A horse of course
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Dino Crisis
Launched roughly at the height of the Resident Evil craze on the original Playstation, Dino Crisis is a quasi-fixed-perspective survival horror in which a team of crack special forces do their best impression of classic B-movies on a remote island filled with hostile prehistoric lifeforms. Wise-cracking black hacker, humourless middle-aged vet, two redshirts and the sassy, black-leather redhead weapons expert Regina hunt try to extract a missing megalomaniac and escape from the island before something explodes or warps reality or something. I wasn't really paying attention.
To the best of my admittedly porous memory I hadn't touched this title up until a couple of weeks ago. I definitely recall it getting pretty heavy coverage in PS1 magazines back in the day, with the fully-3d graphics, "predator AI", and "Panic Horror" elements being promoted by Capcom. But whilst it garnered passable scores in the infamous 70-85% bracket, it never managed to distinguish itself within the genre in the way Silent Hill or Parasite Eve did, and most people were probably only ever aware of it as "Resident Evil with Raptors". Gameplay still follows the classic RE formula, with faster and more aggressive dinosaurs replacing zombies and an invulnerable T-Rex popping up to harass the player during various scripted sequences. The raptors were supposedly meant to actively hunt the player, up to and including ambushes and following blood trails left when the player fails to treat open wounds, though the only real evidence of this is a handful of unmolested enemies sometimes being teleported from one room to another based on scripted events. Enemy variety is essentially limited to raptors, very small raptors, and very fat raptors, plus a couple of brief cameos by pterodactyls (let me be the first to congratulate myself for remembering the correct spelling of that without looking it up). There are a few other minor additions to the typical playstation survival horror experience, such as early incarnations of QTEs as "danger mode" to avoid instant death or extra damage, as well as item chests now being independent of one another and locked by a finite number of "plugs" found around the facility (presumably to try and add an extra level of decision making to resource management).
Aside from the setting, the only significant deviation from RE the average player will notice is that puzzles are a much greater (and more time-consuming) element of gameplay. It's rare to find your progress blocked by a simple keyhole or card reader, for example. Typically, a locked door requires both an "input" and "decoder" item, which must then be combined to access cryptic alphabetical and numerical challenges of varying complexity. On top of these, there are plenty of memorization, mechanical and (less frequently) reaction puzzles peppered throughout each floor of the base. As someone who's never been particularly good at or patient with these in adventure games, they weren't nearly as bad as I'd heard, though there's no question that they result in some odd pacing - depending on the order in which Regina performs tasks, don't be surprised if you spend ten minutes on one puzzle, only to run straight into another of comparable length three minutes later.
Visually, the game's 3d environments scale well with HD resolutions but lack the charm and detail of pre-rendered backgrounds. CGI cutscenes are of comparable quality to other Capcom classics of the era, though the score doesn't leave much of an impression. Depending on how much time you waste running in circles, there's a good 5-7hrs of content for a first run, with the usual alternate costumes and multiple endings as an option for replays. Whilst there's nothing particularly awful about the game by the standards of its peers, it's hardly a benchmark title in the history of the console, let alone the genre as a whole. Only recommended for completionists. There are about three or four pages worth of Regina x Dinosaur art on Hentai Foundry, in case anyone was wondering.
Launched roughly at the height of the Resident Evil craze on the original Playstation, Dino Crisis is a quasi-fixed-perspective survival horror in which a team of crack special forces do their best impression of classic B-movies on a remote island filled with hostile prehistoric lifeforms. Wise-cracking black hacker, humourless middle-aged vet, two redshirts and the sassy, black-leather redhead weapons expert Regina hunt try to extract a missing megalomaniac and escape from the island before something explodes or warps reality or something. I wasn't really paying attention.
To the best of my admittedly porous memory I hadn't touched this title up until a couple of weeks ago. I definitely recall it getting pretty heavy coverage in PS1 magazines back in the day, with the fully-3d graphics, "predator AI", and "Panic Horror" elements being promoted by Capcom. But whilst it garnered passable scores in the infamous 70-85% bracket, it never managed to distinguish itself within the genre in the way Silent Hill or Parasite Eve did, and most people were probably only ever aware of it as "Resident Evil with Raptors". Gameplay still follows the classic RE formula, with faster and more aggressive dinosaurs replacing zombies and an invulnerable T-Rex popping up to harass the player during various scripted sequences. The raptors were supposedly meant to actively hunt the player, up to and including ambushes and following blood trails left when the player fails to treat open wounds, though the only real evidence of this is a handful of unmolested enemies sometimes being teleported from one room to another based on scripted events. Enemy variety is essentially limited to raptors, very small raptors, and very fat raptors, plus a couple of brief cameos by pterodactyls (let me be the first to congratulate myself for remembering the correct spelling of that without looking it up). There are a few other minor additions to the typical playstation survival horror experience, such as early incarnations of QTEs as "danger mode" to avoid instant death or extra damage, as well as item chests now being independent of one another and locked by a finite number of "plugs" found around the facility (presumably to try and add an extra level of decision making to resource management).
Aside from the setting, the only significant deviation from RE the average player will notice is that puzzles are a much greater (and more time-consuming) element of gameplay. It's rare to find your progress blocked by a simple keyhole or card reader, for example. Typically, a locked door requires both an "input" and "decoder" item, which must then be combined to access cryptic alphabetical and numerical challenges of varying complexity. On top of these, there are plenty of memorization, mechanical and (less frequently) reaction puzzles peppered throughout each floor of the base. As someone who's never been particularly good at or patient with these in adventure games, they weren't nearly as bad as I'd heard, though there's no question that they result in some odd pacing - depending on the order in which Regina performs tasks, don't be surprised if you spend ten minutes on one puzzle, only to run straight into another of comparable length three minutes later.
Visually, the game's 3d environments scale well with HD resolutions but lack the charm and detail of pre-rendered backgrounds. CGI cutscenes are of comparable quality to other Capcom classics of the era, though the score doesn't leave much of an impression. Depending on how much time you waste running in circles, there's a good 5-7hrs of content for a first run, with the usual alternate costumes and multiple endings as an option for replays. Whilst there's nothing particularly awful about the game by the standards of its peers, it's hardly a benchmark title in the history of the console, let alone the genre as a whole. Only recommended for completionists. There are about three or four pages worth of Regina x Dinosaur art on Hentai Foundry, in case anyone was wondering.
