I played thru Daikatana 4 times. Yes, FOUR TIMES. Bear with me.

It was Quake 2 engine, and that transition (which probably killed the Daikatana for good) happened during 1997 E3 when Romero saw Carmack's fancy Q2 engine. People were wet at that time just thinking about that game. When Romero prepared for E3 they fucked up something in Ion office so the demo that went to the E3 was slow as molasses version, totally not the thing they intended to showcase. When they found that out, it was too late.

So Romero panicked and, always wanting to be ahead of the pack, he made a deal with id to grab the new and hot engine. The thinking within Ion Storm was that hey, it's a Quake engine. It has to be the same as Q1, right? RIGHT?

WRONG.

Q2 code was different; Carmack made a lot of modifications and it was basically a whole new bag of potatoes. So Romero got shot in the balls twice: First by Carmack showing off something that just blew Daikatana demo out of the water, and by getting a code that he mistakenly thought would be the same...

Now about the disappointment...

Plussed just for having played it 4 times. That's dedication. Or insanity.

Now you know why I started drinking alcohol...

what were you drinking before then?

You wouldn't want to know....

kinda like the start of?

Who allowed them to film my lost black brotha????????????????

Fact is, since the fabled "bitch" ad the community was so aggressive towards Romero, and so disillusioned by his constant storytelling, and so bewildered by the drama that was happening @ Ion Storm's office (the wars inside are another story, one could write a book about how messed up the IS corporate dynamics were then), that no one even expected Daikatana to be okay on arrival.

Everybody thought and voiced it expressively: Either it will be the Holy Grail or we will burn this crap down and boot it to the Moon.

Cue May 23, year 2000. We already had the likes of Half-Life, UT, Unreal under the belt not to mention Q3A so when Daikatana arrived it was old news. The situation can be likened to what happened with DNF; Daikatana had been a punchline for so long people just didn't care when it arrived.

Fact is, the game has its highs. When you go to the medieval/ancient times it gets interesting and sometimes you can see that it was a work of talented but grossly misguided bunch of developers. But the first level....OH THE FIRST LEVEL. Imagine green, brown, all shades in between, kinda like an interior of cow's stomach and ROBOT CROCODiLES and other insanity that just attacks you relentlessly while you try to navigate the maze of putrid, puke-colored corridors an valleys wondering what the hell is this all about.. The first level of Daikatana is responsible for more flak this game received than any other level. Also, bugs. BUGS. The initial release was so buggy it was used by PC recycling companies to completely destroy old PCs. Seriously, the game was one big bug. Beta testing was hasty and incomplete, and the game was a patchwork of code. Then the patches came and the situation got stabilized...somewhat. The game is still buggy.

Also, don't use the sidekicks. They were supposed to have "advanced AI" but truth is, they're TERRIBLE. And in some cases they cannot be killed or the level will fail. Imagine that: Playing a legal guardian for a retarded piece of game code. So Romero did make us his bitches after all!

But the real disappointment came much earlier. They said that if you survived the Daikatana intro, you can safely consider yourself an apocalypse-proof mofo. Just watch this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soVX-A-NilE
Even in 2000 this was just a laughingstock.

After we went thru this crap and started playing, most people I know resorted to cheats in many places (especially on that dumb first level) because in some cases completing the level is plain impossible because of the sidekicks, enemies, design errors etc.

But having said that, Daikatana IS playable. And sometimes it's even fun to go thru this huge, gargantuan mish-mash of ideas. When you play it you can see where one team left and the other took over (yeah this happened late in the DK development), where one idea was abandoned halfway through, where someone just forgot how to write a code, and where they just wanted to finish it to release the game.

It's really very akin to DNF. Both games had set unrealistic goals for themselves, both were made by insane visionnaires with too much money and egos too big to catch a glimpse of reality. Both were extreme failures when compared to the goals they wanted to achieve, but when we set all of that crap aside, they're mediocre but playable games. Actually not that bad.

The thing is, it's impressive that Romero even managed to finish Daikatana. it's a mess, shore, it is infamous and a laughingstock of entire PC gaming community but he still delivered. It's like a bloated, abortive, mutated, depraved, debilitated, bulbous, leaking fetus that was born prematurely due to a collective gangbang by an innumerable bunch of developers. Still, it's very much completed.

brool story co

I've seen fragments of the intro. Couldn't sit through whole video ;)
I tried to count all the polygons used in the intro.
There were around 2 maybe 3.

Thats the point.

The entire game was supposed to be the ultimate and turned out being nothing more than a failed attempt at comedy.

Skip intro and play the game, finish it if you dare and then make your own opinion. It's definitely not an acclaimed piece of gaming history, and deservedly so. Still it can be fun at times, for notalgia value if anything else.

And about Romero and his feelings towards Daikatana: He still believes it was cool. Maybe not that cool that he thought it would turn out, but he's still pretty much in love with Daikatana. No wonder; it was the crux of his entire career, it was supposed to make him the GOD OF FPS.

Fact is, while Romero and his merry band of misfits tried to make something out of Quake 1 code, Carmack managed to make Quake 2 and Quake 3, both setting standards for game devlopment and technology for years to come; And the fact that HL ran on Quake 1 engine too but at the same time managed to make an unbelievably realistic world, cinematographics and seamless experience and mingle all of this with AI that had to be seen to be believed (even today HL's HECU marines stand tall in terms of their AI capabilities), made Romero and Daikatana look like deluded lunatics.

This made the Romero's vision even more of a failure; he pissed on id work ethics (Carmack is an obsessed workaholic and humble yet genius programmer) by saying that he will build a gaming Hollywood. And when he built it and made it a chewing bone for tabloids Carmack and his team delivered. Multiple times.

Nicely put Lolzy, i remember playing it and god youre right, the first level was sad. Crazy taking into account in the ign coop video where Romero plays Doom1 with another guy, he says you always make the first level last, so you already know all the things the engine can do and that its very important to have a good first impression on a game. In my case i tried playing it some times, but got stuck with those early sidekuck bugs so i couldnt advance much, never reached the medieval theme. I liked the intro tho. I think the worst decision was the engine change, he should have just tried to add the improved lighting to the q1 engine or release the game without it.

Gonna slap this down here:
http://www.daikatananews.net/

Newest news:
- June 2 ,2014 -
Wow, some people never let go ; ))
Nice find! :)

I should also mention that there is, or was an OpenSource remake of Daikatana originally named OpenKatana, I am not sure what major things are happening to the project as its ModDB page has not received and update for a year. However I have found the developers personal twitter and he has mentioned things here and there recently in the past few months about information regarding the project.

http://www.moddb.com/games/openkatana
https://twitter.com/hogsy16

Here is some footage of it.

http://youtu.be/Zp_DC_wkQdQ
http://youtu.be/__giuE7Gav0
http://vimeo.com/97064864

Interestingly enough it is built off of the FodQuake engine and is being heavily modified.

There is also a free release of Daikatana Deathmatch which I believe was released 3-4 years ago.

http://www.moddb.com/games/daikatana/download...m-121-full

Haven't played much of it in the past few years but it exists still! \o/

Couldn't find any servers on free multiplayer version. Played it a year ago and there were plenty of servers.

nm

If I buy games on humble bundle how do I get them? Are they DRM free files like or gog.com or I'm actually buying a Steam activation?

Anachronox is very underrated RPG from Ion Storm. If you buy this bundle, definitely don't ignore that one.

It depends on the bundle. Unfortunately every game (from the first tier) here is on steam :c
After buying game you get message and e-mail with link to list of games and if you have account on humble bundle you can access your games from library.
I've read something about this rpg and I'm looking forward to play it :)

Too bad, I won't be getting it then.

Anachronox graphics were outdated even at a time of release (Quake II engine) but if you can get past that, you're gonna enjoy it. Prepare for some really whacky characters

Anachronox rules, man!

BTW it's another game apart from Deus Ex that wasnt supervised by Romero and wasa swan song for the company. After Daishitana, Eidos has burnt enough money not to buy out and then disband Ion Storm...

Just read its wiki, good read.

Since we are telling Daikatana stories, as a kid/teen I saw the Daikatana and Duke Nukem's bundles at a store. I was really, really close to getting lolkatana instead of Duke, lol.

Sick rape avoiding skills!

I bought it ($2..) for Daikatana and Anachronox. Anachronox was a brilliant game and I only played a little Daikatana.

Did you play Thief?