Trespasser (video game)

Trespasser
Developer(s) DreamWorks Interactive
Publisher(s) Electronic Arts
Designer(s) Seamus Blackley
Composer(s) Bill Brown
Series Jurassic Park
Engine Trespasser engine
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
Release date(s) October 28, 1998
Genre(s) Action-adventure, first-person shooter
Mode(s) Single player

Trespasser is a video game released in 1998 for Microsoft Windows. The game was billed as a "digital sequel" to the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, on which it is based.[1][2] The player assumes the role of Anne who is the sole survivor of a plane crash on InGen's "Site B" one year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. With a fractured arm and only her wits about her, Anne must escape the remote island by solving puzzles and evading dangerous dinosaurs.

The game is noted for the involvement of the film's director, Steven Spielberg, and award-winning British actors Richard Attenborough and Minnie Driver. Trespasser's game engine was advanced for its time and required a fast and powerful computer to adequately display the game's detailed graphics without pixelation artifacts.[3] The ambitious game disappointed many reviewers[4] and has been mocked as "...the worst game of 1998."[5] It is believed this was caused by rushing the game's development to reach the preset release date and the game being too overly ambitious and advanced for its time.[6]

Plot

The game opens with John Hammond reading an excerpt from his memoirs. Hammond is a rich industrialist who used his wealth to assemble a scientific team that cloned dinosaurs. Intent on creating an amusement park showcasing his biological attractions, Hammond's park ultimately fails when the dinosaurs escape.[7] While Jurassic Park was built on Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica, the animals were raised at an alternate location, Isla Sorna, also named "Site B".[8] Trespasser takes place a year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where the general public has learned about the existence of Jurassic Park.[7]

The game begins in a dark apartment, where mail is piling up and a phone rings. When it goes to voice-mail, a woman named Jill leaves a message, expressing amazement that Anne (the apartment's resident) had actually gone ahead on a trip to the tropics. The message closes with Jill's comment, "I thought you HATED flying." The scene changes to an unseen person closing and bolting an airplane bathroom door and then the sounds of retching can be heard. The plane suddenly bucks and an apparent malfunction occurs and the plane crashes.[9]

Anne awakens on the shores of an island (apparently the sole survivor of the crash), and proceeds to explore.[7] Anne learns she is on Site B, InGen's dinosaur breeding facility. Pursued by dinosaurs, Anne makes use of weapons left behind to defend herself as she explores. Following a monorail track into the island interior, Anne encounters dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Velociraptor, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Parasaurolophus, and Albertosaurus. After recovering security cards from an InGen town, Anne proceeds past a dam and to a large mountain. At the summit, Anne is able to contact the United States Navy on an emergency channel. After defeating the Alpha Velociraptor and its tribe that lives atop the mountain, she is rescued by helicopter. The game closes as Anne returns to her apartment. Jill calls and the message goes to the answering machine, saying she "better have a good damn reason for not calling," Anne wordlessly responds by tossing a raptor claw on her desk.

Gameplay

The entire game is played through the eyes of Anne (voiced by Driver).[10] There are only three cut scenes, one that begins the game and one that concludes the game, and an introductory video. There is occasional orchestral music, scored by Bill Brown. As she traverses the island, Anne will often talk to herself or remember clips of John Hammond's memoirs (voiced by Richard Attenborough) describing the creation (and downfall) of Jurassic Park.[8] There are no time limits or difficulty settings to adjust and only the first level has text prompts to aid players that are new to the game.

Screenshot showing a Triceratops

This game features no HUD.[4] Anne's health is represented by a heart-shaped tattoo on her breast, that the player can look down to. The ink of the tattoo is filled in depending on the amount of damage she has taken; when it is filled completely and a chain appears around it, Anne dies.[11] Anne's health regenerates quickly over time as long as she does not take further damage. The only way for the player to know how much ammunition is left in a particular weapon is by picking up and then weighing the weapon and specifically saying things such as, "About eight shots," "Feels full," and "Hasn't been used."[4] The game was aiming for a high level of realism, although whether it succeeded has been a matter of much debate, as well as a source of many frustrations. For example, Anne sometimes has difficulty holding onto items without dropping them, to a degree many players describe as wholly unrealistic.[12]

By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out in to the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, push and throw objects. This allows the player to create improvised weaponry, for instance: picking up a large rock off the ground and hitting an enemy with it. Anne can move her arm in any direction, allowing the player to get a different feel of use for each weapon. However, this feature is extremely cumbersome, as it requires up to five buttons (maximum) to be pressed to fully manipulate the arm (picking up, dropping, moving, swinging, and rotating). This makes utilizing the arm in the heat of battle somewhat frustrating.[11] Anne can only carry two items at once and when bumping into things will often drop items.[8] Further problems with the arm included a contribution to logical flaws in the promoted realistic portions of the game. For example, Anne could drag steel girders that theoretically weighed a ton or more, and swing them around or toss them several feet with little difficulty, but could not use this same arm to pull herself over a 3-foot (0.91 m) high embankment. The wrist is able to rotate 360 degrees several times over and the lack of an elbow often results in erratic and impossible movement.[3]

In addition to picking up objects off the ground to use as weapons, Anne can find and use various other armaments including key cards and diskettes. In situations requiring button input (such as keypads), Anne will extend out one of her fingers. In keeping with the "hyper realistic" vision of the game, firearms have no cross-hairs, causing the player to first align the gun by adjusting Anne's wrist and then manually move her arm to aim at dinosaurs.[4] Due to the non-traditional nature of the controls, inexperienced players may find it difficult to fire their weapons. Anne can carry up to two weapons at a time. Weapons have been made to incorporate realistic recoil, as if being held with two hands. Once each firearm is empty, it serves little use except as a club when swung. Empty weapons cannot be reloaded, and must be discarded and another one found. Hints and keypad codes appear in unexpected places on walls, often in a level or two before they are needed.

Development

The game was initiated by two former employees of Looking Glass Technologies, Seamus Blackley and Austin Grossman. With the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park expected to be a success and after securing the movie license, the pair approached several movie animation groups before signing with DreamWorks Interactive.[13] Adobe Photoshop 5 and 3D Studio Max were used to produce the game. A 3D model of the island was built and digitally scanned to construct the game environment.[13]

Money was the biggest problem in the development of Trespasser and the game went severely over-budget several times throughout its development. Originally, the game was to be released in the fall of 1997.[9][14] However, due to a number of problems and how advanced the game was becoming, the project was delayed by a year. The rush to release the game caused many features to either be cut, or left unfinished and unpolished.[13] One notable example resulted in the left arm being removed from the game due to difficulties coding the behaviour of both arms together.[15] A late shift in development effectively changed the game's genre from survival horror to action shooter, resulting in many complaints upon release. Additional problems were caused by the lack of experienced management and the use of artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling.[9]

After struggling with development for over two years, developers released an unfinished game set within a very large and open outdoor environment.[15] This was caused by the game development starting before the 3dfx Voodoo 1 moved towards 3D hardware.[13] As a result, some techniques, including bump mapping and image caching, were incompatible with graphics processing units. Near the end of development the programmers developed a renderer that drew bump mapped objects in software and the terrain in hardware, but most objects were bump mapped so the speed advantages of hardware acceleration were negated. Trespasser used many textures for its mip levels and image cache, more than the most highly lauded gaming card of the time, the Voodoo2, could handle, and the game used the lower resolution textures in hardware mode instead of the high resolution ones available in software mode. This resulted in the game running faster and looking better in software mode, while running in hardware mode meant the game ran slower and looked worse.[13]

The Trespasser engine contained several features not normally seen in game engines at the time. In 1998, it was one of the first engines to successfully portray outdoor environments full of hundreds of trees. Computers in 1998 could not render the complex environments it generated, resulting in the worst clipping one reviewer had ever seen with another reviewer finding the game experienced slowdown and frame rate drops.[12][16] In addition, the Trespasser engine featured the first game world to be completely influenced by classical mechanics and was also the first game to use ragdoll physics.[17] One of the most advanced features of the rendering engine was the ability to render objects like trees and rocks as 2D sprites, which, when close enough to Anne, would be replaced by their 3D counterpart.[13] Elements using this technique are known as "impostors." Unfortunately, this often led to an ugly "popping" where a low-resolution object suddenly "pops" into 3D immediately in front of the player.

Trespasser features a robust physics system, but instead of accurate, per-polygon collisions, Trespasser uses a "Box System" where every object in the game acts as if it is encased in an invisible box. Additionally, Trespasser's physics are based on the Penalty Force Method, in which, when two objects collide – rather than stopping movement, the two objects push away from one another until they are no longer colliding.[13] In the final release the dinosaurs were disallowed from making jump attacks and entering buildings to avoid interpenetration, a glitch where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another.[13]

Andrew Grant was Trespasser's chief artificial intelligence programmer.[18] Every animation in Trespasser is done using inverse kinematics. No animation in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is generated automatically through their artificial intelligence. Due to the rushed nature of development, this feature resulted in awkward movement as the dinosaurs performed unnaturally.[4] Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions and the possibility of dinosaurs fighting each other.[4] Dinosaurs would react to the player differently depending on what mood they were in.[18] System bugs in the artificial intelligence routines made it so that dinosaurs would switch between mood-based actions so quickly that they would stop moving and acting. A quick fix was hard-coded in to the game that locked all dinosaurs’ anger at maximum, leaving all other emotions at zero.[13]

Reception

Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
GameRankings56.64%[19]
Review scores
PublicationScore
AllGame[16]
CVG1/10[12]
Edge2/10[20]
GamePro[8]
Game RevolutionB-[21]
GameSpot3.9/10[22]
IGN4.7/10[3]
PC Gamer (US)62%[23]
PC Zone70%[24]
The Cincinnati Enquirer[25]

Before the release of the game, it was announced that Trespasser would revolutionize PC gaming. Unfortunately, after the game's release, reviews noted that it "failed to impress". Trespasser was not only a critical but also a commercial failure with only (about) 50,000 copies sold.[15] Reviews of the game were mostly negative, but some reviewers felt the game had positive elements and a few were impressed by the title's originality and scale. Many of the reviewers disliked the poor graphics performance on even the fastest, graphically accelerated PCs available upon the game's release. Despite the anticipation over the many "first attempts at" within the game's original development scope, the reality did not match the hype.[10][17]

A Computer and Video Games review thought the game was a "dog" and gave it a score of 1 out of 10.[12] A GameSpot review by Elliot Chin described it as the most frustrating game he had ever played with "boring gameplay and annoying bugs".[22] Some of the complaints included the needlessly complicated physics engine, levels being over-filled with box-stacking puzzles, exploration being tiresome due to slow movement speed, landscapes being barren with few dinosaurs, too many collision detection bugs, poor voice acting and a clumsy arm interface.[22] An IGN review was more favourable, describing the plot as "super-intriguing" with high praise for the realism of the game's physics engine.[3] Despite featuring a blocky and heavily pixelated environment that offered limited interaction, the dinosaurs were convincing and "looked and moved really well" and the reviewer felt the game was badly implemented but still ground-breaking.[3] One Game Revolution review described the game's graphical engine as gorgeous with impressive real-time shadows and good water and particle physics. On the downside, the gameplay was very basic with the usual "key-finding, enemy-killing, button-pushing" of the FPS genre and when there was more than one dinosaur on-screen the game slowed considerably.[21] An AllGame reviewer didn't like the bugs and graphical glitches or the slow frame rate but concluded the game was a "ground breaking title that offers some great thrills, challenges, puzzles, and rewarding gameplay".[16] PC Gamer UK thought the game got the atmospherics right.[4] PC Zone felt the game could be quite frightening but that there were too many guns scattered around the island.[24] An Adrenaline Vault review liked the game's originality and some tense moments, but disliked the critically bad flaws such as the slow treks, the lack of a real inventory system, the frustrating interface and there being too many guns lying around.[11]

Computer Gaming World awarded the game "Coaster of the Year".[26] GameSpot included Trespasser as one of nominees for the title of the Most Disappointing Game of the Year ("losing" to Star Wars Rebellion)[27] and gave it the dubious award of the Worst Game of the Year (PC), commenting: "Of all the games released this year, none was as ill-received and terrible as Trespasser. No game was implemented as poorly, and no game squandered its potential as much. No game played as awfully. (...) There's one thing we won't forget: Trespasser was undoubtedly the worst game of 1998."[5]

As time went on, fans got involved into making their own new levels using TresEd, fan-made software that allows the user to edit Trespasser.[8][9][11] The fan community was also capable on achieving the original source code[28] to create modifications and unofficial patches.[29] In 2014, based on this available source code, a code review was done by Fabien Sanglard which revealed several design aspects of the game.[30]

Legacy

Despite lackluster reviews, the game's unique control scheme inspired at least two indie titles. Both the developers of Surgeon Simulator 2013[31] and the original Octodad[32] have cited the game as a source of inspiration.

References

  1. ↑ "E3: a whiz-bang preview of next year's digital thrills". CNN. 1997-06-21. Archived from the original on 2000-04-15.
  2. ↑ "Trespasser to Intrude on Gamers". GameSpot. 1998-10-22. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Tal Blevins (1998-10-30). "Trespasser". IGN. IGN Entertainment, Inc. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Craig Pearson (2007-05-16). "PC Feature Long Play: Trespasser". PC Gamer UK. Future Publishing Limited. Archived from the original on 2007-06-24. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  5. 1 2 Worst Game of the Year – GameSpot.com
  6. ↑ "Jurassic Park: Trespasser remake aims to make good on long-lost promises". joystiq.com. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  7. 1 2 3 Trespasser Manual. 1998. DreamWorks Interactive. p5.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Peter Olafson (2000-11-24). "Review: Trespasser (PC)". GamePro. IDG Entertainment. Archived from the original on 2008-12-11. Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  9. 1 2 3 4 John Alderman (1997-03-04). "Jurassic Game Flouts Hyper-Real Physic". Wired. CondéNet. Archived from the original on 2008-12-11. Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  10. 1 2 Byron Hinson. "ActiveWindows – Trespasser Review". Active Network, Inc. Retrieved 2008-02-09.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Emil Pagliarulo (1998-10-30). "Trespasser: Adrenaline Vault". The Adrenaline Vault. NewWorld.com. Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Kim Randell (2001-08-15). "PC Review: Trespasser". Computer and Video Games. Future Publishing Limited. Archived from the original on 2007-06-24. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Wyckoff, Richard (1999-05-14). "Postmortem: DreamWorks Interactive's Trespasser". GamaSutra. Retrieved 2009-11-21.
  14. ↑ Wilson, Johnny L. (March 1997). "Primevel Prey" (PDF). Computer Gaming World. pp. 54–56.
  15. 1 2 3 Jim Hatley (2008-12-08). "Jurassic Park: Trespasser – the revolutionary game that never was". Geek.com. Retrieved 2008-02-08.
  16. 1 2 3 Shawn Sackenheim. "Trespasser - Review". Allgame. Macrovision Corporation. Archived from the original on 2014-11-15. Retrieved 2014-11-15.
  17. 1 2 Macedonia, Michael (August 2006). "Why Graphics Power Is Revolutionizing Physics". Computer. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 2008-02-09.
  18. 1 2 "Creating Intelligent Creatures". Computer Graphics World. PennWell Corporation. Retrieved 2008-02-11.
  19. ↑ "Trespasser for PC". GameRankings. CNET Networks, Inc. Retrieved 2012-11-01.
  20. ↑ Edge staff (January 1999). "Trespasser". Edge (67).
  21. 1 2 Calvin Hubble (December 1998). "Trespasser Review". Game Revolution. CraveOnline. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  22. 1 2 3 Elliot Chin (1998-11-19). "Trespasser Review". GameSpot. CBS Interactive Inc. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  23. ↑ Todd Vaughn (January 1999). "Trespasser". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on 2000-02-29. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  24. 1 2 Richie Shoemaker (1999). "PC Review: Trespasser". PC Zone. Future Publishing Limited. Archived from the original on 2009-02-08. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  25. ↑ James Bottorff (1998). "'Trespasser' the next Jurassic Adventure". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Archived from the original on 2001-04-28. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  26. ↑ "Computer Gaming World's 1999 Premier Awards". Computer Gaming World. Archived from the original on March 3, 2000. Retrieved November 21, 2010.
  27. ↑ Most Disappointing Game of the Year – GameSpot.com
  28. ↑ Bailey, Kat (2014-05-15). "Jurassic Park: Trespasser remake aims to make good on long-lost promises". joystiq.com. Retrieved 2014-08-13. The community has even managed to get hold of the original source code, which they've set to work modifying.
  29. ↑ Patches on trescom.org
  30. ↑ Sanglard, Fabien (2014-06-10). "Jurassic Park: Trespasser CG Source Code Review". fabiensanglard.net. Retrieved 2014-08-13.
  31. ↑ Rose, Mike. "The blissfully awkward controls of Surgeon Simulator 2013". Gamasutra. Retrieved Oct 2, 2014.
  32. ↑ Rose, Mike. "How Octodad turned a group of strangers into best friends". Gamasutra. Retrieved Oct 2, 2014.
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