I've been playing it for about two days now and thought I'd post some
stuff on it, in case anybody's curious.
First, the graphics. Despite previews on IGN stating that the character
models were going to be improved for the DC version, I have noticed no
difference in them at all. Textures, similarly, are unchanged from the PC
version but, while still blurry and repetitive, benefit from NTSC nicely and
appear somewhat decent in some areas but overall poor for a DC game. There
is also almost no aliasing in this game, and the game appears to be using
tri-linear filtering for the textures. The light affect is nicely done as
well, scrolling fairly smoothly around the room when its on and manages to
create a somewhat impressive effect in dark rooms. The framerate goes from
60FPS in tight corridors to sub 15 at times when the action is hot, in open
rooms, and when explosions are happening, and in more open corridors it
appears to be more around 20-30FPS.
Now, on to the load times of this so called GOLD release of the game.
The game loads almost every second or third corner of ever single corridor.
Now, memory limitations aside, this is just nuts. Simply looking at the
level sizes of Quake III Arena, or any other Dreamcast game, clearly
demonstrates that the memory was not *this* limited. Combine the frequency
of the load times with the fact that the load times are 20-30seconds long
and the game almost literally becomes more loading than actual gameplay. I
have noticed that the CDR versions of every game I've played had longer load
times than the original, sometimes almost twice as long, but that would
still make this game load way too often for 10-15 seconds each.
Saving presents a similar problem. Bringing up the save screen takes
two seconds to load, changing menus or selecting a VMU takes another two,
and actually saving takes 10 seconds. Also, the save feature is rather
buggy in my opinion, and does not save over your old file automatically, but
creates a new one if there is available memory, or asks you to delete a file
(non-half life, or half life), which takes another four seconds to do.
also, at first it asks for around 75 memory blocks, but as you progress
through the level it increases to as much as 125 memory blocks, requiring an
entire VMU to save.
Controls are fully customizable, but default to the face buttons
controlling forward/backward and strafing, the analog stick controlling
looking left and right and up and down, the right trigger attacking, the
digital pad up jumping, down crouching, right activating panels and left
turning on the suit's light. The left trigger shifts the digital pad over
to select weapons and a press of the right trigger activates the selected
weapon.
I'm not entirely convinced that this version is any kind of completed
work. I'd have to play all the way through to be sure that there are no
bugs or glitches that are obvious, but I haven't noticed any so far. The
combination of framerate issues, lack of any real upgrades to the graphics,
load times, frequency of loading and the freaky save feature tells me that
this is an earlier version than what was decided against being released in
July of 2001.
However, if it actually were this bad at that time, then I can
completely understand why they decided to scrap it rather than release it
like this. This product would have been bad PR for everybody involved as it
is, and needed a little bit more time in the oven I think. Yet it does
appear to still be Half-Life in gameplay, and the audio is great as well, so
fans might say that it's still the best FPS out there, or on the DC.
