RRR: Die Hard Trilogy (PSX)

What I thought back during release….

An excellent mix of on foot 3rd person shoot em up gameplay, twitchy light gun action, and driving mission based madness. So many floors of terrorists and gun shooting goodness in Die Hard, easily my favorite of the three. Even if I played it without a light gun, Die Hard 2 still plays well enough, though it seems way too difficult. Although not totally faithful in its recreation of the New York City streets and spectacles, the driving action in Die Hard With a Vengeance is bar none one of the best I’ve played to date, even with the annoying Samuel L. Jackson sound a like that won’t shut up.

Rating Then: 8.8

What I think years later….

Die Hard

Out the gate, you are running and gunning. I forgot how frustrating it is to come back to this part of the trilogy, forgetting the controls. First thing I do is lob a grenade and blow one terrorist up, and nearly myself. It doesn’t look terrible, but it does look pretty feeble for its time. One big plus is that there’s a lot of destructibility to each floor. Cars in the garage you start off with blow up, and even overhead sprinklers if you lob a grenade in the right place, or blow a car up below it. You can see through walls (they fade for you) when you turn around, but you have such a  small field of view ahead of you, it seems like you have to run up to about 6′ from an enemy to see them pop up on screen. Aiming is somewhat senseless, a far cry from what I remembered from my experiences with this game back around high school (10+ years ago). You just turn the direction you want to face while shooting, and press X. No head shots, no nut shots, no precision shooting. I get the terrorist number per floor down to 0, and then it jumps back to 1 out of no where. I kill him, and suddenly there’s a 30 second timer going off. You have to run to find a bomb before it blows up, which is inside an elevator.

John McClaine usually looks like a slob, but this is ridiculous.

Each floor presents the same looking enemies, same lifeless AI. They perform a ‘spray and pray’ better than most of the n00bs I used to play in Call of Duty 4. Might I add, there’s one terrorist enemy model that looks exactly like a hostage, only they walk around with a tiny handgun that you can barely see. You try walking up to them after you freed a hostage earlier, thinking its a hostage, and you start getting shot. Some of these weapons that are available are deathtraps in a barrel! I picked up a shotgun that has explosive blast impacts, with a huge blast radius. Huh? I have not seen Die Hard or Die Harder in a while, but I don’t remember shotguns with explosions on impact. I just died on the second floor because that same gun shot right by an enemy in front of me, who shot me dead. I get no continues? Only ‘three lives’ which deplete quickly if you do not pay attention to your surroundings. Once you lose all three ‘lives’, you’re dead. No continuing from where you left off. I remember getting to the end with no problems at all. Now I’m lucky if I can even get past the third floor.

It’s not horrible, but even for its era, I can’t see how I ever thought this was top of the line in any way, shape or form.

Die Harder

I was prepared for this one. I remembered the punishing difficulty from before, so I don’t think I will be. First off, it looks crude, just as much as Die Hard. Once again just like Die Hard, there’s a wealth of destruction all around you. Trading away good looks for destructibility all around you does pay off sometimes, as there weren’t many games out there where background interaction was so prominent. The price you pay is having to look at ugly explosions, ugly terrorists and ugly scenery all around.

I have absolutely no idea what was going on during that screen cap, and judging by the looks of things, I don't want to know.

Difficulty is still brutal yes, but it doesn’t seem as brutal as it used to. Sure, you do get hit a lot, and hit detection seems oddly spotty with your cross hairs aimed right at a terrorist. Luckily, with the brutal difficulty, you can still find health replenishment readily available throughout the stages, either from bending machines you can mercilessly shoot, or just around the corner at usually a good time. You need those health replenishment whenever you can, cause once you lose all your health, you’re dead. Like Die Hard, you can’t continue, so you better have extreme patience, or a good eye and fast reaction time.

Oddly, the one I least like in the past, is so far my favorite one. It has not aged well….neither has Die Hard, but I feel like I have more control over how I die.

Die Hard With a Vengeance

Okay, I remember this being fast paced and cool as hell, with good vehicular controls and the only things against it were the horrible sound bits from fake Samuel L. Jackson, and NYC not being faithfullyrecreated. I know I had to take out bombs by running into them (buh?!) and beat the timer to the next bomb, or NYC gets blown up in a nuclear type looking fashion. This definitely stands the test of time….right?

What….the hell….

We're not gonna make it!

So it looks pretty decent. Animations look proper, buildings look like buildings, etc. But oh my word….the controls are absolutely HORRIBLE. You can use Up/down for forward/reverse, but when I bang into something, I suddenly can’t, and am stuck using X exclusively to go forward. You’ll be banging into quite a bit as well, as the collision detection is abysmal. I can have what equates to 8″ of space between a car and myself, and I’ll ram them. Same thing goes with walls, pillars, and about anything that will impede your forward progress. Was I high when I thought this controlled well? I know I was young, and I can add stupid to that without second thought, but man….this is painful. The one ‘bright’ part about the controls are 90 degree turns with the press of a button. Since handling is pretty poor, braking and turning is out of the question. Wait for the words of wisdom from your annoying voice backseat driver (like “TURN LEFT UP HERE!”) and press L1 at that corner and you can usually pull off a 90 degree turn and keep going without missing a beat. Hold the button too long and it seems like you spin too far.

Lets talk about how fundamentally broken the premise of Die Hard With a Vengence is….your targets are bombs. They range from being in garbage cans, to inside cars, to moving vehicular targets, to….people. The point of this game is to ram each bomb to blow them up and disarm them from blowing the city away in a fiery nuclear looking blast. You see, ramming a bomb in this game is good, cause it will blow up into a smaller, half city block mushroom cloud looking explosion. Not getting to the bomb in time, and the city is covered in a sea of fire.

What?!

If it controlled even halfway properly, the difficulty wouldn’t be as high as it is now. It’s the prettiest game of the three, but that’s like your seven year old sister winning a beauty contest, and the only other contestants are Fluffy the ugly hairless chihuahua from next door, and Uncle Gilbert, who fell asleep without a shirt on and who’s belly jiggles every time he breathes out. It’s amazing how poorly some games have aged. Over ten years ago, I thought Die Hard Trilogy was a magnificent trifecta of objective based diving, chaotic light gun action, and fast paced third person shooting. Today, it feels like I’m playing an alpha build of a three pack of games, that have little or no feeling or connection to the Die Hard movie trilogy.

Fluffy.

Rating Now: 5.3