Classic Game Review <SWIV 3D>

This is the story of a game that, with the passing of years, probably no one even remembers anymore. The time was 1997, still before the Asian financial crisis. Maybe that’s why, but the price of computer games back then was, if anything, more expensive than it is now in 2019, certainly not cheap. SWIV 3D cost a whopping 36,000 won (I think), which, converted to today’s prices, would easily come to about 100,000 won.

Anyway, the reason I bought this game was simply that I was bewitched by its 3D graphics. By today’s standards it would look like nothing more than clay-like graphics, but at the time, just the very fact of bringing the dimensions of reality into the monitor was revolutionary enough.

Of course, it seems I wasn’t the only one who experienced this kind of “3D shock.” A fair number of games came out in 3D, first and foremost. The reason I add the qualifier “first and foremost” is that, in most cases, they were garbage games. These garbage games were so preoccupied with just making something in 3D that they gave little or no thought to why it was 3D, why it had to be 3D, and what kind of fun a 3D space might offer as a game.

SWIV 3D was not much different. Since it was a shooter, you naturally had to blow something up, and because it was a 3D world, you couldn’t build it as a conventional, linear scrolling shooter. As a result, the whole game came down to raiding and blowing up enemies scattered aimlessly here and there across a vast 3D world. Of course, it’s not as if there was no thrill of destruction, but there was absolutely no sense of urgency. That’s only natural, since the enemies were just waiting for the player to come to them.

And so SWIV 3D flopped, and the SWIV franchise shut its doors. I, too, at some point grew tired of the game and ended up quitting without ever seeing the ending. A shame, really.

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