Picked up Dino Crisis 1 & 2 yesterday for $1.20 each on PSN. I have a disc copy of DC1 somewhere and had played like an hour of it in 1999 but it got backlogged and it wasn't until someone mentioned in the thread on the PSN sale yesterday that DC1 was a Shinji Mikami directed game, (something I never knew), 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 and 6 hours I've ever spent!
Played through basically the entire game 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 mark when it felt like it was almost other and at that point I figured the final area of the game 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 overall (not much ammo either), 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.
It was also just a lot of fun to play a survival game like this where the best tactic 90% of the time is just running like hell past all the enemies weaving around them to conserve health & ammo. The constant speed and running gives the game a fast paced intensity and looking at the map and memorizing the next run you're gonna do from one save point to where you gotta go next is just fun and holds up great today.
Overall it just had something that a lot of modern games lack. I'm not super nostalgic in general with gaming and I greatly prefer modern games, especially as many old-school games have terrible interfaces and have random really slow things to them (Xenogears text speed <.<), but at the same time I gotta hand it to Dino Crisis. 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, cutscenes or dialogue, tutorials, etc... done usually in order to stretch out to 10-30 hour game lengths, but games like Dino Crisis, RE1, MGS1 just move at a great pace for 5-7 hours and then are done are just are so much more consistently edge of your seat engaging and easier to keep playing for hours at a time (there are handfuls of great modern games that give that feel too, but it generally feels like most modern games are bloated in order to keep players from returning them quickly).
Heck, the controls on the Vita version of the PS Classic I was playing 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.
Now that being said, besides the awful tank controls (which were obviously way worse with my never ending 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 Dino Crisis has you going through an interesting Jurassic Park type place, nope the game is just set in a boring standard lab (that happens to have Dinos) 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 level design structuring, but it flowed well so I'm fine with it and no complaints).
Dino Crisis isn't a ton worse than RE1, 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 or at least RE5). But really, it's Mikami directed and Mikami directed games are some of the best games out there, so it does feels a bit phoned in for him. 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+; TEW has a lot of great things going for it, but there are way too many shitty 1/10 type parts scattered throughout that really bring the experience down; game needed another 6 months of playtesting and cutting).
So yeah, Dino Crisis is definitely worth the 5-6 hours of time and $1.20. Looking forward to trying out Dino Crisis 2 for the first time now as I never picked it up back in the day because of the genre change to action.
Additionally, as much as the final boss fight is weak as heck in DC1, it totally gets credit for:
That was so old-school Capcom and was great lol
...and it's one of the best $1.20 and 6 hours I've ever spent!
Played through basically the entire game 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 mark when it felt like it was almost other and at that point I figured the final area of the game 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 overall (not much ammo either), 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.
It was also just a lot of fun to play a survival game like this where the best tactic 90% of the time is just running like hell past all the enemies weaving around them to conserve health & ammo. The constant speed and running gives the game a fast paced intensity and looking at the map and memorizing the next run you're gonna do from one save point to where you gotta go next is just fun and holds up great today.
Overall it just had something that a lot of modern games lack. I'm not super nostalgic in general with gaming and I greatly prefer modern games, especially as many old-school games have terrible interfaces and have random really slow things to them (Xenogears text speed <.<), but at the same time I gotta hand it to Dino Crisis. 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, cutscenes or dialogue, tutorials, etc... done usually in order to stretch out to 10-30 hour game lengths, but games like Dino Crisis, RE1, MGS1 just move at a great pace for 5-7 hours and then are done are just are so much more consistently edge of your seat engaging and easier to keep playing for hours at a time (there are handfuls of great modern games that give that feel too, but it generally feels like most modern games are bloated in order to keep players from returning them quickly).
Heck, the controls on the Vita version of the PS Classic I was playing 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.
Now that being said, besides the awful tank controls (which were obviously way worse with my never ending 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 Dino Crisis has you going through an interesting Jurassic Park type place, nope the game is just set in a boring standard lab (that happens to have Dinos) 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 level design structuring, but it flowed well so I'm fine with it and no complaints).
Dino Crisis isn't a ton worse than RE1, 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 or at least RE5). But really, it's Mikami directed and Mikami directed games are some of the best games out there, so it does feels a bit phoned in for him. 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+; TEW has a lot of great things going for it, but there are way too many shitty 1/10 type parts scattered throughout that really bring the experience down; game needed another 6 months of playtesting and cutting).
So yeah, Dino Crisis is definitely worth the 5-6 hours of time and $1.20. Looking forward to trying out Dino Crisis 2 for the first time now as I never picked it up back in the day because of the genre change to action.
Additionally, as much as the final boss fight is weak as heck in DC1, it totally gets credit for:
T-Rex chasing you while riding on a FLYING SPACESHIP THROUGH A WATERWAY
