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This thread has been linked to the game 'Jurassic Park: Trespasser'.
Imagine the ultimate PC game - a game where you can go anywhere, do anything, the only limit being your imagination. Where you have the freedom to explore your environment and use whatever you find to ensure your continued survival. Where you are definitely not alone but share your surroundings with many other living, breathing, intelligent creatures. A game so revolutionary that there isn't a mould for it to break - a game that is both graphically stunning and a joy to play. Are you imagining that? Well, stop it, because Jurassic Park: Trespasser is nothing like it.
Sorry for getting your hopes up there but you've just had a taste of the kind of hype and frenzied anticipation that surrounded the release of Trespasser , hype which the final game didn't live up to. Hopefully Telltale's forthcoming Jurassic Park game will be better, but Trespasser was so dire that it pretty much killed off the gaming side of the whole franchise.
The premise behind Trespasser is that eight years have passed since the events in The Lost World and Ingen, the company behind the genetically recreated dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park and the later failed expedition to capture a Tyrannosaurus Rex has gone bust. Now, Site B, the breeding ground for the dinosaurs has become the stuff of urban legend, a mythical location which few people believe actually exists. Until, that is, you, playing some young air-traveller or other, find yourself the only survivor of an air disaster that leaves you stranded on Site B.
Quite how the heroine that you play survives the air disaster is unclear, given that the pilots and other passengers apparently all cop it when the platform crashes and blows up. It could have something to do with the fact that during the intro sequence she is being violently ill in the plane's toilet, which itself must be made of the same kind of material that aircraft flight recorders are made of - who knows? What you do know is that you've got to find a way off the dinosaur filled island somehow, preferably retaining all of your bodily appendages - not necessarily an easy task given the saurian and frequently hostile nature of the island's inhabitants.
To make good your escape, you have to venture across the island, level by level, until you find some means of escape. "Hang on - levels?" some of you may well be thinking at this point, "I thought this was supposed to be an island. Where do levels come into it?"
If you did think this, then give yourself a pat on the back because you've just spotted the first of Trespasser's many flaws. You don't have the freedom to run around the island as you please - the island is in fact split into a series of linear levels - levels that you can't even move backwards and forwards between. This linearity seriously detracts from Trespasser's appeal - I can't speak for other gamers, but one of the reasons I was looking forward to playing Trespasser was that I hoped the main character would have the freedom to wander around the island as she pleased. But no, this is not an open world game.
And to add insult to injury, objects can't be taken between levels. At one point in the game, I reached a high wall which, as it transpires, was the end of a level. The problem was, I had a large yellow tool box with me which I thought might come in handy later, but to my dismay I couldn't hold it while I climbed up the large crane which was conveniently placed to allow me to climb over the wall. So, I had an idea and, feeling rather smug, I threw the box over the wall, and then climbed the crane, gun in my belt, ready to pick up the box over the wall. Only it wasn't there, and neither was the gun - so much for Trespasser's supposed realism.
As for the levels themselves, the quality of the level design varies somewhat. There are some levels which are pretty open and well designed - the abandoned town on Site B for instance is rather spooky, complete with empty buildings and churches, all of which can be explored. But the other levels in the game are less impressive - the levels that take place in the open are nearly all designed in such a way that there is only one path that you can take through the levels. Hills are used to block your progress, often forcing you take a long winding path through the level, which wouldn't be quite so bad if some of the 'hills' weren't about two foot tall and could easily be scaled by a small two year old child.
This brings me neatly onto another negative point about Trespasser - the fact that the game's heroine is about as athletic as a housebrick. Voiced by Minnie 'Who?' Driver, she is more Jabba the Hutt than Lara Croft in terms of her manoeuvrability. She can't climb at all, so climbing trees to avoid velociraptors is out of the question, and she can't run either. Okay, the manual does say pressing a certain key makes her run - but in actual fact this only makes her move marginally faster than she usually does, increasing her speed from 'crawl' to 'walk slightly faster than normal'. By no stretch of the imagination could her slothful speed be considered running, and when you're trying to evade a velociraptor, that's not going be much use at all. Or is it? It may just be - because fortunately for Trespasser's slow-coach heroine, the dinosaurs in Trespasser aren't altogether too bright.
Yep, I had to mention the dinosaurs sooner or later, since they are the game's real selling point, or so Dreamworks, the makers of the game, would have us believe. In actual fact, they're something of a disappointment. There are two basic types of dinosaurs in Trespasser, at least in terms of overall behaviour. The first type of dinosaurs that you'll be likely to encounter throughout the game are 'guard' dinosaurs. These dinosaurs stay in the same place, virtually motionless, until you wander into their locality at which point they see you and come after you. But if you wander out of their area, which can be quite small, no matter how wounded you are they'll never attempt to come after you, preferring instead to stand stock still once more. Nearly all the velociraptors in the game exhibit this kind of behaviour.
Granted, there are seven types in the game - Velociraptors, Albertosaurs and Tyrannosaurs, all carnivores; and the less hostile herbivores Stegosaurus, Triceratops, or Parasaurolophus - but you encounter the velociraptors the most and given the fact that you usually can't avoid them thanks to the aforementioned stupid hills, it rapidly becomes clear that Trespasser isn't much more sophisticated than most other shoot-em-ups.
So what about the other dinosaurs and dinosaur species in the game? Well, they're supposedly 'hunting' dinosaurs, wandering around the levels in search of prey, doing dinosaury things and generally behaving in an intelligent manner. Except that they're not very intelligent at all, and frequently exhibit bizarre behaviour. Take the T-Rexes that you encounter throughout the game. At one point I wandered into a clearing to find a giant T-Rex standing there - I wandered around it, and it paid no attention to me, nor to the other dinosaur in the clearing. But as soon as I wandered into another clearing it barrelled up and started attacking me. Then it stopped attacking and just sort of walked backwards and forwards for no apparent reason. In the end, I just pumped a few bullets into it and watched it drop.
This brings me conveniently around to the weapons that you can use to dish out some dino-death - there are about eight different types of weapons, including a pistol, a shotgun and an uzi. But don't think for one minute that Trespasser is a shoot-em-up. Each weapon contains a limited amount of ammo, usually enough for no more than seven or eight shots, and the unusual user interface (which I'll mention in a moment) makes it hard for you to actually aim your gun. At first, you'll need every last bullet you've got to keep the dinosaurs at bay; and after you've run out of ammo, you'll just have to run - at a snails pace.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that you can't carry more than two items at once - one in your right hand and one clipped to your belt. The main character never seems to think of placing items in her other hand, her pockets or her cleavage. Cleavage? Yep, that's right - our heroine's bust is put to good use in this game, unlike Lara Croft's assets which are used only for marketing purposes. Upon the heroine's chest is a heart tattoo which fills up when she takes damage - this slowly empties when she's not being attacked, meaning she can recover from any injuries but she can't take much damage before she keels over and becomes dino-food.
Her vulnerability isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's probably the only good thing about the game. It's refreshing to play as a character who can't take two hundred bullets to the chest and keep on coming, although given that she is somewhat slow this does make keeping her alive quite hard indeed.
Trespasser features a rather unusual physics engine. When it was first released there weren't many games around with proper physics. And in Trespasser nearly all the objects in the game can be pushed pulled, shot, knocked about, picked up and used as weapons by using the mouse to move your on-screen hand and then to pick them up. The objects generally behave like they would in real life - at least, that's the theory. It works reasonably well when you're knocking items about but there are points in the game where the physics seem a little bit suspect. One such point is whenever you have to push a crate around so you can stand on it. Once you jump on a crate, any crate in fact, no matter how still you're standing, it starts to wobble around like mad, rolling around like it was in fact circular. What's going on there, I have no idea.
As far as Trespasser's graphics go there's no denying that the dinosaurs are well animated, even though the textures look a little bit dated. The dinosaurs move convincingly and while it's disappointing that they don't show visible signs of damage when you blast them, they do act injured. I was impressed when, having shot a velociraptor, it moved away, stumbling and struggling. They look good too, constructed of a bucket-load of polygons that really look the part, having supposedly been modelled with real skeletons (whatever the flip that means). What is slightly less impressive is the fact that when you dispatch the dinosaurs for good, they lie on the ground with their eyes open, looking frozen rather than dead.
The landscape isn't all that great, however, since the foliage tends to look blocky when you view it from a distance of more than four feet away. The sound effects are pretty decent though, with the dinos all emitting quite spooky roars and growls as they attack - it's just a pity that John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough (the bloke who doesn't do nature films), keeps chipping in with his commentary on the island at inappropriate moments - fortunately there's an option in the game menu to shut the stupid bearded git up.
By now, you may have got the idea that Trespasser isn't much cop at all. And you'd be right - it isn't. To summarise, it runs slowly, the dinosaurs are thick as two short planks, the main character's utterly unatheletic, the levels aren't much cop at all, you have no real freedom to do what you want in the game, it gets boring rather quickly, and most of the 'puzzles' in the game involve shoving crates around. Trespasser is just one big mess, and while the developers were brave to try making a really good Jurassic park game, they failed miserably.
Sorry for getting your hopes up there but you've just had a taste of the kind of hype and frenzied anticipation that surrounded the release of Trespasser , hype which the final game didn't live up to. Hopefully Telltale's forthcoming Jurassic Park game will be better, but Trespasser was so dire that it pretty much killed off the gaming side of the whole franchise.
The premise behind Trespasser is that eight years have passed since the events in The Lost World and Ingen, the company behind the genetically recreated dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park and the later failed expedition to capture a Tyrannosaurus Rex has gone bust. Now, Site B, the breeding ground for the dinosaurs has become the stuff of urban legend, a mythical location which few people believe actually exists. Until, that is, you, playing some young air-traveller or other, find yourself the only survivor of an air disaster that leaves you stranded on Site B.
Quite how the heroine that you play survives the air disaster is unclear, given that the pilots and other passengers apparently all cop it when the platform crashes and blows up. It could have something to do with the fact that during the intro sequence she is being violently ill in the plane's toilet, which itself must be made of the same kind of material that aircraft flight recorders are made of - who knows? What you do know is that you've got to find a way off the dinosaur filled island somehow, preferably retaining all of your bodily appendages - not necessarily an easy task given the saurian and frequently hostile nature of the island's inhabitants.
To make good your escape, you have to venture across the island, level by level, until you find some means of escape. "Hang on - levels?" some of you may well be thinking at this point, "I thought this was supposed to be an island. Where do levels come into it?"
If you did think this, then give yourself a pat on the back because you've just spotted the first of Trespasser's many flaws. You don't have the freedom to run around the island as you please - the island is in fact split into a series of linear levels - levels that you can't even move backwards and forwards between. This linearity seriously detracts from Trespasser's appeal - I can't speak for other gamers, but one of the reasons I was looking forward to playing Trespasser was that I hoped the main character would have the freedom to wander around the island as she pleased. But no, this is not an open world game.
And to add insult to injury, objects can't be taken between levels. At one point in the game, I reached a high wall which, as it transpires, was the end of a level. The problem was, I had a large yellow tool box with me which I thought might come in handy later, but to my dismay I couldn't hold it while I climbed up the large crane which was conveniently placed to allow me to climb over the wall. So, I had an idea and, feeling rather smug, I threw the box over the wall, and then climbed the crane, gun in my belt, ready to pick up the box over the wall. Only it wasn't there, and neither was the gun - so much for Trespasser's supposed realism.
As for the levels themselves, the quality of the level design varies somewhat. There are some levels which are pretty open and well designed - the abandoned town on Site B for instance is rather spooky, complete with empty buildings and churches, all of which can be explored. But the other levels in the game are less impressive - the levels that take place in the open are nearly all designed in such a way that there is only one path that you can take through the levels. Hills are used to block your progress, often forcing you take a long winding path through the level, which wouldn't be quite so bad if some of the 'hills' weren't about two foot tall and could easily be scaled by a small two year old child.
This brings me neatly onto another negative point about Trespasser - the fact that the game's heroine is about as athletic as a housebrick. Voiced by Minnie 'Who?' Driver, she is more Jabba the Hutt than Lara Croft in terms of her manoeuvrability. She can't climb at all, so climbing trees to avoid velociraptors is out of the question, and she can't run either. Okay, the manual does say pressing a certain key makes her run - but in actual fact this only makes her move marginally faster than she usually does, increasing her speed from 'crawl' to 'walk slightly faster than normal'. By no stretch of the imagination could her slothful speed be considered running, and when you're trying to evade a velociraptor, that's not going be much use at all. Or is it? It may just be - because fortunately for Trespasser's slow-coach heroine, the dinosaurs in Trespasser aren't altogether too bright.
Yep, I had to mention the dinosaurs sooner or later, since they are the game's real selling point, or so Dreamworks, the makers of the game, would have us believe. In actual fact, they're something of a disappointment. There are two basic types of dinosaurs in Trespasser, at least in terms of overall behaviour. The first type of dinosaurs that you'll be likely to encounter throughout the game are 'guard' dinosaurs. These dinosaurs stay in the same place, virtually motionless, until you wander into their locality at which point they see you and come after you. But if you wander out of their area, which can be quite small, no matter how wounded you are they'll never attempt to come after you, preferring instead to stand stock still once more. Nearly all the velociraptors in the game exhibit this kind of behaviour.
Granted, there are seven types in the game - Velociraptors, Albertosaurs and Tyrannosaurs, all carnivores; and the less hostile herbivores Stegosaurus, Triceratops, or Parasaurolophus - but you encounter the velociraptors the most and given the fact that you usually can't avoid them thanks to the aforementioned stupid hills, it rapidly becomes clear that Trespasser isn't much more sophisticated than most other shoot-em-ups.
So what about the other dinosaurs and dinosaur species in the game? Well, they're supposedly 'hunting' dinosaurs, wandering around the levels in search of prey, doing dinosaury things and generally behaving in an intelligent manner. Except that they're not very intelligent at all, and frequently exhibit bizarre behaviour. Take the T-Rexes that you encounter throughout the game. At one point I wandered into a clearing to find a giant T-Rex standing there - I wandered around it, and it paid no attention to me, nor to the other dinosaur in the clearing. But as soon as I wandered into another clearing it barrelled up and started attacking me. Then it stopped attacking and just sort of walked backwards and forwards for no apparent reason. In the end, I just pumped a few bullets into it and watched it drop.
This brings me conveniently around to the weapons that you can use to dish out some dino-death - there are about eight different types of weapons, including a pistol, a shotgun and an uzi. But don't think for one minute that Trespasser is a shoot-em-up. Each weapon contains a limited amount of ammo, usually enough for no more than seven or eight shots, and the unusual user interface (which I'll mention in a moment) makes it hard for you to actually aim your gun. At first, you'll need every last bullet you've got to keep the dinosaurs at bay; and after you've run out of ammo, you'll just have to run - at a snails pace.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that you can't carry more than two items at once - one in your right hand and one clipped to your belt. The main character never seems to think of placing items in her other hand, her pockets or her cleavage. Cleavage? Yep, that's right - our heroine's bust is put to good use in this game, unlike Lara Croft's assets which are used only for marketing purposes. Upon the heroine's chest is a heart tattoo which fills up when she takes damage - this slowly empties when she's not being attacked, meaning she can recover from any injuries but she can't take much damage before she keels over and becomes dino-food.
Her vulnerability isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's probably the only good thing about the game. It's refreshing to play as a character who can't take two hundred bullets to the chest and keep on coming, although given that she is somewhat slow this does make keeping her alive quite hard indeed.
Trespasser features a rather unusual physics engine. When it was first released there weren't many games around with proper physics. And in Trespasser nearly all the objects in the game can be pushed pulled, shot, knocked about, picked up and used as weapons by using the mouse to move your on-screen hand and then to pick them up. The objects generally behave like they would in real life - at least, that's the theory. It works reasonably well when you're knocking items about but there are points in the game where the physics seem a little bit suspect. One such point is whenever you have to push a crate around so you can stand on it. Once you jump on a crate, any crate in fact, no matter how still you're standing, it starts to wobble around like mad, rolling around like it was in fact circular. What's going on there, I have no idea.
As far as Trespasser's graphics go there's no denying that the dinosaurs are well animated, even though the textures look a little bit dated. The dinosaurs move convincingly and while it's disappointing that they don't show visible signs of damage when you blast them, they do act injured. I was impressed when, having shot a velociraptor, it moved away, stumbling and struggling. They look good too, constructed of a bucket-load of polygons that really look the part, having supposedly been modelled with real skeletons (whatever the flip that means). What is slightly less impressive is the fact that when you dispatch the dinosaurs for good, they lie on the ground with their eyes open, looking frozen rather than dead.
The landscape isn't all that great, however, since the foliage tends to look blocky when you view it from a distance of more than four feet away. The sound effects are pretty decent though, with the dinos all emitting quite spooky roars and growls as they attack - it's just a pity that John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough (the bloke who doesn't do nature films), keeps chipping in with his commentary on the island at inappropriate moments - fortunately there's an option in the game menu to shut the stupid bearded git up.
By now, you may have got the idea that Trespasser isn't much cop at all. And you'd be right - it isn't. To summarise, it runs slowly, the dinosaurs are thick as two short planks, the main character's utterly unatheletic, the levels aren't much cop at all, you have no real freedom to do what you want in the game, it gets boring rather quickly, and most of the 'puzzles' in the game involve shoving crates around. Trespasser is just one big mess, and while the developers were brave to try making a really good Jurassic park game, they failed miserably.
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Imagine the ultimate PC game - a game where you can go anywhere, do anything, the only limit being your imagination. Where you have the freedom to explore your environment and use whatever you find to ensure your continued survival. Where you are definitely not alone but share your surroundings with many other living, breathing, intelligent creatures. A game so revolutionary that there isn't a mould for it to break - a game that is both graphically stunning and a joy to play. Are you imagining that? Well, stop it, because Jurassic Park: Trespasser is nothing like it.
Sorry for getting your hopes up there but you've just had a taste of the kind of hype and frenzied anticipation that surrounded the release of Trespasser , hype which the final game didn't live up to. Hopefully Telltale's forthcoming Jurassic Park game will be better, but Trespasser was so dire that it pretty much killed off the gaming side of the whole franchise.
The premise behind Trespasser is that eight years have passed since the events in The Lost World and Ingen, the company behind the genetically recreated dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park and the later failed expedition to capture a Tyrannosaurus Rex has gone bust. Now, Site B, the breeding ground for the dinosaurs has become the stuff of urban legend, a mythical location which few people believe actually exists. Until, that is, you, playing some young air-traveller or other, find yourself the only survivor of an air disaster that leaves you stranded on Site B.
Quite how the heroine that you play survives the air disaster is unclear, given that the pilots and other passengers apparently all cop it when the platform crashes and blows up. It could have something to do with the fact that during the intro sequence she is being violently ill in the plane's toilet, which itself must be made of the same kind of material that aircraft flight recorders are made of - who knows? What you do know is that you've got to find a way off the dinosaur filled island somehow, preferably retaining all of your bodily appendages - not necessarily an easy task given the saurian and frequently hostile nature of the island's inhabitants.
To make good your escape, you have to venture across the island, level by level, until you find some means of escape. "Hang on - levels?" some of you may well be thinking at this point, "I thought this was supposed to be an island. Where do levels come into it?"
If you did think this, then give yourself a pat on the back because you've just spotted the first of Trespasser's many flaws. You don't have the freedom to run around the island as you please - the island is in fact split into a series of linear levels - levels that you can't even move backwards and forwards between. This linearity seriously detracts from Trespasser's appeal - I can't speak for other gamers, but one of the reasons I was looking forward to playing Trespasser was that I hoped the main character would have the freedom to wander around the island as she pleased. But no, this is not an open world game.
And to add insult to injury, objects can't be taken between levels. At one point in the game, I reached a high wall which, as it transpires, was the end of a level. The problem was, I had a large yellow tool box with me which I thought might come in handy later, but to my dismay I couldn't hold it while I climbed up the large crane which was conveniently placed to allow me to climb over the wall. So, I had an idea and, feeling rather smug, I threw the box over the wall, and then climbed the crane, gun in my belt, ready to pick up the box over the wall. Only it wasn't there, and neither was the gun - so much for Trespasser's supposed realism.
As for the levels themselves, the quality of the level design varies somewhat. There are some levels which are pretty open and well designed - the abandoned town on Site B for instance is rather spooky, complete with empty buildings and churches, all of which can be explored. But the other levels in the game are less impressive - the levels that take place in the open are nearly all designed in such a way that there is only one path that you can take through the levels. Hills are used to block your progress, often forcing you take a long winding path through the level, which wouldn't be quite so bad if some of the 'hills' weren't about two foot tall and could easily be scaled by a small two year old child.
This brings me neatly onto another negative point about Trespasser - the fact that the game's heroine is about as athletic as a housebrick. Voiced by Minnie 'Who?' Driver, she is more Jabba the Hutt than Lara Croft in terms of her manoeuvrability. She can't climb at all, so climbing trees to avoid velociraptors is out of the question, and she can't run either. Okay, the manual does say pressing a certain key makes her run - but in actual fact this only makes her move marginally faster than she usually does, increasing her speed from 'crawl' to 'walk slightly faster than normal'. By no stretch of the imagination could her slothful speed be considered running, and when you're trying to evade a velociraptor, that's not going be much use at all. Or is it? It may just be - because fortunately for Trespasser's slow-coach heroine, the dinosaurs in Trespasser aren't altogether too bright.
Yep, I had to mention the dinosaurs sooner or later, since they are the game's real selling point, or so Dreamworks, the makers of the game, would have us believe. In actual fact, they're something of a disappointment. There are two basic types of dinosaurs in Trespasser, at least in terms of overall behaviour. The first type of dinosaurs that you'll be likely to encounter throughout the game are 'guard' dinosaurs. These dinosaurs stay in the same place, virtually motionless, until you wander into their locality at which point they see you and come after you. But if you wander out of their area, which can be quite small, no matter how wounded you are they'll never attempt to come after you, preferring instead to stand stock still once more. Nearly all the velociraptors in the game exhibit this kind of behaviour.
Granted, there are seven types in the game - Velociraptors, Albertosaurs and Tyrannosaurs, all carnivores; and the less hostile herbivores Stegosaurus, Triceratops, or Parasaurolophus - but you encounter the velociraptors the most and given the fact that you usually can't avoid them thanks to the aforementioned stupid hills, it rapidly becomes clear that Trespasser isn't much more sophisticated than most other shoot-em-ups.
So what about the other dinosaurs and dinosaur species in the game? Well, they're supposedly 'hunting' dinosaurs, wandering around the levels in search of prey, doing dinosaury things and generally behaving in an intelligent manner. Except that they're not very intelligent at all, and frequently exhibit bizarre behaviour. Take the T-Rexes that you encounter throughout the game. At one point I wandered into a clearing to find a giant T-Rex standing there - I wandered around it, and it paid no attention to me, nor to the other dinosaur in the clearing. But as soon as I wandered into another clearing it barrelled up and started attacking me. Then it stopped attacking and just sort of walked backwards and forwards for no apparent reason. In the end, I just pumped a few bullets into it and watched it drop.
This brings me conveniently around to the weapons that you can use to dish out some dino-death - there are about eight different types of weapons, including a pistol, a shotgun and an uzi. But don't think for one minute that Trespasser is a shoot-em-up. Each weapon contains a limited amount of ammo, usually enough for no more than seven or eight shots, and the unusual user interface (which I'll mention in a moment) makes it hard for you to actually aim your gun. At first, you'll need every last bullet you've got to keep the dinosaurs at bay; and after you've run out of ammo, you'll just have to run - at a snails pace.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that you can't carry more than two items at once - one in your right hand and one clipped to your belt. The main character never seems to think of placing items in her other hand, her pockets or her cleavage. Cleavage? Yep, that's right - our heroine's bust is put to good use in this game, unlike Lara Croft's assets which are used only for marketing purposes. Upon the heroine's chest is a heart tattoo which fills up when she takes damage - this slowly empties when she's not being attacked, meaning she can recover from any injuries but she can't take much damage before she keels over and becomes dino-food.
Her vulnerability isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's probably the only good thing about the game. It's refreshing to play as a character who can't take two hundred bullets to the chest and keep on coming, although given that she is somewhat slow this does make keeping her alive quite hard indeed.
Trespasser features a rather unusual physics engine. When it was first released there weren't many games around with proper physics. And in Trespasser nearly all the objects in the game can be pushed pulled, shot, knocked about, picked up and used as weapons by using the mouse to move your on-screen hand and then to pick them up. The objects generally behave like they would in real life - at least, that's the theory. It works reasonably well when you're knocking items about but there are points in the game where the physics seem a little bit suspect. One such point is whenever you have to push a crate around so you can stand on it. Once you jump on a crate, any crate in fact, no matter how still you're standing, it starts to wobble around like mad, rolling around like it was in fact circular. What's going on there, I have no idea.
As far as Trespasser's graphics go there's no denying that the dinosaurs are well animated, even though the textures look a little bit dated. The dinosaurs move convincingly and while it's disappointing that they don't show visible signs of damage when you blast them, they do act injured. I was impressed when, having shot a velociraptor, it moved away, stumbling and struggling. They look good too, constructed of a bucket-load of polygons that really look the part, having supposedly been modelled with real skeletons (whatever the flip that means). What is slightly less impressive is the fact that when you dispatch the dinosaurs for good, they lie on the ground with their eyes open, looking frozen rather than dead.
The landscape isn't all that great, however, since the foliage tends to look blocky when you view it from a distance of more than four feet away. The sound effects are pretty decent though, with the dinos all emitting quite spooky roars and growls as they attack - it's just a pity that John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough (the bloke who doesn't do nature films), keeps chipping in with his commentary on the island at inappropriate moments - fortunately there's an option in the game menu to shut the stupid bearded git up.
By now, you may have got the idea that Trespasser isn't much cop at all. And you'd be right - it isn't. To summarise, it runs slowly, the dinosaurs are thick as two short planks, the main character's utterly unatheletic, the levels aren't much cop at all, you have no real freedom to do what you want in the game, it gets boring rather quickly, and most of the 'puzzles' in the game involve shoving crates around. Trespasser is just one big mess, and while the developers were brave to try making a really good Jurassic park game, they failed miserably.
Sorry for getting your hopes up there but you've just had a taste of the kind of hype and frenzied anticipation that surrounded the release of Trespasser , hype which the final game didn't live up to. Hopefully Telltale's forthcoming Jurassic Park game will be better, but Trespasser was so dire that it pretty much killed off the gaming side of the whole franchise.
The premise behind Trespasser is that eight years have passed since the events in The Lost World and Ingen, the company behind the genetically recreated dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park and the later failed expedition to capture a Tyrannosaurus Rex has gone bust. Now, Site B, the breeding ground for the dinosaurs has become the stuff of urban legend, a mythical location which few people believe actually exists. Until, that is, you, playing some young air-traveller or other, find yourself the only survivor of an air disaster that leaves you stranded on Site B.
Quite how the heroine that you play survives the air disaster is unclear, given that the pilots and other passengers apparently all cop it when the platform crashes and blows up. It could have something to do with the fact that during the intro sequence she is being violently ill in the plane's toilet, which itself must be made of the same kind of material that aircraft flight recorders are made of - who knows? What you do know is that you've got to find a way off the dinosaur filled island somehow, preferably retaining all of your bodily appendages - not necessarily an easy task given the saurian and frequently hostile nature of the island's inhabitants.
To make good your escape, you have to venture across the island, level by level, until you find some means of escape. "Hang on - levels?" some of you may well be thinking at this point, "I thought this was supposed to be an island. Where do levels come into it?"
If you did think this, then give yourself a pat on the back because you've just spotted the first of Trespasser's many flaws. You don't have the freedom to run around the island as you please - the island is in fact split into a series of linear levels - levels that you can't even move backwards and forwards between. This linearity seriously detracts from Trespasser's appeal - I can't speak for other gamers, but one of the reasons I was looking forward to playing Trespasser was that I hoped the main character would have the freedom to wander around the island as she pleased. But no, this is not an open world game.
And to add insult to injury, objects can't be taken between levels. At one point in the game, I reached a high wall which, as it transpires, was the end of a level. The problem was, I had a large yellow tool box with me which I thought might come in handy later, but to my dismay I couldn't hold it while I climbed up the large crane which was conveniently placed to allow me to climb over the wall. So, I had an idea and, feeling rather smug, I threw the box over the wall, and then climbed the crane, gun in my belt, ready to pick up the box over the wall. Only it wasn't there, and neither was the gun - so much for Trespasser's supposed realism.
As for the levels themselves, the quality of the level design varies somewhat. There are some levels which are pretty open and well designed - the abandoned town on Site B for instance is rather spooky, complete with empty buildings and churches, all of which can be explored. But the other levels in the game are less impressive - the levels that take place in the open are nearly all designed in such a way that there is only one path that you can take through the levels. Hills are used to block your progress, often forcing you take a long winding path through the level, which wouldn't be quite so bad if some of the 'hills' weren't about two foot tall and could easily be scaled by a small two year old child.
This brings me neatly onto another negative point about Trespasser - the fact that the game's heroine is about as athletic as a housebrick. Voiced by Minnie 'Who?' Driver, she is more Jabba the Hutt than Lara Croft in terms of her manoeuvrability. She can't climb at all, so climbing trees to avoid velociraptors is out of the question, and she can't run either. Okay, the manual does say pressing a certain key makes her run - but in actual fact this only makes her move marginally faster than she usually does, increasing her speed from 'crawl' to 'walk slightly faster than normal'. By no stretch of the imagination could her slothful speed be considered running, and when you're trying to evade a velociraptor, that's not going be much use at all. Or is it? It may just be - because fortunately for Trespasser's slow-coach heroine, the dinosaurs in Trespasser aren't altogether too bright.
Yep, I had to mention the dinosaurs sooner or later, since they are the game's real selling point, or so Dreamworks, the makers of the game, would have us believe. In actual fact, they're something of a disappointment. There are two basic types of dinosaurs in Trespasser, at least in terms of overall behaviour. The first type of dinosaurs that you'll be likely to encounter throughout the game are 'guard' dinosaurs. These dinosaurs stay in the same place, virtually motionless, until you wander into their locality at which point they see you and come after you. But if you wander out of their area, which can be quite small, no matter how wounded you are they'll never attempt to come after you, preferring instead to stand stock still once more. Nearly all the velociraptors in the game exhibit this kind of behaviour.
Granted, there are seven types in the game - Velociraptors, Albertosaurs and Tyrannosaurs, all carnivores; and the less hostile herbivores Stegosaurus, Triceratops, or Parasaurolophus - but you encounter the velociraptors the most and given the fact that you usually can't avoid them thanks to the aforementioned stupid hills, it rapidly becomes clear that Trespasser isn't much more sophisticated than most other shoot-em-ups.
So what about the other dinosaurs and dinosaur species in the game? Well, they're supposedly 'hunting' dinosaurs, wandering around the levels in search of prey, doing dinosaury things and generally behaving in an intelligent manner. Except that they're not very intelligent at all, and frequently exhibit bizarre behaviour. Take the T-Rexes that you encounter throughout the game. At one point I wandered into a clearing to find a giant T-Rex standing there - I wandered around it, and it paid no attention to me, nor to the other dinosaur in the clearing. But as soon as I wandered into another clearing it barrelled up and started attacking me. Then it stopped attacking and just sort of walked backwards and forwards for no apparent reason. In the end, I just pumped a few bullets into it and watched it drop.
This brings me conveniently around to the weapons that you can use to dish out some dino-death - there are about eight different types of weapons, including a pistol, a shotgun and an uzi. But don't think for one minute that Trespasser is a shoot-em-up. Each weapon contains a limited amount of ammo, usually enough for no more than seven or eight shots, and the unusual user interface (which I'll mention in a moment) makes it hard for you to actually aim your gun. At first, you'll need every last bullet you've got to keep the dinosaurs at bay; and after you've run out of ammo, you'll just have to run - at a snails pace.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that you can't carry more than two items at once - one in your right hand and one clipped to your belt. The main character never seems to think of placing items in her other hand, her pockets or her cleavage. Cleavage? Yep, that's right - our heroine's bust is put to good use in this game, unlike Lara Croft's assets which are used only for marketing purposes. Upon the heroine's chest is a heart tattoo which fills up when she takes damage - this slowly empties when she's not being attacked, meaning she can recover from any injuries but she can't take much damage before she keels over and becomes dino-food.
Her vulnerability isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's probably the only good thing about the game. It's refreshing to play as a character who can't take two hundred bullets to the chest and keep on coming, although given that she is somewhat slow this does make keeping her alive quite hard indeed.
Trespasser features a rather unusual physics engine. When it was first released there weren't many games around with proper physics. And in Trespasser nearly all the objects in the game can be pushed pulled, shot, knocked about, picked up and used as weapons by using the mouse to move your on-screen hand and then to pick them up. The objects generally behave like they would in real life - at least, that's the theory. It works reasonably well when you're knocking items about but there are points in the game where the physics seem a little bit suspect. One such point is whenever you have to push a crate around so you can stand on it. Once you jump on a crate, any crate in fact, no matter how still you're standing, it starts to wobble around like mad, rolling around like it was in fact circular. What's going on there, I have no idea.
As far as Trespasser's graphics go there's no denying that the dinosaurs are well animated, even though the textures look a little bit dated. The dinosaurs move convincingly and while it's disappointing that they don't show visible signs of damage when you blast them, they do act injured. I was impressed when, having shot a velociraptor, it moved away, stumbling and struggling. They look good too, constructed of a bucket-load of polygons that really look the part, having supposedly been modelled with real skeletons (whatever the flip that means). What is slightly less impressive is the fact that when you dispatch the dinosaurs for good, they lie on the ground with their eyes open, looking frozen rather than dead.
The landscape isn't all that great, however, since the foliage tends to look blocky when you view it from a distance of more than four feet away. The sound effects are pretty decent though, with the dinos all emitting quite spooky roars and growls as they attack - it's just a pity that John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough (the bloke who doesn't do nature films), keeps chipping in with his commentary on the island at inappropriate moments - fortunately there's an option in the game menu to shut the stupid bearded git up.
By now, you may have got the idea that Trespasser isn't much cop at all. And you'd be right - it isn't. To summarise, it runs slowly, the dinosaurs are thick as two short planks, the main character's utterly unatheletic, the levels aren't much cop at all, you have no real freedom to do what you want in the game, it gets boring rather quickly, and most of the 'puzzles' in the game involve shoving crates around. Trespasser is just one big mess, and while the developers were brave to try making a really good Jurassic park game, they failed miserably.