So I went ahead and gave the latest Turok game a rental, having been a passing fan of the original, even though I knew full well how sharply the series declined from just slightly above average to downright depressing over the span of just a few sequels. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I’ve put a good dent in it and feel that I’m very near to the end. The thing that really gets me about this game is that it feels too much like a missed opportunity. I’m glad they decided to drop the ‘Dinosaur Hunter’ subtitle, because that very well would have been considered false advertisement. Seriously, for a game that’s supposed to be about killing big bad-ass dinos with heavy firepower (you have the heavy firepower this time, not the dinos thank God), you sure do kill an awful lot of soldiers, bugs and helicopters.
That’s right, helicopters. In the jungle. They fly their helicopters in the jungle. These pilots don’t seem to have any trouble zipping around the jungle either; you see a helicopter zip in and out of the dense foliage about a dozen times before you’re even told to take one down. It’s hard to say if it’s the same helicopter or if the bad guys have an entire fleet of these things, but considering I’ve already had to take out two of them, I’m guessing the latter.
Back to what matters; the lack of dinosaurs, at least the lack of variety in the dinosaurs. If I’m counting right, there’s only about 5 different types of dinosaur for you to fight. You’ve got the Raptor, and about 5 million different texture-swapped versions, you’ve got the slightly larger Raptor look alike (I think they call this one a dilo), then there’s some weird salamander looking guy that runs around and up and down trees, the T-rex and the wimpy little Compy that leaves you alone most of the time. Now there is also some herbivores running around, but I’ve only been able to interact with one of them. The first freaking dinosaurs you see are some huge Brontosauruses lumbering in the distance that you never see again. I seem to recall seeing a Pterodactyl at some point too, but it was just an ambient creature.
It seems to me that they could have ditched most of the soldiers, completely axed the giant scorpions, and just went with adding more varied types of dinosaurs. It would be awesome to take down some Triceratops, but I guess they thought a spider-tank was cooler, haven’t I seen that somewhere else before? Oh yeah, Halo 2 and 3.
Well, I could ramble on and on about the misgivings of Turok for a few more pages at least, but at the end of the day, I’m still playing the game and I’m still having fun doing it. Isn’t that all that matters?
One last quick little tidbit of info; I guess the big news of the week that likely slipped under everyone’s ‘things I care about’ radar is that Jim Ward stepped down as the President of LucasArts. I love how they say things like “stepped down” and “for personal reasons”, anyone that’s has ever spent any time working in any big business industry knows all the code phrases for “fired and thrown out on their ass”.
The significance in this? Well as I’m sure most of you know, Totally Games (my employer) used to work exclusively with LucasArts for the better part of their 20+ years in business, creating the acclaimed X-Wing series of games in that time. Secret Weapons Over Normandy was the last title Totally Games developed for LucasArts and was released at the end of 2003, Jim Ward took over at LucasArts in 2004. See the correlation yet? When Jim Ward came on board, he more or less took the stance that all game development would be done in house, effectively ending all relations with 3rd party developers. Then he went and laid off a bunch of the development staff.
So if there was ever a chance that the world may see a TIE Fighter 2, Jim Ward pretty much obliterated it. I’m not saying that there were ever any plans for a TIE Fighter 2, but, you know. Since Jim Ward is no longer with LucasArts, it may be interesting to see where they plan to go in the future.
I think that original (Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter) was the first or at least one of the first games on PC that used power of graphic accelerator.
Ah, those were the days!
The most used accelerator at that time was called 3dfx Voodoo, but then it was replaced by other cards eventually.
Anyway, I think that compared to current games, Turok wouldn’t look all that great.
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