leileilol wrote on 2020-08-07, 01:14:
Also mind that most "mods" for DC HL are naive asset replacements under the guise of a "yeah!!! DC finally has <game>!!!" delusion. Let's hope Paranoia isn't one of those cases...
So it turns out it's definitely mostly that. Apparently so much was cut from the PC version, it's really more of a de-make than a "port." None of the scripting was there, which makes sense as I don't think the modders had source-level access on the Dreamcast, and a lot of what was included didn't seem to work right. To top it off, it was buggy as shit, regularly corrupting its own savegames and at one point nearly hosing the laser on my poor console, god knows how. It straight up crashed with memory protection faults a bunch of times, and the frequent long loads weren't much fun either.
TO BE FAIR, the Dreamcast Half-life port was a leaked unreleased beta, and is known for having bugs & memory issues itself... I suspect the port was pushing the hardware just a little too hard & wouldn't have been release-able without a TON of further optimizations. They cancelled it for a reason after all. If the DC had ANY kind of capacity for virtual memory or a data cache, it might have helped a lot. I don't know how much of Paranoia's issues were due to HL itself being unfinished, but at least some of them were. The modders had to work with what they had.
That in mind, I'm genuinely impressed with how much they managed to get in - the custom models and environments are a lot more detailed than HL1, albeit making for shorter maps and way more of those long loading boundaries. Despite conversion to low-res textures, what's there looked pretty good. But I wouldn't call it "playable" all the way through in this state. The saving grace is the fact that the console is enabled and sv_cheats=1 was on by default, which means you can god-mode and noclip your way out of softlocks, or through most of the game, for that matter.
Seriously, though, that was absolutely my kind of jank - well recommended. 😜 It looked like a really cool conversion, but go check it out on PC rather than Dreamcast, unless you have a thing for broken glitchy homebrew like I do.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!