My Top 100: #66 – Die Hard Trilogy

 

As a kid, it wasn’t very often that I had to be prevented from seeing violent movies.  I was never into guns, tanks or other “macho” things that others my age tended to be interested in.  The furthest I ever got to it was playing “war” with friends in the woods behind our house.  It was fun as hell playing with pretend guns, but it never made me want to watch violent action movies – it wasn’t a question of not wanting to see violence on screen, but a question of interest!

Screw TimeCop – I wanted to see Kindergarten Cop whenever it got to The Movie Network!  That stuff was hilarious!

Anyway, my point is that I only really started to watch action movies once I hit my teens.  Mission: Impossible, Twister, Independence Day…  1996 was a great year to turn (PG-) 13, but I had quite a bit of catching up to do.

 

 

Also released in ’96 was Die Hard Trilogy for PlayStation.

To me, this console was going to be a flash in the pan – why wouldn’t it be?  Panasonic’s 3DO and Phillips’ CDi were both busts, and Sega’s Saturn wasn’t exactly flying off store shelves, either.  Why should Sony’s attempt be any different?

My friend Abba would often rent various consoles, and we’d hang out quite a bit and critique the latest titles.  He rented the Saturn with Sega Rally one winter, and I felt that that was just a glorified Genesis – it even had pretty much the same controller!  When he rented a PlayStation with Die Hard Trilogy (good ol’ reliable Blockbuster Video), I was prepared to be unimpressed.

I was way, wayyyy wrong about that one.

It’s essentially three games on one disc, one for each Die Hard movie released up to that point.  The first game is a third-person shooter where John McClane fights through hordes of terrorists in Nakatomi Plaza.  There were about 24 levels (I think), one for each floor of the building that had hostages.  It was pretty tough, but you could approach every room with captives in more than one way, which made it oh-so-satisfying to beat every level.

The Die Harder game was by far my favourite of the three.  Though you could use a light gun and play it Time Crisis-style, the normal controller was all we had, and it actually worked really well!  I haven’t played it recently to see how the controls have aged – this game was released before the Dual Shock controllers were available – but I know the atmosphere in the first few levels was quite awesome.

I guess I just love levels set in the Winter.  Doesn’t matter what game it is, if it’s snowing, I’ll love it.  Strange!

The game based on With a Vengeance is an arcade racer, something along the lines of Crazy Taxi.  Instead of picking up fares, you’re driving through various parts of New York City to detonate bombs by running into them.  If the timer runs out before you get to your next target, the whole city blows up.  Negotiating traffic was the name of the game, and various scripted events would happen to switch it up a bit.

Nothing says “ownage” quite like an ambulance running ahead of you, clearing a path by ramming all the cars out of the way!

So, yeah.  Not only is it quite a fun game, but it brings back so many memories from that awkward period in gaming.  It wasn’t looking too good there, for a while, until Sony and Nintendo really allowed us to believe that 3D games could work, if done right.