Dino Crisis (E) ISO
Description :
Raw instinct takes over in this new, adrenaline-pumping journey into
Survival Horror. Something is terribly wrong. Your covert mission to
infiltrate as isolated, research compound, has gone haywire... now you
find yourself pursued by a relentless, pre-historic terror. Suddenly,
your mission becomes a desperate fight for survival.
Regina slumped against the medical room door. Relief that the horrors
were locked out, at least for a moment, settled upon her with the same
slow weight as the aqua neon glare. Dragging herself across the room,
she was only now becoming aware of the pain from her wound as the
adrenaline ebbed. Crimson splashes fell steadily onto the gleaming white
tiles as she moved from the door to the bed.
Forget the
rumours. The magnificent Dino Crisis is NO middling take on Resident
Evil. Dino Crisis is a razor-edged survival horror experience in its own
right which pushed everything in the genre forward - physics, combat,
puzzles, character drama and gore. The coppery taste of mortality left
in your mouth after each game is testimony to some potent and
surprisingly well-developed horror themes which contrast the highest
technology against soft flesh and blood.
The context: Capcom's last move was Resident Evil 2.
Other developers had beaten Capcom to the punch in taking their own
genre and developing it with subject matter other than zombies. For
instance, ASCII's point-and-click Clock Tower embroiled players in a serial killer mystery in Norway. Konami's shattering Silent Hill
(before which I abase myself 666 times) turned the search for our
missing daughter into a journey through incomprehensible nightmares. In
1999 Capcom broke off from the undead themselves and returned to the
frey they had created with some suspicious-looking reptile eggs bundled
in their arms...
Dino Crisis
If Jurassic Park
had been a straight-ahead horror film for adults instead of stopping to
cuddle around with cute kids, comic sidekicks and talky overtures as it
did, the result might have been something like Dino Crisis - though
probably still not half as sharp.
A covert military operation
to 'repatriate' a rogue scientist from a secluded island complex turns
nasty when the trio of operatives who survive the helicopter drop find
everyone on the base torn to shreds. To their shock and disbelief, the
murderous third party turns out to be... dinosaurs. Dinosaurs which are
now roaming the island and the complex as if they've lived there
forever. Personal dynamics explode in conflict when team leader Gail
vows to complete the mission no matter what (I think his name is
shooting for irony since he is a very hardcore marine type), tech-boy
Rick just wants to get the hell out of there, and Regina - the flippest
survival horror heroine we've ever played - does most of the hard work
while looking out for both her partners.
In Dino Crisis I feel
the creators went out of their way to explore alternatives for this
genre in almost every area - even just for the sake of it in some cases -
but always to fascinating or thrilling effect.
- The visual presentation became roving 3D as opposed to the gorgeous but static Resident Evil backdrops.
-
The emphases of combat have been shifted all over the place to create
the very alien and yet 'realistic' experience of fighting with (and
evading) dinosaurs. Even the weakest dinosaur can take tremendous
punishment from a regular weapon, and in any close encounter you are
almost guaranteed to come out wounded. Yet there is a lot more space in
this game to vary your encounter strategies. I am also won over by the
imagination and research which has brought the dinosaurs to frightening
onscreen life.
- Ammo is sparse at one moment but drowning you in the next, thanks to the complex colour-coded emergency supply box system.
-
There is an extensive and modular system for mixing items. It's
daunting at first but very rewarding as you learn by your own research
how, for instance, anaesthetic might be used either to enhance a medikit
or to make a sleeping dart.
- Puzzles are far more numerous,
varied and abstract than in the Resident Evils prior to this game. Dino
Crisis is content to make you sit down with pen and paper to solve
alphanumerical twisters, to play concentration and memory style games or
to manipulate 3D puzzle elements in quick succession. It's the puzzle
queen of the genre. It also stars some of the most affectingly grisly
puzzles in the genre. Imagine trying to identify the one dead research
assistant whose fingerprints you need from amongst a base-full of
disemboweled corpses.
- The inter-character drama here is
strong, since your team-mates Gail and Rick constantly disagree on the
best course of action for the mission. The conflict is crystallised in
moments where you must choose whose plan to go along with, changing the
path of the game. Choose the idea you believe in it says - which I
really like, as it makes an attempt to rally your personal moral and
behavioural traits the first time you play!
- For me, the most
inspired touch was removing any kind of health meter (though for some
players, this totally freaks them out). You must observe Regina's
physical movements and bleeding onscreen to gauge how she's faring.
Bleeding is a separate issue from flesh wounds and requires different
medical treatment. And BOY does Regina bleed, thanks to the tasty (or
sick-inducing for some) new 'blood engine' specific to Dino Crisis. If
you do die, you can be saved by Resuscitation items (extra lives in
effect) and a supply of arcade-style Continues, quite different to
Resident Evil's truly final 'GAME OVER's. Not to mention a lot more
friendly to newcomers to this kind of game.
Regina
It's
impossible to imagine Dino Crisis with anyone other than Regina as its
central figure. The images of her shockingly jagged blood-coloured hair,
exotic can't-place-them features and that curious grey spysuit are
indelibly stamped upon this game. Her personality is also a shot for the
genre: strident and engaging with a delight for assertive sarcasm. This
is all a far cry from the cardboard heroine syndrome that caught up
with Jill Valentine for Resident Evil 3. Regina's vocal performance by Stephanie Morgenstern is great fun too.
'This is no joke you idiot! We were just attacked by a big-ass lizard!'
... remains my favourite Regina quote, though a lot of players prefer her ridiculously unfazed 'That's disgusting,' at the moment Gail first shows her an eviscerated corpse.
Regina
has all the core moves of the survival horror heroine at her disposal
which she pulls off with great fluidity. She was also the first woman
lucky enough to add the 'quick 180 degree turn' to her arsenal, and the
first to start flicking her head around for more dramatic glances in the
direction she's moving (What a claim to fame!). Dino Crisis also
introduced the ability to select different ammo types for all of your
weapons - the pistol, shotgun and grenade launcher - a system whose next
interpretation would be Resident Evil 3's mixable gunpowders.
I've
seen Regina jokingly called 'that fat-butted chick', but she also seems
to be the dark horse of desirable heroines in these games. Curious
eyes, shock hair, wide derriere... her bizarre allure sneaks up on you!
Japan continues to provide us Westerners with its enigmatic perspective
on women, and I continue to be spellbound whilst circling the elusive
meanings in my imagination. Frankly I doubt that either Japan or myself
will ever fully understand what is going on here.
Ibis Island
There
is no doubt that Shinji Mikami is a masterful director of these games.
His visual and emotional ideas are always potent and most importantly of
all, he understands the dynamics of horror. The newly-untethered roving
camera system mobilised for Dino Crisis offers a style and feel
considerably different to Resident Evil and far more in league with Silent Hill.
The camera floats along behind Regina for the majority of the game with
the cold precision of a Kubrick film. Long sequences in which we simply
run - through glowingly-lit science facility tunnels with doors opening
automatically before us, or along a nighttime rooftop, or through a
cavernous underground passage beneath Ibis Island - are beautiful and
hypnotic, and can erode a player's sense of time. Regina stays onscreen
for the 'door opening' loading screens too, a nice move which increases
our empathy with her (since she never goes out of sight) as well as
extinguishing most of our impatience at the smallest breaks in our game.
Musically, Dino Crisis is again trying something new for the
genre with beautiful and threatening results. The expected 'warm'
musical reactions to particular onscreen moments are slashed back. Dino
Crisis uses cold synth patterns which follow their agendas almost in spite
of what is happening onscreen, let alone in any other elements of the
music, with bassy drones and searing moments of brass roaring around
beneath. What didn't change is that they composed something very
poignant for the 'save game room' theme. Where else would I find that
fear-tinged inwardly-looking music but in survival horror?
Dino Violence
Like Steven Seagal, dinosaurs are Hard To Kill,
and fending off the carnivores for the length of the adventure is the
tense focus of Dino Crisis. It's fun, challenging, scary and gory in
rapid succession. Combat physics have the distinct smell of the real
about them, especially when it comes to depicting the damage visited
upon the human body.
The game provocatively sets you up for a
mauling from the start. The fact is that shooting dinosaurs with your
puny 9mm Parabelum rounds (which is all you've got in the beginning)
will barely make them flinch. Raptors will charge you in response, leap
on you and crush you to the floor, knock you across a room with their
tail, flip you overhead, and best of all, rip into you with their teeth.
When a dinosaur fixes onto Regina's arm and starts tearing, the effect
is scarily dehumanising as you watch her mauled and shaken like a
ragdoll before she's spat away bleeding. All the while the game's camera
cranes back and forth to follow the blood-letting with cold
disinterest.
When you do escape, you're left with wounds which
won't stop bleeding! Blood spits and drips from Regina's ripped flesh,
leaving a messy trail on the floor wherever you walk and draining your
life away until you can find a hemostat. Dino Crisis' gleeful and
splashy new bleeding factor increases the game's power in so many ways.
It stirs very primal and queasy feelings which make you feel like your
life is really on the line. Bleeding to death as you limp about
looking for health can certainly make for an end which feels genuinely
tragic. Or funny, once you've reached that goofy mood that only
end-to-end videogame deaths can induce ('Oh yay! I got torn apart
again.')
You can come back for revenge on your tormentors later
with better weapons. Once you've modified your Glock 34 to become a
Glock 35 and slapped in the 40S&W ammo, you start producing critical
hits and squirts of blood. The shotgun and grenade launcher will send
the beasts flying into walls and furniture amongst great welters of the
red stuff. If you've mixed up anaesthetic darts you can put dinos to
sleep, or slay them outright if you're clever enough to mix up a poison
dart.
Then it's the dinos' turn to come back with 'better
weapons'. Larger purple-scaled velociraptors will tag-team you. Flying
pteradons swoop upon you whenever you expose yourself on the complex's
rooftops, tearing at your abdomen and bowling you across the screen.
Such assaults can even send your weapon flying from your hand and you'll
need to run and grab it. The most dread dinosaur is a kind I'd never
heard of before I played Dino Crisis, but one which I doubt I will now
forget. The Therezino. A hulking, plodding dark lizard with elephantine
limbs which it uses to absolutely maul you in the way a grizzly bear
would. The whole screen and soundtrack reverberates with the pounding of
these monsters. I think these guys even outdo the impressive but
obligatory T-Rex who makes repeated passes at Regina in this game.
Everyone wants and expects a T-Rex in any entertainment featuring dinosaurs these days. But 'Therezinos'?
The
inclusion of the red laser grids throughout the complex which can be
toggled from either side - to grant or prevent access to any living
thing - is a masterstroke. Not just for strategic fun. This single
feature elicits an incredible range of emotions if you just stand there
and watch a lone dinosaur's reaction at being sealed off from you. At
first: Relief! You're safe. Now amusement. The stupid dinosaur keeps
hurling itself into the lasers trying to break through. Doesn't it
learn? Twice, three times, four times. It's no longer funny, it's
frustrating. There's an awful scream from the dino every time it gets
burned, but moments later it rolls to its feet, maybe stalks about a
bit, reconsiders the situation (it's the same) and launches itself anew.
Finally all you are able to feel is fear, as it's quite apparent that
the only instinctive thought alive behind those reptilian eyes is of
killing you.
By the same token, dinos will often chase you
between rooms, smashing through doors to get at you or leaping through
windows and vents at the worst possible moment.
Given that
videogames often struggle to make even the animals we are familiar with
behave realistically, the dinosaurs here are stunningly 'alive'. They
nose about rooms, sway and hiss and rear up, stroll, walk and dash, and
can be found sleeping at times. They seem entirely dynamic from moment
to moment, not obeying any reassuring patterns, and this is what gives
your encounters with them such a knife-edge quality. Combined with the
seemingly endless ways Regina can get torn apart or thrown about by
these animals, the dinosaur experience is perfection. When I had only
heard about this game, I never conceived that it would feel as
electrifying and real (for extinct animals!) as it does.
Puzzles and Technology
Amidst the violence, you will knuckle down for a lot
of puzzling. You'll fiddle with onscreen locks and codes, reconfigure
computer systems, open cryptically sealed doors, shove crates around a
warehouse to clear your path, and reassemble hi-tech machine components.
Best of all, a high quotient of these puzzles are %100 replayable in
the sense that it's always fun to figure them out on the spot.
The
'non-replayable' puzzles are also a considerable advance on what we've
seen before. I love the Digital Disc Key password systems where you have
to keep using new cyphers to break the codes which keep doors locked by
writing it all out on paper. In other areas, the expanding scope for
lateral thinking is really impressive. I was surprised upon more than
one occasion when a long shot I thought might work did work. For
instance, thinking to collect someone's fingerprints in advance off an
object I knew they had touched, rather than chasing the person up in the
flesh later on. Certain puzzles with a technological bent, such as
repairing and restarting a whopping generator, can be distressingly
deep. The corresponding satisfaction in completing such tasks is HUGE.
Blood and Technology
The
disquieting mixture of steel sterility, technology and gore which makes
most people afraid of the dentist and hospitals is tackled on a grand
scale in Dino Crisis. This is the major horror theme saturating the
story and the atmosphere - our highest technology versus our flesh and
blood, and the interwoven vulnerability of both.
The idea is
visited again and again throughout the game. A researcher carrying a
vital computer chip gets dismembered by a T-Rex and for one horrible
moment it looks like you might have to retrieve the chip from the
dinosaur's stomach. A detail which seems insignificant at the time -
turning on a researcher's pager from his personal telephone whilst
fiddling around at his desk - later acquires a wicked significance when
you hear a mysterious beeping in a hallway full of nameless corpses.
Technological means of identifying people, and finding ways to cheat
these, are an obsession of Dino Crisis. You can't help but feel a chill
as people's identities are reduced to a pattern you can extract with a
fingerprint collecting device from a bloody handprint they left on
something in their final moments. Yet there's no way to avoid trekking
about the complex collecting and exploiting identities like a ghoul. You
need them to beat the hi-tech security and power systems which thwart
your progress or escape at every turn.
The scientists in this
game were working under Dr. Kirk on an experiment to transcend reality
itself, using the planet's highest technology. But their end was the
opposite of transcendent... they got torn about by dinosaurs. And when
we see Regina's blood vividly spitting onto the floor because an animal
tore a hole in her, our mortal frailty in the face of all we've overcome
through technology thuds home with sickening speed. This is the deeper
bite of Dino Crisis.
Dinosaurs Live
With a
familiar-but-unfamiliar spin on almost every element of the genre, Dino
Crisis is definitely its own survival horror game and one of the best.
The contrasts are amazing. The atmosphere is powerfully grim in spite of
this being the most brightly lit survival horror adventure to date.
There's more blood dripping from the screen than ever, but the ghostly
camerawork and musical score display unflinching disinterest even as
they deliver the gore to your face. You've got the flippest heroine to
date with the striking Regina, whose mediations with toughie Gail and
techie Rick are always engaging. And there's room in here to have fun by
playing in lots of different ways. You can try to kill all the dinos,
dodge all the dinos, or 'sleep' all the dinos with darts. You can search
for improved solutions to the puzzles and you can also try siding with
Rick or Gail at each decision point to see what different things happen
in the story. Unlockable extra costumes for Regina (which aren't silly
and have a good joke amongst them), and a tough bonus mission for the
combat-thirsty are just the final icing on the cake.
Dino Crisis is an incredibly rich long-term gaming and horror experience. Cheekier, scarier, bloodier. HAIL REGINA!
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