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Retro|Spective 068: Headhunter - Private Dick Edition

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    Retro|Spective 068: Headhunter - Private Dick Edition

    The second of this weeks double bumper threads see's us take to our bikes as a...





    Mainline Entry 01 - Headhunter
    Formats:
    Dreamcast and Playstation 2
    Taking a tonal lead from 80's Verhoevan movies, particularly Robocop's satirical tone, Headhunter was an attempt to create a new top tier showcase for Sega's final console to woo mass gamers over in the wake of MGS's success. Playing as Jack Wade, the third person cover shooter saw you roam the open city streets following the mission points as Jack attempts to discover his past having woken in a lab at the start of the game. The game was fairly well received but suffered at the same hands as late Saturn releases had, it came out at the end of the Dreamcast's short life and Sega opted to only release it in the EU which heavily restricted its impact. Unlike some past releases, Sega went on to port the game to the PS2 where it finally hit the states and found a niche audience though its shine was lost amid a much more competitive field.



    Mainline Entry 02 - Headhunter: Redemption
    Formats:
    Playstation 2 and Xbox
    Amuze were able to move on from the original game and to have another stab at it with this sequel that jumped events on by 20 years. Jack returned alongside the new lead, the awfully named, Leeza X. The basic mechanics were the same but gone was the free roaming bike sections and satirical edge and in its place was a fairly grungy generic visual air. The game posted reasonable reviews but in an era of many similar shooters the game found itself lost at retail. The game was Amuze's second and final game, the company closing the shutters the very next year.




    Share your thoughts and memories of Headhunter
    Last edited by Neon Ignition; 27-03-2020, 14:38.

    #2
    I had completely forgotten this game received a sequel. I quite enjoyed the first one. It was no MGS but it was an engaging third person action shooter, and it was streets ahead of broadly similar games from the same period like Tomorrow Never Dies and C12: Final Resistance (although I did quite enjoy the former at the time, I suspect it was abysmal).

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      #3
      Loved this game despite having never played it.

      The comments section of the USA gaming sites who were producing guides on how US games could import it were just marvellous. The vitriol, the quaking, keyboard-stabbing anger that the US gamers were showing:

      "What do you MEAN it isn't coming out here? Why the **** not??!"
      "Well I'm not importing it. Sega don't care about us! They can go **** themselves!"
      "Why aren't we getting it? I don't understand, don't they WANT my money?"
      "Do videogames get slapped with import tax?"
      "Can someone explain this PAL thing?"
      "Why do we have to import stuff from 3rd world countries?" (this is a quote. Seriously, I remember this one)

      Honestly, the idea that videogames exist which don't reach the US was a new concept to some of these people, who where obviously accustomed to the industry primarily catering to them. As a Euro player who at one point could've rattled off a list of games I wanted but never got to buy, there was a sense of grim satisfaction and empathy with this.

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        #4
        I have quite the soft spot for the original. There are so many ropey moments in it but sometimes it sang, it's quite a relaxed game and whilst the open world was redundant I found the sensitive bike handling to be like a mini-game in of itself. It's just quite a fun little game to go through. The sequel felt like a miracle that it happened at all but I can't even get my head around how it managed to deliver an experience that was as misjudged, stripping everything that I liked about the first out.

        For this years penultimate entry:
        Clue - Well timed jump scares you can set your watch to

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          #5
          Didn't really gel with the orig but found myself strangely very much enjoying the sequel on OG Xbox yonks back, it had a certain satisfying clackiness to the gunplay iirc.

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            #6
            I loved the DC game, it had issues but it was a great game with really nice gfx and brilliant sound and I loved the Robocop feel to the game

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              #7
              Bumped up from the depths of 2018 to give us another chance at appreciating this Dreamcast gem now that the intrepid investigation into OXM and Amuze's clash over the sequel has begun.




              The investigation begins... hey mum! I'm a Private Dick!

              Comment


                #8
                Tracking post.

                I have yet to play the sequel, despite prompting the investigation.

                But I loved the first game on Dreamcast. At the time my friends were all waiting for Metal gear Solid 2 on the PS2, and I kept trying to convince them of Headhunter on Dreamcast. In the end, I think I enjoyed Headhunter more than MGS2, not because it was better, per say, but I liked the variety offered by the bike riding and the eclectic mix of locations.

                Roaming the shopping mall with a shotgun shooting the SWAT type guys who came in, with smoke/mist all over, was great. I was also impressed by the little details. I fired the shotgun at a guy standing in front of a store window. He went flying back against the wall, while the buckshot also hit the window breaking the glass. At that moment I thought to myself: "This is truly next gen."

                I then went around shooting all the shop windows.

                Anyone else remember the weird glitch in the DC game, which prevented you from completing the game on your second, harder playthrough? The throwable ammo clips, to distract enemies, was glitched, making it impossible to complete one of the LEILA licenses, and therefore the game. On Normal difficulty it was fine, but for some reason on the harder second playthrough option it stopped working. I always wondered if maybe there was a secret ending for finishing it a 2nd time.

                Comment


                  #9
                  So in light of the investigation, I went back and replayed through headhunter on PS2. previously I'd finished it two or three times on Dreamcast. I rushed a bit since I knew the surprises, and the final section was a bit drawn out, but I still love it and still think that even today it's a fine game worth playing through. A lot of people have bad memories of the controls - but I found them tight, responsive, and never failed me. Even without the camera mapped to the right stick (there's just a recentre button), the controls were good. And the bike was great. The trick is tapping the button instead of slamming hard on the accelerator. Also the bomb diffuse section might be one of the finest moments in gaming. A thousand times better than the bomb section in MGS2, which was a lame excuse for backtracking. Also crisp visuals, great sound design and music, good acting, and a surprisingly excellent story which has improved with time and resonates with today's climate.

                  The original Headhunter is still amazing. That moment when you first leave the Stern mansion on your bike and the crisp hi-res (for the time!) skyline of LA looms up. What a moment.

                  Headhunter Redemption

                  Which brings us to this travesty. Yesterday I tried playing through it. After about 3 hours of repeating the same 15 minute loop, near the fire bridge, I rage quit, deleting it from my HDD. This game is a hot burning trash fire of unplayable garbage.

                  Apart from the fact the graphics are washed out and blurry, the soundtrack more generic, the characters unlikeable, the story both tired and off in a weird direction, too many areas set underground, and the removal of the cool bike sections...

                  Apart from all of that.

                  The ****ing aiming is ****ing ****ed. It's actually unplayable.

                  You lean against a wall and pop out to shoot a guy coming down the corridor, and the reticule meanders like a drunk in a thunderstorm all over the place. Now, at first I thought my controller was broken. Maybe when is witched the Xbox on I had the stick pushed in a direction slightly, so it didn't set itself.

                  But this was no hardware error. I looked online. This crap was intentional!

                  Now, some people will argue it's meant to represent that you control a rookie, that it enhances the student/mentor relationship between Leeza and Jack, sort of like how Luke Skywalker was crap at first and Yoda had to guide him to brilliance. Or something.

                  These people are idiots and this is just an excuse to justify a horrendous garbage bad awful stupid wretchedly unplayable ****ing crap idea that should have been deleted at the paper napkin phase of the design. You know, when everyone was drunk on peach Schnapps and someone said: "Hey, let's make it impossible to aim at absolutely anything! And when the player fires 20 times only 1 of those times will actually hit!"

                  And then someone else, even more drunk on the Schnapps, probably said: "Yes! The likelihood of hitting anything will be only 5%! That's brilliant! We'll tell everyone it's because they're a rookie!"

                  I am not trying to be amusing when I type this. I would waste all my ammo and the reticule constantly refused to actually aim at anyone. It was almost like a rhythm action game. As the reticule would swerve over the target I would try to tap the button to shoot as it came into the sweet zone. This is terrible unforgivable design. It's just trash.

                  Also the checkpoints are awful. In the first game each new area was a checkpoint, even moving between floors. Every time you saw a loading screen. Here you need to touch a terminal, and there are FAR apart during the fire bridge section. I just could not get past the endless spawning enemies who were impossible to kill with intentionally broken targetting.

                  I hate Headhunter Redemption. I am not surprised the reviewer made up rubbish. Nobody wants to play crap like this. I would have used press screens and lambasted it from a dizzy height. 2/10 would be generous.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Yep, I'll never really understand why it strayed so hard away from the original games approach which was really much more reflective of where games were headed than the sequel. Presumably it had bigger restraints in some way on it but it was an epic misfire that killed a promising series.

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