Remember Dino Crisis?  “Resident Evil with dinosaurs,” is how it was generally billed by your EGMs, then-EB employees and survival horror enthusiasts back in ’99, or whenever it was released.  I remember going to my local game shop (again, most likely Electronics Boutique) the day it came out.  I was pretty excited, although I kind of thought the picture of Regina on the cover of the game looked sort of like a pig, or maybe a goat.  Somewhat new to the burgeoning realm of survival horror, I was really looking forward to play it.

Think of it: the atmosphere of Shinji Mikami’s zombie masterpiece, but with prehistoric enemies that (in theory) you couldn’t outrun or otherwise escape.  The idea!  It turned out the claims made by the public gaming pulse were more or less correct, since the game made me jump out of my seat on more than one occasion and to this day remains one of my favorite old-school survival horror titles.  I loved it so much I slogged through it four times to get Regina in her sexy ‘jungle woman’ costume.  Hell, I even bought the game again a few years later on Dreamcast just so I could enjoy the game again with smoother textures (I still had my ps one version).  Of course, by then the graphics were dated, but that’s beside the point.

Then DC2 was announced, and I was pretty happy to be seeing a sequel.  Regina was hotter, the game seemed promising, with more weapons and enemies and some new blonde dude named Dylan.  I wasn’t too keen on Capcom going back to pre-rendered backgrounds or the that they were re-tooling the game for a more arcadey experience, but the screenshots looked pretty crisp, so I kept my cynicism in check.  Then I played the game—re-tooled was right!

I ended up enjoying it anyway, but it definitely wasn’t a survival horror game.  I was a little disappointed, but that’s because it wasn’t a horror game.  As an action title, it was still pretty fun, but the shift away from survival horror left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth.

Fast forward a few years and Capcom announced Dino Crisis 3 for Xbox.  That they  made some deal with Microsoft to put the game out on a clunky system that was outsold by the posthumous ps one for several months instead of on the PS2, the more logical and smarter originally slated platform for development, was probably a bad decision on Capcom’s part, but whatever.  At the time, I didn’t own an Xbox and wasn’t overly enthusiastic about Microsoft’s garnering of third party support, but I was still interested in seeing another installment in the franchise—hopefully one that would restore some of the genius of the original.

Thus, I read a preview, which read something like (paraphrase) this: “Dino Crisis 3 takes place, in the future, in space.”  I started to lose heart, but kept reading.  “Since the game takes place on a space station in the future, don’t expect to see Regina, since she’s dead.  But to make up for her the lack of her sexy red-haired ass, a large bulk of the new game’s gameplay elements involve the space station you have to explore evolving.  And there are intelligent dinosaurs that can not only eviscerate you, but can also play in chess.”  I didn’t need to read anymore.  Images of dinosaurs with glasses in white lab coats speaking about nefarious plans to “destroy the humans”—invaded my brain.  It was, needless to say, a horrible thought, although one that was unsubstantiated and quite possibly induced by some heavy alcohol consumption.  I didn’t actually believe that this is what would be in the game, but the small amount of factual information that I read before I became utterly horrified was enough to keep me away.

So, how did I end up with a copy of DC3, and what in god’s name would I subject myself to its horrors?  Quite simply, I found it at a local used game shop one day.  I had seen it sitting there for months and had been quietly eyeing it.  I don’t know what possessed me to actually buy it, but I did.  I won’t say I wish I hadn’t, but I will say that it’s easy to see why no one really cares about this game.  Really, take out one reference to how the spaceship Ozymandias uses Third Energy to run it, and it could have been another series entirely, albeit one that would have very similar game mechanics to DC2.

That being said, the game does play a lot like the second installment of the series, but a very stripped down version of it.  I don’t really know what the developers were thinking with this generally-unnecessary major overhaul of the series, but things are seriously limited.  Instead of Regina, you play most of the game as Patrick, who looks like he might as well be Regina’s incestuous brother, and a little as some chick named Sonya.  This is again similar to DC2, but neither Patrick nor Sonya really do that much.

They wander around, shoot at a lot of intelligent genetically engineered dinosaurs, go on survival horror “fetch the key/accomplish the task” trips.  But instead of the formidable arsenal of DC2, Patrick/Sonya each have one gun.  One.  It has three different kinds of ammo, but it’s one gun.  For a quote-unquote survival horror game, a single, non-upgradable weapon is pretty goddamn ridiculous.  You don’t even have to find the other kinds of ammo.  It’s all right there the second you set foot on the spaceship.  There’s also some defensive secondary weapon missile/laser/electricity things, (again, only three) which become necessary since they’re also inconveniently the keys to unlocking some of the Ozymandias’ security doors.

Speaking of that, there’s a hell of a lot more platforming in DC3, since Capcom decided to add a jumping/hovering mechanism to the game.  But the in-game is camera is doesn’t adjust and is set up in an atmospheric style that makes me think the programmers forgot that they weren’t making a game with pre-rendered backgrounds.  Now, I don’t know whose idea all the new platforming business was in the first place, but all I can say to the talented folks at Capcom is IF YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A GAME THAT REQUIRES A LOT OF DEPTH-HEAVY EXPLORATION AND COMBAT MAKE THE GODDAMN CAMERA ADJUSTABLE.

Sadly, DC3 doesn’t follow this rule.  Essentially any sense of where you are, or worse, where your enemies are, is sacrificed for the sense of scope and atmosphere that shows off the size and, uh, beauty of the Ozymandias. Maybe the higher-ups were still high on whatever they were high on when they decided to make Dino Stalker.  Maybe.

In fact, I’d so far as to say that the game has one of the probably the most infuriating camera I’ve come across since Sonic Adventure.  Throw in a hard to read 3D map system and you’ve got a recipe a game that will have you wandering around the same room for fifteen minutes to find the exit.

That’s one strike against DC3.  So, how does the combat fare?  Quite simply, it survives, but nothing more.  The reason being that your solitary gun by default has all the power of a bag of honey roasted peanuts against foes like electricity-bearing and ape-like raptors.  Yes, the game is kind of weird.  The other bullets for your supergun, a shotgun spread and lasers, are better ammo against the competition, but you’ll burn through them fast and then you’ll have to spend more of your hard earned combo points on more.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but the enemies are hard because they teleport out of nowhere expect to run into a total of 10 or 15 of them per room if you stick around to kill them all.  They’re also damn fast and you can really only take two or three hits from any of them before death.  The aforementioned combo points can be used to upgrade health and energy consumption for your gay looking jet-packing thing, but it doesn’t really solve the problem that the combat becomes stale quickly, mostly.

The story doesn’t really offer any motivation for playing, either. It’s fairly ludicrous second-tier-Capcom fare: (Flagship was mentioned in the credits, but I’m unsure of their exact involvement—Mikami produced this one, so maybe that’s it), a renegade computer system trying to recreate human life by genetically engineering  and splicing human and dino DNA to create a resistance to radiation, which original crew died of exposure to 300 some years ago.  The story wasn’t that interesting in DC2, but it was serviceable.  I didn’t really care about anything that was going on in DC3, but I kept playing anyway.  I guess I just wanted to see more of the monster designs.

Actually, if there’s one reason to play DC3, it’s the dinos themselves.  The game is undeniably pretty—though you’ll be too frustrated with the camera to really enjoy it most of the time—and the dinosaurs look pretty awesome as well, with high poly counts, polish and good amount of detail.  The massive bosses are swell, too.  They fill the screen and take an average of ten of fifteen minutes to kill, though I used the default pop-gun for most of the game.  Call me a masochist, but I guess the enemies really were my sole motivation to see this one through to the end.  The game clocks in at a whopping six hours or so, which doesn’t really make sense, because the ship is so massive.  It seems like in the last half hour of the game, the director just got lazy, cut a bunch of crap and threw in a renegade-computer-related deus ex machina for the development team.  Anyway, despite the game throwing 1800 bosses at you in the last ten minutes or so, there’s still a very limited number of dino designs.  What a disappointment!

But, uh, once you get used to the game’s many quirks, it becomes perfectly playable.  Well, mostly.  Even though I’ve spent the last 1600 words or so seemingly bashing the game, I don’t hate it.  There’s no Dr. Kirk (not that that’s important), no Regina, and no horror really, unless you count one gory scene at the beginning of DC3, and doesn’t live up to either the first or the second game in the series.  I don’t know if I’d call it enjoyable, and can’t say I’d whole heartedly recommend it, but DC3 is entertaining in spite of itself…at least if you’ve got a little streak of self-sadism and an Xbox lying around.