So over the past year or two I have begun to amass a pretty staggering collection of games at least a decade old. These games usually come as part of bundle including newer titles or other old titles I have fond memories of. Thanks to the Humble Bundle among others I have grown a collection so large that I will likely never play through the entirety of any of these games. But I want to give them a chance. At least say I tried playing some of these games, even if in the end I don't finish them. And the only way I am going to stick with a mission like that will be if I write a blog about my experiences. Now I could begin with any of a handful of games but I thought I would start with my most recent pickup, the Humble Square Enix Bundle. I have played at least portions of Deus Ex and its sequel in the past so I thought I would start with the Hitman games. I have played Absolution but never any of the earlier titles. So I decided to start at the beginning and tonight I played Hitman: Codename 47.

Hitman was first released in 2000, making it almost 15 years old. While certain aspects of it are quite impressive for a 15 year old game, others have aged about as poorly as all natural grapefruit juice left out in the Sahara Desert. The controls were the very first indication that this game came from another era. By default I was supposed to use the number pad to control Agent 47. Even switching to the default ASDW option required a ton of fiddling. In Hitman hitting W runs while hitting S walks forward. D and A perform tank turns as if this was some bad PS1 horror game. Z and X are your default strafing keys. Reloading your weapon requires you to hit 1. F drops whatever you are carrying and the spacebar is used to interact. After changing virtually every control option to something I could at least kind of use I realized that because walk and run were separate keys I was not going to be able to map things to standard controls. I eventually put walk on Q so that I could quickly switch between a walk and a run as needed.

Luckily the AI didn't seem to mind if I ran through the levels, and there are as far as I can tell no non-lethal ways to take out opponents. So while I could sneak up behind an enemy, it doesn't seem to change anything if I shoot him in the back. So I mostly just run. The other half of the coin is that this is one of those old stealth games where getting seen might not automatically fail you (or it might depending on the level) but continuing on will likely be more of a chore than starting over. Hitman takes things a step further than most other stealth games in that each person you kill deducts from your total payment for the mission. And you have to pay for every piece of equipment you bring into a mission. So it is possible to "beat" a level but earn no money for it, meaning you might start the next level with nothing but the clothes on your back. Unlike newer entries in the series which have items you can pick up within each level to perform kills, in this original game there are very few objects you can interact with in the environment. Since you can't use your fists to take down enemies, at this point you are basically screwed and might as well just replay the previous level. Possibly even worse is when the deductions end up being higher than your earnings. At that point the game will tell you that you have failed the mission. That would of course be after you completed the entire mission, not when you actually hit the fail state.

Now many purists will tell me, and probably rightly so, that this is a stealth game and if I am having these problems then I am not playing the game well. And I will absolutely agree with those people. But this is a game where there are no mid-mission checkpoints. You can revive once or twice if you die but that doesn't reset any of the actions you have taken. Some of these missions can border on being an hour long on your first time through. The current mission I'm on involves assassinating a Triad leader. The mission has several different components that each require you to perform several steps to complete them. The problem is that if you die after completing 3/4 of the components you are still sent all the way back to the beginning of the mission. And you then have to go through half an hour of content you have already played just to get back to the spot you failed on before. And being an old stealth game built around trial and error, you are almost as likely to make another error at the same spot and have to do everything again before you figure out what the game actually wants you to do. And you have to go through this every step of the way. The game wants to support experimentation but I find myself just using tried and true methods because a single mistake could have me going through half an hour or more of the level again. And those tried and true methods usually include shooting a guard that might see me and taking his clothes. It's a safer method than trying to just sneak around. So, no, I am not playing the game well, but I don't have time to play each mission in this game dozens of times to get it right so screw the purists.

If you can manage to get through the incredibly frustrating mission structure you'll find some decent ideas that have of course been since improved upon by the later entries in the series. And the visuals are pretty impressive for a game this old. The AI has problems but compared to what AI was doing in other games in 2000 it is pretty impressive stuff. Mainly, though, Hitman feels like the first entry in the series that it is. Everything works but it also all needs to be expanded upon. As such Hitman is an interesting look at an early attempt at the stealth genre but is not something I could find enjoyable as a game 15 years later.