32 Bits 1996: D & Alien Trilogy

32 Bits is a series where I revisit the most popular games of the recent past; from the launch of the original Playstation to the last days of the Xbox 360. Why?

To chart the evolution of games.
To destroy people’s nostalgic feelings by playing the “classics” they all know…alongside the detritus everyone played at the time, but no one remembers.
To rediscover games unjustly forgotten by history.

The time is March 1996: three months into the Playstation’s first full year. The Nintendo 64 is several months away; while Sega’s Saturn system is fading fast.

In each post I review two games; each came out at roughly the same time. Sometimes they’re connected; usually, they’re unrelated. The only thing they have in common: membership in Sony’s Greatest Hits line, or its European and Japanese equivalents. These games all sold at least 150,000 copies and were what everyone played in their day. Why were they popular, and what can we learn from them today?

Playstation #22:

D

Developed by WARP, published by Acclaim

Originally developed for the 3DO

Playstation version released: December 1995 (Japan), March 1996 (North America/Europe)

Best-Seller in: Japan (The Best)

In 1994, a new game company formed in Japan – founded by a musician who would become one of game design’s biggest rebels.

Kenji Eno, founder of the short-lived company WARP, created an inventive body of work. He developed for unpopular systems; he delivered special editions personally, and packed games with special WARP condoms. And befitting his career as a musician, he made creative use of sound.

Alas, D is a rough introduction to a singular creator. It’s based around an original mechanic, but unfortunately it’s one that drenches the game in tedium.

The ever-ticking clock.

D is famous for taking place in real-time. The player can’t save or even pause; the clock is always ticking towards midnight. If you don’t complete the game’s three discs in two actual hours, the game ends abruptly.

When I started playing D I was surprised by the perfunctory feel of the game’s story. It felt tacked on…and sure enough, it was: Eno developed the game without any story scenes so that he could avoid publisher censorship by submitting this story-free version to them.

Laura considers a clue.

The game’s main character is Laura. One of WARP’s odder inventions was this “digital actress”; a character who took lead roles in all their works – though each character is different, they’re all named Laura, and they all look the same.

Laura arrives at her father’s hospital and finds everyone is dead; soon, a portal transports her into an ominous medieval castle. Her father’s translucent head warns her to turn around and leave – despite the only possible exit being locked. These scenes are unintentionally hilarious at first, and just tiring later due to the repetition. His see-through noggin warns you to turn back half a dozen times.

A cryptic scene from one of Laura’s flashbacks.

Scattered throughout the castle are four hidden scarab beetles. Each gives you a cryptic scene from Laura’s past. The flashbacks build to a scene of shocking brutality; here the crude graphics, which sabotage the game’s conclusion by rendering a theoretically terrifying villain laughable, in no way dull the impact of D’s biggest twist.

A wheel puzzle.

In D, you wander around the castle solving typically inane adventure game puzzles. Alas, the game’s puzzles are intentionally designed to be tedious time wasters. Progress through the second disc is stymied by the need to turn a wheel to unlock rooms; often you’ll turn it ten or more times, watching the same animation every time. No thought is required, just rote memorization. A confounding puzzle on the third disc shows you two wheels and a ball between them; you must turn the wheels until the ball falls onto the other wheel. There’s nothing particularly clever about any puzzles in D; they’re busywork, plain and simple, an artificial means of generating suspense. As you turn wheels, study stars and unlock safes the clock is still ticking away…

A suit of armor menaces Laura.

Laura cannot die. In disc 2 she passes through a long corridor, lined with suits of armor. When one springs to life and attacks, an orange LEFT button pops up on-screen. Yes, D unexpectedly includes a quick time event. And here I thought that in the 90s they were safely confined to the likes of Dragon’s Lair. Fail to press the right buttons…and Laura’s knocked into the pit below. There’s a convenient ladder that deposits you right back into the QTE, ready for another go. The only threat in D are diversions wasting your precious time.

D takes place in the first person – Laura swivels from point of interest to point of interest. A creative method of exploration…yet frustratingly, you often can’t move to the point you want. To reach the dresser in the bedroom on disc 2, you can’t just walk there from the door – you have to move to a painting, and only then can you look towards that dresser.

Though D’s horror elements resemble the hokey jump scares of a flash game, it creates a convincingly suspenseful atmosphere. Unfortunately, its central gimmick necessitates tedious design to function. Despite its many failings, D and its creators deserve applause for trying something new. Their creation may not work, but it’s a one-of-a-kind experience.

D was originally designed for the 3DO; its Playstation release was hampered when far too few copies were made and Acclaim couldn’t meet demand. In response, WARP spurned Sony. Their next game, Enemy Zero (a game with invisible enemies you track via noise), was developed for the Saturn. One of their most original games, Real Sound (an audio-only game created for the blind) followed suit. D2 (the only link to the original is Laura) began development on a system so unpopular, it never even came out – the Panasonic M2. A vastly different D2 later made its way onto the Dreamcast; the most ambitious game WARP ever made, D2 was also their last; WARP left the game industry soon after its failure, and the company dissolved in 2005.

Eno retired from game development after D2. He returned to music, and tried his hand at many diverse projects. Then in 2009 he made his gaming comeback with You, Me & the Cubes for the Wii.

Unfortunately, it would be the last game he ever worked on. Eno died this February at the age of 42; he will be remembered as one of the most visionary, inventive designers in gaming history.

A zero out of five is a must-play game that also happens to be terrible. D is not a good game, but it’s a endearingly fascinating one that makes some interesting decisions.

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Playstation #23:

Alien Trilogy

Developed by Probe, published by Acclaim

Released: February 1996 (North America), March 1996 (Europe)

Best-Seller in: North America (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum)

One of the most persistent canards among nostalgic gamers is the oft-repeated assertion that gaming has been dumbed down for modern audiences; that a long-gone heyday of extreme difficulty has given way to the defanged challenges of modern, mainstream games.

This belief is largely bullshit. The tutorials widely decried by “hardcore” gmers are necessary replacements for little-read manuals. AAA games adopted unlimited lives and continues because their focus shifted from providing a worthy challenge to guiding players through a story. And it’s hard to dismiss the generation that produced Dark Souls [dev. by From Software/2011/PS3, Xbox 360 & PC] and Super Meat Boy [Team Meat/2010/Xbox 360 & PC] as an era of simplistic, undemanding games.

The graph of FPS map design - on the left is Doom, to the right a unnamed, archetypal modern shooter.

The graph of FPS map design – on the left is Doom, to the right an archetypal modern shooter.

One piece of evidence trotted out by territorial gamers is a graphic comparing level design in Doom [id/1993/DOS, etc.] to modern shooters. Doom’s levels are complex webs of stairs, passageways and chambers. The modern shooter’s design is extraordinarily linear, just a straight line broken up by cutscenes. What a stunning indictment…of 1993’s level design.

The earlier game’s levels are a confounding maze, a circular time-waster where backtracking is common and it’s easy to get lost. The latter may be linear, but so are the levels in Valve’s beloved Half-Life [1998/PC & PS2] and Left 4 Dead [2008/PC & Xbox 360]. Though Valve executes their designs with considerably more excitement than modern military shooter developers, there’s nothing wrong with developers focusing their efforts.

Alas, Alien Trilogy gives in to sprawl. There were surprisingly few first person shooters on the original Playstation: ports of Doom and its knockoffs, plus originals Kileak [Genki/1995] and Disruptor [Insomniac/1996] early in the system’s life; ports of Quake and the original franchise Medal of Honor [DreamWorks/1999] in the console’s last years. And thank God for that, since the first person shooters of the mid-90s are generally abysmal, an endless procession of aliens in dark corridors.

Later in the decade, first person shooters and gaming would be revolutionized by the open environments of Unreal [Epic & Digital Extremes/1998/PC], the storytelling of Half-Life, realism of Rainbow Six [Red Storm/1998/PC, etc.], RPG elements of Deus Ex [Ion Storm/2000/PC & PS2], and freedom of Starsiege: Tribes [Dynamix/1998/PC]. But all those games are in the future, years after Alien Trilogy.

Alien Trilogy is the first movie licensed game I’ve played for 32 Bits; I must confess that I’ve never seen any of the Alien films. The game faithfully replicates the alien xenomorphs and their acidic blood; the protagonist is Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the first solo female hero I’ve seen in this series, even if she’s just an arm holding a gun.

Fighting a xenomorph.

Unfortunately Alien Trilogy adheres to the conventions of the corridor shooter. You charge through dark corridors, unlocking doors. Behind every door lurks a swarm of enemies. Pump ammo into them until they’re dead. Repeat. Like many of Doom‘s progeny, it lacks that game’s propulsive energy.

Levels begin as circuitous labyrinths and only grow larger as the game goes on. There are the requisite secrets to find, but why? Trekking through dark corridors is tiring. At least Alien Trilogy creates a convincingly suspenseful atmosphere, with the pounding heartbeats of its score adding considerably to the game’s foreboding feeling. The sound is excellent; long before you can see enemies, you can hear them scamper just out of sight, track them with beeps on the radar.

The sprawl of Alien Trilogy doesn’t add to the suspense. Alien Trilogy builds up to skirmishes with atmospheric intensity, but the firefights themselves are merely frustrating attempts to maneuver out of your enemy’s reach. Besides, something can only be scary a certain number of times before it becomes routine. Once a xenomorph pops out from around a corner and kills you a dozen times, it’s not surprising anymore. It’s expected, and when a game only has a few tricks it falls apart the second you’re used to them.

A hallway full of bodies. Stepping on the corpses of alien foes hurts you.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that suspense is when you know there’s a bomb under the table, but don’t know when it’ll go off. In Alien Trilogy there’s a bomb under the table, alright – but it’s a dud.

It’s interesting to compare Alien Trilogy with D. Knowing nothing about either game, I threw them together since they both came out early in ‘96; I found out later that they’re both published by Acclaim (a large publisher that collapsed in 2004), and design decisions in both lead to tedium. But D is original in ways that still hold interest today; Alien Trilogy is derivative despite its strong atmosphere and suspense.

They don’t make them like this anymore – and that’s a good thing.

A two out of five means a game is mediocre and boring (or historically unimportant); it’s eminently skippable. Alien Trilogy creates a suspenseful atmosphere but that’s the only real distinguishing factor here.