Trespasser: The Lost World - Jurassic Park

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
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
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.