“What if Resident Evil but crossed with Jurassic Park” was an extremely 1990s idea, but if you’re up for a trip back in time to the days when the PS1 was hot shit and Generation X still had working knees, Capcom has just rereleased Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 on Steam.
Both games were ported to PC in the early 2000s, and most recently rereleased on GOG in January of last year. In fact, the versions on Steam now list GOG.com as a co-developer, since they’re almost the same. One difference: DRM. Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 on Steam use the Enigma Protector DRM, which is why when I went to play the first one a window popped up telling me to “Chack Registry” before I could launch it. Yes, with the typo.
You may remember Enigma as the DRM added to a bunch of older Capcom games, resulting in complaints of slowdowns and crashes in Resident Evil Revelations that eventually saw the update rolled back. Enigma’s being held against Dino Crisis as well, with the Steam forums full of complaints about it already. (As well as complaints about the lack of achievements.)
The assumption is that Capcom’s in bed with DRM as part of its current anti-modding stance, which began when someone rocked up to a Corner2Corner Street Fighter 6 tournament with a naked Chun Li mod installed. As far as I know Dino Crisis has never had much of a modding scene on PC, though the Classic REbirth mod for the first three Resident Evil games also supports the first two Dino Crises if you want them to play nicer with modern hardware.
Still, if you need to have games in your Steam library so you don’t forget they exist, Dino Crisis on Steam is currently on sale for $5 and so is Dino Crisis 2.
