daikatana for all seasons (and other FPS oddities)

i am now on LEVEL 3 of my daikatana replay on shogun and im having such a good time i cant stop wanting to post about it…so now here is my daikatana apologia thread. can a mod move my daikatana posts in here? thank you!

whenever you die in this game it looks like this

you just explode into fuckin gibs no matter what killed you and it says you failed at life. you should have made better choices, you got fucked easily. Daikatana is a whole game about making better choices.

you have to corner peek 24/7 in this game because theres hyper lethal enemies behind every door and up every elevator that wants a piece of you and you need all the help you can get with this shit. like look at this fucking room. thanks john

the reason this game is great is because they give you a chainsaw thing you can put on your fist in an unskippable 10 second draw animation called THE ULTIMATE GAS HANDS and it does like, an unbelievable amount of damage. it kills most enemies in one hit. so after you get blown to pieces you come back with that sucker and kill em all no problem. this is the kind of galaxy brain weapon design you have to get used to. i have no idea why they thought this game would work with a limited save system

i wish i had instant replay on so i could make a gif of me going up an elevator, immediately turning to get hit in the face by a frog leaping 20 feet across the room and getting stuck inside my hitbox. this happens all the time with these motherfuckers, here is a screenshot of one skyhooking himself onto my forehead and fucking me easily

i made a post on here thats pretty old by now where i defended the game and im here to correct a grave mistakes i made the first time. the C4 launcher is actually awesome. yes the blast radius is fuckhuge and yes they give it to you in a level thats all corners. but said level is also a sewer packed with fucking frogs and dragonflies and these big asshole mech guys who shoot rockets at you, who get stuck on each other like a herd of feral animals trying to kill your ass, so you can set up prox mine ambushes with the C4s or just airshot them by detonating it mid air by hitting the weapon selection key again, the enormous blast radius means you can clear out entire groups of flying enemies or the little jumping frog fucks you can’t see or enemies behind walls. And this is how I feel even after i instakilled myself with it like an hour earlier immediately after a difficult battle. john caught me slipping and that one is on me

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as much as i like to make fun of daikatanas story the fact that it starts w a 10 minute cutscene explaining the convoluted relationship between three families where (based on deus ex) an ion storm employee does a racist accent and says shit like this, is awesome. the mishima cremation DEATH COLLECTORS turn people into fucking hamburgers!!

i will never get over these guys faces. look at this fuckin texturework baby!!


there aren’t a lot of GREAT examples yet but like the ancient greece episode and dark ages episodes look COOL. this game has a very weird aesthetic to me in the future parts, like a weird mix of hexen 2 and deus ex and like…I don’t know. Disgusting. everything is gross in an extremely quake 2 engine way, like kingpin, that i think works in the games favor.



after the intro you immediately get dropped into a level titled “Marsh” because daikatana is pleasantly invested in trying to make the levels feel like places even if not even fromsoft would have the balls to drop you into a bog-sewer named “Poison Swamp” the second the game begins with a weapon that self-damages when you fire it in water. It does have like, sewer music though


Check out this bullshit ladder. I love this fucking game

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i forgot to mention that you have to change the texture gamma to 2 (i didnt in that last post, oops) or the game looks too dark on modern monitors. you want to be able to appreciate the nice quake 2 engine lighting since the engine swap is mostly responsible for the game being a bit of a mess, it should count for something, and if you set the texture gamma too high all the lights look ugly

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you convinced me to put this on my list for the holidays

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I don’t remember if patch 1.3 fixes this but every time ive played recently I’ve had to play on hard (shogun) because the QA team for the game only had time to test shogun difficulty before release and there’s like at least one instance I remember where an elevator floor grate doesn’t appear on normal or lower and mikiko just commits suicide every time because her AI is like 10x worse than superfly and she doesn’t even start ugly crying over your gibs when you die. Playing on hard really isn’t a big deal because daikatana is kind of like shogo and you explode constantly anyway, and the 1.3 patch adds unlimited saves so you can quick save now. Also if you ever figure out a good way to get on ladders and climb down let me know

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Much like life, daikatana is a wonderful collage of beauties and horrors. Thanks john. Fuck you john

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the main thing i remember about this game is coming across a nest of those dragonfly things and thinking it was really cool. some nice little world building. i didnt play it much further than that, been meaning to for ages though. i hear there are mods that fix a lot of the problems with the game, too. not sure if i would want to play with or without them

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The dragonfly nests are cool. You can destroy them from far away without spawning the enemies inside which you have the opportunity to do a lot if you move cautiously even though daikatana sort of counter-intuitively lets you run fast as fuck. The last secret in the first level where you get the C4 Vitzatergo (it’s Italian or something I guess) is a little cave full of the fucking things and the miniboss from the bridge that probably killed you like 11 times earlier in the level, and theres this big cluster of like two dozen of the nests up on a ledge that I think you’re supposed to be able to blow up with the C4 launcher before they hatch but in practice you get swarmed by like 20 dragonflies and a boss monster in a tight space with a gun that fires proximity explosives that fly like 3 feet. This area is how I killed myself with the C4 gun.

you need to play with the fanpatch 1.3. Like I love this game but not being able to have unlimited saves is unacceptable. Replaying 15-20 minute chunks over and over because a lot of save gems are in secrets does not lend itself to the game’s style of forcing you to take unavoidable damage because of enemy placement or man’s most devious creation, the ladder. Its better to turn it into a game of rapid choices and consequences by mashing that mf quicksave button cuz then you can appreciate how hilarious the gameplay design often is instead of getting pissed off all the time.

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Oh yeah and the game no longer crashes 20 times an hour, or when the map changes (there’s 3 mapchanges a level!), or when you try to load half your saves. I haven’t had to noclip once. This is probably the first time I’ve ever had all the scripted sequences in the sewer level work properly. That’s really important!

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(reupping old material):

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I can see it

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the third level, solitary


its also the first real appearance of these guys, the mishima security guards, who are naturally hitscan enemies armed with Future Glocks packed with some kind of super bullet that causes you to explode into gibs. exploding into gibs when you die in daikatana, go figure!

They sprint around the environment in this bizarrely unpredictable way, like the only point of comparison I can think of is that they have the speed of the eponymous final boss of richard boderman from sven coop (pictured here)

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and movement style of like, that video of those people working in a call center when a fucking warthog charges in out of nowhere and crashes into everything trying to get out of the room in a panic. I took a screenshot of every time they killed me in the first area where you have to fight like 4 at once before I got annoyed and started killing them one by one around the corner with the ion blaster


i didnt talk about it yet but john romero really liked chrono trigger so this is him making chrono trigger. but theres no time travel for at least another 4 levels. for now all we get is the SKILL SYSTEM and party members. when you kill monsters you get XP to level up and you can put it in the stats you see on the left side of all my screenshots. power and attack are the best cuz they make you do more damage (so now my ion blaster gibs humans in 1 hit instead of 2) and speed up your attacks respectively. speed and acro are movement speed and jumping, and a point of vitality gives you 50 HP. obviously some stats are better than others in a game where you can already run super fast but if you find all the secrets you can be max level by the end of the game, and you can only level up stats to a specific cap per episode. like you have to be in episode 2 to put more than 2 points into a stat, etc. there is one interesting wrinkle, and thats the daikatana, which we get in E1M7…when you get kills with the daikatana the sword becomes more powerful instead of you, even after it reaches max level. however when it gets to max level it looks fucking awesome and kills everything in one hit sooo really leveling that shit up is almost always worth it. we’ll get back to the daikatana when we get it cuz party members are going to be awfully relevant soon…

check it out heres one of the many difficulty differences. on easy theres a ladder here, on hard you have to crouch jump. ive seen a few threads on steam/gog about people thinking this part is broken cuz the ladder is missing. half-life 1 came out in 1998 and has that whole part in the hazard course that teaches you to crouch jump…i wonder how many people struggled with that back then. yes I already know about dsp playing black mesa. Anyway there’s an acro powerup in here that makes the 6 million dollar man noise when you jump and you navigate through some brief machinery hidden in the walls which would be a cool touch…

except it drops you out of a pipe right in front of a hitscan enemy you can’t see lol. fuck you john. next time I will make sure i triangulate the enemys position based on the maintenance men yelling WAUUUUGH like this is fucking Blood 2 before i enter a pipe. i should have intuited that the pipes work on mario rules and there is no guarantee you will be ok on the other side of that warp based on the main character being named after shigeru miyamoto. i’m sorry john

i had to make a video about the area immediately after this. like every other elevator in daikatana you immediately get shot to shit the second it finishes but this one is weird because all these robos are just standing there waiting to kill me in a single file line and theres like a bunch of guys just calmly dissecting a corpse in the corner of the room while this is happening and i had to resort to the most absurd tactics in the world to make it through this room after repeated deaths. its such a beautiful example of why this game is great and awful

busted said “you have to inhabit the mind of an 11-year-old to win, just the cheapest coward”, and nothing I ever post in here can capture the spirit of daikatana better than that. one of my earliest memories is messing around in half-life 1 while my dad was in the bathroom, throwing all his grenades down a shaft trying to kill a vortigaunt instead of climbing down the ladder because it was sCaRy. daikatana…for your heart :slight_smile:

i have to finish the level later, im exhausted of this shit

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it looks like this game owns

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This makes me want to suck it down™

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don’t your buddies take the exp when they kill enemies too? so the best way to level up is to not have them anywhere near you

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So when’s the deathmatch night?

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To this day John maintains that Daikatana has the best air movement of any FPS. It’s about the only praise he affords it.

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those gnarly ken scott textures
i spoke to that guy a couple times back in the day
he made me this for a clan i never actually played for, for free!

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i wish i could find a better copy of it!

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