messiah (the shiny game) was there ever a console port?

[pragmatic insanester]

i heard it was coming to the n64 and gamefaqs has a blank dreamcast catagory.

[fishsandwich]

NO, no console port ever.

I was looking forward to it, too... I believe it was also announced for PSone.

Darn

:(

[suppafly]

Right, no console version. However, I dont think anyone would miss that game...it was very mediocre!

[Crush Crawfish]

There's an advertisement for it on the back of my Wild 9 manual for PS1, so I'd assume it was going to be released for PS1 as well, but I guess it never happened. What type of game was it going to be?

[Queen Of The Felines]

If I remember correctly it involved a cherub that was able to possess people and use their bodies to do certain stuff.

Kristine

[fishsandwich]

If I remember correctly it involved a cherub that was able to possess people and use their bodies to do certain stuff.

Kristine

She is correct... your cherub was very weak and fragile unless it possessed the body of another character... I remember it being a bit controversial as some of the characters were hookers and pimps. Nothing that would cause much of fuss in our post-GTA world, but hot stuff a few years back.

The BIG thing with Messiah was that it used some sort of advanced graphics engine that added or subtracted polygons from both the character and enviormnental models in relation to what was going on... a scene with very little action would have characters and/or backgrounds with very high polygon counts. When the action started to get intense or you had a lot of charaters on screen, the graphics engine would subtract detail from the screen so the frame rate would stay constant. IGN only lists PC, PSone, and Dreamcast versions... they don't mention an N64 version. Only the PC game came out and it didn't make much of a splash at retail.

The graphics technology was supposed to be "the next big thing" and I remember interviews with the developers where they talked about how they were skipping a lot of evolutionary steps and going straight for super-new technology and programming techniques.

Here's a bit from IGN... evidentally the article I remember was from NEXT GENERATION and has become somewhat infamous...

Thanks to the fact that our old EIC, Trent, actually worked on Next Generation during the now-infamous Messiah issue (September 1997, for those of you counting), I've managed to grab a copy of the original Messiah preview, and decided to see just how close the final product came to all of Shiny's original promises. For the most part the piece is a giant ode to the engine, which is appropriate since at that point the game was still a glorified technology demo. The game was right on target for Spring of 1998, and the piece is appropriately impressed with the character models, which were supposed to change the way we look at character detail in videogaming. In a standard Perry style the man of Shiny goes on to propel Messiah into the stratosphere as a game of epic proportions, with the visuals to match. No game could live up to the promises that Messiah first offered up, but overall it seems as though even the promises don't seem as great in 2000 as they did in 1997-8. A lot of games have been released since then, and the world of Messiah just doesn't seem so, well, shiny now.

IGN gave it a 7.5 average and said it was a decent 3-D platform game that ended too quickly. Evidentally they never really got the graphics engine to work like they originally wanted.

Cheers

:D

[ktulu]

Messiah was a REALLY wierd game but I liked it a lot. I mean the whole idea was pretty strange and the gameplay was original. The engine was used in some other games I think, at least the similar technology, and the principles are still used to this day, although today 2 sets of models are used, low polygon and high polygon.

[aaron7]

I never understood that game. I played it, but never knew what I was doing LOL

[-hellvin-]

Yeah, I had a tough time with this game too. After possessing people I usually had no idea where to go or what to do so I would just shoot the other guards and they'd just just capping my ass.