Trespasser: The Lost World - Jurassic Park

The Good
Imagine a virtual game-world where you can explore kilometer-sized levels where every stone, every crate, every piece of wood lying around has a detailed physics model applied to it. Imagine dinosaurs that try to attack you as a group, sneak up behind you and bite the gun out of your hand before you even get to shoot.

You play Anne, a woman stranded on a mysterious island after a terrible plane accident. Soon you find out that this island is "Site B" where InGen built their dinosaur-breeding facilities. Your only mission is to get away from this raptor-contaminated island as soon as possible.

Trespasser was the only game ever created that features exploration gameplay in a detailed, physically correct environment. No HUD, no stats only your right arm which you have to use to pick up, throw and push things. And, well, your left breast with a little heart-shaped tattoo on it that acts as a "health-indicator". Because everything in Trespasser is part of the game-world you can even see your own body in first person view.

Trespassers graphics were quite remarkable by the time it was released. Huge outdoor environments, unusual special effects like bump-mapping, real-time shadows and realistic water created an incredibly realistic-looking world.

But the most interesting part of course was the physics-engine. I first realized how powerful it was when I came to a small cliff with a pack of velociraptors approaching me. I only had a few shots in my gun and there were at least two of them left. I thought I'm already as good as dead when I looked up and saw the rusted wreck of a jeep lying on the edge of the cliff just above the raptors. So I aimed high and shot the wreck. Slowly it started moving, then it rolled down the cliff hitting both of the raptors with full speed and just smashed them. It looked just amazing like a scene from a movie. Later on I read that this particular scene in the game was the idea of Steven Spielberg himself, who visited the Dreamworks Interactive studios from time to time. Well it looks like making movies isn't his only talent. :)

It's quite surprising that an official movie-licensed game has such an unique gameplay concept. Trespasser features the voices of Minnie Driver (Anne) and Richard Attenbourgh (John Hammond) who is reading from a fictitious book he wrote which Anne seemed to have read and remembers during her trip. The game however doesn't have many connections with the story of The Lost World which is probably a good thing. The Music is very good, it sounds like a real movie score and adds a lot to the feeling of playing an interactive movie.

The Bad
There is a reason why big gaming companies avoid making original games. It's much easier to make a game that just copies the gameplay of an existing genere than inventing and balancing a totally new gaming concept. Few things in Trespasser have ever been there before. Even the first person shooter elements are different as your gun is just a physical object like any other. This brings a lot of problems.

First controlling your virtual hand using your mouse is a nearly impossible task for someone who never played the game before and a lot of gamers already give up at this point, calling the game unplayable. The next thing is the physics-engine itself. Though its very impressive and well-working most times it has dozens of annoying bugs, like objects falling through walls, raptors falling through walls and you getting stuck IN a wall.

The system requirements are a bit extreme too. I have an Athlon XP 1800 with 512MB ram and a geforce2MX and the game still runs quite slowly at some spots for a six-years old game! I remember not being able to play it by the time it came out although I had a pretty high-end system then.

The Bottom Line
Maybe this game could have been a big hit if the developers had the time to actually finish it... Many people see it as a good example for "unused potentials". The physics engine, the huge outdoor environments, the incredible atmosphere, Trespasser has many elements of a gaming masterpiece but lacks of true perfection. Despite all it's flaws Trespasser is an incredible game and one of my all-time favorites because there's simply no other game like this. Once you've mastered the funny controls (which requires you to play it through at least once) Trespasser is a truly wonderful game with an awesome atmosphere.

The Good
A very novel, and potentially intelligent game idea. The physics at work here can be absolutely astounding, and I spent a large amount of time at the beginning of the game just holding onto a barrel and rolling it around on its base. There were probably Raptors watching from the bushes, wondering where I had gotten the hallucinogens. Also, the graphics are simply astounding with the right hardware.

The Bad
That noted, I DIDN'T have the right hardware. At first the game's graphics only played in a weird kind of negative color scheme, and I had to reinstall. Second, the arm controls are so awkward that by the time I can usually level a gun at a charging dino, I've poked him in the eye with it and I have to resort to slapping him into submission. At one point I gave up on playing the game and just tried to get the girl to slap herself, then spending an hour playing "Jurassic Park: Contortionist" and reducing the once proud Minnie Driver into a twisty circus freak. Another gripe is with layout. Why are there a selection of guns at the beginning of each area that would make Heston proud? Did the guys from "Deer Hunter" get bored with the ten point bucks and decide to find themselves some bigger game and just left their spares lying around? And for such an advanced physics engine, why is it possible to die when you just jump off the back of a pickup truck? Granted, I had one cool moment in this game when I slammed a door on a dino's head, but after that I just started to notice that they all looked a little embarrased to be appearing in this game. And that life meter! "Oh, 'scuse me, I need to check my left boob to see how hurt I am. Just wait a sec' while I pop this baby out..." I felt dirty. The Lara Croft thing no-no me.

The Bottom Line
I didn't have to pay for this game and I still felt raped. Dreamworks is the Extreme Headgames of the adventure genre, and we should wait for somebody competent to pick up this great idea.

The Good
The game's realistic physics model was certainly interesting. Pretty much every object in the game ranging from crates, paint cans, chairs, and rocks could be picked up, thrown, pushed, knock each other over in a domino effect, and would generally be movable in a manner that you'd expect from real life. At first this was novel, but at times it could be annoying as crates you were trying to stand on fell over, or a gun you were trying to pick up rolls off a cliff because you accidentally nudged it. Not to mention the fact many of the game's "puzzles" relied heavily on the physics engine, resulting in the aforementioned crates falling over problem.

The physics engine also resulted in interesting interaction with the dinosaurs. Because the gun you hold in your hand exists as real objects in the game world, if a raptor got too close to you, it could push your gun aside with its snout as it bites you (thus messing up your aim), or even knock the gun out of your hand with its tail. Depending on how you felt about this, this could either be viewed as realistic, annoying, or both. I must admit I personally found this added some excitement to close quarter battles as you desperated groped at your feet for your gun while the raptor lunges at you. However since nine times out of ten this resulted in your death I found myself loading from saved games and killing the raptors from a distance. You could also lose your gun if you bumped your handed against something. This made moving through enclosed areas somewhat annoying.

Combat with the dinosaurs was pretty interesting. Since your character moves at a "realistic" (ie slow) speed, it is almost impossible to outrun the raptors even though they also appear somewhat sluggish. Thus combat is the only way to dissuade them from eating you. There are variety of ways to do this, the most common of which are the guns.

The game provides you with a wide variety of real-life manufactured guns, ranging from magnums, submachine guns, and even AK-47s. Guns have a fixed amount of ammo and cannot be reloaded, and so must be discarded after use (leaving you vulnerable). In some areas guns are so plentiful this really isn't a problem and you can pretty much go around wasting raptors like Turok, while in other areas (especially the last three levels) they are rather rare forcing you to make every shot count and occasionally find alternative ways to kill and/or escape the carnivores. I found this effective rather than annoying as the feeling of nakedness you get from being unarmed is quite interesting and isn't found in most other FPS. Also, there are no crosshairs and no auto-aiming, so you really need to work on using the guns to get accurate shots. I found that the guns gave a very satifying "kick" when fired, and the fact you move the gun-arm itself in combat rather than the body attached to the gun (like in most other FPS)somehow made shooting them off more satisfying. The dinosaurs spurt blood and go down quite nicely (especially if you shoot them in the head or go full auto with an AK-47), however for some reason they tend to die in a silly looking belly down pose.

Besides the guns, there are variety of fun ways to kill the dinosaurs based on the physics engine. You can drop heavy crates on them, hit them with close combat weapons such as baseball bats or two-by-fours, or even smash them over the head with a rock. It is even possible to kill a raptor by stabbing them in the head with a rifle, and while not entirely realistic it does save ammo. However the game isn't very consistant, sometimes this works and sometimes no matter how much you whack a dinosaur on the head nothing happens. And heavy objects (such as smallers crates, chairs, rocks, and barrels) have no effect if you throw them at the raptors, even if you hit them right in the head. There are a variety of places where large structures such as jeeps and trailers could be knocked over and dropped on a dinosaur, and you could also lure raptors to the edge of a cliff, dodge them as they lunge, and laugh as they roll over the edge.

The dinosaurs themselves are certainly well animated, with cool skins and skeletal animation which give them fluid movement. However there isn't much variety in the dinosaurs(seven species in total, including the ever-present raptors), and except for the raptors there are only two or three per level. It's odd how the total number of non-raptors on the island can be counted on two hands, but the raptors are everywhere. The raptors are scary enough at first, but the real show stealers are the larger carnivores which show up later on in the game, such as the Allosaurs and the seven massive (and nigh-invincible) Tyrannosaurus Rexs. Still, I would have enjoyed the game more if there were more non-hostile dinosaurs just wandering around. Also, more interaction between the dinosaurs would have been nice (occasionally a predator will attack a heribivore or another predator instead of you, but this almost never happens even when herbivores are present).

The levels are a mixed bag. Some areas are really badly designed, such as large empty outdoor areas, and a monorail where you have to leap from one unfinished section of track to the next like a Mario Brother. However other areas look quite good, such as the abandoned town and lab areas, and even some old Mayan ruins. These areas look quite decrepit and creepy, like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. The various ravenous raptors and occasional T-Rex patrolling the abandoned buildings also adds to the effect. Being stalked by the raptors through the gutted-out town ruins is very effective and chilling.

Finally, the sound in the game is great. The sounds the dinosaurs make, ranging from the raptor's hostile growls to the T-Rex's booming roar, are very nice and atmospheric. The carnivores also make cool crunching and slurping sounds when they dine on the corpse of a fresh kill (which more often than not is you). When hit, different objects in the game make different sounds depending on what they're made of (wood, steel, plaster, etc). If you try to pat a dead dino with you hands you hear a realistic leathery sound. The game stars the voices of Sir Richard Attenbourgh (who played John Hammond in the Jurassic Park movies and in the game) and Minnie Driver (who voices Anne), two reputable actors. They don't have much to work with, but they do their best. Finally, there's the game's CD music, which is terrific. The CD tunes range from pounding actions tunes when you run across a large carnivore, to slow ominous music when you shift through Ingen's decaying ruins. Unfortunately the CD tracks are very short (about 20-40 seconds each) and only play at specific points in the game.

The Bad
The graphics in the game are grainy in software mode, but do smooth out and look pretty good on a graphics card. Environments are lush and objects and creatures look great close up. However there are several annoying quirks such as disappearing objects (certain signs and even the ceiling can vanish if you look at them at certain angles) and the fact everything outside of a six foot radius becomes blurred and unfocused.

Although I personally found the arm/hand interface to be novel and interesting, at times it could be fairly annoying, such as when trying to pick up large objects or stack crates. Also there are a very large number of buttons which need to be used to use the arm successfully (3 to 5 keys as well as the mouse) which results in some minor hand-twisting which becomes almost impossible on top of trying to manuever in combat. Anne's arm also occasionally twists and convolutes in disturbing ways and becomes difficult to control, especially when acting upon heavy or fixed objects (such as large crates or sentry guns).

Anne's slow speed of movement also results in a good degree of tedium as you sluggishly tredge through the levels. This is especially true of levels which involve a lot of backtracking, such as the abandoned town, where you've already killed the raptors and there's nothing left to do but slowly move from one place to another.

Two particular parts of the game I found incredibly annoying. In one area, you had to climb a cliff wall by jumping from one outcropping to another. What was annoying was that it was impossible to know in which order you needed to jump to reach the top, and if you didn't jump on the rocks in the exact order the designers intended the game wouldn't let you progress even if it looked like you could climb up. Throughout the game, it is impossible to tell which sloped surfaces can be climbed and which are impassible. Another type of interaction I found annoying was inputing passwords. There are three numerical keypads in the game where you have to enter a password to progress. Unlike many other adventure games figuring out the passwords is easy, but inputing them is nearly impossible. This is because you have to use the hand to push the individual buttons, just like real life. unlike real life, Anne's hand has no nerve endings since it's just a mesh of polygons, and as a result you can't feel the buttons and end up numbly mashing them inaccurately.

The final problem is with the AI. The game brags that the dinosaurs are living, breathing entities, but in the game you can actually see the dinosaurs standing around doing nothing until you get close enough, at which point they "activate" and start moving around. Also, instead of wandering around the levels raptors are spawned out of thin air to attack you (most of the time this is done out of your sight, but sometimes you can actually see the raptors drop out of the sky like a hungry gift from God). This really detracts from the illusion of a living world promised by the game. Also, there are times when the AI will react illogically. A T-Rex will stand in a clearing with two tasty velociraptors and yet do nothing, but will chase you down once you get close enough. A velociraptor will chase you into a building and then walk headfirst into a wall because they haven't been programmed for indoor movement. A T-Rex will become imbedded in a tree and start rotating in circles.

One particularly embarrassing error involved the final boss. Now, normally the game's last battle is quite thrilling. When you reach the Summit, a pounding action variation of the Jurrasic Park theme starts playing and all of a sudden the mother of all raptors comes out from behind a building and charges right at you. However, I found that if you ran quickly and managed to jump back to the metal catwalk over the summit, the Alpha raptor would just stand there and not move since you were out of her range. Finally after I shot at it a couple times, the "super raptor" started moving, only to make an abrupt turn, ram her head against a building, bounce off, and go flailing down the mountain. I admit this was funny as hell, but it kind of detracted from the suspense. After loading a saved game and trying it again, I found I was unable to get her to bump her head again, but it was relatively easy to lure her over the edge from the safety of the catwalk. Maybe this was deliberately put in as an alternative way to win the game without fighting it out. But it really just seems like something the development team overlooked.

The Bottom Line
This is actually a fun game. There is a continous feeling of tension as the raptors stalk you in a frightening manner (even though they have a fondness for head-on attacks and only ever manage to ambush you by being spawned right next to you), and being chased down by a T-Rex is as exciting as you might expect. Blowing away dinosaurs with the various weapons is fun, and aside from a few annoying puzzles the physics engine is very cool. Some people who were expecting a typical First Person Shooter will probably be baffled and annoyed by the interface, but personally I found it interesting. The game does create an interesting constant feeling of suspense and vulnerability that you don't usually find in most First Person Shooters (except perhaps Aliens vs. Predator). However, the game is bogged down by the numerous errors and problems mentioned above, and really takes an effort to like.

The Good
Every good thing that you heard about Trespasser is basically true, if there ever was a game that was ahead of it's time then this is it. I don't know the details, but the story behind the development of Trespasser must have been something special, as In the days when Quake was king the fact that someone decided to take a major license and do something like this is admirable to say the least.

The game takes place in The Lost World's Site B dino-infested island but, (first bold move) completely forgets the movie and the novel's plot and instead casts you as the lone survivor of a plane crash that gets stranded on Site B. As you leave the beach you start the game in, you are confronted with the truth behind those dinosaur rumours and set forth in a quest to escape the island while Hammond's voiceover introduces the locations and sets the stage for whatever you are going to find at the next corner (as your character recalls quotes from his autobiography) and adds some intrigue and subplots to what's essentially a "get the hell out of there" plot.

The real star of the show however, is the gameplay. Instead of opting for a typical run 'n gun approach, the developers instead opted to create a realistic, free-roaming simulation of the island where the emphasis was on exploration, realistic environment interaction and survival instead of pure action. To achieve this they created huge, incredibly detailed (for the time at least) 3D jungle environments that your character could easily explore and threw into the mix what has to go down in history as the first really impressive physics simulation for a game of it's kind. Every object in the game can be picked up, pulled, pushed, rolled, etc. and it reacts realistically with the environment according to it's mass, which enforces a sense of realism hardly ever seen in a videogame (both before and since).

To enhance the level of simulation the gameplay toned down your character's abilities to realistic levels. Your character isn't a super-woman that can run around, perform acrobatic stunts and shoot everyone with deadly accuracy a-la Lara Croft. Instead she has trouble running at a decent speed, and barely can jump. Furthermore, you don't have a handy-dandy health bar or any stuff like that, instead you have to look down and check out your model (!!) to see how you are doing, and while the notion that she automatically regenerates over time can be somewhat stupid, it's compensated by the fact that there are no health-pickups, powerups or stupid "videogamy" stuff to pick up.

As you would have expected however, you will run into dinos, and you are going to have to keep them at bay with some firepower, and this is another area where the game excels. You don't go around collecting weapons as a female Rambo, weapons are scarcely spread through the abandoned installations and are mainly pea-shooters, cannot be reloaded, and most dinos shrug off their hits easily. And their handling doesn't boil down to you centering a magic crosshair on a dino and pulling your handy "fire button". Instead the game's interface includes a simulated "arm" that's hard to describe (just go ahead and play to see what I'm talking about) which has wrist/hand controls and which comes into play whenever you interact with the gameworld. Be it stacking crates, activating switches, opening doors and handling weapons. Translation? Handling anything in the game isn't a matter of pressing a generic "use key" but instead you have to actually reach out and grab the item you want to. Using a weapon works the same way, and calls for you to pick it up, aim it MANUALLY by using the weapon's actual sights and shooting takes into consideration your lead, recoil, etc.

Taking the concept further you can only take with you 2 items at any given time, be it an AK-47 or a keycard... Not even Silent Hill, with it's intentionally clumsy combat and realistic touches such as tripping goes as far as Trespasser in terms of desperation-inducing realism, and when you trow on top of that a free-roaming virtual island (probably the first really extensive virtual landscape developed for any game) and the realistic physics model you have one of the most interesting "real life" simulations ever conceived.

With added dinos of course.

Oh and if you remember this was the launch title for Dreamworks Interactive, so they poured all their production values into it, which can be most admired in the music and voiceover departments.

The Bad
Unfortunately all the bad stuff you heard about the game is also true. The problem with Trespasser is that while it might have been an incredibly groundbreaking experiment in realistic and innovative game design, it's an utter failure as a game.

There are problems everywhere you look at, but I'll try to be as concise as I can. Basically all the creativity seems to have been poured into the design and features explained above, but what good are they if they only get used into a game where you are all the time stacking crates, chasing colored keycards and pressing assorted buttons?

All you get to enjoy then is the "escape the dinos" survival-horror aspect, and while the realism in the game goes a long way to create a genuine sense of tension and despair, the game drops to it's knees when you notice the braindead AI which allows you to easily exploit it's many holes and brainfarts to your advantage and the really slow pace of the dinos. Sure, they can outrun you, but that hardly means anything, and when you look at the movie's blindingly fast raptors coming out of nowhere and making mincemeat of whatever they can find you can't help but feel extremely let down with the dinos in Trespasser. They can still make mincemeat out of you, but they take about an hour to slug their butts to where you are and all they do is press their snouts towards you as you hear a biting noise for an attack animation.... niiiiiice.

Also, given the lenghty and groundbreaking process of developing the new technologies for the game, the game falls quite behind in terms of QA. There are as many bugs in this game as in the jungle it's supposed to take place in, and they often hinder the gameplay as you get weird reactions from the collision detection routines, clipping errors galore and millions of mishaps involving your arm.

And aside from all that you have the good ol' bitching. Stuff that some gamers might ignore but I just find annoying. Such as the stupidity behind making revolving doors that ALWAYS manage to find a way to knock the weapon out of your hands, the weapons disappearing whenever you enter a new scene, the "I only have one arm" approach that causes your character to handle ANYTHING with just her right arm (she must put some serious hours at the gym, as she can fire assault guns and shotguns with just her right hand and not even flinch!), etc. etc.

Oh and there are some shitty hardware issues that make it a problematic title to this day... watch out.

The Bottom Line
The only real way to define Trespasser is as an incredibly cool showcase of new ideas stuck in a shitty game. Make no mistake, I have a profound admiration for what the guys behind Trespasser did, but there's no denying it's a rather mediocre game.

Most hardcore gamers should take a look at it to see one hell of an amazing achievement way ahead of it's time, but don't expect it to be an enjoyable gaming experience on top of that.

The Good
This game was ambitious, very ambitious, and that shows through. The concept of controlling an arm and picking objects up really does add to a sense of presence in the world. One that counts. The physics, when they work properly, add a great deal to the gameplay, after all there's nothing like pushing a car onto a dinosaur to kill it. The stereo sound is fantasic, sometimes the first hint you have of the dinosaur, is the sound of its breathing. Then you run, and without health packs to run to, it can get hairy, which is fantastic. Later games have ignored this, that in real life you don't get health packs, and this game reminds you.

This is backed upby the dinosaur AI, yes it has problems. However when it works, it really does, giving the feeling that the dinosaurs are indeed after your blood.

The Bad
Of course there are many faults with the game. I could list them, the funny AI (nothing like seeing a dinosaur run off a cliff in an act of sheer stupidity), the poor level design (really poor). These all add to create the effect of a game that began with high concepts, but did not get the time to realise them. Which is a shame, as the public looks at the game for the aesthetics first of all, which is where the game falls down on. Once you get past the poor elements, that game does have some magical moments, which cannot be recreated, due to the emergent nature of the dinosuars.

The most telling fault is the level design, really. There are sections are fiendishly complex, and the town level left me wandering backwards and forwards, only to be confronted with buildings which were out of scale with themselves and me. All problems which stem from an apparent rush job, which with more time the solid engine could overcome.

The most obvious flaw is the manipulation system, guns that can't reload, and which drop from the hand at the slightest touch, but hey, the game is an experiment in my view.

The Bottom Line
This game has to be used as a design example for the future. Only now (2003) are we seeing games truely looking to real physics engines again, this game was five years ahead of the pack. The sheer reality which the game gives is warrant of play, and many people gripe about it, but the game is an experiment in my view, and one that partially worked. It's a shame the engine was never used again (to my knowledge). So much work let down by last minute rushes, possibly due to the franchise nature of it being a Jurassic Park game. Which, it has almost nothing to do with, but never mind.

Play this game, for the experience, you may not be dissapointed. A classic game in my view for the sheer attempt of what it was trying to achieve.

The Good
Ah, this kind of thing comes around once in a blue moon. It's a good, old-fashioned disaster of a game, modestly hyped before release, accompanied in pre-release with some slightly misleading screenshots, a brave stab at innovation which failed in a spectacular and interesting way. It was going to revolutionise the gaming world, with its physics engine. And like Tesla, it has its fans. I actually enjoyed it; but then again, one of my favourite films is 'Zardoz', a pretentious sci-fi film in which Sean Connery runs around in a red nappy.

You play a character called Anne who is voiced by Minnie Driver stranded island dinosaurs Richard Attenborough wise - but misguided - man voiceover escape keycards big levels run about raptors rat-a-tat! And that's the plot. Driver has a passable American accent and Richard Attenborough, star of 'Guns at Batasi' and director of 1978's 'Magic' cannot help but sound commanding. The musical snippets are effective, although they don't seem to have been done with a real orchestra.

The crux of the game was its physics engine. You pick things up, throw them about, stack them and so forth, and they act like real-life objects. When you pick up a gun, you have to aim it with the gunsights, rather than an imaginary heads-up-display crosshair; this innovation has subsequently appeared in some of the more serious action games, viz 'Operation Flashpoint' and 'Hidden and Dangerous' etc. You can carry something on your back and something in your hand, and no more. You interact with the environment by using your right arm, and if you want to press buttons you actually have to make your on-screen hand physically press the buttons, rather than just using a 'use' key. All in all it was an iconoclastic game, designed by people who wanted to make something innovative and different. The game is ahead of its time, in fact, but things which are ahead of their time are nonetheless still out of their time, and Trespasser suffers from being a pioneer.

Trespasser takes place in a set of mostly outdoors locations, all of them large; there is an effectively creepy atmosphere, and the game is reminiscent of old-fashioned exploration games such as 'Damocles', 'Myst' and so forth.

Furthermore, when Minnie Driver hurts herself or falls off something, she moans, and I like that. I like that a lot. Minnie Driver is a nice lady. I like her. She is good and pure. She wasn't famous when this game was made, but she is famous now. An actor, and a singer. Or, more accurately, an 'actress', because she is a woman actor.

The Bad
Imagine a game designed by a physics professor who has never played a computer game in his life; a games designer who was impressed with Tomb Raider but who can only contact the physics professor by post; and a man who likes guns a lot and will go to great lengths to model guns and make them have the right amount of ammunition, fire in the right way, etc, but who is again only barely in contact with the others. And there is a further man who designs monster AI, but he was off sick and could only provide his input by posting some sheets of paper with machine code written on them, in pencil. Voila! Trespasser.

The graphics are very poor. They give the impression of great size and distance, but look very poor; trees and buses are blocky and ugly until you get close to them, and walls tend to flicker in and out of existence as you approach them. The textures are small and repeat in a grid-like fashion. Even in 1998, the game was ugly; reminiscent of 'Delta Force 2' in its combination of ugliness and extreme system requirements due to the great quantity of ugliness that the engine has to render. Nothing feels substantial, and you often fall partially through the floor, or witness dinosaurs doing the same. The dinosaurs rampage around as if drunk, approaching you before running off to the side, running away, slowly approaching you again, falling over(!), running into objects and killing themselves. They slur around like drunken bums.

The press screenshots masked an important factor; the arm. You interact with the environment with your right arm. In the screenshots it looked relatively ordinary. But in the game it is like an elephant in the living room; huge and hard to ignore. You have no left arm. When you hold a rifle, you hold it at arm's length, directly away from your chest (a chest which you can see, if you look downwards; a tattoo on your left breast acts as a health meter(!)).When you are running around with a keycard or rock in your hand, you hold it at arm's length, your arm flopping around like a Dalek's eye-stalk. Your arm is clumsy. Your body is clumsy. The impression I get is that the aforementioned physics professor had some clever ideas, but was either too blind to see that they did not work, or too much of a megalomaniac to care. God damn, he must have thought, I am right and the doubters are wrong; but I will have the last laugh! The arm could have been taken out, and Trespasser would be no worse; Trespasser should have been about running and hiding from dinosaurs, achieving substantial things with clever tricks, using objects in novel ways, killing the dinosaurs with hard-to-find weapons; instead, it is about using an arm to manipulate things, as it it was 'Trespasser: The Robot Arm Simulator'. Do deep-sea explorers, as they explore the deep with their submersibles, do they think of their work as deep-sea exploration, or arm manipulation?

The environment is interactive, in that you can pick things up and throw them. But no more. If you find a helmet, you cannot wear it; instead, you can throw it, and I managed to kill a dinosaur this way, by throwing a helmet at it. If you find boots, you cannot wear them. Apart from keypads and card slots, which you must tortuously operate with your remote-controlled arm, there is nothing in the game with which to interact significantly. You can hold door handles, and try to open them, but it does not work properly.

At one point you can shoot a car, which is stuck at the top of a canyon wall, and the cars fall onto the head of a dinosaur and kills it, thus saving you a shot; the reviews made much of this moment, as if the game was filled with them. But it is not, there are no other moments like that. Sometimes you are allowed to operate static machine-guns, but you cannot; your arm flops around aimlessly, and you cannot see to aim anyway, because your head flops in the wrong direction.

Essentially, everything in this game fails. It is ugly. The AI does not really work. Things fall into the floor, get stuck on doors. Your arm is ludicrous, ridiculous, an autistically literal mistake.

Guns. The game's main gameplay element is the pursuit of guns; they are the only technological items in the game's world that you can pick up and use. There are lots of them, and they seem out of place, as if a gun fetishist had infiltrated the design team in the dead of night. The pistols aren't too bad, but the rifles and shotguns - particularly the shotguns - are almost impossible to aim beyond a few feet, as you have to line up the tiny sights, which you are holding at arm's length. In the screenshots, the guns were show in a standard action game pose - emerging from the bottom-right of the screen, pointing towards the middle - but in the game itself you have to aim them by holding them at right-angles to your chest, as I have mentioned. You end up staring at the weapon's butt-plate, as you hold it with your right arm fully extended. It is ridiculous to see.

The Bottom Line
As I recall this game topped the software charts in the UK for the briefest period of time, on pre-orders perhaps, before being scrubbed from history. It's a fascinating failure, and the atmosphere of being alone on a big island is effective; the feeling of being stalked by dinosaurs works, or rather would work if they were not so stupid (when you are far away from them, they stand stock-still; when you kill them, they all die in a strange belly-down position, every single one of them). The physics engine is very clever, and if the designers had been able to finish the game - and show it to some people who had played computer games before - it might have been a legendary hit. It could have been a classic. Instead it is memorable for other reasons.

The Good
The graphics are pretty nice; though they lack intense detail they still cut it. Guns are plentiful and placed just where you need them most. Looking down and seeing a big pair of jugs is always a nice thing, too bad the tattoo wasn't on her rear end huh? LOL The dinosaurs aren't dumb, they get right in your face and if a near by dino pisses them off they wind up attacking one another. i also found that Minnie Driver has a rather sexy voice, she does the voice over rather well.

The Bad
She can't jump! i mean she can and does jump but she's awful at it. [Rule of thumb for future players: Before making a potential life ending jump make sure to save your game because she'll most likely ignore the fact that your hitting the jump key and fall to her demise]. Raptors, cool looking? yes. monotony from their over abundance? you bet your sweet ass. The game needed a wider variety of dinos. The task of picking up boxes is what annoyed me the most.. well, it's a tie between that and her feeble attempts at jumping, she constantly contorts her arm like a circus freak. When you finally get the box where you want it she usually knocks it over when trying to climb on top of it. And forget about stacking boxes on top of each other... it will drive you mad!

The Bottom Line
Not a bad game but not a good game, it's worth a try. If your asked to pay more than $5 for it you'll be getting the screw job.

The Good
Just about the only thing I liked about the game was the novelty of the arm technology which directly correlates to your mouse.

The Bad
The aformentioned "novelty" of the hand-mouse gimmick became all too cumbersome when it was crunchtime and the raptors started running at me, it took me forever to aim my weapon well enough to actually HIT that speeding raptor and by that time he was all over me.

And speaking of weapons... I thought it really stunk that there wasn't such a thing as a RELOAD to the designers of this horrid game. Even if I found the exact same weapon as I was already carrying it would not allow me to transfer ammunition or to carry any in my pocket so i'd drop two good rounds in one revolver for one loaded with six.

Also, it appears dinosaurs are made of soild, bulletproof steel because it will amaze you just how many rounds it can take to down even the smallest Dino and then, you're out of ammo and must proceed to throw rocks at those mean raptors (ooh rocks, aren't you frightened? Didn't think so.) and of course the character you play has the worst hand-eye coordination on earth and has never heard of leaning her arm back to gather more momentum, making your throwing attempts pathetic and futile.

And lastly, probably the thing i hated most about Trespasser was it's ludicrous hardware demands and it's absolutely horrid 3d engine. I was playing on my Pentium 2 333mhz with a Diamond Monster Fusion 3d card (which was high technology at the time.) and my framerate was in the single-digits most of the time, not to mention that it just plain looked bad. And to make things worse 3d acceleration actually LOWERS the image quality when turned on, so the only person who could possibly run this game smoothly was someone with about a 700mhz AMD Processor (because the unusual 3DNow! technology is endorsed with Trespasser) and Dual Voodoo 3 boards set in SLI mode and at the time this game was released neither existed.

I found myself throwing this game away the next week in disgust, DO NOT BUY IT!

The Bottom Line
A really lousy attempt for Dreamworks Entertainment to cash in on The Lost World's financial sucess.

The Good
Lots of weapons, cool locations.

The Bad
You ALWAYS drop things. Very bad physics cause some wacky stuff to happen- such as boxes rolling into each other then blasting out into the air. Or trying to pick up a rifle from under a truck only to be thrust several miles up and left to fall to your doom!!! Also you move VERY slow and you can hardly navigate through most areas. Mindless keycard-hunting and really long load times even on newer computers!!

The Bottom Line
A good idea poorly executed... VERY poorly executed. The idea was to give the player total interaction with the environment- allowing them to pick up, move and manipulate almost any object in the game world, from weapons to rocks, 2x4's, sticks, crates, etc. However, your character seems to have a butter finger grip and, therefore, she constantly drops things forcing you to pick them up repeatedly. Combine this with annoying Minnie Driver voice overs and some of the worst physics ever and you have Trespasser. Avoid this game.

The Good
Its not like any other First person 3D game, the unique engine gives it great graphics (look at its rendering of water !) and the physics allow for true to life puzzles. Totally immersive and really big. I bought it in spite of the bad reviews and am not sorry at all.

The Bad
the requirements are a little steep and the resolution doesnt go above 800x 600 and some of the puzzles are of the get the key type ( not many though)

The Bottom Line
If you want a unique experience that in my opinion kicks Half-Lifes butt, you cant go wrong here.