Daikatana Comes to GOG.com

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

Marshall Lemon | 8 February 2013 7:21 am

The infamous shooter that tarnished John Romero's reputation can now be sucked down on Windows 8.

Before Duke Nukem Forever, there was Daikatana. The brainchild of John Romero and Ion Storm, Daikatana was supposed to be the next big thing in PC gaming. Three years after its planned release, gamers finally sat down to discover out-of-date graphics, incompetent AI companions, and artificially limited level saves. Coupled with a marketing campaign that promised to make us John Romero's bitch, the game found itself reviled even by fans of Romero's work. Now the infamous PC shooter has found a home with GOG.com, where today's gamers can decide for themselves whether Daikatana was a misunderstood gem, or honestly deserves all the hatred heaped upon it.

More: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121999-Daikatana-Comes-to-GOG-com

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It's not a terrible move by GOG, since they probably were able to secure the right to sell it for practically nothing. But I think they got the price point wrong. Apparently they're selling it at $5,99, which I think is much too high. By all accounts the game is as bad as everybody says (having watched some of a Let's Play on YouTube I would agree), so they can only sell it to people who buy it out of sheer morbid curiosity or the ones who want to be able to say they own one of the worst games ever. And to do that I think they should have set the price at $0,99 - $1,99.

[sofa king]

1. Ha ha ha.

I never actually saw the game. We tried to load and run it on every system we had in the house at the time, but couldn't get it to work. Friends of mine reported clipping errors so bad that players routinely waded waist-deep in floor panels and got stuck on corners.

I remember reading an interview with Romero in which he lashed out at his critics, effectively saying that his beta-testing on the masses was not yet complete and that he personally would fix the game once all the data was in. Elsewhere I read that Romero's financial troubles ensured that he really was personally responsible for most of the design and coding, and the non-existent support after the game's release--most of the design team had quit and formed their own company. It came and went within 90 days.

So, I guess he finally fixed it.

I remember at the time thinking that John Romero was just like Steve Jobs with all of the chutzpah, but none of the competence or polish.

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

2. I don't know if they actually fixed it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the game is still as broken as it was back then. I doubt anybody actually thought it was worth the bother. Even Romero probably abandoned it as soon as he could, even though its legacy hangs over his head to this day.

The only thing that GOG probably did is make sure it runs on modern systems, but it probably runs as badly as it did back then!

Anyway if you want to see the game without actually having to go through the pain of playing it, you can see it here:

It is hilariously bad.

[sofa king]

4. It also seems to have pioneered the awful 10-minute intro.

I have certainly seen more than one of those in years since!

More seriously, that intro is clearly supposed to be a technology money-shot, but the polygons, lighting, camera movement, and textures are all much worse than in Quake II, which provided the engine for Daikatana:

It's as if the intro was sketched out with the intention of tossing in the money-shot graphics at the end of development, but at the end there was no time to optimize graphics at all and the result is a regression from prior standards. The splashy cinematics of the scene instead help to emphasize how bad it looks. The game has its pants around its ankles from the very start.

[Riftaxe]

3. Lol I still have the CDs

not that it is worth the dosbox to run it in.

After seeing unreal 2 years earlier on sli voodoo2's....or even quake 2 we can only hope it paid for his ferrari