Daikatana

WHERE'S MY MONEY JOHN

We live in a world where the Homeworld series is not on GOG, but Daikatana is. It's as awful today as it was back then. Weapons that kill you at the drop of the hat, A.I. that's beyond laughable, a villain that doesn't carry the kind of weight we expected from Romero and add to that, the fact that the game is clumsy to control and even harder to understand. I remind you... we live in a world where Daikatana is on GOG, but the Homeworld games are not. -_-

There's a lot of word going around that if you separate Daikatana from its sordid history, ignore the disappointment of its massive hype train, and the travesty of its ill thought-out marketing, that you'll find at its heart, it's just average. That, however, is bull to the highest degree. Daikatana is garbage, it was dated on release, visually and in the scope and execution of its level design, its weapon were either utterly unspectacular or were so lethal that they would kill you moron often than the enemies (in some poorly dreamed up idea of skill). The sidekick AI was not only terrible, but the game didn't even seem to be designed around their presence, the levels are so claustrophobic and tight that they would get more in the way than anything, and that's when they weren't getting stuck on things, getting crushed by doors, or being entirely arbitrary about when they actually decided to help shoot things. There's endless more you can go on about, the god awful balancing, rendering the first chapter the hardest of the entire game, with chapter two being piss easy and three being just as harmless, and the fourth being moderately challenging at best. Enemy design is awful, with little to no interesting AI behaviors (unacceptable in a post Unreal, post Half-Life industry) and horrible, annoying, tiny enemies (and tiny, annoying flying enemies). Its story is absolutely awful, boring, and the writing is infantile at best. Levels are obtuse and labyrinthine. Textures are muddy and god awful, and the colored lighting is eye searing, with neon green, far too dark areas, and generally bizarre lighting choices. Its only redeeming features are that the level architecture is semi-impressive (with the Greece chapter having some decent structures and the like) and that it delivers on having a lot of content. Not that any of it is good. Avoid this crap, it would have been bad if it made its original 1997 release date, but for 2000, it's unforgivably moronic.

Not unless you are really REALLY morbidly curious to see just how badly a gamer can be screwed up. This game was failure of advertising, it was a failure of marketing, it was a failure of design and it was a failure of programming. I doubt age has changed this.

Diakatana was originally released back in early 2000 for PC and with the maketing stating that "John Romero was to make you his bitch", gamers cryed afowl and stated it was "the worst game ever". In the industry that we (the cusomers) have been acustom to for the last 20 years, the term "Worst Game EVER" is a complete joke, even in the eyes of bigtime/indie developers & publishers. Is it the woest game ever or even THAT BAD as most people say? No, Diakatana while having a great concept & ideas on paper, is a game that is enjoyable yet a higly flawed shooter due to the development timeline the game had. The story while poinless & all over the place, has a certain B-level charm that it's keep the game moving forward and overall a fun experiance. The soundtrack is a underrated one and bring to mind soundtracks from shooters like Quake 2. In the end. Diakatana is not the worst nor even a horrible game like most gamers/YouTube content creators state. This title shows while it is a highly flawed shooter, it also shows why John Romero was not only a crutal part to id Software, as co-creator of Wolfenstien 3d, Doom, Doom II & Quake but a crutal part to the behemoth that is the (first-person) Shooter genre.