Jurassic Park: Trespasser

[Mzo]

As all of you who eagerly follow my exploits in the Completion thread are no doubt aware, My friend John and I recently completed Red Steel on the Wii. Something happened during that playthrough that I have kept to myself until now; the passage of time has taken the edge off the memory and I finally feel comfortable sharing this with the rest of you.

So there I was, performing complicated wrist calisthenics in order to zoom in and shoot like the 100th stereotypical Japanese dude when another came into the scene, on my right, interrupting the former's catcalls of "gaijin!" with his own. As I swung the Wiimote over I suddenly became entranced by the unnatural bend of Scott-san's arm. Suddenly, everything but the arm lost all color and meaning as a scarred and sealed-off part of my mind came to life and I remembered. I remembered Jurassic Park: Trespasser. When I came to again, I was laying on the floor with foam-flecked lips and a Wiimote strap in my clenched jaw.

It must have been during my time at college, between rounds of multiiplayer Half Life (who the fuck played that, anyway?). I don't remember who brought it into the network, but I hope they took the easy way out and committed suicide after realizing what they had done. That was where I found it; the full install of Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Dinosaurs rule, JP rules, and I really liked FPS games. How could this possibly be a bad idea?

The arm. The arm was so amazing. I know not many of you have seen this game, but do your best to imagine: the mouse controls your right arm. You can rotate it, lift and lower it, and swing it side to side. This is like Arm 101, all the basic functionality you would expect. Kind of a neat idea, in theory. I really can't stress how ridiculous and amazing the arm is. You need to see it. Arm Simulator 2000.

Now imagine that you need just the right distance from objects in order to place your hand on them, and that your hand has to be oriented in just the right way to pick them up. I'm not done, it gets better. Imagine that all objects, including the gun you are trying to pick up, are governed by a physics engine as kinetically explosive as the Max Payne games, and that your flailing retard arm can actually push the very gun you are trying to pick up off the table or what have you, onto the floor. Now you have to re-orient yourself, find the proper arm length, orient the hand again, etc.

Ok, now say all your work has paid off and you've picked up the gun. As you turn towards the exit, a spring in your step from your little victory, your hand lightly grazes the doorway, sending your weapon sprawling to the ground once more. Also, there are raptors, and they are not your friends.

I need to play this game again. I don't know why I love bad games, but this is like the Ark, the fucking Grail of bad games. I need to beat this game. I will take screenshots and FRAPS it with commentary if someone helps me find this game again.

[jyoung]

I was also a fan of Jurassic Park and FPSs back then and remember getting pumped up for this game to come out.

Then I read a review in Gamepro where they called it one of the worst PC games of all time and never bothered to track down a copy.

[Tain]

I tried this like two years ago.

Really fucking stupid. In an awesome way. It was sweet.

Might go without saying, but shooting the gun involves lining iron sights up with your vision with all that arm rotation shit if you expect to hit anything. It's something else.

Ridiculous technology for the time, too.

[epmode]

WAT A COINCIDENCE I just read something about this the other day: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ch...article?page=2

Remember poor old Trespasser, that Jurassic Park-themed, physics-oriented shooter that came out long before Half-Life 2 was a twinkle in Gabe Newell's eye? Various Valve personnel have complained over the years that Trespasser's critical and commercial (and technical) failure terrified them like Swiss schoolchildren locked in a room with Roman Polanski, and so they didn't dare to dabble in real-time physics until years after Trespasser's release.

I don't buy that, though: Trespasser, the tragic brainchild of Looking Glass vet and all-round smart-guy Austin Grossman, set the template for everything you see in modern physics-based shooters. Stacking puzzles, physical object manipulation (think the Gravity Gun), ragdoll corpses, inverse kinematics instead of scripted animations (think Spore), vast open-ended environments - anything you've seen in everything from Crysis to Penumbra was premièred here.

Trespasser also featured innovations that have, thus far, yet to be repeated. A "Real-Time Foley" system allowed the game to mix sound files in real-time, facilitating the sound of any imaginable object collision. Christ, it even featured bump-mapping - which wasn't particularly well-received by mid-range and even high-end gaming PC users back in 1998.

None of this stopped Trespasser from becoming a terrible, badly-stitched, fried perch-scented gimp-suit of a game at the time, of course. The player character's arm, for example, was required to manipulate any object in Trespasser (including weapons), but was apparently boneless and thus wont to wobble disconcertingly (and counter-intuitively) at crucial moments.

Crates were frustratingly bouncy, making any attempt at staircase-building a bit like stacking balloons. But despite all this, it's hard not to play the game - over a decade on, is my hair falling out darling - and see everything that was so astonishingly innovative about it. And I refuse to believe that when Valve was readying Half-Life 2 they didn't at least take a passing glance at the wonderful ideas hidden beneath Trespasser's mangled veneer.

I'd like to try it though! Licensing problems will keep it from ever showing up on a download service, I'm sure.

[Mzo]

Who needs an HUD when you could instead have Minnie Driver (how??) tell you how many bullets are left in your clip as you fire?

There are videos on YouTube, and some of these people have mastered the arm. Just by looking at these you'd think that picking up weapons and shooting them are of themselves easy tasks, but they are not. They just make it look easy.

Crab-walking dinos for the fucking win.

I'm scared to buy this and then find it doesn't work on vista, need to troll some more forums for info.

Edit: also, FIRST FPS WHERE YOU CAN STARE AT YOUR OWN RACK

[Grave]

I played the demo back when it came out and that was enough. Arm shit was baffling. Unsure if I really feel like doing it again with the full version!

[Geen]

I want my six minutes and fifty two seconds back (I spared myself of this video's last 31 seconds).



The arm looks so... awkward. Epmode's quote calling the arm boneless looks spot on. I also like jamming this limped limb into buttons, keyswitches and other horrible places.

[YellerDog]

I don't feel like looking it up, but isn't there a fairly ridiculous mod community for this?

[RoleTroll]

Yes, it does look like a Wii game. I totally love the look, feel, audio over the game... everything except the "innovative" controls. I'd love to see it remade with modern tech and controls. (This from a guy who liked Turok Evolution, though. I like dinos.)

[Diff-chan]

Postmortem on Trespasser: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...reamworks_.php

Everything about this game was like 10 years too early.