What if I told you that there was a game released in 1998 which featured fully-rendered jungle environments, dinosaurs who interacted with each other in a thriving digital ecosystem, real-time Foley sound mixing, real-time shadowing, bumpmapping, and an extremely advanced physics engine that predated (and possibly outclassed) Havok? Then what would you say if I told you the game was absolutely terrible? It should now be a little clearer why you've probably never even heard of Trespasser, the game that <i>almost </i>changed the world.
Trespasser is a first-person survival horror game set on Isla Sorna after the events of Jurassic Park: The Lost World. You play as Anne, a city girl with no apparent wilderness survival skills who has just found herself marooned on Isla Sorna after a nasty plane crash. There is no traditional HUD, and the only thing resembling a health meter is a heart tattoo on one of Anne's ample bosoms that slowly fills with blood as she becomes injured. Since there is no ammo counter, Anne will call off how many rounds are left as you shoot. You can't reload, so when the clip is empty you can either drop the gun or chuck it impotently at whatever carnivore happens to be baring down on you.
The first few minutes of the game were truly awe-inspiring the first time I booted the game up back in '98. The graphics were significantly better than anything else around at that time, with wonderfully rendered water that would splash and ripple convincingly when disturbed, gorgeous trees, rocks, and plant life, and (comparatively) high resolution textures. I thought I was in for one of the most amazing game experiences of my life...until I met <i>the arm, </i>that is<i>.</i>
You see, Trespasser isn't like other first person games where you walk over a gun and it instantly appears in your hands. In Trespasser, you have to push a button to extend Anne's arm, manually move the arm over to the object you want to pick up (which to Trespasser's credit is just about anything) bend down, touch her hand to it and hit the "pick up" button, then be very careful not to smack the object into anything, lest she drop it. The general idea was a great one, but the clunky implementation means it's just too frustrating to be immersive. Actually, the arm is really a microcosm of the entire Trespasser experience; everything was a great idea but nothing works. The AI, which was much touted before the game's release, was never finished and is laughably bad. Dinosaurs will run right past you, get lost, attack, then suddenly change their minds and ignore you again. The extremely "advanced" animation system doesn't work either. The dinos all look stiff, run awkwardly, and contort into bizarre shapes when they try to turn. The only promise that the developers were able to deliver on is the physics engine, which remains impressive to this day. Sadly, the barrel-and-rock-stacking physics puzzles are not up to the standard of the technology that fuels them, which ends up making the game even more frustrating.
It occurs to me that I haven't even really described Trespasser's core gameplay. Basically, it involves walking around the island from one bland physics puzzle to the next trying to find enough guns to kill the dinosaurs you aren't able to run (or rather, slowly walk) away from. There is no plot, though you will occasionally hear excerpts from John Hammond's memoirs at random, which leads me to believe there was a story at some point in development that was scrapped. The game is buggy beyond belief, so if you do decide to track down a copy, don't expect to finish the game without several patches and a lot of luck.
I must say though, that despite all of its problems, I still have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Trespasser. It's true that the game collapsed under its own ambition, but that type of ambition is what drives the industry forward. I feel like Trespasser would have been a fantastic game if the developers had scaled back what they were trying to do with the technology and focused more on gameplay, or if the publisher had thrown them a bone and let them bring their vision to fruition, which probably would have cost a lot and delayed the game <i>at least </i>a year. Sadly, as it stands, it's little more than an interesting tech demo from a bygone era. Don't feel bad about skipping this one, but do have a look at the video below to see just how almost cool Trespasser was.
R.E.P
