Trespasser - PC - Review

[Bluepixie]

Immersive, atmospheric and vastly unappreciated. Technologically impressive as well as being a joy to explore.

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Set several years after Jurassic Park: The Lost World, the game puts you in the role of a plane crash survivor stranded on the dinosaur-infested island from the film. It is the player's job to survive long enough to get off the island.

Sounds great?

Well it is. Straight off the bat is the presentation, with the intro sequence narrated by none other than Richard Attenborough playing John Hammond; the creator of Jurassic Park. You are then introduced to Anne, played by Minnie Driver, who is the unfortunate tourist that crash lands off the coast of Isla Sorna. Now, compared to modern standards this game looks pretty primitive, however it still has a lot to offer. Bumping the resolution up 1280x960 and putting the view distance up makes a huge difference. The island has a lot of detail, the engine even uses specular bumpmapping on the dinosaurs skin. Orchids can be found amongst the undergrowth, old unwanted pictures in abandoned houses, the rusting shells of hunting jeeps and huge skeletons. Little things like the way Hammond and Anne talk to you about their personal feelings, hopes and dreams makes them real. Exploring the hollow shell that used to be the science team village and the abandoned labs full of derelict equipment is eerie and unsettling. These little details make the game so involving. They really put a lot of time and effort into this game. It deserves so much more that people realise. The feeling of isolation is very strong, only likable to Terminator Future Shock and System Shock. The game world feels coherent and solid which makes it such a joy to explore, which is what this game is really about, and messing up raptors with a shotgun.

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Yes, there are plenty of raptors on the island, and they generally mess you up. They are well animated, this goes for all of the dinos. In the early parts of the game you’ll only meet one or two at a time and have a habit of sneaking about, scaring the crap out of you, then eating you. However in the later stages you have to take on up to 4 or 5 sometimes and its hard work. Then there is the T-Rex’s. This is 2006, and they were very impressive, I can’t imagine what going up against one of these beasts must have been like in 1998. Best to let them come into contact with herbivores to kill and feed, which can work in your favour as long as they don’t notice you shuffling off. The herbivores unfortunately don’t crop up in the game as much I would have liked, but considering this game is pre T&L it’s not surprising that the dino count is kept low in most areas.

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Which brings me to the next and probably most important part of Trespasser. I take it you’ve all played Half-Life 2? Think the physics were amazing and ground breaking? Love the smart little puzzles involving your environment? Well, Trespasser did it first. Trespasser has a full physics engine; everything has weight, material, and is effected by gravity. Want to pile up some boxes to get up a broken staircase? Sure go ahead. Need to get on top of a hut on stilts? Shoot out the supports. Raptor coming for your ass, got no guns? Grab a stick and smack him one, may not do much good but it’s worth a shot.

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Combat and interaction is the strangest aspect of Trespasser. You don’t just run over weapons to pick them up, you actually have an arm. Yes, an arm, which you can control fully. To pick up a weapon, you extend your arm then grab it, then move your arm until you’ve lined up the sights. Which looks comical at first, seeing this arm sticking you in front of you, but you get used to it. The weapons actually are models so if you get close to object and hit them too hard with your gun, you may drop it. It really adds to the immersion. For example, you are lining up a shot on a dino at long range, you really have to be steady and line it up properly, which makes the kill all the more satisfying. Heck you can stick your MP5K to the side gangsta style and mess the raptors up close and personal or just grab a big metal hammer and smash their skulls in. Combat in Trespasser is much slower than we are used to these days, but nothing is more terrifying than when a raptor gets so close that it whacks you guns out of your hands. You are franticly trying to pick it up again as big nasty jaws bite your butt. You can only hold 2 weapons at a time, and there is no reloading, so you have to make every shot count. It also makes searching your surroundings for weapons a constant pass time, which is a little strange considering the games realistic styling, you would think you’d have a bag for extra ammo. However, I can see why they didn’t do this as a bag would require an inventory system, breaking the immersion. Which is why there is no HUD. You have to listen to Minnie count out the rounds left in the gun she is holding. Want to see how much health you have left? Look down and check out the tattoo on the impressive rack Anne is packing.

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Don’t get me wrong this game has its faults. The physics engine has its problems and the level and dinosaur design are limited by the technology of the time. The major failing of Trespasser is that its sights were aimed so high. To create a true living breathing world full of creatures with their own agendas and life cycles is only now in 2006, becoming achievable. Despite its failings, Trespasser is a good game and will be enjoyed by the gamer that can explore and indulge in a finely crafted atmosphere, as well as for its technological achievements.

Niall Macdonald

[YegaDoyai]

The Background:(for interest?)

As most of you know I've been round the block a few times when it comes to gaming. In 98 when this game came out I had Creatives first attempt at a standalone (ie non 3dfx) graphics accelerator. Such were the times, the drivers didn't unlock the option for acceleration until fully 1 year after its launch. I seem to remember it was an S3 Virge derivitive. I had a Cyrix 233+ (Equivilent to about a P166 and had MMX no less). I think I also had a PCI 128 sound card but I may have had my SBLive! Anyway, it was my first year at Uni and my first year with decent and constant access to the net. As such it was the first year that I could kep track of the games without having to buy magazines. Trespasser had intrigued me since the early E3 images from '97. Huge open terrain and dinosaures and crucialy a film licence that was not going to use anything other than the 'idea' of the film, which reminded me of my favorite game of all time Terminator: Future Shock. When I finally got my hands on a demo I was dissapointed to only get 5-10FPS and struggled to make out what was going on because the excellent drivers for the afforementioned graphics accelerator lied about it's ability to render a blended alpha source (transparent texture). However I loved the fact that I could mess up raptors by knocking crates on them, or by pulling the supports away from the cabin and watching it roll down the hill. It was also the first game with full skeletal animation and, to a certain degree, rag doll physics. Anyway the game was released for about £50 and that was WAY too much for me so I played Half-Life and was content. The next year I got a Matrox G400 and a Celeron A 366 (Clocked to 450) and looked about for a copy of the game, it was still selling for about £30 and it was over a year old so again I passed it by. This continued for a long time until I finally forgot about it (it never came out on a budget label).

When Niall moved to Aberdeen (in '03) I mentioned in passing to him on several occasions that most of the things we were seeing as 'future developments' in either AI or physics had already ben attempted in Trespasser and, frankly, I was not impressed. Nialls comment is lost to me and maybe he can remember what he said but I remember him saying that he thought that we needed to find a copy and play through to see what it was really like as he rememberd the demo but was also unable to play it at the time.

The Technology:(For me)

Come early '06 and Niall tells me he has finally aquired a copy. A brief search online reveals a couple of patches allowing higher res and further draw distances and also included some fan made texture packs. Considering the age of the game most of the technology we take for granted nowadays was unavailable. Things like transparency and shadow maps were deemed very impresive for the day. Remember that when Half-Life came out (same year as this) it had a software mode and won awards for it's ability to use coloured lighting and other fancy effects. It did not cast dynamic shadows (Trespasser does), it did not have a physics engine that could deal with complex physical interactions (Trespasser does), its AI (at the time lauded as the best available) is nothing more than set waypoints and cursory objectives, the AI in Trespasser is more akin to the visability and flanking ability of FarCry. When you drop things in the water they float and rotate as the center of gravity is found, wavelets slowly emerge from the bobbing object AND THEN INTERACT WITH THE ROCKS STICKING OUT THE WATER!! Granted the waves are little more than an alpha channel texture blended with the transparent water texture and combined with the seafloor texture (that's 3 texture ops btw something that took till the original Radeon until it could be done in a single pass) but there is no pixel shader here, no vertex shader, this was being calculated, on the fly, by your processor. No wonder it required such beasty specs at the time.

The AI for the time would have been frighteningly real. In Half-Life we were treated to some of the best scripted fights EVER, they are still to be surpassed and I have now played through HL2, Far Cry, FEAR, Doom 3 and Quake 4 amongst others. However Trespasser has open terrain and has moveable physics objects so a scripted AI would fall over the moment the player put a crate in the way or made a tower of crates to get to some previously inaccessable area. The AI in Trespasser only has to deal with 'simple' beasts but in that it has some design beauty. The Raptors wait underneath you pacing back and forth, occasionaly snapping and snarling at each other, watching you, waiting for you to show a weakness. When you ARE caught in the open they move forward and then feint away, if you press on they turn and attack, if you are more cautious they will group up and move round to your side while another attracts your attention to the front. If there is a bush they can jump out of they will head for it and try an coax you nearer. When they are wounded they run away, attacking only in numbers or when cornerd. Simple AI, devestatingly effective. You feel hunted, you constantly watch your back and when you DO get caught out by that sneaky silent raptor only to hear it's quick feet on the undergrowth I can assure you F.E.A.R. has nothing on the panic that rises.

As Niall notes, the levels are sparse of entities, there are maybe 10-15 dinos in any one level that can take up to an hour to walk through (technically you could walk by most enemies). This is a technology thing and something that will just have to be accepted (like playing ZDoom and refusing to use the jump option). Overall the levels are not as 'full' of detail as Half-Life either, but considering that on one of the later levels where you have to accend a mountain you can see from the bottom all the way to the top and get there without loading again it is quite an achievment. The last thing I'd like to say about the technology side of things encompasses the sound and animation. The sound is by a film studio Dreamworks, you might of heard of them? Trust me, the sound is second to none. The animation is limited but effective, compared to modern games the dinos have little freedom of movement but what they do do, they do effectively.

The Gameplay:(For Strings)

You are alone, on an island, you find some weapons. What do you do? Do you have need of the weapons? You decide to take them, if there are weapons here, there may be folk with weapons on the island, right? You move off the beach and into the jungle, under the canopy the sunlight glints through the trees and creates pools of light and dark, highlighting some of the flowers and debris on the jungle floor. It looks great, I wonder what I'm going to do here? You see some crates and a something on top of them. You move over to explore and find that you cannot reach the crates, far less the object on top. You look around and find a rock. Taking the rock you hurl it at the crate and lo and behold the crate rocks back and spills the object clattering onto the boulders behind. You quickly move to the boulders in time to watch the rifle slide and tumble its way off the rocks and come to a dull thud on the jungle floor. In the distance an animal makes a strange and oddly violent noise. Too much Discovery channel tells you that only predators make noises like that, and only very large and dangerous ones make noises so loud that you can hear them from a long distance.

That is how I'd some up the gameplay, you WANT to explore because you want to know what happens, you don't WANT to kill the dinos and you don't have to if can avoid them. They don't want to kill you, they want to EAT you, if you offer them something easier than you to eat then they will ignore you.

Simply awesome, all the faults you find with this game are due to its age, nothing else. A remake of this is required.