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Games Entertainment

Daikatana Sucks: It's Official 182

Posted by Hemos from the bites-my-butt dept.
quakedaddy writes: "There's a pretty comical look at 'John Romero's Suck it down I will make you my bitch Daikatana.' Guess it's official -- Ion Storm's cash cow to be never will be. The first person shooter that took four years to make is just poo. There's also some info on Paul Steed's sacking from id Software here." Anyone else played it?
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Daikatana Sucks: It's Official More

Daikatana Sucks: It's Official

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  • It doesn't matter (Score:4)

    by sprayNwipe ( 95435 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:24PM (#1020752) Homepage
    Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if DK is good or not anymore for romero - It's already at #5 for sales last week:

    GameWEEK Sales charts for 5/21/00 [208.232.126.139]

    My theory is that people are buying it to see how bad it is - with that much hype, people are going to be curious.

    Whether it makes its money back or not, I don't know...I think Ion Storms other titles (Deus Ex, Anacronox) will start bringing revenue in for Ion, as well as being *shock* suprisingly good games (especially when compared to DK and Dominon ;p)

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:4)

    by FraggleMI ( 117868 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:26PM (#1020753) Homepage
    I wish that I could have a multi million dollar lesson...
  • 1. The guns are WAYYYYY to powerful and not properly balanced. One should not have the ability to kill an entire room (albeit a small room) of people with one shot from a particular weapon.

    Of course not. *cough* redeemer *cough* bfg *cough*
  • You forgot the Marathon series for Mac, some of the finest FPS for its time. There were many hours of saturating the network, and who knows how many failed tests because of those games on our campus. And if you thought SHODAN was a looney in System Shock, just wait until you meet Durandal.
  • Stop messing with the natural order. Stop experimenting with other dimensions. For the love of humanity, just STOP!
  • Or perhaps a technological tombstone, a-la Trespasser.
  • Actually, I don't think that's appropriate. Most of the reviews I'm seeing agree that Daikatana (which I haven't yet played) isn't completely devoid of merit, it's just bad. No one has said anything so good about Battlefield Earth.

    The thing that makes Daikatana's badness so hard to swallow is the amount of time and money invested in it. With that in mind, I suggest the following alternative: Daikatana is the Waterworld of computer games.
  • How about Blake stone ? [3dgamers.com]

    Not many people seem to have heard of it, probably rightly so. :)
  • Okay, so I had this demo, right? And it was supposed to be good, right? Wrong....I turned both my monitor and the in-game brightness all the way up, and I still couldn't see jackity crap around me. Factoring in that none of the enemies came above my knee or below my hairline, it made for a very frustrating play experience. Games should be hard, but they shouldn't punish you for not walking with your nose to the ground.

    Maybe I'll kick off the reviews with this. Maybe not.
    ------------------------
  • Picasso could barely hawk his wares for food. Maybe in time Daikatana will be seen as an autistic masterpiece too.

  • How 2 Save Daikatana (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All EIDOS has to do is strike a deal with PC Gamer and re-release the title as "Coconut Monkey Presents!"
  • In the case of yesterday's story where the article ws in postscript and there are a lot of people at work without access to a postscript viewr, then it is a service. Not to mention cases where the site/story in question gets /.ed and the only other choice is listneing to people comment on a story they didn't read.
  • http://arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/daikatana/daik atana-1.html

    Like the others: funny, short, to the point.

  • Daikatana is just another creative embarrassment in a long line of such writing/designing disasters that are basically making the American video game industry a lot like the Japanese movie industry of days gone by. Except that Godzilla didn't look so blocky.

    Heh, I wonder if about 10 years in the future if there will be cult fans of bad games like Japanese Cinema...

    "Come on over man, we're gonna get some beer, play some Daikatana and Deerhunter and laugh 'till we puke!"

  • I read a MUCH more entertaining review 4 days ago on Voodooextreme [voodooextreme.com].

    -H
  • May I suggest The Wheel of Time [wheeloftime.com] if you want a non sci-fi FPS.


    He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
  • All these terrible reviews are making me want to buy this game. How bad is it? I couldn't resist hearing 2 Live Crew when the popular notion was to ban them. I can't resist buying the game now that the popular notion is to rip it.

    Maybe the old cliche is true. Maybe bad press is better than no press after all?
  • One web site's opinion on a game that has become trendy to make fun of makes this news official?

    Seems kind of subjective to me, but hell I thought it sucked me down too.

    Ah hell, this whole post is coming out the wrong way, just like all those games that get released early.

    But what I really find sad is that Paul Steed closed Looking Glass. They made THIEF man. What the hell was he thinking? It's no wonder ID fired him.

    This is my understanding of the current situations in game world.
    WooH, maybe burning these Microsoft CD's in my office was a bad idea, the fumes are starting to brun my trhota.

  • He'd be proud of it, yes. He also realizes, since it is a pile of shit, it stinks. Romero thinks Daikatana is a masterpiece. In this way, his shit stinks less than Romeros. :)
  • 3 years for this. I could program something in pascal more entaining then this game in 3 years!!

  • You know, I don't really follow the gaming world, but when the whole "Stevie Case in Playboy" broughahah was kicking around here a couple of weeks back, I mostly thought, "Weird. for a game that promises to be one of the hottest new releases this year (italics represent my assumption), this is an unusually cheesy publicity stunt for the company." After all, with the talent supposedly hired in Ion Storm, it's not like they need to push product that hard, right?

    Now we see the fruits of their collective talents.

    Ogg feel stupid. Ogg go now, throw rock at cave painting, try not get hit by flint chips. (<-- original FPS)

    -TBHiX-

  • Does the game at least use a new superwhammydyne game engine? At least if it did they could recoup a few losses licensing the engine. You know, like that sucky game Unreal did? Unreal sucked after the first level. At least these guys were honest and sucked from the beginning.

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:3)

    by Carnage4Life ( 106069 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:35PM (#1020774) Homepage Journal
    This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves.

    Yeah, your type of attitude bothers me a great deal as well. Reasoning like that is lowering standards everywhere and has screwed up our educational system with ludicrous concepts like social promotion (why bother doing well if you go on to the next class anyway? therefore there are no repercussions for failure). So what do you suggest that after spending four years shooting of his mouth and drowning us with his ego we should congratulate John Romero for shipping software even if it is shitty?!? Hell, no.
    As for the so-called Daikatana Process "big, frigging deal". Every sufficiently large software project has interesting stories of design, personality clashes and innovation hiding away somewhere...why should we celebrate the story of the creation of a horrible piece of software when there are more deserving projects to laud both as games and as feats of engineering and design (Half-Life, System Shock 2, Baldur's Gate, Quake 3, Theif I and II, anything from Blizzard, etc). Next thing you'll be suggesting that we cheer MSFT on for being brave enough to release Windows 95/98 even though they knew they'd get laughed at...

    PS: I especially dislike Ion Storm because after Eidos wasted money supporting them there was nothing left over to stop Looking Glass Studios from going under [slashdot.org].

    analogy:
    Frankly if I shot my mouth of about how much I could code to a bunch of developers and how l33t I was only to turn out not to be able to write a BubbleSort or create a Hash Function I'd expect to be laughed out of town and I would deserve it.

  • Nope. It uses the old Quake II engine.

  • umm, they licensed the quake (1!) engine, and then upgraded to the quake 2 engine.

    so, no.
  • The worst part about the whole Daikatana mess doesn't even have to do with Ion Storm at all, but Looking Glass. Looking Glass closed because their deal with Eidos fell through, because Eidos didn't have enough money to pay. Meanwhile, Eidos had sunk multiple millions in to a game that predictably sucked and will never ever recoup the losses. Meanwhile, the folks at Looking Glass made Thief 2, which is selling well and getting great reviews all around. This game was made under a lot of preassure, as the company had been having financial problems, but they still produced an amazing product. Their engine isn't that fantastic graphically either (the sound is awesome though) but unlike Daikatana, the gameplay itself is great. It's truly sad that something like this happened, that a piece of overbudget crap put a group of creative and well respected game designers out of a job. I hope Romero is ashamed at himself for making such garbage and for denying the folks of Looking Glass a chance to make more great games.
  • What's this page now, Old Man Murray [oldmanmurray.com] or something? While you're over there, look at the SWAT 3 Strategy Guide [oldmanmurray.com], it's funny.

    A good, "non-biased" review of Daikatana can be found at Dailyradar [dailyradar.com].

    -jpowers
  • As soon as John Romero was lionized by the popular press, you just knew that everything he touched from then on would turn to shit.
  • My theory is that people are buying it to see how bad it is - with that much hype, people are going to be curious.

    At the Electronics Boutique last weekend, I gawked at the box like I was rubbernecking at a road accident. I couldn't help myself: I really wanted to buy the damn thing just to wallow in its awfulness.

    I didn't buy it, though. It'll hit the bargain bins soon enough.

  • id (Score:2)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 )

    The only thing I wonder, is what would of been producted if you gave ID Software or Blizzard 4 years to produce a game and $20-30 Million (or what ever the amount was) and a hand full of talented developers.

    OH wait, Blizzard is a bad example, how long has Diablo II been in production? 2-3, 4 years?? Oh wait, Diablo II looking intresting, fun and graphically appealing though. :)

    I would like to see a side by side "deathmatch" or Quake3 vs Dakartina

  • Getting big-titted sluts to do your levels for you instead of actual level designers
  • Oh, for the love of god!
    Anyone naming anything "Extreme" in this day in age should be sent crawling back to the marketing seminar from whence they came!

    Ah, sorry for the rant folks, I must be having a low blood sugar attack. I think I'll walk up to Taco Bell and get one of their Extreme Number Two combos...

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • I didn't need this story to tell me Daikatana sucks - Thresh's put up a review [firingsquad.com] this morning. They tore it up, just like everybody else did, with a score of 25%.
  • Why are you defending Ion Storm? They've been promising a game for four years and then release a POS that Eidos sucked up the cost of. This new drink coaster is putting Eidos out of money that could be better used to hire Lara Croft models with.
  • Come on, Lowtax; don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.
  • Personally, I'd prefer nude Laura Croft models. I'm not going to fault anyone for trying, and it's just bad form to attack them personally (which is rampant here) rather than attack their crappy progs.

  • Re:Everybody loves Daikatana! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jee-zus... You know it's bad when both Gamespot and Happypuppy give it a bad review. Neither are known for being particularly impartial-- for example, HP had the unmitigated gall to give Tomb Raider 1.7-- er, Tomb Raider 3 a bloody 7 out of 10. A piss-poor review from them is a pretty good indicator of an absolutely unplayable title.

    (Not really an AC, just Bieeardo trying to avoid karma whoring.)

  • This is the result of Eidos capping off the number of press copies to 500.

    "Ha, reminds me of the movie "the Avengers". It was so bad that the studio didn't let critics see it in advance to slow down the bad reviews and at least maybe get a good weekend in.

    -rt-
  • I remember a friend of mine was playing doom on a PC and I showed him Marathon on my Mac. "What's this? You can look up and down? Amazing!" I won't even get into how engrossing the Marathon story was. Ah, those were the days...

    -------

  • Wow, what a shock... (Score:5)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @12:49PM (#1020791)
    Wow, who would have thought this thing would suck after spending so much money and time on it.

    Everyone should read the story on Ion Storm that ran in the Dallas Observer (here is a link to it) [dallasobserver.com] for a picture of too much ego + too much money.

    On the plus side, instead of saying "Oh, that's the Heaven's Gate of Computer Games", we can say "Oh, how Daikatana"
  • ...is for someone to design some Battlefield Earth [aint-it-cool-news.com] skins and levels to make the whole ordeal complete!
  • Not if used appropriately
  • A working URL is here [dallasobserver.com].
  • Daikatana sx0rs! this isnt flambait, Henmos said so! only weenies play it!

    in all seriousness though, i played the demo...and *cough* it wasn't all that. i ran around in a cheap rip off of a level from Turok on the N64, fighting dragonflys of all things, and looking at the text 'you feel the poison leaving your body' or some such broken english nonsense run by.

    my boss was like 'faeryman, turn that crap off.' for once my boss was right.

    sorry john, i used to have a picture of you (long flowing hair and all) taped on my monitor. not anymore bud, not anymore
  • Yes, but there is a great deal of difference between your professors and the introduction to Daikatana. First, the "stereotypical" reversal of "r" and "l" sounds by Japanese speakers is due to their similarities (I'd dig out one of my linguistics textbooks, but I don't feel like it). It really can't be helped.

    Second, since the first episode is set in Japan, and the main character is presumably Japanese, and the old man is most certainly Japanese, it stands to reason that they may actually be speaking... wait for it... Japanese!

    Now, following this line of reasoning, it can be safely assumed that the dialogue has been translated into English, possibly via Suspension of Disbelief. Since the dialogue is a translation of two native Japanese speakers conversing, the old man's confusion of "r" and "l" sounds would not have been translated through-- the sound differences are irrelevant in Japanese, and therefore irrelevant to the translation. Since his "r" and "l" sounds are confused, even after translation, it's patently obvious that this confusion was intentionally included; unfortunately, it's impossible to tell if its inclusion was supposed to provoke indignation, laughter, this rant, or even more controversy over Romero's apparent disconnection from reality.

  • another review (Score:5)

    by matticus ( 93537 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @12:55PM (#1020797) Homepage
    Lowtax at Something Awful [somethingawful.com] has an even funnier look at Daikatana and the release [voodooextreme.com]. it's utterly hilarious. you thought the sharky extreme review was mean, i don't know how Romero can look at his face in the morning after this review. ouch...but for some real comedy, read Lowtax's reviews of The War In Heaven or Thundra.
  • I find it interesting that so many people enjoy slamming daikatana for being such a bad game. A common theme seems to be like the one mentioned by the poster "Ion Storm's cash cow to be never will be."

    Here is something to look at:
    http://208.232.126.139/npd_trsts/lookuptrsts.asp ?id=15&date=5/21/00

    See thanks to all your guys free publicity in wanting to slam this horrible game, it has sparked an interest that has driven the game's sales rank to 5th!

    Now all those people who bought this game because they wanted to see just how bad it was could have spent this money on say, something made by Looking Glass.

    I hope your proud.

  • daikatana pr0n (Score:3)

    by schmack ( 32384 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:40PM (#1020799)
    You've gotta check out this mp3 [conhugeco.org] by The Laziest Men on Mars.

    It takes chunks of dialog from the Daikatana characters and sets it to a cheesy porn soundtrack to provide a whole new meaning to the "big sword" moniker. This link came from Old Man Murray [oldmanmurray.com].

    Much funnier than ASCII text could ever be.

  • WOW! I have never seen such a scathing article in my life. Oh wait I forgot about Aqua DP2 and DP3.(Not flaimbait!) Anyways I can't belive that something could be so horrible. After reading about every single problem and flaw, I need to try it to see how bad it could possibly be. I mean it's like staring at a car wreck or trying to install MS Exchange server over and expecting a different result. You know it's morbid... You know it's wrong... But you just have to do it! Great marketing Romero. Make a game so bad people have to play it to see how bad it really is.
  • The thing that pisses me off when I read about half ass games that get published is I wonder what was sacraficed to breathe life into this turd.

    I wanted to see Babylon 5:Into the Fire. [firstones.com] It was a game that was high on my "to buy" list. I had been to Sierra's site several times to check out the screenshots, mpg movies, and occasionally read the developer's .plan files.

    As many of you know, Sierra fired a bunch of it's developers. The development staff of B5 (as well as the developers for Middle Earth) was given 30 days notice and the software was cancelled.

    OH, but Thank God Sierra spared 3d Virtual Bullrider!! It was bad enough to see B5 axed, and the LOTR game killed with a major motion picture on the way - but I really would have gone fscking nuts if they had cancelled the Bullrider game!!!

    So Daikatana sucks. It will soon be forgotten. At least John Romero could afford to buy nice tits for his girlfriend. [playboy.com]

    I spen more time thinking about great games that died than half ass ones heading for the closeout bin at Best Buy.
  • Um, he didn't leave, he was fired.
  • . I think this was an incredible learning experience for John Romero

    Gee isn't that a nice way to say "sorry you suck, loser?"

    From what I've heard around the grape vine (aka stuck in traffic with my roommate). Romero is the wana-bee elite coder that Carmak is. Romero has a very posh office, he enjoys starbucks and power lunches. While Carmak actually produced shit. He was busy making people believe he produced shit.

    The way is works at any job I've been at is the general impression of how much work you actually do is about 80% BS and about 20% real work,. Or maybe 90/10. ether case I have a feeling Romero is a craft master at the > percentage and just plain talent-less at real work. Maybe he saw this as a way to prove to people he doesn't suck shit.

    Looks like it was a pretty big mistake.

    -Jon

    Damm that sheit be scandalous

  • Looks like they run freebsd + apache. Check out what netcraft comes back with
    http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.sharkyex treme.com
  • Ran Marathon I on a IIsi with 16Mhz.

    The frame rate was painfully slow and evil.
    Just to be safe. I wouldn't go below 33Mhz. for any Marathon!

    I didn't know what I was missing until I tried the Trilogy pack on my 6400 Performa/ 180 Mhz.

    Just wish Forge was a little better.

  • uh, Marathon? And it seems as though you did have a Mac at some point, so platform issues should be no excuse.

    -------
  • You've gotta check out this mp3 by The Laziest Men on Mars.

    The server seems to be slashdotted, anybody got a mirror?

    Or maybe I'll just go trawl Napster...

    Cheers,
    -j.

  • Sadly, I know the experience first hand. The company that I still work for (for the next 1.5 weeks that is...) used to be a cdrom company. Back in the days we dropped some serious coin developing a georgeous game, based on dolphins in space, none-the-less, but when the bottom of the cd-rom market, it was eventually shelved. A very sad thing, indeed. In the hayday we had a dual (perhaps triple) shifts of animators working on farms of SGIs, rendering 24x7x365 on a large SGI Challenge XL (bad ass machine of it's day.) After the fall, the SGIs became desktop machines for web programmers, and the XL had a short life as a really big and expensive web server. Not that we haven't done some really great work in the past couple of years, but now that I'm in my last days of employment there, I look back on that game with sadness and loss--the work that had been done would've been like nothing else you'd seen on the market. R*I*P Bluestar. The company is Magnet [magnet.com] for those interested.
  • What's truly disturbing about the 'Sales chart' is that, "who wants to be a millionaire2" is #1. Tells ya something about what the mass market buys
  • He said "properly balanced". The Redeemer is suicide to use at close-to-mid range, and you only get *one* rocket before you have to pick it up again. And it's slow.

    As for the BFG, it used up tons of ammo and was slow to fire, and a sufficiently smart player knew how to avoid it: You got out of the directional cone originating from the firing player. He fires north, you run south as fast as you fucking can. Both were properly balanced weapons.

    The powerful weapons in DK are the same way. You'll only get 2 shots with them, and ammo is nowhere to be found. They are avoidable by a sufficiently skilled player who would run out of view of a player who had them. They have a long delay before firing. They are also suicide if there is no one else to kill. So they have the added benifit that if the person misses, they'll be dead or close to it.
    I have to wonder how much some of these people have actually played with the weapons.
  • Was the dolphins in space game related to Brin's Uplift War series? For those who haven't read it, it's pretty darn brilliant sci-fi stuff.
  • Do the words 'SUCK IT' ring a bell?

    I don't care how long it took him, or how much work he put into it, or how it's his heart and soul and he's going to get a complex because his game gets bashed. He called us his bitch. He threw down the gauntlet years ago. Now his game is out, and 99% of the gaming population thinks it sucks shit. We have EVERY right to pick that gauntlet back up and beat the hell outta him with it.

    Lesson to the game industry: If you're going to insult the gaming public with your desires for oral sex, you DAMN WELL better make the best game EVER.

    You know what to do with the HELLO.

  • Romero is a fantastic public figure. That's about it. Romero is primarily a figurehead, I honestly doubt that he could run a project such as this well. Reason being? He simply goofs around too much. John Romero is the _only_ popular 3DFPS developer that insists on making the occasional IRC visit. He constantly shows up to press events and interviews. He loses to well publicized matches against other FPS 'celebrities' (anyone remember killcreek? I'm sure you do, she's in playboy this month).

    "It was dreadfully apparent that neither Romero or Wilson had ever played Age of Empires outside of once or twice, and both were aptly defeated by Shelley, with Wilson resigning first.
    The second tournament -- Gods, Mortals, and a Beta Tester - was a bit more exciting."
    Tim Deen, a programmer from ES, finally won the second match.

    (from here [mordor.ch])

    He faked his own death. [loonygames.com] His constant antics and shows only show us what kind of person he is; an actor, someone who enjoys being in the limelight. It comes as absolutely NO surprise that daikatana failed, I was telling people this years ago when he insisted on coming to IRC to 'gauge' what's going on in the community. John, don't you have some work to do or something?

  • Re:from Ion Storm employee? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I propose "Linux Syndrome."

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:3)

    by SedentaryZ ( 31149 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:53PM (#1020816)
    The review on Sharky's extreme that was linked here *was* a constructive criticism of the game. It went into pretty good detail about the game's problems.

    Remember, Daikatana was a high visibility project started by (at the time) one of the most influential people in PC gaming. Can you recall the "Romero is going to make you his bitch!" advertising campaign? With all the hype generated by ION Storm for this game, I'm not surprised to see reviews that don't pull any punches in reporting on the weak points of this game. "Suck it down??" You got that right.

    The big question that I have is wondering if EIDOS is going to recover *any* of their investment in ION with this game. Is the negative pub from this game going to affect ION's other upcoming releases? Is someone who actually buys the game going to be so turned off that he'll never buy another ION game?

    At some point within the past year they had to realize that the game simply wasn't going to work - someone should have pulled the plug on this thing over a year ago.

  • Jeff K. [somethingawful.com] has a positively hysterical comparison between Ghouls and Ghosts and Daikatana [somethingawful.com].

  • Non-existent AI (Score:3)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:01PM (#1020821) Homepage
    I've only played the demo (right through, though, unlike some people) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. I always compare FPS games with Half-Life, admittedly my favourite game ever (have a look here for what I'm doing with it [man.ac.uk]), so be warned...

    The game looks alright, although the coloured lighting is overused at points. The enemies look fairly good, although they don't seem to have many triangles compared with other games. They do look reasonably solid, unlike some. Graphically, not bad - but that's not the problem.

    It's the enemy AI. The enemies in Doom are more intelligent than these ones. They get stuck around corners. At one point, I stood just round a pillar while a load of robotic mosquitoes piled up, unable to navigate eight world units to their right in order to fly around. They're stupid compared with Doom's enemies, and utterly brain-dead compared with Half-Life's.

    When an enemy in a computer game attacks, I don't want it to advance straight towards me where I can gun it down before it reaches me, I want it to show at least some hint of realistic behaviour. I love fights where I have to plan what to do beforehand, and probably take cover and retreat if necessary. Daikatana did not require any such strategy - just mindless standing and shooting. Occasionally I would move to the left or right while shooting, just to add a bit of variation, but it was rarely necessary to do so.

    Daikatana's first, swamp-based episode specialises in ultra-annoying enemies that sneak up and nibble on you. Incredibly annoying to kill - they move reasonably quickly and are difficult to see. Contrast this with Half-Life's headcrabs, which move very slowly, then pounce at your face - you can actually see when they're attacking.

    The sidekicks aren't quite as bad as some people keep making out - although I imagine they could get pretty stuck in places, and get in the way in others. It's a nice idea, but by no means original. Half-Life had scientists and security guards, while its Opposing Force mission pack put you alongside soldiers which would fight with you. The sidekick AI in Daikatana seemed similar to the Half-Life security guards, which was fine for short periods, but would be pretty annoying for an entire game...

    In a way, it's intriguing to compare Half-Life and Daikatana. Both are first games, both were dramatically behind schedule, both attempt to tell a story, and change the way we think about FPS-style games. Unfortunately, while Half-Life succeeds in a spectacular manner, Daikatana fails miserably...

    Oh well. Time to wait for the release of Half-Life 1.1 and Worldcraft 3.3... :-)

    Ford Prefect
  • What about an expansion for Daikatana that is downloadable for free. It creates a dimensional rift that gives gamers their money back.
  • I forgot, it was 'SUCK IT DOWN', not 'SUCK IT'. I can't believe I forgot it - after all, they did trademark the phrase. (Damn you Old Man Murray ... you don't have the story in your archive for me to link to.)

    Add to all this the fact that the death of Looking Glass must be avenged. It's official, Ion Storm must die.

    You know what to do with the HELLO.

  • At first, I thought it might be Romero himself, but the poster didn't say "bitch" once, so it can't be.
  • Innovation in gameplay isn't worth the CD blanks.

    Most of the profit from game publishing comes from the first couple of weeks of sales, before anyone gets much of a chance to play it. Hype, hot screenshots (whether or not they're from a pre-rendered cutscene), and a cool cardboard box sell copies. (the only exceptions are a few gamedev idols, like id, that everybody buys)

    It's an inherently incompetent economic system, where demand has nothing to do with quality.

  • FPS plots (Score:5)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:12PM (#1020839) Homepage
    They're all pretty similar, really...

    Doom: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and Hell. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimension to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly brain).

    Quake: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and various undefined dimensions. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimensions to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly jelly).

    Half-Life: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and a mysterious alien world called Xen. Generic gun-toting, solitary theoretical physicist goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into Xen to kill yet more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly foetus thing).

    Admittedly, Half-Life has a few more plot details which are pretty cool, but it's still remarkably familiar... :-)

    Ford Prefect
  • /. linked to this article in the New York Times [nytimes.com] over a year ago. Good article - it looks like the questions posed are answered: it's all John Carmack and no Romero. Don't laugh too hard at the picture of Romero at the top of the page... I almost fell out of my chair and hurt myself.

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:5)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:18PM (#1020844)
    The actual quote goes: "The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time. The last 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time." When said that way, it better points out how the picky nature of the final details is usually the problem, not the misjudgment of how much work there was to do.

    Given either interpretation of the quote, though, Romero gets no sympathy from me. In a competitive marketplace, there's no "gold star for trying."

    Romero and Ion Storm had AMPLE opportunity to realize that they were making a bad game. They had more time than any other computer game in history to take a couple steps back and give a long look to their product with an eye to improving or replacing it. They didn't. They dropped the ball in an incredibly competitive market, a market they chose to compete in, regardless of the risks involved.

    This isn't the Special Olympics, the gaming market doesn't run on the "everyone's a winner on the inside" philosophy. More the "can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" philosophy.

    (*shrug) It's the ugly facts of life, but calling out that a game is just poo, when in fact it is, is not a bad attitude, it's the free market in action.
    --
  • Well the game looks like a perfect fit for someone like me, even if it is 'Quake 2'. For one, at least it's a few different maps. Second, it runs on an NT machine which doesn't happen to be owned by someone with enough cash to drop on a P-III and a massive video card. And, you can get Daikatana from buy.com [buy.com] for $32.94 plus shipping. Using one of these coupons [amazing-bargains.com] and the price goes down to $22.94 plus shipping or $32.94 with no shipping. Thanks to pricescan.com [pricescan.com] and amazing-bargains.com [amazing-bargains.com] for finding the price and coupon, respectively. The point being, go out, buy the game, judge for yourself. If nothing else the story, whatever its faults, seems original enough to perhaps at least prod the FPS world out of the 'boom boom boom' mode (even if not in the same way as Thief 2). Of course, nothing looks as cool as what the people over at artifact entertainment [artifact-e...inment.com] are doing: Demise and Horizons. Both labors of love in their own right. (Demise is, btw, the successor to Mordor, and was formerly called 'Infinite Worlds'.) Demise is out and ready for order, and Horizons is pretty alpha atm.
  • He said "properly balanced". The Redeemer is suicide to use at close-to-mid range, and you only get *one* rocket before you have to pick it up again. And it's slow.

    As for the BFG, it used up tons of ammo and was slow to fire, and a sufficiently smart player knew how to avoid it: You got out of the directional cone originating from the firing player. He fires north, you run south as fast as you fucking can. Both were properly balanced weapons.

  • Re: You are incorrect (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @03:07PM (#1020870)
    Although Daikatana is indeed #5 on the Top Sales chart currently, this only measures the amount of product SHIPPED to stores, not sold. So, from the sales chart, we known Eidos has shipped lots of copies of Daikatana out to stores. What remains to be seen is how many of these copies actually are sold. Any and all product that the retailer does not want anymore (e.g - if it's not selling well) are returned to the publisher at their expense. Translation: Eidos has to buy back all unsold copies at cost. However, I do agree that there are probably large numbers of Daikatana being sold to members of the press. This is the result of Eidos capping off the number of press copies to 500.

  • Keep in mind Ion Storm != Daikatana (Score:3)

    by Mantle ( 104724 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:31PM (#1020872)
    I think a lot of people incorrectly link the failiure of Daikatana (which I agree, it is a faliure) to the failiure of John Romero. Even though he failed to create an entertaining game, he did manage to create a successful development house. Even though the company is known heavily for it's exterior image and mansion like offices, there are still many talented people that work there, such as Warren Spector and Tom Hall.

    Eidos would be fools to spend $20 Million on Daikatana and Romero alone. However, if you look at the products soon to come out of Ion Storm (Deus Ex, Anachronox), their future doesn't look so bleak.

    What John Romero did during the past 4 years was not only Daikatana, he also had to lay the foundation to develop 3 games at the same time. It's unfortunate Looking Glass had to go under because of Ion Storm (not John Romero personally) but it looks like some equally as impressive games will come out of Ion in the future.

  • Everybody loves Daikatana! (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:32PM (#1020873)

    Everybody loves Daikatana! Look at all these great reviews:

    • Sharky [sharkyextreme.com] sez it rawks! yeah right
    • FiringSquad: [firingsquad.com] "It is absolutely inferior in almost every conceivable way."
    • Damage Gaming [damagegaming.com] say: "I gave it a 3 out of 5, and that's generous"
    • CTNews [ctnews3d.com]: "in the end all I got was frustration"
    • GameSpot [zdnet.com] gives it a 4.6 out of 10
    • DailyRadar: [dailyradar.com] "Ultimate Gas Hands. Need we say more?"
    • GameProWorld [gameproworld.com] damns with faint praise: "It's not that bad."
    • Computer Games Online [cdmag.com] gives it 1.5 stars - "amateurish epic lands with a spectacular thud"
    • PC.IGN: [ign.com] "It's finally here. And we reviewed it. What? What else do you want us to say?"
    • Honest3D [honest3d.com] - "You all know that I didn't enjoy Soldier of Fortune - well I liked it a lot more than Daikatana."
    • GameCenter [gamecenter.com] gives it a 3 out of 10: "Daikatana is a waste of your time and money. Go play Half-Life again instead."
    • Happy Puppy [happypuppy.com]: "It'll make you wish it never came out at all"
    • GameZone [gamezone.com] actually seemed to kind of like it
    • GameSeek [daikatanaseek.com] really did like it! "f I had to describe this game in a word or two I would say that it is most entertaining!"
    • Ingava [ingava.com] didn't hate it all that much
    • Game Revolution: [game-revolution.com] "[A]lthough the game is nowhere near as good as it was promoted to be, ... it is not the worst game released this year. It is, however, stunningly outdated and mediocre."
    • Maximum PC: [maximumpc.com] "Four years for this?... It sucks. It sucks big-time. In fact, it sucks so bad, we have to wonder what kind of curious monstrosity the developers could have created with an eight-year product cycle.
    • GameFan [gamefan.com]: "It's not as bad as you think."
    • PCGamers.Net [pcgamers.net]: "Final Score: 70 out of 100, and I'm disappointed. Sigh."
    • GamePig [gamepig.com]: "Daikatana isn't a bad game, and was often fun to play. However, it's got several flaws that kept me from really enjoying it."

    If you're at all curious about how the hell this happened, GameSpot has a great article called "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana" [gamespot.com] that gives all the gorey details. They also have a complete walk-through [gamespot.com], though the concept kinda makes me shudder...

    --
    Anonymous cowards are looking forward to the DVD letterboxed release of Ishtar

  • Bungie has released the Marathon 2 source code! Go here:
    http://source.bungie.org/index.html

  • I know what John Romero can do next... (Score:3)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:00PM (#1020879) Homepage
    Start a company with Derek Smart of "Battlecruiser 3000" fame!
  • The last one (full 3D action - it did have the ability to go first person with a hot key, though it was far easier to play 3rd person)?

    While not a game that revolved around fighting all the time, you did have to get into "sword fights" and crossbow fights as you went deeper into the game, as well as solve puzzles. True, the whole game didn't revolve around the fighting aspect (which the games you mentioned do), but in my mind it should still qualify.

    Or, maybe it is a whole different genre - one that hasn't been fully explored yet. I don't know what to call it, but it goes beyond interactive fiction - it was almost a true interactive movie, in a sense - or maybe you could call it interactive Machinima (or however that is spelled)...

  • Re:another review (Score:3)

    by magicsquid ( 85985 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:03PM (#1020881) Homepage
    I suppose this is flame bait, but here goes anyway. I played the demo and *gasp* I liked it. I'm tired of seeing all the sci fi first person shooters, and when I played the first level of Daikatana I thought it was just going to be another of those. To my surprise it wasn't. Sure it had sci fi elements, but I was pleasantly surprised that it had dark ages mythology/fantasy in there also. I thought that the graphics were good and the shading/textures were good also. I thought that the wide selection of weapons were just as good, and I thought better than any other fps that I had played. To each his own though.

    "I can't kill my friend. Kill my friend."

  • There is one simple criteria. (Score:5)

    by DaveWood ( 101146 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:05PM (#1020884) Homepage
    And it was obvious to me from the Demo that DK was going to be a dog because of it. Daikatana's story was horrible, and it is compounded by bad voice acting and bad "puzzle" design.

    It's simple, really: if you want to make a single-player game, you should, cursorily at least, check and make sure it's well written.

    Half-life was a half-baked retread by movie standards, but it was still so much better than anything anyone else had bothered to do in terms of a story and/or gameplay that everyone (including me) was entranced.

    Daikatana's creative team comes off like rank amatuers, and it's obvious from every aspect of the materials in the game. The fact that their management skills/kung fu weren't the best is just sad and/or ironic. But, we had fair warning. This is the guy, after all, who founded his company on the whiny, middle-school notion (I paraphrase) "My vision comes first. Those little technology/logistics problems are secondary."

    Daikatana is just another creative embarrassment in a long line of such writing/designing disasters that are basically making the American video game industry a lot like the Japanese movie industry of days gone by. Except that Godzilla didn't look so blocky.

    There's nothing remarkable about it, either. It will stay that way until the industry's fusion with the rest of the entertainment industry moves farther along, at which point we will go from the Godzilla phase to... er... the Independence Day phase? Ouch.

  • It's not as easy as you think. (Score:5)

    by Mantle ( 104724 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:07PM (#1020886)
    The first person shooter that took four years to make is just poo.

    This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves. I think this was an incredible learning experience for John Romero and I hate to see people criticize him non-constructively. Obviously the game did not turn out the way it should have ideally, but the least people could do for his time would be polite...

    I read an interesting quote once, "Once you finish the first 90% of a project, then you have to finish the other 90%." A lot of people think John Romero is an immature partygoer that never does a full days work. I disagree. It would have been so easy to give up at the end after being delayed so many times, but he bit the bullet and saw it to the end. Congratulations to him!

    Take a look at this article to take a good look at the "Daikatana Process". It's quite long (took me an hour to read) but very in depth and thorough.

    http://www.gamespot.com/fea tures/btg-daikatana/index.html [gamespot.com]

  • wouldn't you be proud of your shit?
  • Marathon I and II ran pretty well on my LCIII, which was a 25 Mhz '030. A 33Mhz one should be just fine.

    As for Infinity, it's hard to say. I never tried it.

    Now, when I tried running Marathon on my mom's 16 Mhz '020 LC on the other hand... Heh. Now that sucked.


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Re:FPS plots (Score:5)

    by jafac ( 1449 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @02:41PM (#1020900) Homepage
    and for those who didn't play Marathon:

    Marathon: Earth's first colony ship, the Marathon, made from a hollowed-out asteroid, at the end of it's sub-light journey to a nearby star-system, is attacked by aliens bent on taking over the ship, destroying the nascent human colony on the planet below, and finding out where it came from so they can enslave humanity. The aliens are slavers, and have many races of slaves working for them. You are a super-killer cyborg, a military weapon, and it's your job to save the ship. You are sometimes aided by three AI's aboard the ship, who provide you with information, teleport you hither and yon, supply you with weapons, or become unresponsive or turn against you as the aliens hack into them. Later you find out that Durandal, one of the AI's actually was mad, signalled the alien scout ship, used you to get himself transmitted to the alien ship, and take it over, thus giving him the ability to travel faster than light - then use you and the alien ship to travel to an alien outpost, ex-home planet of one of the slave races, to uncover the secret to a technology that will allow Durandal to escape the eventual collapse of the universe in 12 billion years. (when you're an AI, and think yourself otherwise immortal, I guess you start pondering such problems).

    Next - funny you should ask - comes Halo:, I've seen some kick ass demos, the plotline is based around a ringworld (smaller than Larry Niven's orbiting a gas giant, not constructed around it). Supposedly there's a plot tie-in to Marathon, but the details haven't leaked yet.

    I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .

  • Not really selling that well either (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those of you who think Romero is having the last laugh with massive sales that were inevitable after 4 years of hype.... PCData showed 2,952 units sold in its first week. They cover about 60% of the market, which means 5,000 sold in the first week. This presumably includes many months of pre-orders. 4 years of hype gave them about $160,000 in their debut week. For better or for worse, Eidos is taking a bath.
  • It was probably made by an actual Diakatana fan.

    Some people enjoy the game, which is disturbing. But even scarier Diakatana has this strange affect on a small, rabidly-loyal group of gamers. These are people who have been playing the old demo for over a year and write up hideously long and ugly fan pages for each other about how elite they are how the new demo/game isn't as good as the old, yadda yadda yadda. They all worship Romero as a god and curse the demon Carmack.
    very odd.

    It's very much like the Amiga syndrome. i.e. the Amiga addicts who to this day will insist their 68040 amigas out-perform a P3 and that Zorro slots are better than PCI, and that Dave Hayne will one day lead the army of Rightenous against the Wicked....

    I don't know if there's an official name for this type of behavior but I propose "Amiga Syndrome".

  • wow, looking at that list makes me realize how down and out the PC gaming market is. consoles are kicking the PC's ass every which way.
  • How about "this is the Battlefield Earth of computer games"?

    But I think critics had even more fun with that disaster.

  • Greatest Game of all time? No. Fun? Hell yes (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:18PM (#1020913)
    I'm pretty far into Daikatana right now. Is it the greatest game of all time? No. Is it the most innovative and newest of technology demos on the market? No. Is there any redeeming value to the game? Yep.

    Daikatana is a lot of fun. There is enough variety in it that one rarely grows bored. All the complaints about shooting robotic mosquitos and frogs show that the people citing this as the game's downfall have not played past the first few levels. The mosquitos are gone after a level or two, as are the frogs. Never to be seen again. All enemies are like that in this game. Sooner or later, you wave goodbye to a critter, knowing that it will never grace the screen again in this game. The same goes for the weapons. As soon as you start to grow comfortable with one weapon's powers, you are thrust into a new world with all new weapons to learn.

    The game features cooperative play, as well. You and 3 of your friends can run about shooting each other "by accident."

    Level design goes from wonderful to mediocre at times. Creature design does the same. The skins on the creatures can be amazing, though. Lots of Doom-y skulls, faces, demony things on the textures.

    It's great fun. It's $29.99 at most stores. It's eaten up the past few weeks of my time, as well as the time of my friends, who rarely read forums or go to gaming websites, who have no idea who John Romero is, and have no idea how long it should/shouldn't take to make a game.

    Not only have I reccomended it to close friends, I will continue to reccomend this game to others. Nobody I have encouraged to buy this game has come back upset...but they have come back with only 3 hours of sleep due to trying to get out of Greece for hours on end, battling Ray Harryhausen style skeletons and nekkid chicks.

    Your mileage may vary.
  • Gamespot's piece quotes Romero as saying something like this (paraphrased by me because I couldn't be bothered to c&p):

    "I saw what id did with six people in nine months on Quake. I extrapolated that and reckoned we could do better in seven months with more people."

    Can you say Brooks' Law?

  • Frankly if I shot my mouth of about how much I could code to a bunch of developers and how l33t I was only to turn out not to be able to write a BubbleSort or create a Hash Function I'd expect to be laughed out of town and I would deserve it.

    Begging the question, "Why on Earth would you want to write a bubble sort?"

    The bubble sort is the Daikatana of sorting algorithms.



    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • I've Played Every FPS Ever Released, And... (Score:3)

    by 1200 ( 165427 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2000 @01:15AM (#1020917)
    It's true. I have played every FPS ever released. Even the bad ones. All the way to the end. Here, to establish my credentials, is all the ones I can think of. My thoughts on Daikatana will follow.

    Doom, DoomII, Final Doom (in both PC, Mac,Playstation, and N64 versions) Quake (PC, Sega, N64 + the two expansions packs) QuakeII (plus Juggernaut, Ground Zero, and Zaero expansions), Quake3Arena, Unreal and all expansions, Half-Life (aae), Duke Nukem (PC, Mac, PSX, and N64 +expansions), Goldeneye, Star Wars (the 2 PC ones and the N64 one, Blood, Blood 2, System Shock 1+2, Soldier of Fortune, Nam,Powerslave (PSX), Spec Ops, Shadow Warrior,Sin, Thief, Thief II, Shogo M.A.D, Brahma Force: Assault on Beltlogger 9 (PSX), Klingon Honor Guard, Alien Trilogy, Alien Vs. Predator (plus bonus levels), Redneck Rampage (and all expansions), Requiem, Kingpin, Mortyr, and an old PSX one that involved the use of "psionics."

    And now, Daikatana. It really is a very bad game. Ugly, monotonous, frustrating (in the bad sense of the word). And the worst voice-over acting since "Shadow Warrior," which featured the famous potentially-offensive stereotypical "inscrutable Chinaman."

    The closest I've seen to a game this bad was "Nam," a Doom-engine piece of crap with an intriguing box.

    Some people have said the problem with Daikatana was that it was too ambitious. Nonsense. Shadows of the Empire, for the N64, was too ambitious, with too many different types of gameplay. And I still enjoyed it.

    It's too bad someone with a fresh pair of eyes didn't look at Daikatana before it was too late and suggest that they alter it so that your "helpers" -- Superfly Johnson and Mikiko -- would instead be hostages that you have to escort to safety. Because that's what you end up doing.

    The AI for helpers is doable. Kingpin did it well. So did Half-life.

    And it's not a matter of Daikatana just not being able to live up to the hype. Because I'm very easily satisfied with an FPS of any kind. I even liked Klingon Honor Guard. And Mortyr!

    So if you want something resembling what Daikatana was supposed to be, track down a copy of the old PSX game "Powerslave," an FPS set in ancient Egypt. Or "Requiem," another excellent game with a good story that didn't get much attention.

    And if you bothered to read the list of FPS's I've played, and there's one missing: Trust me -- I've played it. On second thought, let me know: the thought that there's an FPS I haven't played yet excites me in a way Daikatana never will.

  • Why is it that all the reviewers seem to heap glowing praise on Diakatana for it's "unique time-travel aspects"? They seem to think that if it wasn't for the crappy execution, the idea would have been original and worthwhile.

    Doesn't anyone remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game? Turtles in Time? (Also release on SNES as TMNT4) Sure it was back in the early 90's but c'mon...to the best of my knowledge it was the first game not about time travel to incorporate time travel.

    It was also a damn good game. From 2500000 BC up to 2030 back to (then) present 1992. A fun filled romp through time.

    Bah. I understand that reviewers may be desperate for SOMETHING good to say but...please...time travel is old hat for movies AND video games...so enough already.

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • >I think this was an incredible learning experience for John Romero and I hate to see people criticize him non-constructively. Obviously the game did not turn out the way it should have ideally, but the least people could do for his time would be polite...

    Gosh, I hope someone gives me 30 million dollars. I would even put in writing that I'll get twice, no THREE times the educational value that John Romero got out of his.

    I thought that most people are being polite. The impression that I got is sadness. That all this time we were hoping he'd pull it off. That most game developers that could bring more to the table can't find funding. That despite this game being a flop, He is still responsible for making sure his company will be successfull enough to keep everyone in it employed.

    Good luck,
    ErikZ

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:5)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:18PM (#1020928)
    This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves. I think this was an incredible learning experience for John Romero and I hate to see people criticize him non-constructively. Obviously the game did not turn out the way it should have ideally, but the least people could do for his time would be polite...

    Please... there are cases when carring on in the face of adversity is admirable, and cases where it is stupid. This would obviously be one of the latter.

    If you are going to be a hot shot, leave the best job you will probably ever have, start your own company, blow ~$20 Million of other people's money, take 4 years, and turn out a piece of shit you deserve whatever ribbing you get. If, on top of all this, little things like the majority of your developers quiting one day don't make you question things, well, it shows you are lacking something in the common sense department.

    Someone poured their heart and soul into the Edsel too, and New Coke, and the Judge Dread movie, and they sucked too....

  • Re:It's not as easy as you think. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @01:23PM (#1020932)
    This type of attitude bothers me a lot. Romero poured his heart and soul into this game, and even though it was totally over-hyped and underachieving in the end, Daikatana made it to store shelves.

    If I spent the next 5 hours of my life working on a sculpture, it would probably look like a turd. But if I poured my heart and soul for the rest of my life into this sculpture, and it _still_ looked like a turd, guess what? IT'S STILL A PIECE OF SHIT!!
  • I bet Romero now wishes Killcreek's breast implants were refundable.

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