DAY 23 / GAME 23 Parasite Eve

DAY 23 / GAME 23

Parasite Eve

              Back in the PS1 days Squaresoft really seemed to be dipping it's feet in a bunch of genres.  Some attempts were better than others, but one game they did that I absolutely loved was Parasite Eve.  Labeled a 'cinematic RPG', Parasite Eve featured some amazing (at the time) pre-rendered 'full-motion-video' cinematics that really helped sell the story.  It was a quick, easy to get into RPG for someone like myself who, at the time, found traditional RPG games slow and boring.  

            Man, I know it's really dated now, but at the time that whole cinematic introduction really sold it for me.  But even more than that, I remember getting really excited about working in 3D and perhaps making something that good some day.  Parasite Eve used a technique that was common around that time.  Placing a 3D character overtop of pre-rendered background in order to achieve more complex and detailed settings than you normally would if it were realtime.  Same as in Resident Evil, FF7 and Grim Fandango.  Only trouble with that is that it's not scaleable.    So, it may have looked good at the time, but an HD remake doesn't mean porting the game into a better system;  You'd have to go back with the original resources and re-render all the backgrounds.  Which is a lot more to ask of a publisher.  Which is too bad really, because I would absolutely love a rebuild of this game.  Partly for graphical reasons, but also because it had terrible load time and even worse controls.  Some of the levels were even hard to navigate because of the low resolution. 

            Still, I loved this game.  I even rebought it on the PlayStation Store so I could have a copy to play on my PSP.  The music was amazing, and having an RPG that wasn't fantasy based really appealed to me.  This is one of those games I never did beat.  I got really far in it but one of the discs started acting up near the end.  And when I bought the downloadable version, I got stuck somewhere near the beginning.  Undoubtedly I'll play this again sometime.  If I'm lucky, it'll be an HD version.