Retro|Spective 175: D / Enemy Zero

[Neon Ignition]

History in Games:
1995 - D
1996 - Enemy Zero
1999 - D2

Overview:
Released amidst the genre of interactive movies peak, D saw players guide Laura Harris as she investigated a hospital that her father has been on a murder spree in. The set up quickly sees the hospital turn into a castle and Laura is sent plunging into a dangerous puzzle box of FMV sequences with just two hours to complete the game. Ambitiously, Enemy Zero quickly followed adding FPS combat against invisible enemies whilst D2 occurred independently of both games and saw Laura stranded in snowy wilderness during turn based third person gameplay. Despite lasting a further fourteen years developer Warp would only put out one more unrelated game making this trilogy their biggest gaming contribution.





Did you enjoy the D trilogy or where they another example of the sub-genres limits?

[wakka]

Of these, I've only played D (although I'm aiming to play Enemy Zero very soon, and this thread has actually nudged me that I should play D2 as well).

I played D through only a couple of years back, so it was very much a retro game. It's a curiosity at this point. You're looking at some extremely slow paced trudging about, a couple of simple puzzles, and a story that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. It's worth a play through if you're interested in it, because it's only about 90 minutes long, but I do have a feeling that if it were significantly longer it would have eventually become interminable.

I'd be interested in the perspective of someone who did play it when it was contemporary. There must have been a 'Wow' factor which carried it much more.

[Asura]

Enemy Zero was a great game ruined by one of my most hated design choices.

Namely that you can save - but there's a limit to how many times you can save for the entire game, and if you run out, you'll have to complete the entire rest of the game without saving, or simply restart, and the game gives you no indication of how far through it you are.

I despise this. I mean, Resident Evil had the ink ribbon mechanic which was the same crap but in RE, the saving grace was that you were given tons of the ribbons; I suspect most people finished RE2 with 30 or so in their possession. I still think it's a bad mechanic which should just be removed from the game but at least they saw the sense to (1) give you more than you needed and (2) replenish your supplies regularly throughout. If EZ gave you recharges for the save PDA-thing, it wasn't enough.

I never finished Enemy Zero for this reason.

I get what this mechanic is trying to do; it's trying to make saving a precious resource, to make it so you stretch yourself between saves. It's fine on paper, but not in practice, because when I play a videogame, it exists for my entertainment, at my leisure; I decide how long I want to play it for in a given session.

[Cepp]

I thought D was a Vampire Hunter D video game when I saw it back in the day

Never played more than a few minutes of it. Maybe I should give it a go if its that short, I do have the GOG release.

[cutmymilk]

I played D on the Saturn when I was 15 and it blew my little mind, graphically. Those FMV games were so cool. I even had the Mansion Butterfly game which was really weird.

I wanted Enemy Zero but it was too rare/expensive. I remember being blown away by the D2 screenshots at the end of Sega Saturn Mag's run (it looked like X Files in the snow to me) when they were showing Dreamcast stuff but I never played it.

These are perfect games for a modern re release because of rarity and regional releases in the case of D2.

[Yakumo]

Big fan of D, D2 (Japanese version) and Enemy Zero. I did finish all but can't really remember the ending of Enemy Zero. I do remember that it had really clean video though. Again the Japanese version. For some reason a lot of PAL games had even more grain on the FMV. Well, except for Bug Too. The Japanese version uses Cinipac while the PAL version uses true motion.