You have to understand that this is Daikatana, an expert FPS. You cannot expect to just throw a glance at it and understand it. You must memorise these messages, know them like a true samurai knows the Bushido by heart.

Daikatana - it is more than fan fiction about a D&D campaign, it is a way of life. Design is Law.

- kissekatt

Introduction

Welcome to Daikatana, one of the worst games ever made. But don't just take my word for it.

Lowtax:

It's always a sad day when you realize the Pod People have triumphed once again.

In case you folks out there don't know, the Pod People are responsible for creating all those God-awful movies, games, and television shows that the rest of us stare at and wonder, "who the hell thought this could possibly be entertaining?" The Pod People corrupted the "Trespasser" programming team by shooting mind control beams and causing them to go out and drink Big Gulps full of unrefined grain alcohol. The Pod People zapped Wes Craven and told him that the extra six dollars he would get from "Scream 3" would offset its lack of creativity, writing, and acting talent. The Pod People abducted Illiad and convinced him to make a "User Friendly" line of Linux ashtrays, BeOS corn cob holders, and Macintosh plastic mustaches. I am sorry to report that the Pod People have successfully added another victim to their growing list: gaming industry legend John Romero. Using "Advanced Technology", I will recreate the moment the evil Pod People first took control of the design guru, so we can note how this insidious group of evil beings operate:

JOHN ROMERO: "Alright team, I've got a fabulous idea for a game! I've been listening to what the gamers want and are looking for, and I've got some killer thoughts! This will be the best game ever created!"
ION STORM TEAM: "HOORAY!!!"
JOHN ROMERO: "First of all, we'll need to make our own engine. A superb engine, featuring advanced effects like T&L, dynamic LOD, curved surfaces and-"
POD PEOPLE: "John xyblah grawh rawwwwr!" (translated: "John, you are our bitch now!")
JOHN ROMERO: (shot by evil Pod Peoples' ray gun) "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
ION STORM TEAM: "John, are you okay?"
JOHN ROMERO: (slowly getting up from the ground) "I LIKE BUGS AND FROGS."
ION STORM TEAM: "What?"
JOHN ROMERO: "'SUPERFLY JOHNSON' IS A GOOD NAME FOR A BLACK MAN."
ION STORM TEAM: "We quit."

The actual game demo is a mere 100+ megs, which can technically be considered as "the first mistake". Sure, it's getting more and more common for companies to release game demos which exceed 100 megs, but it doesn't help soften the review any for us gamers on 56k modems that have to wait half a day to get the file. It's one thing to go to McDonald's and order the Fillet O' Fish; it's another thing to drive seven hours out of your way to pick one up - and either way, it is still awful. Once I got the demo, I made the foolish attempt at actually installing it (in retrospect, I should've known better). I immediately got an error message during decompression, so I headed to one of the three Daikatana fan pages (which will soon be down to only two sites once Geocities finds out how much webspace the other one is taking up). It said I needed to manually unzip the install file into a directory and then run the setup file. I'll be honest; this is a HUGE strike against the game. Why do I think that something this small and inconsequential counts so much against the review? Simple - the team has literally had over two fucking years to make this game, and they don't even care enough to get a functional demo installer working? Don't they have any pride in this project, or do they simply not give a rat's ass? Or was it the work of the Pod People again? All three systems I tried to run it on got the same message, so it definitely wasn't a problem native to only computer.

(more)

IGN:

June 1, 2000 - Perhaps you've heard about Daikatana, Romero's ode to such hits as Showgirls and Ishtar in video game form, but if you haven't, here's a quick recap: man works on hit shooter. Man remakes hit shooter. Man works on other hit shooter. Man works on really big shooter. Man keeps working on big shooter. Repeat for years. Man finally releases big shooter. Big shooter really isn't all that big. It's been a long ride, but unfortunately this game isn't about Ion Storm's struggles, it's about time-travel and shooting monsters down big hallways, which in the shape of Daikatana is much less interesting than its real-life counterpart.

As Hiro Miyamoto, you're just an average martial arts instructor who gets involved in a mission of time-shattering proportions. You must rescue the girl from the evil corporation, find the sword with the girl, and travel back in time with the sword, the girl and a Superfly to get a vaccine for a virus that has wiped out two-thirds of the world's populace. The sword is the Daikatana, a weapon wielded by your ancestors, and you are... a guy with guns that fires at things a lot. This is a shooter, which means that while there are cutscenes and plotlines happening in the background, most of it is window dressing for miles of action and gallons of blood and flayed flesh.

The game is split up into four time periods, each of which contains a fair number of levels -- so many, in fact, that you'll definitely be ready for the next period when you finish one of the four. When Daikatana was first pitched, it was one of its most major points -- you'll have four sets of weapons to cover everything from future Kyoto to ancient Greece, to the dark ages of Norway and near-future San Francisco. On top of the United Nations of weapons, Romero also promised that this would be the first game to have sidekicks that you'd actively control during gameplay. These wouldn't just be characters to spice up the scenery, they would play an active part in contributing to the gameplay. Well, four years later and everyone's gone that far, taken the boat trip, and waved to Daikatana while sailing into beautiful new waters while it became even more bogged down in production. Rogue Spear, Half-Life, and Soldier of Fortune are but a few of the games to take some of those concepts and run with them into bright new territories.

So let's start, shall we? You couldn't ask for a worse opening to a game.

(more)

Games Radar:

Will John Romero make you his bitch? Can he? The early magazine ads for Daikatana certainly seemed to think so, loudly touting the Doom co-creator's bitch-making prowess in bold, black letters. Now, if his game-making prowess had been as legendary, Daikatana might not be on this list.

Almost four years and millions of dollars in the making, Daikatana was the game industry's first truly great runaway production. The wildly ambitious flagship project of Ion Storm, a company founded by the then-celebrated Romero under the credo "Design is Law," the game was supposed to usher in a new era of creative freedom and break down any restrictions on designers' visions. Instead, it was a fiasco of epic proportions, due largely to a premature PR blitz (including coverage in TIME magazine and the aforementioned "bitch" ad) that laid the foundation for Daikatana becoming an object of widespread ridicule.
Big Screen, Main Screen

Work on Daikatana began in 1997, and was supposed to have been finished in seven months. As production snowballed, the game was nearly completed, then scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Rivalries and feuds developed within the company, and reports started emerging from disgruntled employees that the development team was unfocused and unable to work together. And whether it was deserved or not, Romero's image became one of an aloof millionaire who partied while his pet project crumbled around him.

(more)

Gamespot:

After more than three years in production, Daikatana, the first game developed entirely in-house by Ion Storm, has been released. And it's pretty bad. Ironically, Daikatana's biggest failures are due in large part to both a lack of imagination and poor design choices - in short, the very principles on which Ion Storm was founded.

Daikatana is a cross between a first-person shooter and a stat-based, story-driven role-playing game. But you get the feeling the game isn't going to tread any new narrative ground early on. Daikatana's opening scene is five minutes of dense, tedious exposition delivered as a virtual monologue by a character who stands still while the camera makes swooping motions around him. At some point in his speech he apparently gets killed but then recovers just enough to deliver another minute of exposition in the classic dying-guy choked gasp. In a sense, the segment does set a mood: Since you realize that Daikatana is supposed to be story-driven, you'll find that the numbing lack of creativity displayed in both the structure and writing of this first scene acts as an ill omen of things to come.

The plot is advanced through periodic in-game cutscenes that are usually shorter than the opening cutscene but equally inane. It's as if whoever wrote the story wasn't aware of the game going on between the plot points. At one point your character Hiro is spooked by the appearance of a ghost after having just dispatched two hundred reanimated skeletons in the previous level. At a later point, characters debate walking through a graveyard. One of them says he has a bad feeling about it, while another chides him for being superstitious. Meanwhile, they've both forgotten that they were battling an entire army of zombies moments ago and that the time for healthy skepticism is over. This sort of disparity between the plot and the gameplay is frequent and gives the story a cheap, threadbare quality that works against any atmosphere the game attempts to build.

(more)

You get the point. But we're going to play it anyway. And by "we" I mostly mean Suspicious, because I'm running through this as a Daikatana virgin. I've had this game sitting in my house for a couple of weeks now, and decided that there would be no better way to share Daikatana with you guys than to share the soul-crushing experience of playing this for the first time. However, that being said, I knew nobody would want to watch me bumble around while screaming about the horror of frogs over and over again, so I ~~suckered~~ enlisted our resident FPS expert Suspicious to run through the game so he could actually know where to go. There's also a third slot open for anyone who is insane enough to tag along with us, although I don't blame you one bit if you're not.

The rules of this LP are simple. The first thing is that it'll be.....

What's this now? A tribute to my magnum opus?

What the fuck?

You know who I am. I'm the creator of Daikatana and resident FPS design god John Romero.

No, I know who you are. What in the hell are you doing here?

Well, I have my computer set up to autosearch Google every five seconds to find out if anyone is talking about Daikatana, and this thread popped up.

How is that even possible? I haven't even posted this yet.

Never mind that. We're here to talk about the greatest and most misunderstood FPS of all time. And you don't set the rules of this LP. I do. So get ready to suck it down, bitch.

..........

The first thing is that this game is going to be done on the hardest difficulty. There is no better way to demonstrate how I plan on making you my bitch. Second of all, you will have friendly fire on. SUCK IT DOWN! Third of all, I want to prove to everyone that my creations are perfect, so there'll be none of that candy-ass patching the game shit on my watch. Fourth of all, you.....

Wait wait wait, no patching the game? John, this game is practically unplayable out of the box.

You call it unplayable, but I call it a challenge.

I call it bullsh...

Quiet, son. FPS Jesus is speaking. The fourth stipulation is that.........actually, I didn't have any more.

Thank God. So John, what if the game crashes and I have to patch it? Because from what I hear, there's about a 100% chance of that happening.

Then I will allow you to patch it, but only if that happens.

Fine. Are you at least going to stick around and provide insight and commentary for this thread?

Why not? I don't have anything else to do.

...........You're a sad man, John. A sad sad man.

I may even deem some people worthy of having their questions answered by the greatest game developer ever, as long as they're respectful and polite.

Yeah, John, I'm sure they will be.

Anyway, onto the action!

Updates

Proteus

Suspicious

??????????? It could even be YOU!

Introduction (Google)

Episode 1: Japan 2455 AD

Episode 2: Greece 1200 BC

Episode 3: Norway 560 AD

Episode 4: San Francisco 2030 AD

Finale:

Deathmatch Videos

E1 session:
Daikatanas Only (Static_Fiend)
Shockwave/Daikatanas Only (Static_Fiend)
The rest of our deathmatch not seen above (LordMune, no audio

)
E2 session:
Gimmick Match: C4 only (LordMune)
Gimmick Match: CTF, Hammers only (LordMune)
The full match (almost 2 hours) (LordMune)
E3 Session:
(Match by Match: Kitfox88)
Claws and Swords/Claws and Swords again/Bows only/Normal Ep3 Weapons/C4 Launcher only/Eye of Zeus and Discus
Eye of Zeus and Discus again/Hammers and Discus/Normal Ep3 Weapons
(Match by Match: Change)
DM #1/DM #2/DM #3/DM #4/DM #5 (Sissy CTF) /DM #6 (Short Shockwaves)
DM #7 (Demons and Daikatanas)/DM #8 (Daikatanas)/DM #9 (Daikatanas)/DM #10 (Crossbows)/DM #11 (Crossbows)/DM #12 (C4 only)
DM #13 (Eye of Zeus only)/DM #14 (Eye)/DM #15 (Hammers)/DM #16/DM #17 (Tridents)
The full match (LordMune)
E4 Session:
(Match by Match: Change)
DM 1/DM 2/DM 3/DM 4/DM 5/DM 6/DM 7
(Match by Match: Static Fiend - Stage6)
Match 1/
Another Daikatana DM match
(LordMune videos)
Daikatana DM Episode 4 Pain-a-thon (01:20)
Final Match - Shockwaves Only
Session: Final (probably the only one worth watching)
(Match by Match: Change)
Hey Daikatanites!/Stop Hammer time./Hammer time still./More hammer time.
Team (the term Team is used in the loosest possible sense here) DM versus me.
Speedy Snakes Venomize Debby./Louisville Sluggers (Powa Shotguns)
Instagib Ionization with random rockets/Flaming Frisbees/Speedy Slice and dice Debby
The Second Speedy Slash and Dash Debbies./wisp, sissy claw, meteors. Speed.
wisp, sissy claw, meteors. Speed./OH fuck infinite ammo attack chaingun.../Infinite ammo Metamaser. Shitty map.
The metamasers they are everywhere./C4 and Shockwaves and then Shotcycler like crazy.
Frisbee with unlimited frisbees./Short, Intermediate match, we start to lose it
Ok, in the blender we went off the deep end.
Let's quit Daikatana.

Bonus

N64 Version: (Friendly Factory)
Marsh (Google)

Old school SA MP3 content: Laziest Men on Mars - Superfly's Johnson
Daikatana Deathmatch 1.2.1 (everything you need for *shudder* Daikatana multiplayer)
Monkeyforahead plays Daikatana for the GBC (1) (from the Let's Fail thread)
Monkeyforahead plays Daikatana for the GBC (2) (from the Let's Fail thread)
What a L5 Daikatana looks like through Suspicious' eyes. (Google)
Slowbeef is a fucking faggot. A funny faggot, but a faggot nonetheless

Porkness posted:

Here's one of the funniest things about this thread:

http://boomp3.com/m/265b40eae5ad

Change posted:

I hope for your sake you don't listen to this then.

Daikatana DM post chat (backup). Almost 11 and a half minutes of pure mind fuck. I'd do more because there is more good bad things but I'm broken now. Thank/Hurt McKain, Proteus and Glottis mostly.