It is December and here's the first of a month full of Christmas newsletters... sort of. They're all going to be about games that I personally feel have an attachment to this time of year and will conclude on Friday 30th December with my GAME OF THE YEAR 2022 newsletter. I've still got a few things I need to play before I set that in stone!

Special shoutout this week to the bold Stuart Gipp, who has also written about Die Hard Trilogy this week. I promise I didn't steal his idea, we're just two elite gentleman of old videogames who decided to flood your timeline with Die Hard content to kick off the Christmas period. He's writing a fucking BOOK, you know?

If It Is A Christmas Movie, Then It Is A Christmas Game, Right?

When the original Die Hard Trilogy was released, I remember it being a huge deal. It was based on DIE HARD, a trilogy of incredible movies, including one that would be forever argued for and against its status of a Christmas movie by total dullards and was a sort-of sequel to the already very good Alien Trilogy, released near the launch of the PS1. Unlike that release, this would follow the movies a bit closer and also offer three totally different game types for each one - a top down shooter for Die Hard, a lightgun shooter for Die Hard 2: Die Harder and a driving game for Die Hard With A Vengeance. All three decent, with one standing head and shoulders above the others.

The top down shooter is solid, with lots of cool destructible scenery and explosion effects. You can strafe by using the shoulder buttons to avoid damage and you can see when an enemy is targeting you by a cute little visual display of their crosshair appearing on screen. It's very simple - kill all the enemies in the maze-like stages and try to rescue as many hostages as possible. Try, because there's no penalty other than a lower score for gunning them down in the crossfire. That's something that is the case throughout Die Hard Trilogy - the respect for innocent human life is absolute zero, to the point where it almost feels like a macabre joke. It's an arcade style shoot 'em up with vibes of Smash TV and once you've cleared a floor, you have a minute to find an elevator that contains a bomb, otherwise the whole thing blows up and its game over. It's a fair bit of fun and the only real disappointing aspect is, despite the setting and the fact you're playing as John McClane, there's nothing else that really screams DIE HARD. No Holly to rescue, no leap off the top using a fire extinguisher, no Al offering words of support from outside and sadly, no Hans Gruber as the final boss.

Die Hard With A Vengeance isn't quite as good but it is really interesting, especially for a game released in 1996. It's a fairly large, free roaming area where you punt about it at ridiculous speeds in a taxi, trying to find bombs against a tight time limit, defusing these bombs by crashing into them. And, well, crashing into everything else on your way to doing so. In this game you can go full Grand Theft Auto (a whole year before GTA!) and mow down countless innocent pedestrians, causing blood to splatter all over the screen and need the use of the window wipers to remove it. It's WILD. There's also literally no punishment for doing this! Powerups scatter the maps, from time extensions to speed boosts (which leave a trail of fire behind the car) and even stuff like the ability to cause a giant explosion that launches you into the air and an ambulance that will brute force a path through heavy traffic for you to follow - like a much more aggressive version of the moment this happens in the movie! The only thing that really lets the side down here is the handling of the car is just far too twitchy and inconsistent. The concept is great, but even skilled drivers will come unstuck because of how unreliable the car can be.

What is most unexpected, however, is the sheer quality of the lightgun shooter for Die Hard 2. It is, no word of a lie, one of the best lightgun games of that generation. While Sega had Virtua Cop doing the business, Die Hard Trilogy has THE cop, John McClane, blasting the ever-living shit out of anything on the screen. ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.

Part of what makes Die Hard 2 so damn enjoyable is almost everything can be destroyed. Panels on the roof can be knocked off, anything glass can be shattered, wooden boards splintered and anything that looks even slightly explosive will detonate when shot. Almost every squeeze of the trigger delivers some kind of visual feedback from the game and it feels super satisfying. Every gun you pick up has a different sense of impact and there's a lot of variety, most of which are found hidden in parts of the destructible scenery, giving you a reason to just constantly blast away at the game. This isn't a game about accuracy - it's absolute carnage.

Enemies, when shot with anything more powerful than the default weapon absolutely explode with gore - with a well-placed explosion sometimes (and I am not making this up) will BLAST THE ENTIRE STILL INTACT SKELETON OUT OF THEIR BODY. A crimson mist and there it is, the clean white bones of the skeleton flying through the air. Incredible stuff.

The game itself is very similar to Virtua Cop. The camera follows a set route, enemies jump out and a crosshair tells you which one is the most immediate threat. Sometimes you'll do a segment particularly well and that'll unlock a secret alternative route, usually packed with power ups and new weapons and, unlike the other two games on this collection, the levels do follow the rough path of the film's plot. It's genuinely up there with the best lightgun games you can get for either the Saturn or PS1 and anyone who knows, knows that is high praise indeed.

What is even more unexpected is that there was a Die Hard Trilogy 2, released in 2000 by a totally different developer, when the PS1 was on the back nine and it is surprisingly enjoyable! Mercifully, the two terrible follow ups to the original trilogy hadn't been released, so this is a unique story about John McClane's trip to Las Vegas going tits up due to terrorists and the 'trilogy' aspect is the three game modes from the original being present in this too, albeit scattered throughout a linear narrative, rather than three separate chunks (although there is an 'arcade' mode that lets you just select to play through all the levels of each style, if you want).

Unfortunately, the dark humour of the first game is gone here - its a much more straight laced affair and the lightgun part is far, far less fun. You can't destroy almost all of the scenery and - shock horror - you now lose health for shooting hostages. The driving sections are far easier to control but are lacking in a lot of the character and daft moments, with the gore and massive explosions gone completely. However, the on foot shooter sections are probably, overall, a little more interesting.

It's now a bit more fleshed out, with each level requiring you to complete a series of objectives and reach the end of the level, like most action games of the era post-Goldeneye. There's a lot more in the way of interactive elements like switches and door puzzles to solve and the enemy A.I. is far more switched on to what you're doing, rather than mindlessly wandering the halls until they spot you. You can still shoot out glass panels, chuck a myriad of explosives around and the actual arsenal is a bit more varied than the selection of machine guns in the previous title. It's not an all-timer and it certainly doesn't live up to the overall package that is Die Hard Trilogy but I've seen Trilogy 2 get a bit of a kicking online and my experience with it is that it was far from a bad game.

A final mention has to go to the Bruce Willis voice impersonator (and, to a lesser extent, the Samuel L. Jackson impersonator). Neither of them are particularly accurate but both deliver some legitimately legendary dialogue - even just mentioning Die Hard Trilogy online this week resulted in responses that were just lines from the game. This is a title that has embedded itself in the minds of a generation of videogame fans.

Die Hard Trilogy is a bit of a mixed bag but its part of the early PlayStation library that is genuinely iconic and still worth a go even in the present day - whether you play it at Christmas or not is up to you, of course.

THANKS FOR READING.

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