Watch Part One here: ua-cam.com/video/OajIdOxQ_Q4/v-deo.html Watch Part Two here: ua-cam.com/video/MYRl7Mg8KKU/v-deo.html If you enjoy the video please share it around!
Well, part of why so much CGI effects these days look so fake, is because of stingy studio execs exploiting the lack of a proper union, in regards to CGI in general. It's why Disney committed self-sabotage with Treasure Planet, in order to abandon 2nd animation.
This video is a triumph. It is equal parts funny, entertaining, reflective, and thought-provoking. Despite its daunting runtime, it never feels like it's belaboring the point or being redundant. It is a masterclass in how to structure a comprehensive retrospective, and it has that "just one more chapter" energy that any good pageturner should have. You have every right to be proud of this.
I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 12 year old gamer when Trespasser came out. I received a new copy for my birthday, having read about its development for years via issues of PC Gamer, and as a total Dino nerd, I’d have wished for it either way. Having built a- for the time- potent gaming rig with my own allowance/help from parents, I installed it on my 40 gig 10k rpm drive and asked my 950 mhz AMD Thunderbird and Voodoo 2 Banshee to transport me to Isla Sorna… and met with a wall of crashes thicker than a concrete T-Rex pen. Ah, Trespasser- *research indicates* that it was quite a lark…
@@ginogatash4030It's an American term that comes from and compares to Rabbits and Squirrels. Basically bright eyed bushy tailed means you were young, energetic, and (usually) naive.
I first learned of the existence of Trespasser in 2005 when browsing Wikipedia during some downtime at work. It became something of an obsession, i have read basically every interview, watched that old LP many times, listened to Jurassic Time...and i can still say this video is one of the most exhaustingly comprehensive pieces on the game. You deserve so many more subs than youve got, i enjoy your work immensely.
I've never heard of this game and am completely in awe after watching this. You managed to portray the fascination and love people have for this game in a way that I almost feel like I experienced it myself. I can completely relate as someone who was in his teenage years during the 2000s - games were at this magical point with little public attention, having passionate people trying to create new experiences. Games trying to push borders had this magical feeling of discovery when trying them out. I felt this so much while watching this video, and hearing all the background details just added to the fascination. Fantastic work.
I've been waiting with fingers crossed for your trespasser look for awhile now and what do you go and do but make a six hour video. We don't deserve you, you're something else. Thanks champion.
This is easily one of the best videos on Trespasser by far. It's a perfect blend of informative and entertaining, I love it! Thank you for all the hard work you do, your videos bring me so much joy and I often find myself sleeping to them when my overworked brain or tinnitus decides to keep me up at night. Keep doing what you enjoy doing! ❤
Finished watching this! Thanks for taking so much time to talk about the game, and thanks for mentioning TresCom. It was really nice getting an intact narrative about Tres from development to today, all at once. Many kudos.
Holy shit is this ever one of THE BEST Jurassic Park videos on UA-cam! Not just Trespasser vids, I mean JP as a franchise. The research put into this is a marvel!
This game is so special to me. I've played this piece of shit far more times than I'm willing to admit. In general that's how I'd describe the game, special. There's some weird charm about it that makes me remember randomly every couple of months. There's some charisma in there, in the dense jungle,betwen the drunk dinosaurs, in an empty room,on a dirty floor,somewhere in the Pacific.
How in great planet earth am I 37 years old and NEVER heard of this game before?! Im going to go on quite the discovery learning about this, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
if I recall, melee weapons killing you on the belt was a pre-release issue since they were scripted to do damage with their tips while you held them, which included when they were in your blet. The final game removed whatever way they delt damage aside from the Mace I think. You can still kill enemies with melee weapons (or empty guns since they're awkwardly swung when out of ammo) or sticks if you mange to "jam" the object into the raptor's neck, which will usually cause you to drop it but promptly result in the raptor bleeding rapidly from the neck and dying.
'Carried' melee weapons killing the player isn't really a thing, it's been spotted a few times, but that's not intended behavior. Weapons/items carried on Anne's person have no collision or anything. 'Damage' values for any item are kind of funny because even low values like 2.0 randomly make weapons deal 1 hit KO's. No clue how it works. Nobody seems to.
Trespasser is one of those games I have always had an insatiable curiosity with. Jurassic Park was a huge obsession of mine when I was nine or ten, and while I gravitated more towards Operation Genesis' management simulation design, Trespasser was one of those things that always stuck out to me. It wasn't an action game, it wasn't a platformer, and it certainly wasn't strategy, it was something else. Flash forward a few years and I got around to playing Thief and Thief 2 in middle school, and the switch finally flipped in my brain. This is the genre that Trespasser was trying to be, and I can't help but love it for that.
As a note, pre-release builds of Trespasser have revealed early versions of both the Plantation House level and Pine Valley containing the geothermal plant.
This game feels like someone saw what games would look like in the future but all they saw was vr games and assumed all of them are just that. However if this game ever ends up in vr in any way I would play it in a heartbeat
Yeah, I hadn't quite picked up on it but it's like a VR game that you need to control with mouse and keyboard. As rough as the game is I do have to keep reminding myself that it's from 1998.
Wow, what an absolutely incredible video. I'm left in awe. It's very rare that I will watch a video this long straight through, but this was so worth it. Thanks for all your time and effort! I thought it was a very cool gesture to mention so many of the developers by name. Also, I'm glad you mentioned the amazing Hammond Memoirs collection. Finding it on UA-cam, and loving the narration and the music was what got me interested in Trespasser in the first place. Watching it after the first two films, knowing that Richard Attenborough is gone, and with the music and his performance, can be a very emotional and moving experience. Anyways, thanks again, and take care!
Hell yes: I am indeed down for a 6 hour Trespasser retrospective, let's go. I found some of your other vids earlier, so I am stoked to see you keep making bangers, you have a good pregame and structuralist focus.
I guess much like an actual fossil, you can see something that looks a little like what we see now in the modern day but just a good bit more primeval. You can see the anatomy of a bird but just a bit bigger; You can see a modern FPS with physics and a story focus but bound to the limitations of late 90s PC specs and with more jank.
The double take I did when Cahokia was mentioned toward the end cause I live so close to the Cahokia mounds and simply never grasped their importance LOL
Still making my way through this, but I need to say that this is positively brilliant! There are so many details and themes hidden under the surface of the game that UNBELIEVABLY make Trespasser a borderline masterpiece, actually? This breakdown is absolute gold - thank you for making it!
Not all the way through yet, but I absolutely love the video so far. You've quickly become one of my favourite content creators - no notes, your stuff is brill. And it's a crime your subscriber count isn't a hundredfold higher. I'll try and spread the word. I got this game right when it released, I was twelve years old. And Jurassic Park was my favourite movie. I also got Half Life that same year for Christmas. But, honestly, Trespasser left the greater impression 😅 I barely remember bad performance or crashes or anything, I was completely enamoured. My guess is, that it was then and there that I realised that I love an immersive gaming experience. I did finish the game three times back in the day and a fourth time some ten-ish years back. Might give it another go. Deus Ex came along, I started playing Thief, when the third game released, later there were Dishonored and Prey, System Shock of course. ImmSims are just my favourite genre. And I'll forever be thankful for Trespasser for laying the first, very wobbly stone that got me that far genre adjacent. By the way, I gave you your 451st like, so ImmSims all the way, I guess 😂 Kudos on a job superbly done and thank you for your insightful entertainment!❤
I got Trespasser as a kid and i got to the first dinosaur and then it stopped working. Shame that I didn't keep the box and the manual; it would be worth a hunderd euros! It does have one of the best covers in FPS history!
Dang UA-cam had full alerts on and bastards didn't tell me about the arrival of this glorious masterpiece! Anyhow many thanks for all the work put into this ,as always the small details make it top tier work ❤ from NZ
26:44 would have been a good use for the other arm like put the tattoo on that arm or maybe put a health monitoring iWatch type device that has your stats on it 🤷🏻😊
This ended up pushing me to reinstall Trespasser after getting about half way through it a few years ago and it still falls into such a strange spot genre wise that I don't think anyone has been able to properly match. It feels like a walking sim that's based off a dream where you dreamed about jurassic park after falling asleep with it on while you were zonked out on cold meds, your brain making up some sort of experience that it matches up enough that you roll with it and goddamn do I love it. I'm so glad people keep giving this game love in various forms
This is it! This is your magnum opus, your masterpiece. I loved the video. So informative, thorough and engaging. I learned so much about this amazing game and its history. Trespasser's always been a bit of a curiosity to me, although I've never had the privilege to play it myself. I just think the idea of being entirely alone on a dinosaur-infested island, alone amongst the remnants of human habitation on the island is so fascinating and creepy. You captured that aspect in your retrospective and really did the project justice, MNTM, seriously. You should be very proud.
I know that it's a completely different game, but the vibe of Tresspasser, especially the number of derelict buildings that you can explore, reminds me of Pathologic. It's just so full of detail whilst simultaneously feeling really empty and isolating. I almost feel like the only reason that Pathologic doesn't directly feel like a successor to this game is because the dinosaurs have been mostly replaced with humans and you can buy heroin from kids by trading it for a shirt button and a sewing needle.
This is probably the longest video game review/retrospective that isn’t a compilation of multiple videos. Good job, what franchise are you going to do next after JP?
The intense feeling of "Oh, this is what Valve used as the template for the Source Engine" I keep getting from watching this footage is incredible, even if it wasn't true. Your favorite game engine's designer favorite game indeed.
Top-notch video. I've seen a few other Trespasser videos, but this blows them out of the water. As a long-time fan, I'm consistently surprised by how low your subscriber count is.
You make great video documentaries dude! Keep it up. Just sent this series to my old roommate as JP is his favorite series ever (he’s got all movies going back to VHS lol). Keep up the good work!
Before I get into watching what I know will be an amazing video I just wanted to say that I found your channel Christmas Day here in Aus and I binged all of your Jurassic park and Dino crisis videos and I gotta say you’ve easily and very quickly become one of my favourite channels, thank you for making such great content and I can’t wait to finish this video!
A 6 hour video on a game I'll probably never play but based on some of my favorite books and movies? Sound good 🎉 I've played just about every game in your first two videos but never had the chance to play Trespasser. Maybe this hot mess will get a remaster, can always dream. Great video!
When I first learned about Trespasser years ago, it's designs, concepts, overall aim for storytelling, and ambitious attempts at new gameplay mechanics caught me in a grasp, and I couldn't seem to forget about it. It has a charm like none I've ever seen. And a history like no other. What it wanted to be, what it ended up getting, and where it is now, will forever remain a monument of time. Old games such as this will always hold a place in my heart. I used to ramble to my friends about how good this game is from a handful of standpoints, and I'm sure if I'm given the chance, this video is going to get recommended to them. I don't usually make comments, but the way you covered everything in this video is done perfectly, and to be honest, I might just watch it again for the fun of it.
I think Tresspaser was amazing. It was somewhat the Crysis of its day. For its time it was jaw dropping, the gameplay while difficult it felt next generation.
The only issue I had with the video was the NeverKnowsBest section cause that video of his was awful and badly made for basically screaming "look at these people saying mean things about a public figure." That aside, I wasn't expecting this video to appear and I really enjoyed your take on it. I'd love to see you discuss the King Kong game given its a favorite of mine.
Yeah a bunch of time is wasted reiterating the same points about sensationalised game journalism, and public outrage. Like I get they wanted to give an idea of the scope of the public outrage, but it's just minutes wasted on repetitively and slowly reading articles that almost all sayvthe same things, he could have trimmed a lot of it.
Ah, it's come full circle. Your first video I saw was the every Jurassic Park game and now it's a video of most infamous Jurassic Park game. I love it.
The T-Rex in Industrial Jungle is scripted to follow you down the valley. It's not scripted to attack the parasaurolophus afaik. I've had it ignore the other dino and go after me instead.
I loved and hated this game. I was eight when I got the game for Christmas. The sound didn't work, except for the voice overs, framerate was in the upper teens and load times were long. I still played it, starting over constantly. I never got past the operations centre, but I still miss it.
This game was such a buggy mess that sometimes it would just refuse to run, even on lowest graphical setting. Also, the level skip cheat spawned you up in the air, causing fall damage, and would only skip you ahead one level at a time.
It's so weird. Loved the buggy Trespasser when it came out. Played it numerous times during my life - in my 20s and 30s. Loved it every time (just like I love this deep dive of a video). 🥰
I'm roughly 1/3 of the way through this review after going through the last two pieces on Jurassic Park games. I will edit this post as I get through it but so far...every time I see someone talk about Trespasser, and hear that mournful tune from the Town, I can't help but feel sorry for this game and its developers. Trespasser could have been something incredible, a touchstone spoken of in the same kinds of tones we use to refer to Half-Life or certain Final Fantasy titles. Even though it was a failure, it went on to inspire so many people...but even that cannot save it from its ultimate fate, which is to fade away into obscurity as the broken disaster it *was.* Given how many of us are fated to simply turn to dust, forgotten forever like the statues of Ozymandias, I can't help but feel a kind of kinship with this broken, unrealized world. EDIT #1: 4:00:00 From what I understand, the original canon of Jurassic Park was not settled on until Jurassic Park 3 came out in 2001. Despite the obviously 1990s vehicles in the movie, no real dates are given in Jurassic Park or the Lost World. I believe the original intention was for the movies to follow the same timeline as the books (that is, happening in the late 80s and then the mid-90s) before Jurassic Park 3 decided to solidify it's own version of events. Ironically, Trespasser's failure may lie at the core of why this timeline was never fully adopted. EDIT #2: 4:37:45 That the raptors can't jump is something that has been discussed by the dev team and many of the designers/hackers over at Trescom for years. ResearchIndicates talks about it in his Let's Play as well: many of the Raptor's behaviours had to be disabled for stability reasons. Not only would Raptors jumping all over the place strain the engine and cause potential disaster should they collide with a physics object or a wall. Supposedly they were also susceptible to fall damage, which would have made a nice way to finish some of them off were it not for the fact that they would jump *CONSTANTLY* and kill themselves before you even met them...if the blood spatters they caused didn't crash the game to desktop first. Rather than fight the inevitable, the team disabled most of the Raptor behaviours and abilities (as well as Dinosaurs taking fall damage at all), which results in them being little more than torpedos with teeth. You can reactivate many of these behaviours using mods found at Trescom, but even the ability to jump doesn't really make the raptors any more dangerous or interesting. It CAN lead to some pretty amazing.... *jumpscares* though :V Either way, you can see why so many people are excited for a Survival game within Jurassic Park. If the raptors become anywhere near as terrifying as the Alien from Alien: Isolation they will be a masterpiece of fear. EDIT #3: 4:43:05 The reason why you can't score any melee kills in the game except with the Mace is another one of those "known shippables" the team just had to deal with by release: it is the only melee weapon in the game that still has a "weight" value attached to it, which is how the game determines how much damage physics objects deal the characters in the game world. As another story of the development goes, the team had designed a whole slew of things you could use for melee combat, up to and including human skulls. The problem was that as soon as Ann stored one of these weapons, it would proceed to kill her. The engine couldn't do the correct calculations and therefore any object with *any* weight associated with it that came into contact with Ann's hurtbox damaged her (you can see this if you ever holster the cattle prod after you pick it up: it will continue to pulse on Ann until it knocks her out). As luck would have it however, the shape of Nedry's mace and the placement of its hitbox means that it is the *only* melee weapon Ann can store that won't immediately clobber her to death, and so it got to keep its ridiculous power level. It is a true shame that you cannot take it to the next level, or even the finale, because it would be a treat to beat up the final boss with it.
god the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park STILL look so good, it's incredible. most of the dinosaur shots in that ancient movie look better than most current creature CGI. what a masterpiece
That's because most of these dinosaur shots aren't CGI, but practical wizardry. JP has just 90 seconds of CGI. And what is there does NOT hold up against anything past PS2, PS3 if we're being generous.
if you look up "how much cgi is in the original jurassic park" you'll see a range more like four to nine minutes of cgi, and about nine minutes of animatronics. still not too shabby! though nobody anywhere is citing sources on this so who knows the actual number
That's because most of the shots are animatronics, not CGI. There are a couple of fully rendered sequences, which do stand out, but they're used very sparingly. Honestly, the stop motion sequences they cut were much more elaborate but I do think that it would be to the detriment of the film to have the dinosaurs on screen walking around in full view. Part of the reason that I buy the danger posed by the dinosaurs in that film is because they almost never actually fit inside the frame. They were hiding the fact that the puppets didn't have legs but it makes it much more tense because you only see them from behind cover or from angles that make them appear to be so large that they can't fit into the frame. I feel like it's a nice illustration of why practical effects tend to lend themselves to better film making. Having to use a specific camera angle to get a shot of the effect that doesn't break the illusion really improves the visual storytelling compared to how it works now where the effects are often rendered in advance of the live action shoot, which restricts the potential lighting conditions you can use. Effects tend to look best in the dark, but with practical effects you can guarantee that the lighting will match the environment in the scene without needing to coordinate the digital render and the live set and can therefore be more expressive with the use of coloured lighting and heavy shadows to create a particular atmosphere by experimenting on the day.
Unironically one of the best pieces of gaming related media on youtube. Keep making videos, please. Even if the algorithm doesn't reward you, this type of content is a bacon of quality in a sea of bloated pretentious essays with nothing to say.
UA-cam algo somehow actually showed this to me a little over a week ago! Done watching the first two parts, finally ready to bite into this over the coming week. Your content has been so good and such a nice discovery!
I can't believe i watched a 6 hour video about trespasser with (almost) no break. I hope that says more about your videos quality as about me. Anyway I think you overstate the importance of Trespasser. In your video it sounded it was even a trailblazer. But if anything it hindered game development. It had shown that taking risk are costly and don`t pay. A lesson often learn again and again. To a point that all triple A games nowadays are the same. Who is to say, if there where no Trespasser maybe valve had released a HL2 1 or 2 years earlier, because there where no example of a game build on physic-engine failing so hard. Maybe HL 2 would have been the game that had faild so hard. Maybe that game would have been good, we would be 2 years ahead of our timeline than.
@monotonallizard i literally never watched jurassic park prior to this video and now ive watched the first two Dont know if thats a compliment but I'm giving it as one lol
Man this video is so incredible in so many ways. I've steadily been making my way through it and every single segment brings something new and interesting. All these insights on the devs, the gaming industry, and even the game's critics is so much more than I would have expected from a video essay about this game best known for "kinda sucked, huh." The amount of love you put into making this really really shows, and it makes the viewing experience so much better for it.
The original Cathy's beach can also be found in the scrapped plantation house level. It's way more faithful to the film locationwise, and also features the camping table and dishes etc.
Engaging video. But I will stand by my take that Trespasser sucked on release, and sucks today. At least back in the day I could fantasize about it potentially being good because it was unplayable on our PC due to all the technical issues. Being able to play it in full you can definitely understand what the devs hoped to achieve with it, but any positives are, IMO, far outweighed by the core gameplay being subpar at best. I reject the notion that it deserves praise for being one of the first to have this or that thing that ended up being a mainstay in the industry (eg physic puzzles, open world, etc.) because, quite frankly, those were obvious evolutions of the technology. You had rudimentary physics in the 80s with games like Thrust, so being able to pick up boxes and junk in a realistic manner wasn't exactly a novel concept by the late 90s. As for its influence on the Jurassic franchise as a whole, this is hard to say. I think it's a bit foolish to expect the architects behind things like JP3 and the JW trilogy really bothered to read up on what positives could be taken from Trespasser, let alone actually subject themselves to playing it.
Still watching this behemoth of a video, but fun fact about Old Man Murray which was quoted around 1:45:00 : The 2 writers of that website wrote Portal 2, HL2:E2, and I believe a lot of the TF2 comics. Your whole section about vitriolic negative reviews is fantastic, and something I've been vocal about for a long time. Gamers love nothing more than to conceptualize developers as their enemies; as greedy conmen who want to trick you out of your money. I'm sure that's true of some of the executives, but the artists in the trenches? Not often. Maybe you mention this later in the video, but Seamus Blackley was moved to tears by the community support for Trespasser, and that right there shows the passion. Hell, Trespasser has inspired the game I'm working on in one big way: Guns running out of ammo and being tossed into enemy heads, because it does indeed never get old.
Ok, finished it. Fantastic! It's a bit repetitive now and again, but at 6 hours I think that's to be expected. This really feels like THE definitive Trespasser video, and your analysis about how enchanting its atmosphere is really nailed the lasting appeal of the game. The incomplete, overly spacious game design with no clear gameplay loop actually gives it a unique aura.
Thanks! Yeah, some repetitive stuff slipped through, I'm particularly annoyed about how many times I say 'This is Trespasser's best whatever' but after a certain point I just had to let the perfectionist impulse go.
That one article complaining about how bad it is that there are guns everywhere is hilarious.... you are upset that thr people on an island with T REX'S AND VELOCIRAPTORS, have guns? Seriously? Its like seeing people complain when an aggressive bear or something gets shot by a hiker. You just expect people to fight these things with a pocket knife or something? Games journalism was always terrible.
The complaint is valid considering it makes the dinosaurs a trivial concern. Expecting players to make the game challenging for themselves via self-imposed rules is just bad game design.
I swear to god you are like Thesnakerers double. I was 4 videos deep only to realize i'm on a different channel. You are doing something very, very well
I don't remember where or when I first saw Trespasser, but ever since then it's been lurking at the back of my brain- occasionally reminding me of its existence, whispering temptations to find a way to play it and see what it's about. And now, having seen it in such detail? I want a remake. It clearly had sauce, but needed more time to cook. It's just unfortunate that it'll never happen...
The Geothermal plant puzzle wasn't ever really going to be 'that' complicated. It's mostly just pulling levers, removing a tree branch from a fan, and turning wheels.
Watched the entire 6 hours and it was awesome! I played this game so many times back then and it left me with so many great memories. Thanks for the video!
Congrats on 7000 subs, boss. I saw it coming. I really think this could be the video that pops off if it ends up hitting the algorithm right. No idea why it hasn't yet. UA-cam loves that long-form shit. (and most of us do, too) One of these days you'll wake up to like 10x the subs overnight and be like "what?" I swear by it.
I played the original store release version of the game. At that time and age, I knew nothing about the pre-release hype and was merely drawn in by the awesome box art and description. I unironically loved this game and played countless hours. I've played through the original disc version multiple times (actually never played any of the modded versions or fan updates). It was an exercise in frustration at times, leading to rage quits only to return to the island later for another go. Reflecting back, there were too many weapons strewn about which detracted from the survival aspect. But I don't know that any other game has had me so fully engrossed in the experience. Would love to see the full vision of this game realized one day.
Watch Part One here: ua-cam.com/video/OajIdOxQ_Q4/v-deo.html
Watch Part Two here: ua-cam.com/video/MYRl7Mg8KKU/v-deo.html
If you enjoy the video please share it around!
Thank you so very much for the time and effort you put into this epic. ❤
Now get your arse back to work on the next masterpiece.=)
Well, part of why so much CGI effects these days look so fake, is because of stingy studio execs exploiting the lack of a proper union, in regards to CGI in general.
It's why Disney committed self-sabotage with Treasure Planet, in order to abandon 2nd animation.
This video is a triumph. It is equal parts funny, entertaining, reflective, and thought-provoking. Despite its daunting runtime, it never feels like it's belaboring the point or being redundant. It is a masterclass in how to structure a comprehensive retrospective, and it has that "just one more chapter" energy that any good pageturner should have. You have every right to be proud of this.
I read this comment in Monotonal's voice.
Thanks!
Hbomberguy has been awfully quiet since this 6-hour behemoth dropped.
I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 12 year old gamer when Trespasser came out. I received a new copy for my birthday, having read about its development for years via issues of PC Gamer, and as a total Dino nerd, I’d have wished for it either way. Having built a- for the time- potent gaming rig with my own allowance/help from parents, I installed it on my 40 gig 10k rpm drive and asked my 950 mhz AMD Thunderbird and Voodoo 2 Banshee to transport me to Isla Sorna… and met with a wall of crashes thicker than a concrete T-Rex pen. Ah, Trespasser- *research indicates* that it was quite a lark…
Research indicates still has the best playthrough of Trespasser on the entire internet
Bushy tailed?
I was about the same age when this came out and I never made it past 2-3 hours lol. I eventually put it down for skynet
@@ginogatash4030It's an American term that comes from and compares to Rabbits and Squirrels. Basically bright eyed bushy tailed means you were young, energetic, and (usually) naive.
I first learned of the existence of Trespasser in 2005 when browsing Wikipedia during some downtime at work. It became something of an obsession, i have read basically every interview, watched that old LP many times, listened to Jurassic Time...and i can still say this video is one of the most exhaustingly comprehensive pieces on the game. You deserve so many more subs than youve got, i enjoy your work immensely.
Thanks!
Jesus christ it’s 6 hours long
thank you for this gift lizard boy
I've never heard of this game and am completely in awe after watching this. You managed to portray the fascination and love people have for this game in a way that I almost feel like I experienced it myself. I can completely relate as someone who was in his teenage years during the 2000s - games were at this magical point with little public attention, having passionate people trying to create new experiences. Games trying to push borders had this magical feeling of discovery when trying them out. I felt this so much while watching this video, and hearing all the background details just added to the fascination. Fantastic work.
You've no idea how much I'm looking forward to this! I don't get why your channel isn't bigger and cant wait to binge this
His voice, his cadence, him crying about the game having boobs in. I dunno man I didn't make it 30 mins in.
it is very prophetic how Trespasser, as you say, starts with a crash, but also ends with the poem Ozymandias (ok, secret end, but it's still there)
I've been waiting with fingers crossed for your trespasser look for awhile now and what do you go and do but make a six hour video. We don't deserve you, you're something else. Thanks champion.
This game always had a very special place in my heart. Little did I know historians that make 6 hour encyclopedias feel the same ❤️
This is easily one of the best videos on Trespasser by far. It's a perfect blend of informative and entertaining, I love it!
Thank you for all the hard work you do, your videos bring me so much joy and I often find myself sleeping to them when my overworked brain or tinnitus decides to keep me up at night. Keep doing what you enjoy doing! ❤
Thanks! Tinnitus sucks, glad I can help.
Alright time to make my bucket of Popcorn ready
Finished watching this! Thanks for taking so much time to talk about the game, and thanks for mentioning TresCom. It was really nice getting an intact narrative about Tres from development to today, all at once. Many kudos.
Holy shit is this ever one of THE BEST Jurassic Park videos on UA-cam! Not just Trespasser vids, I mean JP as a franchise. The research put into this is a marvel!
This is such a great video monotonallizard i am so glad i found your channel!!!! GREAT JOB ON THIS ONE MATE!!!!!!
This game is so special to me. I've played this piece of shit far more times than I'm willing to admit. In general that's how I'd describe the game, special. There's some weird charm about it that makes me remember randomly every couple of months. There's some charisma in there, in the dense jungle,betwen the drunk dinosaurs, in an empty room,on a dirty floor,somewhere in the Pacific.
mechanically it’s far from a good game but narratively i think the world building is the best out of any Jurassic game
How in great planet earth am I 37 years old and NEVER heard of this game before?!
Im going to go on quite the discovery learning about this, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
if I recall, melee weapons killing you on the belt was a pre-release issue since they were scripted to do damage with their tips while you held them, which included when they were in your blet.
The final game removed whatever way they delt damage aside from the Mace I think.
You can still kill enemies with melee weapons (or empty guns since they're awkwardly swung when out of ammo) or sticks if you mange to "jam" the object into the raptor's neck, which will usually cause you to drop it but promptly result in the raptor bleeding rapidly from the neck and dying.
'Carried' melee weapons killing the player isn't really a thing, it's been spotted a few times, but that's not intended behavior. Weapons/items carried on Anne's person have no collision or anything.
'Damage' values for any item are kind of funny because even low values like 2.0 randomly make weapons deal 1 hit KO's. No clue how it works. Nobody seems to.
Trespasser is one of those games I have always had an insatiable curiosity with. Jurassic Park was a huge obsession of mine when I was nine or ten, and while I gravitated more towards Operation Genesis' management simulation design, Trespasser was one of those things that always stuck out to me. It wasn't an action game, it wasn't a platformer, and it certainly wasn't strategy, it was something else. Flash forward a few years and I got around to playing Thief and Thief 2 in middle school, and the switch finally flipped in my brain. This is the genre that Trespasser was trying to be, and I can't help but love it for that.
As a note, pre-release builds of Trespasser have revealed early versions of both the Plantation House level and Pine Valley containing the geothermal plant.
This game feels like someone saw what games would look like in the future but all they saw was vr games and assumed all of them are just that.
However if this game ever ends up in vr in any way I would play it in a heartbeat
Yeah, I hadn't quite picked up on it but it's like a VR game that you need to control with mouse and keyboard.
As rough as the game is I do have to keep reminding myself that it's from 1998.
It's better to fail to be Kobe Bryant than to resign yourself to live as a Ubisoft.
I was just watching the other 2 videos very recently lol. Skipped the wait for this wonderful video.
Wow, what an absolutely incredible video. I'm left in awe. It's very rare that I will watch a video this long straight through, but this was so worth it. Thanks for all your time and effort! I thought it was a very cool gesture to mention so many of the developers by name.
Also, I'm glad you mentioned the amazing Hammond Memoirs collection. Finding it on UA-cam, and loving the narration and the music was what got me interested in Trespasser in the first place. Watching it after the first two films, knowing that Richard Attenborough is gone, and with the music and his performance, can be a very emotional and moving experience.
Anyways, thanks again, and take care!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Let the feast begin.
Oh shit, Christmas 2, here we come.
Wow, I never expected how much DNA a Jurassic Park game could share with the walking sim genre. That's really interesting!
6 hours of Jurassic Content, HELL YEAH
Its raining out and I just made a hot drink. What perfect timing! Thank you for all the effort you dod to bring us this!
The pleasure was mine!
Hell yes: I am indeed down for a 6 hour Trespasser retrospective, let's go. I found some of your other vids earlier, so I am stoked to see you keep making bangers, you have a good pregame and structuralist focus.
I guess much like an actual fossil, you can see something that looks a little like what we see now in the modern day but just a good bit more primeval. You can see the anatomy of a bird but just a bit bigger; You can see a modern FPS with physics and a story focus but bound to the limitations of late 90s PC specs and with more jank.
The double take I did when Cahokia was mentioned toward the end cause I live so close to the Cahokia mounds and simply never grasped their importance LOL
Still making my way through this, but I need to say that this is positively brilliant! There are so many details and themes hidden under the surface of the game that UNBELIEVABLY make Trespasser a borderline masterpiece, actually? This breakdown is absolute gold - thank you for making it!
A six hour long retrospective on Trespasser???? Sign me up.
Thank you so much for this, you just made my Christmas a lot better. You make your videos with love and it shows, beautiful work.
Not all the way through yet, but I absolutely love the video so far. You've quickly become one of my favourite content creators - no notes, your stuff is brill. And it's a crime your subscriber count isn't a hundredfold higher. I'll try and spread the word.
I got this game right when it released, I was twelve years old. And Jurassic Park was my favourite movie. I also got Half Life that same year for Christmas. But, honestly, Trespasser left the greater impression 😅
I barely remember bad performance or crashes or anything, I was completely enamoured. My guess is, that it was then and there that I realised that I love an immersive gaming experience. I did finish the game three times back in the day and a fourth time some ten-ish years back. Might give it another go.
Deus Ex came along, I started playing Thief, when the third game released, later there were Dishonored and Prey, System Shock of course. ImmSims are just my favourite genre. And I'll forever be thankful for Trespasser for laying the first, very wobbly stone that got me that far genre adjacent.
By the way, I gave you your 451st like, so ImmSims all the way, I guess 😂
Kudos on a job superbly done and thank you for your insightful entertainment!❤
I got Trespasser as a kid and i got to the first dinosaur and then it stopped working. Shame that I didn't keep the box and the manual; it would be worth a hunderd euros! It does have one of the best covers in FPS history!
Dang UA-cam had full alerts on and bastards didn't tell me about the arrival of this glorious masterpiece!
Anyhow many thanks for all the work put into this ,as always the small details make it top tier work ❤ from NZ
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
26:44 would have been a good use for the other arm like put the tattoo on that arm or maybe put a health monitoring iWatch type device that has your stats on it 🤷🏻😊
Yeah, that's how I'd do it too.
This ended up pushing me to reinstall Trespasser after getting about half way through it a few years ago and it still falls into such a strange spot genre wise that I don't think anyone has been able to properly match. It feels like a walking sim that's based off a dream where you dreamed about jurassic park after falling asleep with it on while you were zonked out on cold meds, your brain making up some sort of experience that it matches up enough that you roll with it and goddamn do I love it.
I'm so glad people keep giving this game love in various forms
This is it! This is your magnum opus, your masterpiece. I loved the video. So informative, thorough and engaging. I learned so much about this amazing game and its history. Trespasser's always been a bit of a curiosity to me, although I've never had the privilege to play it myself. I just think the idea of being entirely alone on a dinosaur-infested island, alone amongst the remnants of human habitation on the island is so fascinating and creepy. You captured that aspect in your retrospective and really did the project justice, MNTM, seriously. You should be very proud.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
This was absolutely gorgeously captured, and I wish I could devote this much energy to my lesser-known Jurassic Park guilty pleasure game. :')
I know that it's a completely different game, but the vibe of Tresspasser, especially the number of derelict buildings that you can explore, reminds me of Pathologic. It's just so full of detail whilst simultaneously feeling really empty and isolating. I almost feel like the only reason that Pathologic doesn't directly feel like a successor to this game is because the dinosaurs have been mostly replaced with humans and you can buy heroin from kids by trading it for a shirt button and a sewing needle.
This is probably the longest video game review/retrospective that isn’t a compilation of multiple videos. Good job, what franchise are you going to do next after JP?
Alien, but that's years away yet. I've still got like twenty more Jurassic Park games to get through.
The intense feeling of "Oh, this is what Valve used as the template for the Source Engine" I keep getting from watching this footage is incredible, even if it wasn't true. Your favorite game engine's designer favorite game indeed.
Top-notch video. I've seen a few other Trespasser videos, but this blows them out of the water. As a long-time fan, I'm consistently surprised by how low your subscriber count is.
Great video!! Also the bonks had my dyin' lol
You make great video documentaries dude! Keep it up. Just sent this series to my old roommate as JP is his favorite series ever (he’s got all movies going back to VHS lol). Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
Before I get into watching what I know will be an amazing video I just wanted to say that I found your channel Christmas Day here in Aus and I binged all of your Jurassic park and Dino crisis videos and I gotta say you’ve easily and very quickly become one of my favourite channels, thank you for making such great content and I can’t wait to finish this video!
A 6 hour video on a game I'll probably never play but based on some of my favorite books and movies? Sound good 🎉
I've played just about every game in your first two videos but never had the chance to play Trespasser. Maybe this hot mess will get a remaster, can always dream. Great video!
A six hour video about a game I’ve never heard of.
Why am I watching this? Because ML never misses.
See you in six hours ❤
When I first learned about Trespasser years ago, it's designs, concepts, overall aim for storytelling, and ambitious attempts at new gameplay mechanics caught me in a grasp, and I couldn't seem to forget about it. It has a charm like none I've ever seen. And a history like no other. What it wanted to be, what it ended up getting, and where it is now, will forever remain a monument of time. Old games such as this will always hold a place in my heart.
I used to ramble to my friends about how good this game is from a handful of standpoints, and I'm sure if I'm given the chance, this video is going to get recommended to them. I don't usually make comments, but the way you covered everything in this video is done perfectly, and to be honest, I might just watch it again for the fun of it.
I think Tresspaser was amazing. It was somewhat the Crysis of its day. For its time it was jaw dropping, the gameplay while difficult it felt next generation.
The only issue I had with the video was the NeverKnowsBest section cause that video of his was awful and badly made for basically screaming "look at these people saying mean things about a public figure."
That aside, I wasn't expecting this video to appear and I really enjoyed your take on it. I'd love to see you discuss the King Kong game given its a favorite of mine.
Yeah a bunch of time is wasted reiterating the same points about sensationalised game journalism, and public outrage.
Like I get they wanted to give an idea of the scope of the public outrage, but it's just minutes wasted on repetitively and slowly reading articles that almost all sayvthe same things, he could have trimmed a lot of it.
Ah, it's come full circle. Your first video I saw was the every Jurassic Park game and now it's a video of most infamous Jurassic Park game. I love it.
The T-Rex in Industrial Jungle is scripted to follow you down the valley. It's not scripted to attack the parasaurolophus afaik. I've had it ignore the other dino and go after me instead.
crazy how doing some xmas cleaning i was also thinking about the Ozymandias poem and then this vid came out
I loved and hated this game. I was eight when I got the game for Christmas. The sound didn't work, except for the voice overs, framerate was in the upper teens and load times were long. I still played it, starting over constantly. I never got past the operations centre, but I still miss it.
The ambition of half life 2 with the graphics of half life 1. I didn't know that this game existed but what an interesting title it is
Dinosaurs in the thumbnail confirmed - crisis averted.
This game was such a buggy mess that sometimes it would just refuse to run, even on lowest graphical setting. Also, the level skip cheat spawned you up in the air, causing fall damage, and would only skip you ahead one level at a time.
The long awaited follow up
A success as an inspiration for future and walking simulator, but a failure as a proper computer games.
It's so weird. Loved the buggy Trespasser when it came out. Played it numerous times during my life - in my 20s and 30s. Loved it every time (just like I love this deep dive of a video). 🥰
30 minutes down, 5.5 hours to go. Consider me seated for the duration. Your stuff remains criminally underrated.
I'm roughly 1/3 of the way through this review after going through the last two pieces on Jurassic Park games. I will edit this post as I get through it but so far...every time I see someone talk about Trespasser, and hear that mournful tune from the Town, I can't help but feel sorry for this game and its developers. Trespasser could have been something incredible, a touchstone spoken of in the same kinds of tones we use to refer to Half-Life or certain Final Fantasy titles. Even though it was a failure, it went on to inspire so many people...but even that cannot save it from its ultimate fate, which is to fade away into obscurity as the broken disaster it *was.* Given how many of us are fated to simply turn to dust, forgotten forever like the statues of Ozymandias, I can't help but feel a kind of kinship with this broken, unrealized world.
EDIT #1: 4:00:00 From what I understand, the original canon of Jurassic Park was not settled on until Jurassic Park 3 came out in 2001. Despite the obviously 1990s vehicles in the movie, no real dates are given in Jurassic Park or the Lost World. I believe the original intention was for the movies to follow the same timeline as the books (that is, happening in the late 80s and then the mid-90s) before Jurassic Park 3 decided to solidify it's own version of events. Ironically, Trespasser's failure may lie at the core of why this timeline was never fully adopted.
EDIT #2: 4:37:45 That the raptors can't jump is something that has been discussed by the dev team and many of the designers/hackers over at Trescom for years. ResearchIndicates talks about it in his Let's Play as well: many of the Raptor's behaviours had to be disabled for stability reasons. Not only would Raptors jumping all over the place strain the engine and cause potential disaster should they collide with a physics object or a wall. Supposedly they were also susceptible to fall damage, which would have made a nice way to finish some of them off were it not for the fact that they would jump *CONSTANTLY* and kill themselves before you even met them...if the blood spatters they caused didn't crash the game to desktop first. Rather than fight the inevitable, the team disabled most of the Raptor behaviours and abilities (as well as Dinosaurs taking fall damage at all), which results in them being little more than torpedos with teeth. You can reactivate many of these behaviours using mods found at Trescom, but even the ability to jump doesn't really make the raptors any more dangerous or interesting. It CAN lead to some pretty amazing.... *jumpscares* though :V Either way, you can see why so many people are excited for a Survival game within Jurassic Park. If the raptors become anywhere near as terrifying as the Alien from Alien: Isolation they will be a masterpiece of fear.
EDIT #3: 4:43:05 The reason why you can't score any melee kills in the game except with the Mace is another one of those "known shippables" the team just had to deal with by release: it is the only melee weapon in the game that still has a "weight" value attached to it, which is how the game determines how much damage physics objects deal the characters in the game world. As another story of the development goes, the team had designed a whole slew of things you could use for melee combat, up to and including human skulls. The problem was that as soon as Ann stored one of these weapons, it would proceed to kill her. The engine couldn't do the correct calculations and therefore any object with *any* weight associated with it that came into contact with Ann's hurtbox damaged her (you can see this if you ever holster the cattle prod after you pick it up: it will continue to pulse on Ann until it knocks her out). As luck would have it however, the shape of Nedry's mace and the placement of its hitbox means that it is the *only* melee weapon Ann can store that won't immediately clobber her to death, and so it got to keep its ridiculous power level. It is a true shame that you cannot take it to the next level, or even the finale, because it would be a treat to beat up the final boss with it.
6 hours?! Cheers, you absolute mentalist.
god the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park STILL look so good, it's incredible. most of the dinosaur shots in that ancient movie look better than most current creature CGI. what a masterpiece
wait, SIX HOURS????????
That's because most of these dinosaur shots aren't CGI, but practical wizardry. JP has just 90 seconds of CGI. And what is there does NOT hold up against anything past PS2, PS3 if we're being generous.
if you look up "how much cgi is in the original jurassic park" you'll see a range more like four to nine minutes of cgi, and about nine minutes of animatronics. still not too shabby! though nobody anywhere is citing sources on this so who knows the actual number
That's because most of the shots are animatronics, not CGI.
There are a couple of fully rendered sequences, which do stand out, but they're used very sparingly.
Honestly, the stop motion sequences they cut were much more elaborate but I do think that it would be to the detriment of the film to have the dinosaurs on screen walking around in full view.
Part of the reason that I buy the danger posed by the dinosaurs in that film is because they almost never actually fit inside the frame. They were hiding the fact that the puppets didn't have legs but it makes it much more tense because you only see them from behind cover or from angles that make them appear to be so large that they can't fit into the frame.
I feel like it's a nice illustration of why practical effects tend to lend themselves to better film making. Having to use a specific camera angle to get a shot of the effect that doesn't break the illusion really improves the visual storytelling compared to how it works now where the effects are often rendered in advance of the live action shoot, which restricts the potential lighting conditions you can use.
Effects tend to look best in the dark, but with practical effects you can guarantee that the lighting will match the environment in the scene without needing to coordinate the digital render and the live set and can therefore be more expressive with the use of coloured lighting and heavy shadows to create a particular atmosphere by experimenting on the day.
Unironically one of the best pieces of gaming related media on youtube.
Keep making videos, please.
Even if the algorithm doesn't reward you, this type of content is a bacon of quality in a sea of bloated pretentious essays with nothing to say.
Thanks!
Oh my, what a gift. Thank you for what I'm sure was a lot of hard work.
UA-cam algo somehow actually showed this to me a little over a week ago! Done watching the first two parts, finally ready to bite into this over the coming week. Your content has been so good and such a nice discovery!
Masterpiece! Thanks for making this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I can't believe i watched a 6 hour video about trespasser with (almost) no break. I hope that says more about your videos quality as about me. Anyway I think you overstate the importance of Trespasser. In your video it sounded it was even a trailblazer. But if anything it hindered game development.
It had shown that taking risk are costly and don`t pay. A lesson often learn again and again. To a point that all triple A games nowadays are the same.
Who is to say, if there where no Trespasser maybe valve had released a HL2 1 or 2 years earlier, because there where no example of a game build on physic-engine failing so hard. Maybe HL 2 would have been the game that had faild so hard. Maybe that game would have been good, we would be 2 years ahead of our timeline than.
i just watched a 6 hour video about a game ill never play
Thank you
You're welcome, glad you enjoyed it!
@monotonallizard i literally never watched jurassic park prior to this video and now ive watched the first two
Dont know if thats a compliment but I'm giving it as one lol
Man this video is so incredible in so many ways. I've steadily been making my way through it and every single segment brings something new and interesting. All these insights on the devs, the gaming industry, and even the game's critics is so much more than I would have expected from a video essay about this game best known for "kinda sucked, huh." The amount of love you put into making this really really shows, and it makes the viewing experience so much better for it.
Thanks!
Can’t resist, sorry. “Your (developers) were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
5:31:45 This was such a gut punch.
Rest in Peace... Jesus, that really sucks.
Trespasser crawled so other open-world games could walk, jump, and run. This game needs a re-make.
The original Cathy's beach can also be found in the scrapped plantation house level. It's way more faithful to the film locationwise, and also features the camping table and dishes etc.
Engaging video. But I will stand by my take that Trespasser sucked on release, and sucks today. At least back in the day I could fantasize about it potentially being good because it was unplayable on our PC due to all the technical issues. Being able to play it in full you can definitely understand what the devs hoped to achieve with it, but any positives are, IMO, far outweighed by the core gameplay being subpar at best. I reject the notion that it deserves praise for being one of the first to have this or that thing that ended up being a mainstay in the industry (eg physic puzzles, open world, etc.) because, quite frankly, those were obvious evolutions of the technology. You had rudimentary physics in the 80s with games like Thrust, so being able to pick up boxes and junk in a realistic manner wasn't exactly a novel concept by the late 90s. As for its influence on the Jurassic franchise as a whole, this is hard to say. I think it's a bit foolish to expect the architects behind things like JP3 and the JW trilogy really bothered to read up on what positives could be taken from Trespasser, let alone actually subject themselves to playing it.
Excellent work! Well done~ Well worth the wait
Thanks!
YEAH I'M THINKING HE'S BACK!!
Awesome work, MNTM. Thank you
Still watching this behemoth of a video, but fun fact about Old Man Murray which was quoted around 1:45:00 : The 2 writers of that website wrote Portal 2, HL2:E2, and I believe a lot of the TF2 comics.
Your whole section about vitriolic negative reviews is fantastic, and something I've been vocal about for a long time. Gamers love nothing more than to conceptualize developers as their enemies; as greedy conmen who want to trick you out of your money. I'm sure that's true of some of the executives, but the artists in the trenches? Not often.
Maybe you mention this later in the video, but Seamus Blackley was moved to tears by the community support for Trespasser, and that right there shows the passion. Hell, Trespasser has inspired the game I'm working on in one big way: Guns running out of ammo and being tossed into enemy heads, because it does indeed never get old.
Ok, finished it. Fantastic! It's a bit repetitive now and again, but at 6 hours I think that's to be expected. This really feels like THE definitive Trespasser video, and your analysis about how enchanting its atmosphere is really nailed the lasting appeal of the game. The incomplete, overly spacious game design with no clear gameplay loop actually gives it a unique aura.
Thanks! Yeah, some repetitive stuff slipped through, I'm particularly annoyed about how many times I say 'This is Trespasser's best whatever' but after a certain point I just had to let the perfectionist impulse go.
3:51:52 Holy cow I missed this bit on the first watch. Yeah Hammond has blood on his hands.
That one article complaining about how bad it is that there are guns everywhere is hilarious.... you are upset that thr people on an island with T REX'S AND VELOCIRAPTORS, have guns? Seriously? Its like seeing people complain when an aggressive bear or something gets shot by a hiker. You just expect people to fight these things with a pocket knife or something? Games journalism was always terrible.
The complaint is valid considering it makes the dinosaurs a trivial concern. Expecting players to make the game challenging for themselves via self-imposed rules is just bad game design.
I swear to god you are like Thesnakerers double. I was 4 videos deep only to realize i'm on a different channel. You are doing something very, very well
I don't remember where or when I first saw Trespasser, but ever since then it's been lurking at the back of my brain- occasionally reminding me of its existence, whispering temptations to find a way to play it and see what it's about. And now, having seen it in such detail? I want a remake. It clearly had sauce, but needed more time to cook. It's just unfortunate that it'll never happen...
I wish they got the extra year to fix it. It could have been good
I believe that title actually goes to dominion lmfao
I'd give it to Fallen Kingdom myself, but yeah.
Research Indicates that I always enjoy in-depth explorations of Tresspasser.
The Geothermal plant puzzle wasn't ever really going to be 'that' complicated. It's mostly just pulling levers, removing a tree branch from a fan, and turning wheels.
I get it, everyone hates the Jurassic World trilogy except for me.
World is a good movie, Dominion is fun, but I really don't care for Fallen Kingdom.
Watched the entire 6 hours and it was awesome! I played this game so many times back then and it left me with so many great memories. Thanks for the video!
IT'S HERE BOYS LFG!!!!
Congrats on 7000 subs, boss. I saw it coming. I really think this could be the video that pops off if it ends up hitting the algorithm right. No idea why it hasn't yet. UA-cam loves that long-form shit. (and most of us do, too)
One of these days you'll wake up to like 10x the subs overnight and be like "what?"
I swear by it.
I love your stuff. Good shit.
I played the original store release version of the game. At that time and age, I knew nothing about the pre-release hype and was merely drawn in by the awesome box art and description. I unironically loved this game and played countless hours. I've played through the original disc version multiple times (actually never played any of the modded versions or fan updates). It was an exercise in frustration at times, leading to rage quits only to return to the island later for another go. Reflecting back, there were too many weapons strewn about which detracted from the survival aspect. But I don't know that any other game has had me so fully engrossed in the experience. Would love to see the full vision of this game realized one day.
The velociraptor colliding under the triceratops and causing the 10fps is the collision detection getting too many calculations at a time.