The Stack

After some rather obvious revelations about the true purpose of the mission (Gasp! The military is only interested in the Third Energy as a potential weapon!) and a fairly anticlimactic final tyrannosaurus fight (most of the real damage is done in a FMV cutscene), I find that the game is over. I’m told that I found one of three endings, and granted the option to use a grenade launcher with infinite ammo in my next session.

So I look online for more info. In the ending I got, I captured Kirk, but at the cost of Gail’s life. There’s a second ending where Gail lives but Kirk escapes — or possibly gets destroyed with all the dinosaurs on the island, but I don’t think that’s very likely, because not only is he handsome and long-haired, he also has a British accent and a haughty, condescending manner. If anyone is going to survive the destruction of a secret island fortress, it’s him. Anyway, these two endings have a clear correlation to an explicit choice given to the player, the last of several instances where Rick and Gail propose two different plans. I had, for the first time, gone with Gail here, out of a desire for completism, refusing to skedaddle when complete victory was at hand. Gail’s death is self-chosen, a result of his own stubborn insistence on giving the mission priority over personal safety. This is actually presented as noble, in a samurai-like way, even though the mission goal itself isn’t.

The third ending is the best of both options: the whole team escapes alive ¹Except for Cooper, who I had completely forgotten about when I wrote up the mission roster in a previous post, because he got eaten by the tyrannosaur before the opening cutscene was over. with Kirk in custody. I’ve seen claims that you have to complete both of the other endings to unlock it, but reports are inconsistent about this.

Possibly this is because different versions of the game are inconsistent about unlockables. There’s a special game mode called “Operation: Wipeout”, in which you simply try to kill as many dinosaurs as possible within a time limit; apparently in the original Playstation version, you had to unlock this by completing the main game once, but it’s available from the very beginning in the PC and Dreamcast ports. The alternate outfits I described supposedly have to be unlocked as well, but obviously I didn’t have to. Every mention I’ve seen of the infinite grenade launcher states that you get it after you’ve seen all three endings — typical for videogames of the era, that you only get the ultimate weapon after you have no reason to keep playing — but I got it after only one.

The fact that no one on the Web seems to know that the PC version works this way makes me consider the possibility that I am, in fact, the only person to ever actually play the PC version. It’s a B title for sure, guilty of all the little stupidities of its genre, ²One thing about Bissel’s commentary on Resident Evil that I neglected to mention before: he complains about it encouraging the notion that videogames are necessarily stupid, and worse, that they shouldn’t try not to be stupid, that lack of stupidity would somehow spoil the fun. and a console port on top of that. But it’s enjoyable for what it is.