chances at further ambitious projects? If you think not, consider then how many bright minds haven’t been as fortunate as Ueda and his crew and how many people have managed to successfully trade those frustrations for a set more of their liking by working on their own. It is no longer “big company or fail” these days.
I say an artistic success that isn’t widely-played is still a success. Few people bought the Velvet Underground’s record when it first came out, but everybody ended up hearing bits of it when those that did buy it used it as inspiration. I think it’s just fine for something to have advancing its field as its ambition, and it’s far easier to do that when it’s just you and a few others with money that you’ve already budgeted. Relying on the system to allow itself to be subverted isn’t the greatest thing to bet on.
06/02/2009 at 17:08 Bret says:
Record, singular?
I have two CDs with the Velvet underground right on the label. Both of which, the internet informs me, were records first. And there are at least three I don’t have.
Or did you mean records, and am I just being obnoxiously pedantic?
07/02/2009 at 10:21 Alarik says:
I finished Daikatana and liked it :)
08/02/2009 at 07:06 SofS says:
Coming back to this late: I think I meant “record” to stand for the first one, the one with “Waiting For My Man” on it (unless I’ve confused them, which is likely since I don’t have them around me). However hyperbolic critics have been about them, I think they’re right when they talk about how deeply they influenced their contemporaries and immediate successors, but I could easily be wrong when I think that their first album made the all-important initial impression.
25/07/2009 at 01:27 Die Drones Die says:
What a douchebaggy article!, you are just another drone jumping on the politically correct opinion of the incredibly flawless uniform and spoiled gaming industry. Daikatana is not the best game on earth, that’s for sure, but spending the time to write an article about code that was released eons ago seems to me vicious and aimed to be another “hey, I am with you, I am one with the pack, like me, embrace me” kind of situation.
What is this, high school?
I never cared about what critics had to say (movies, games or anything I play or watch, etc); my parent’s priority was to raise me with a mind of my own and keep me from being another sheep, begging for acceptance.
After going through most of the id Software, Raven, Carmack and Romero titles, I played Daikatana and thought it was fun and actually quite unique.
I could blabber on about this topic for hours but find it pointless since I’ll for sure end up steamrolled by the army of fools who think the truth about anything gaming is waiting inside the mind of “geniuses” like the guys at Penny Arcade or even yourself. Who the hell are you, anyway?
08/09/2010 at 23:08 Oremor Njoh says:
Suck it down!