P.N. 03

Hubba, hubba, hubba!

An obsessive child writes...

Dear Capkom, my name is FraNk and i am 12 years old. i think that vAneesa in pN03 is really nice and pretty and the way she movEs her botom has made all my fRiends want to buY a Gamecub. doEs Vanness have an addres or ICq that i can speak to heR on?

Capcom had better prepare themselves for many such letters and worse, because Ms. Schneider is in possession of what could well be the most figure-hugging suit in existence.

Danger in the Desert

Vanessa in a slinky black number

Right. Woman in a tight fitting suit, fair enough. She is in a strange desert by herself - hmmm, my reality sensors are bleeping. Some robots pop out of the sand and start shooting her, oh deary me. In retaliation she dances to the side and then does a cartwheel to avoid a missile. A twisting forward leap, light trails criss-crossing as she moves and she lands perfectly on the blind side of her assailant - leaving her plenty of time to hold her palm out and shoot some lasers from her bare hand. Reality TV this is not.

There isn't a whole lot to say about P.N. 03, although tying it down and squeezing a straight answer out of it is tricky. Played and viewed in the third person, your one and only objective is to destroy all the robots in each area. Do that and then move onto the next area and do the same again. Whilst you could complete the game by merely fulfilling the requirements in your job description and keeping your head down, as you go past your boss on the way out, that wouldn't really be a very good way of playing the game. It would be like going to ‘an all you can eat’ buffet and eating only breadsticks.

Fast Mover

By the power of Greyskull!

No, merely doing the shooty thing would not be proper. This is, after all, a pure shooter and most games of this type have something up their sleeve. In this instance the trick is Vanessa herself: she is certainly a nimble person and has gymnastic abilities that would make even the cattiest of cats fear for their reputation of being able to land on their feet.

Enter a room and your enemies appear in front of you. The game locks onto the nearest enemy to you and this allows you to move around quite freely in order to avoid enemy fire. Using the trigger buttons will make you do a quick jump to the side, with a double press performing a cartwheel. You can do forward flips, backflips and small jumps to the side as well - and you can perform all this whilst still keeping your sights locked on the enemy. You can change which enemy is locked on with a press of a button, which will allow you to weaken each one significantly so that you can then administer the killing shots quickly enough to get combos. Kill an enemy and a timer appears. Kill another enemy before it reaches zero and the timer increases and the combo count goes up. Keep this up to increase the combo count and the bonus points will come flooding in.

Warped Entry

P. N. 03 in shock non-corridor based screenshot

Not all the enemies in a room will appear at once and many of them will only appear when you get to a certain point. Of course this means that to get the best combos you will need to weaken up the first wave whilst still avoiding their fire. You quite literally have to dance around the room in order to do this, which is how the game has been designed - kill the first lot of enemies too quickly, and you may end your combo prematurely because you don't have enough time left in your combo counter to finish off the rest of them.

If you think that Liz Hurley looks good in white jeans then you will like what is on display here - most of it is white. Capcom have gone for a very minimalist, futuristic look with Star Wars being an obvious influence. On the one hand, it is fairly stylish, but many of the textures have quite a 'pearly' look to them, similar to how a compressed jpeg image looks. This is most noticeable when you get close to a wall, though most of the time you will not notice it as you will be concentrating on killing things. Oh, and the animation of Vanessa is superb, with everything perfectly motion captured. The demo/intro movie certainly proves the full extent to which Capcom have made sure that your character moves as convincingly as possible.

Dance Grooves

Phoar! Look at the size of those... energy beams

Suitably for this game, the music is a fairly varied selection of dance tunes. On offer are some up-tempo beats, with other levels playing more ambient tunes with a hint of drum and bass. It is all of a high quality and certainly not generic rubbish in the slightest. The sound effects are as you would expect, though nothing really spectacular.

Capcom have set out to make a game in which you have a lot of control over your character - back flips, rolls, and twists have been provided for your delight. The problem is that you really do not have quite as much control as you need. Often I have not been able to do something because I was still finishing an animation from my previous move - and in a game like this, being able to move quickly is critical.

Following on from this, there are times when you cannot get the right angle that you want - the Z button allows you to do a quick 180 degree turn, along with a 90 degree turn. However, it often isn't enough and it can be frustrating when you get hit because of it. Finally, each suit has certain moves that need to be executed on the D-pad and the fiddly GC pad is a poor way of pulling them off

Generic Strife

Vanessa just doesn't seem to be able to make friends with robots

Many of the enemies are also rather generic and most of the rooms that you go through are repeated. Some of these have more than one exit and going back through them can be disorientating as they are always reused - a simple map on the pause screen would have helped immensely. Another problem with the rooms is that many of them are not really all that well designed in the first place.
As you go through the game more suits are made available for you to buy with the points you have accumulated. In between each of the main missions you can play some 'trial missions' in order to earn points for these suits. Sadly, this is used as a cheap way of extending the game as you will have to repeatedly complete them in order to not only buy the suits in the first place, but also to purchase all the necessary upgrades.

These faults let the game down quite badly, which is a shame. I had come to P.N. 03 expecting a Rez quality classic, but what I got was something that couldn't quite live up to its promise. It is almost as if Capcom had a great idea for a game but couldn't quite pull it off.