rE/Generation

Title: rE/Generation
Author: Dream Codex
License: Freeware
Website: http://www.dreamcodex.com/regen.php

A quick nostalgia trip this week. I recently played through a D/Generation remake called rE/Generation. The original D/Gen came out in the early 90s, and I loved it. It was part action game, part adventure game, and part puzzle game, a wonderful hybrid of these various genres.

The best part about D/Gen is the great back story which develops throughout the game. Something has gone wrong at Genoq, a bioweapon developer. You have to rescue the hostages, stop the bioweapons, find out what happened, and save the world . As you work through the rooms and floors, the story is told by the hostages and the computer terminals. It is one of the best stories I have ever seen in a computer game.

The goal of D/Gen is to secure each room. Each contains various baddies to avoid or shoot. There are switches to turn turrets off and toggle force fields. Some doors require special access cards which are usually located in other rooms. You have a gun and sometimes grenades. The game play is actually very simple. Some rooms contain hostages hiding in corners to be rescued. Everytime you reach a hostage, you can talk to them and find out more about what happened. Some rooms contain computer terminals which you can activate and read.



This week's game, rE/Generation, is a remake which came out about two years ago. It is very faithful to the original. A few extra levels were added. Anyone who remembers D/Gen needs to play rE/Gen.

rE/Gen suffers from being an old DOS game converted to Windows. The controls seem outdated, the graphics while better than the original are not great by current standards, and sound is poor. But it is just the way I remember it. So I cannot fault rE/Gen for any of these things.

D/Gen and thus rE/Gen is not a puzzle game, nor is it an action game or adventure games. It is a combination or hybrid, and thus will not appeal to many. Also, it is also a difficult game, but worth it.

There is one bug which I noticed. Clicking on a computer terminal with the Window's mouse in windowed mode, the game freezes. There is also a full screen mode with no mouse cursor.