Giants: Citizen Kabuto

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Giants: Citizen Kabuto
PlayStation 2 boxart
Developer(s) Planet Moon Studios
Publisher(s) Interplay
Engine Amityville
Release date(s) December 6, 2000 (Windows)
December 21, 2001 (PS2)
Genre(s) Action-adventure
Mode(s) Single player, Multiplayer
Rating(s) ESRB: Mature
ESRB: Teen (censored)
USK: 16+
ELSPA: 15+
Platform(s) Windows, Mac OS X, PS2
Media Windows: CD (2); Mac OS X: CD (2); PS2: DVD (1)
Input Keyboard, Mouse
Giants: Citizen Kabuto icon.

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.

Contents

[edit] 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.

[edit] Meccaryns

In the beginning of Giants: Citizen Kabuto you are introduced to the Meccaryns or Meccs for short. These technologically advanced British space marines have obviously mastered space travel and energy based weapondary. The main character of the game Baz is a Meccaryns and is accomanied by his trio of fellow Mecc comrades Tel, Reg, Bennett and Gordon. At the beginning of Giants you are alone and as you progress through the game you eventually reunite your entire squad.

Meccs are one of the most enviromentally versatile units being able to reach or defeat 100% of land based obstacles that are presented to them using there jetpacks (later in the game you will recieve a boost module for your jetpack). Alot of people claim meccs rely on numbers which is true in some cases but a mecc by its lonesome is still a very powerful force especially when they have access to there most power weapon called the millenium gun (a large hand held mortar). Meccaryns vechile of choice is the "turbo chopper" or simply helicopter, its capable of carrying two gunner occupants on the side and the pilot has a machine gun and 3 millenium bombs at his disposal.

[edit] Delphi

Delphi isnt your typical sea reaper grunt, she is in fact the daughter to queen sappho ruler of all sea reapers. Delphi believes that the wanton slaughter and abusive treatment to the smartie people is a disgraceful and cruel facet of Sea reaper behaviour and rejects her heritage because of this. She eventually becomes Baz's lover and the two are often seen being intimate in the cut scenes in between missions. The meccaryns and Delphi fight for the smarties freedom together. While the meccaryns rely on technology to wage war Delphi uses a magical bow and has a plethora of destructive powers e.g a hurricane/tornado spell which envelopes whole bases.

Delphi's bow is like a weapon with 4-6 alternative firing modes all with different effects, damage ratios and abilities. Delphi is the only creature that can swim, all the other creatures succumb to the pirahna's that inhabit the water. This gives her a decided advantage over Meccaryns and especially kabuto. Delphi's main mode of land traversal is her turbo ability, it works in that you aim your cursor at an area a distance away and if the cursor is green Delphi will leap into the air and jump towards the location. When turboing Delphi will looked blurred because she is moving so incrediably fast. Delphi's vechile of choice is the reaper ski which comes equipped with turbo, missles and can even manevour accross land.

[edit] Kabuto

Kabuto like Delphi is not a faction but is a singular playable character. In multiplayer games even by himself against possibly 6 meccaryns and 4 sea reapers with enough skill will dominate the entire game. What is kabuto exactly you may ask? he is a mammoth creature in size and stands on two legs, has two arms like any human but has 100 times the strength of anything in the game, is extremely fast and can squash entire villages will an elbow drop. He is the pinnacle of Sea Reaper magical ingenuity that went horribly wrong. Kabuto went rogue when his Sea reaper masters angered him, alone with no one else of his kind there was only one thing kabuto could possibly imagine of doing.

Eating his sacrifices and killing thousands with his bare hands. Initially kabuto starts of as a relatively small version of himself still incredably strong but very susceptable Meccaryns weapons and reaper magicks. You must eat smarties or Meccaryns/Reapers to fill up a meter on the right hand side of the screen once this is complete you will grow in size and become the next evolution of yourself.

Do this multiple times and kabuto will reach critical mass meaning he cant get any bigger but that doesnt mean the benefits stop there, once kabuto is his maximum size he can now initate strong wrestling type manevours using his adrenaline bar. Also he is now capable of producing two offspring, they look like a much devolved version of yourself and are markedly smaller but are still very powerful. The pair of them are capable of assaulting a reaper base with minimum difficulty. Kabuto does not have a vechile and cannot produce bases like Meccaryns or Reapers can.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 dates are unknown - Though it is known that it will contain modifications to the game's executable file itself.

[edit] Trivia

A poster of Giants can clearly be seen displayed in a corridor throughout the film 'How to make a monster'[1]

[edit] External links

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