I finally played through Carrier on Dreamcast sans Jessifer's story. Pretty neat game. The visuals were surprisingly good imo, and it mostly runs at 60fps. I say mostly not because of dips, but because the game is split up between 60fps and 30fps depending on the area that you're in. I honestly thinks it's really cool they allowed the majority of the game to run at 60fps instead of capping everything down to 30 for consistency, so dividing things up by area worked well. Nice lighting and textures in spots, too, and cool designs/setting. Unexpectedly good music (ambient music?) where it existed. At least one track in particular gave off a strong PSO vibe.
Probably the coolest thing about the gameplay was a little scanner device you get near the beginning of the game. The game has fixed camera angles but is fully 3D, so pulling out the scanner allows you to see everything in the environment from wherever you're standing in first-person. It also brightens things up in the dark (some areas have the lights go out completely), allows you to see through certain organic matter to find doors and items, and will alert you with a visual + sound when an enemy or item is near the center of the screen. That last bit might sound kind of pointless since you'd think you'd be looking straight at the item/enemy in that case, but it's actually really useful. For instance, when entering a new area with a long corridor, you can use the scanner to look all the way down the corridor. Even if you can't actually see the enemy in this circumstance because of how small they would appear from this distance/shadows hiding them, you'll be alerted to their presence. Other enemies will hide in the ceiling and drop drown when you get close, so you can run the scanner over the ceiling to locate them before they're visible. For items, it'll ignore objects in front of your immediate vision, so it'll help you find items hidden behind things like flipped over tables, locker doors, crates you need to use explosives to open, etc.
There's also a neat little survivor system where you'll find people all throughout the ship. They'll give you info, an item, or both, and then you send them to the upper deck or w/e to be rescued. Sometimes they'll look human but already be infected, so you'll want to use your scanner on them before approaching. It'll give you a notification if they're "Safe" or "Dangerous", and if they're dangerous you just start blasting. I'm (pretty) sure I did not kill any innocent people with false positives this way, I trust the science.
The aiming system is also interesting in that it gives a bright blue indicator of what part of the body on an enemy you're aiming at. The idea is you want to stop and steer your aiming a bit to shoot at the head and conserve ammo, but you can also aim to blow up their arms if you're a sick fuck. You also have to time your shots a bit, you can't just mash shot until the enemy is dead. I think this is supposed to represent the bullet missing if you fire again right hitting them since they've been blown back into a slightly different position or something.
I only have a few beefs with the game. For one, the turning felt a little slower than I would've liked, and the delay between pressing a direction to turn and the character actually beginning to turn also felt a little long. There's a quick 180 degree turn, but that also takes longer than I would like. I also felt the game was in dire need of a shotgun. I get they were trying to do their own thing though, so part of that is you get a taser instead of a knife and an assault rifle instead of a shotgun. The pacing felt pretty sluggish at times too, but I'm pretty sure that's down to my overly cautious playstyle more than anything else. Would be pretty fun to watch a speedrun of the game to see how quick the pacing can be, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be popular enough to have any speedruns.
Edit: sorry I didn't mean to write a fucking book about it, jesus christ brain
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