Giants: Citizen Kabuto
| Giants: Citizen Kabuto | |
|---|---|
| Giants: Citizen Kabuto PS2 box | |
| Developer(s) | Planet Moon Studios |
| Publisher(s) | Interplay |
| Engine | Amityville |
| Platform(s) | Windows, Mac OS X, PS2 |
| Release | 2000 (Windows) December 21, 2001 (PS2) |
| Genre(s) | Action adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
Giants: Citizen Kabuto is a multi-platform video game developed by Planet Moon Studios, published by Interplay. It was released in late 2000, after many delays.
The game was praised for its state of the art graphics, humorous story, and innovative genre blending gameplay. The game mixed elements from third-person shooters, real-time strategy games, and action-adventure games.
Synopsis
The story centres around a planet where the local population, known as the Smarties (an odd-looking gnome-like race who likes partying and drinking beer), are being oppressed by the Sea Reapers. Also residing on this planet is a giant called Kabuto who is considered a great menace. This is the hostile situation the Meccaryns (short, British starship troopers who also like to drink beer) are introduced to when they crash land on the planet. The game is split into three sections, one with the Meccaryns, one with a rebel Sea Reaper princess and the final part as a Kabuto look-a-like.
Criticism
The game was also criticized for its various game crashing bugs, bad netcode, bad frame rates, lack of mouse speed changer, and lack of in game saved games. While several patches were developed that solved the majority of the bugs, the damage to the game's reputation had already been done. Despite this the game was a considerable critical success (breaking even commercially).
In terms of multiplayer, the game never became anywhere as popular as games like Quake or Unreal, likely due to the large amount of bugs (both exploitable and otherwise) present in the early versions of the game. To further compound matters, none of the various ports of the game are compatible in any way with each other. Despite this, a small dedicated community for the PC version of the game remains in GameSpy Arcade's Giants lobby, and on the forums of the Giants World Domination website. The game as mentioned, was later released for the Macintosh as well as the PlayStation 2. An Xbox version was in development and by accounts near completion, but never released due to Interplay's declining financial status.
Third Party Modifications
Due to the proprietary nature of the game's engine, and the fact that Planet Moon was unable to release any official modding tools the game lacks a significant modding community. It should be noted however that through community-driven projects such as GiantsEdit, GiantsZip, and GiantsModManager a small but dedicated community of skinners and map makers was created.
In addition to custom maps and skins, a player by the name of Nullpointer (the creator of many of the aforementioned tools) released several unofficial patches that added additional functionality to the game - Allowing custom maps to (for the first time ever) be used without the aid of GiantsModManager, and allowing several previously unavailable bits of functionality to the game. One of Nullpointer's ultimate goals was to create a full (unofficial) update to the game, which would have brought the version number up to 1.5. Though a significant amount of work was done toward this goal, the project was eventually scrapped as a result of Nullpointer's declining interest in the reverse engineering of game software, and the lack of support on the part of the game's developers.
In August of 2005, players [NEO]Tasiin and [NEO]Vortex released the first version of their Giants Graphical Revision Mod (GRM) to the public. Created using tools created by Nullpointer but not publically released, GRM improved the overall graphical quality of the game through a combination of reworked high resolution textures and modified data files. An update to GRM (GRM2.0) is said to be in the works, but details regarding it's contents and/or release date are scarce - Though it is known that it will contain modifications to the game's executable file itself.