It's not really all that bad. Apply the latest patches and if you have the Quake 2 mentality, I think you'll enjoy it.

There are two things that kill this game:

1) It starts off with the worst possible way. Swamp levels. This is only the 1st part or 1st "episode". It gets quite a bit better later on.

2) The sidekicks. Oh my, the sidekicks. They tend to do completely batshit crazy stuff, get themselves killed and you lose.

If you can live with these, you'll enjoy the game. There may be some mod to make them invulnerable, look into it first.

All I remember is that your first enemies are flies and frogs. Or whatever mutated form they come in. But they still resemble flies and frogs.

Of course, they are bigger flies. Much bigger.

Or were they mosquitoes?

hmm that brings back memories maybe I played a demo in the past and forgot.

The leveldesign itself is quite good actually (for a Quake 2 game), it is mostly the repetition of enemies that are no fun to fight with weapons that are no fun to use and sidekick AI that make this a bad game.
It was earlier on gog.com by the way.

http://www.gog.com/game/daikatana

They ought to open source the game (or at least parts of it) and let people try to redeem it somehow. There's probably more money to be made that way at this point.

haha that funny bad jon tron game = the forum.

I only played the demo and watched some gameplay videos, the Greek levels are quite nice-looking IMO. Personally I'd appreciate an entire game made in that style/setting but that's a matter of taste.

The story actually seems kind of clever – Romero cites Chrono Trigger as one of his influences, and you can't really go wrong with that.

However, you can effectively get the story from the unreleased GBC game based on the game. (It sort of plays like the James Bond GB game, but not quite as good.)

I enjoyed this review of the game. There's a lot of YMMV there of course but the author does a good job at being fair to the game's pros and cons while expressing own opinions of it.

I was playing the N64 version of this a few weeks ago. If you like your 1998-2001 shooters then this is at least worth a look, as others have already said.

Also, it was one of those games that was heavily previewed with crazy enthusiasm by almost all major gaming mags those days, just because it's the next game form John Romero. Almost all previewers were going ooohs and aaaahs over the supposed "capabilities" and "innovations" in that game.

And almost all ate their words when it was released.

The formatting of this got totally hosed during a site redesign (looks like you have to start on page 2, and it's white text on a white background so you have to highlight it or copy/paste it elsewhere), but...it's interesting background on the game:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/p9_01.html

[quote=""Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana""]While the employees were arriving in Dallas and getting ready to start work on Daikatana, there wasn't much time for ramp-up or the development of a company culture. According to Romero's original estimates, seven months was all that was needed for the game, in part because he would have eight artists working on the art. "When I finished the design document in March 1997," says Romero, "I believed we could do a game in seven months. At id, we did the creative side of Quake in six months with nine people." Romero extrapolated from those figures and firmly believed that "a lot more people would be able to do a game like Daikatana in seven months." Such a schedule left no room for error, but it would soon become apparent that Daikatana's schedule would need to account for more than zero tolerance for mistakes during production.[/quote]
Heh.

Every time someone mentions Daikatana, this is the first thing that pops into my mind. 🤣 (warning, NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8SC7z8W134

I still can't believe that the whole thing was done using just generic pr0n music and voice clips from the game.

I think its the same story as Duke Nukem Forever. People hype the living hell out of it & then are let down by what they call a "mediocre" experience. Well, what did they honestly expect? After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I personally thought the texturing was a bit lazy in the game, given the quality of other titles Romero was involved in. But once again, expectations.

The story line was solid enough (if a bit tacky), and the game was definitely playable in all aspects. I agree with bigmouth on the sound though 🤣

Forevermore wrote:

I think its the same story as Duke Nukem Forever. People hype the living hell out of it & then are let down by what they call a "mediocre" experience. Well, what did they honestly expect? After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I personally thought the texturing was a bit lazy in the game, given the quality of other titles Romero was involved in. But once again, expectations.

The story line was solid enough (if a bit tacky), and the game was definitely playable in all aspects. I agree with bigmouth on the sound though 🤣

Duke should have been allowed to stay dead rather than be resurrected as the horribleness that is Duke Nukem Forever. If they couldn't do any better than that after 13 years of development time, they should have just let it rest. Instead, they gave us some generic shooter with character models reminiscent of Duke games from the past to give it a nostalgic feel. I personally feel that they dumped all or most of the work that was done in the 13 years and bashed out a new game in a few months on a very low budget using programmers from a third world country that work cheaply, that's how bad the game feels to me.

Yeah, Duke Forever was pretty obviously a cash grab. Same with Gearbox's recent Aliens Colonial Marines. Still, the games were competently built (they aren't broken). They are also fairly entertaining to be honest... Just not top notch AAA stuff like they hype wagon demanded.

sliderider wrote:

Duke should have been allowed to stay dead rather than be resurrected as the horribleness that is Duke Nukem Forever. If they couldn't do any better than that after 13 years of development time, they should have just let it rest. Instead, they gave us some generic shooter with character models reminiscent of Duke games from the past to give it a nostalgic feel. I personally feel that they dumped all or most of the work that was done in the 13 years and bashed out a new game in a few months on a very low budget using programmers from a third world country that work cheaply, that's how bad the game feels to me.

I'm sure it still made money for the publisher. And in the end, that is what matters to the people in charge.

I had to go look this one up. I had hear of it before, but never played it or even looked at any screenshots

I was inspired by this thread to pick up a CD+jewel case off ebay for super cheap. 😉 I'd rather have the old CD than a download version of a "classic" like this.