Funny how it goes. You wait five years for a #1 game directly based on a live action blockbuster, and then three come along at once! I haven’t been missing the days of Batman (the Movie) and Terminator 2, and of Robocop being number one for half of 1989. But I’m not surprised that those type of games weren’t gone for good. The overlap between action films and video games is too strong, and though the reputation of licenced games had suffered through many poor efforts, that was always going to be an obstacle which could be overcome. Die Hard Trilogy does it with style and one smart but not-very-replicable innovation.
Many of those previous movie games increased their breadth, and tried to replicate a wider number of types of scene from the movie, by adopting several different genres. Generally that meant a shooty platformer bit and then something else, like Batman the Movie’s grappling-hook-cornering driving bits. Those genres would be in sequence, though. You would have to play through Terminator 2’s drunken mannequin fighting game bit every single time to get to the other parts, even if you liked them better. That’s how you generally watch movies, after all.
Of course that’s no real reason for games to do the same, and they were on a long term move away from this model. Die Hard Trilogy brings a similar variety but wipes the issue out by starting from a menu where you choose one of three different games, each based on one of the three films. Rather loosely based, but trying to follow the plot of a film in totality didn’t do much good for its predecessors. The lack of FMV film clips is welcome. Instead, each of the three segments you can choose from focuses on an element of its movie, and turns it into an arcade game of its own.
So you get third person exploring and combat (Die Hard), a first person shooting gallery (Die Harder), and a game in which you drive a car around New York trying to run over bombs (Die Hard With a Vengeance). Obviously you need three films for this to really work so neatly, although Die Hard Trilogy’s success ludicrously resulted in a Die Hard Trilogy 2 game which certainly didn’t have another three to work with.
The Die Hard segment of Die Hard Trilogy has you gradually climbing the levels of a tower, shooting terrorists and ‘rescuing’ hostages, who apparently need the reassuring touch of John McClane to feel motivated to take themselves on a wander out to an exit through the middle of a gun battle. The game’s map and directional warning system give you just enough information to make it more a test of reactions and strategy than of luck, and creeping round corners to sneak up on your targets works pretty well, as does having to leg it towards a bomb at the end of each level.
The shooting gallery segment is a bit more advanced than our last back at Operation Thunderbolt, though still working on basically the same principles, shooting power-ups and all. Shooting vending machines and the emerging cola cans takes amusingly bizarre video game logic to a further level, and it does some new things in movement drawing on the Virtua Cop model. Moving the viewpoint in less linear ways adds more cinematic possibilities even if the impact on the gameplay is low. The game works surprisingly well even played with a D-pad and buttons rather than a lightgun, too.
The last part of the trilogy is my least favourite and feels like one of the worst-conceived parts of a more typical game-of-the-film, which made it a surprise to find out that it was developed first and intended as a standalone. Single button presses to do handbrake turns make skidding around corners quickly satisfying, but having to memorise power-up locations to be able to make it to more than the first bomb in time is a drag.
The final part is also where one of the trilogy’s uniting elements is clearest. Alongside a determinedly simplistic narrative approach to killing those nasty terrorists and hopefully not their hostages (but oh well if you do, you’re the good guy), all three games have a delight in blood. Big gobs of it everywhere. Die Hard With a Vengeance lets you play from an in-car view and run over pedestrians, and when you do so it shows you your car’s windscreen wipers sweeping away buckets more of the red stuff. This bit presumably got the game its 18 certificate, and feels like an acknowledgement that the bloodthirstiness overrides most other priorities.
The other most striking uniting feature of the trilogy is an aesthetic one. They all feature bold interfaces, with giant blocky text throughout, usually in yet more red. At the end of a level or at game over, the entire screen gets occupied by the facts of your achievements (or otherwise) and the resultant score being totted up. You get an old-school high score entry bit where you select giant letters by choosing who to shoot from a big ring of people. An aesthetic designed to grab your attention from the other side of an arcade is ported completely to the living room TV. It’s pleasing for its associations, but also a joy in itself.
Die Hard Trilogy is not deep. But in managing to feel like it’s given you a whole wall of an arcade to play with, it nails the fact that choice, variety, and aesthetic focus can make a game feel greater than the sum of its parts.
