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Daikatana Sucks: It's Official
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?
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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) 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"
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Lowtax at Something Awful has an even funnier look at Daikatana and the release. 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.
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
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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Everybody loves Daikatana! Look at all these great reviews:
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" that gives all the gorey details. They also have a complete walk-through, though the concept kinda makes me shudder...
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Anonymous cowards are looking forward to the DVD letterboxed release of Ishtar
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.
We're on the road to Tycho.
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
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.