Giants: Citizen Kabuto

List Price: $49.95 Discount Price: $1.45

Features:

• Windows 95, 98, Me only (not XP compatible)
• Choose one of three races to battle across twenty-five island rendered in full 3D, all beautifully detailed unlike any game environment you've ever experienced
• Hours and hours of pulse-pounding, story-driven single-player campaign, complete with outrageous cut-scenes
• Battle up to 10 players over LAN or the Internet via TCP/IP (monthly subsciption fee may be required, please see software documentation)
• Battle from 1st or 3rd person perspective in addition to the revolutionary Kabuto Mouth-Cam and Foot Stomp/Crunch view

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine	The Matrix

Customer Reviews:

Drive your'peace,love&happiness friends away' or eat them [Posted on 2005-01-29]
This is the first attempt at balanced multi-race mutli-player gaming. One has a big knife, one has a big gun, one is...well just big. He's 40 feet tall and 'sneak a snack' means you'd best watch your back at all times unless you like short baths in ketchup and soda. The 9/1998 press release says, "EAT, BURN, DROWN, KIDNAP OR BURY VICTIMS." Now, I don't actually requiring the digging a hole and shoving someone in, but being taken by surprise by a Reaper, or thrown into the air like popcorn, or just dropping to the ground due to a sudden loss of blood pressure for no reason (except that gaping would in your left side) may expand on the idea. Obviously ESRB rated M = Mature. However, the graphics are light when compared to Doom3, Half Life, or Alice by EA. Here are some more...
11/23/2004 NIMF (National Institute on Media and the Family) most violent games: Doom3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life2, Halo2, Resident Evil Outbreak, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, The Guy Game, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, Mortal Kombat: Deception, and Rumble Roses.
11/23/2004 ICCR (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility) most violent games: Doom3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life2, Halo2, Manhunt, Mortal Kombat: Deception, Postal2, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and Hitman: Blood Money.
I've given you a list to avoid, or to enjoy. You pick. I'm not even into first person shooters, but data is data.

The programmers are rumored to all be crazy, Scottish, or both, but seem to have taken up residence in San Francisco, further leading to the conclusion of crazy. You can clean up the swamps, bogs, etc., build a bridge, and great city, but the place is still a disaster. Why do you think the Southern half of Oregon and the most northern part of CA want to secede and form the new State of Jefferson? I think they need 400,000 people to do this...must be something in the water...but anyway... :)

This will run on WinXP, even though released in ~1998. 64MB of memory on the video card and 256MB on the m-board is still not enough if you want to turn up the shadows and rock'n roll. American Delphi copies come with a arpfix.gzp file. Multi-player is off the LAN (for best latency, use the cross over cable). Many single player chapters of hilarity, oh's, and ah's. Fly several hundred feet in the air, drive a boat, throw your enemy across the landscape into the next hill over, or view your prey from the 3rd person or "Kabuto Mouth-Cam". Build turrets, set land mines, collect peoples souls, or stick them to your belt and walk away so you can have a snack later. Games can't don't do this today!!! They were so far ahead of the crowd it was unthinkable. The fast & fun combo of 1st & 3rd-person, with building too is something that all the major distributors are aiming for. When you see Kabuto body-slam the player's base so hard the earth makes waves and all the other buildings jump, you know you found a winner! Again, in 2004 no one will even dare use different scale monsters until Lord of the Rings came out. Then, Blizzard tried it with World of War Craft. Wizards/Atari had Bio-Ware try and they made dragons that looked like they were all stuck in a subway car, just got packed out of a suit-case, or just plain squished in NWN (Never Winters Nights).

The distributor is Interplay. Titus hopped over the pond here, laid off the developers, boosted up production, kicked out the stock boys after it all shipped, stopped paying wages to customer service, tried to hide the liability and ran back home. The U.S. Gov't today is still trying to get the money back. But, they knew what they were after, crossing the Atlantic. Planet Moon Studios got this one right. nVidia supports the graphics. Creative and AMD are all built into it too.

If you didn't actually make it through all that: This is a really cool game. I bought it used on Amazon.com for less than the shipping. Yeah for Amazon.com!

a sleeper hit [Posted on 2005-07-07]
a very good shooter/fighting/crazyexplosionsandstuff with funny characters and very good graphics, i've beaten the game %100 and i am very impressed.

a really good game, the only problem is noone really knows about it.

The most memorable game I've played [Posted on 2005-08-11]
I've played some of the big titles like Half-Life and Serious Sam. They're great games that deserve their notoriety, but I had more fun playing this lesser known gem.

The first thing you notice with Giants is the lush colors and gorgeous soundscape. The visual environment is easily the most inviting I've seen in a game -- so much so that I was compelled to find a vantage point and just look around for a while. The sounds are enchanting and complement the visuals and action perfectly.

The weapons aren't the hose-em-all stuff found in games like Serious Sam (don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing with those too), but they fit the game and have lots of play value. And getting right down to it, how can any gun compare to a giant that can pick up human-sized enemies and throw them as a weapon?

You play three three kinds of beings in Giants. The first is a Mecc (a humanoid extraterrestrial), the second is Delphi the Sea Reaper, and the third is Kabuto the Giant monster. Each being has several missions, and the missions for the Meccs and Delphi culminate in a fort-building mission that requires destruction of a sea reaper facility.

I enjoyed building the forts. It can be a bit frustrating to see your fort demolished by sea-reapers (not nearly as catastrophic as some StarCraft missions), but you gain a lot of control once you realize how to place your turrets.

Delphi is probably the most low-key of the characters, but she's still fun. Going from the Mecc's shooting and flying to Delphi's magic and swimming was a nice change of pace, and I like how the change doesn't disrupt the feel of the game.

Stomping around as Kabuto and eating your enemies is great fun. And as if being a Giant weren't cool enough, you get to grow bigger by eating smarties. Being big is your weapon, and it's arguably the funnest weapon in the game.

If you think you can deal with the lack of in-game saves, do yourself a favor and check Giants out. I just ordered my second copy of the game and can't wait to play it again.

Runs on WinXP SP2 just fine [Posted on 2006-05-13]
I've always wanted to play this oldie but goodie. Picked
it up from an Amazon reseller, figuring I'd play it on my
older Win95/Dos machine as Amazon description says "Not XP
compatable". Well, I put it on my 6 month old XP machine, and
it installed and plays just perfect. No patches, no special
compatability mode. The disk says it runs Win98 or ME, and
I've never encountered a Win98 game that wouldn't run on XP.

So don't shy away from this game if you have XP!

Godly [Posted on 2007-02-20]
Mere words cannot express how much I love this game. The medium of dance maybe more appropriate. It has its problems (in that there are a few bugs in the non patched version), but all such concerns are quickly swept aside when you start playing it. Probably the most funny game since Sam and Max or Monkey Island, the visuals (bearing in mind they are now 7 years old) are stunnignly beautiful, the plot is well crafted and exciting, the gameplay is ludicrously fun, the music superb, Its all so individual and lovely to use. It has what is lacking in so many modern games: that is personality and soul. Buy it. you will not regret it! (I have left the more serious reviewing to the others below, who did a very good job at describing why its so good,) I hope my hyperbole will convince even one person to get this hugely neglected and forgotten game.

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