Platform: Nintendo Gamecube | Developer: CAPCOM | Publisher: CAPCOM | Released: 29 August 2003

P.N.03 is like Marmite. No it’s not a slightly worrying shade of brown, and it doesn’t taste particularly bad either. P.N.03 is simply a game that you’re likely to love or hate. Or rather a game that boring reviewers hate and guys who like shooting things love.

Looking at Metacritic, for example, will reveal probably the widest range of review scores I’ve ever seen for a game, 90s and 30s and everything in between, and that is the reason that you seriously need to at least try P.N.03. For every person who hates it there’s another one who loves it to bits, and it’s not worth missing out on because someone else doesn’t like it. That’s not to say there aren’t problems with the game. Controls, looks and repetitiveness are all things that P.N.03 is criticised for, but hopefully I’ll be able to convince you that none of these things prevent the game from being incredibly enjoyable. A pretty daunting task actually now that I think about it… Better get on with it.

In many ways P.N.03 is pretty much your basic shooter. The early levels could be likened to a game of Space Invaders, hammering the fire button as fast as you can to take out the enemies in front of you as fast as possible before they can get near you, and moving left and right to move out the way of incoming fire. Then some of the later levels could almost be described as playing Space Invaders with enemies in front, behind and on both sides, and the enemies aren’t going to wait their turn to attack either, all of them firing lasers everywhere you step. It’s a hard game. In fact it’s probably one of the only games I’ve ever had to play on Easy mode first, because Normal kicked the crap out of me in the first few levels. Strangely enough it never seems to get frustrating though, which seems to be one of CAPCOM’s greatest talents. You can always count on them to make a game difficult, but that you want to try again when you fail, rather than throw your controller at the wall.

Of course if it was just a generic shooter there would be no reason to get it over any other generic shooter, so of course the designers were forced to give you some incentive. For a start you play as a woman in very tight clothing who has a nice arse. Maybe not much of a draw for the ladies, but personally the premise of Nice arse + Blowing stuff up sounds pretty fun to me. Next the use of guns was removed early into development because Shinji Mikami felt it was far too generic and boring, opting for the ability to shoot lasers from the main character’s (Vanessa Z Schneider, though I have no idea what the Z could possibly be) hands. Lasers are fun. Finally Shinji Mikami wanted the style of the game to be something different, choosing to base the dodges and special attacks in the game somewhat around ballet or other dance moves. The look of the game is also very… Unique. It’s one of the things that is often criticised about the game, as most of the levels of the game are a series of bright white hallways and rooms, which some found incredibly repetitive. The look of the game was something which slowly grew on me, the white halls are modelled incredibly smoothly and it ends up looking quite sleek, though slightly repetitive by the end of the game. The only let down is the lack of anti-aliasing, which very nearly spoils the smoothness of the environments, but fortunately when you’re jumping and dodging around and of course firing lasers at robots you soon forget about it.

The main design premise of Vanessa was that she would be quick and agile, able to dodge out the way of attacks with ease and jump about like a 6 year old after eating those troublesome blue Smarties. It seems strange then that they chose the control scheme they did. The basic movement controls are similar to those in the original Resident Evil games (And I have no idea why CAPCOM still use this control scheme, it’s horrible) with Vanessa turning left and right a bit sluggishly when you press left or right on the analogue stick. Thankfully a quick press of the Z button will make Vanessa do a 180 degree turn, an idea which would later be used to great effect in RE4, and pressing Z while pressing left or right on the analogue stick will make her do a (slightly less than, for some reason) 90 degree turn. These moves are incredibly useful and help to make the ancient control scheme far more bearable. Pressing L or R will do a nice spinny dodge in the appropriate direction, and pressing the same button again will do a further cartwheel out of the way of any incoming lasers. A is the basic attack button, which makes Vanessa shoot glowing blue balls from her hand and you fire as fast as you can physically press the button. Early in the game there isn’t much of a need to fire that fast, but later on your controller may begin to hate you as you round a corner and press the button 40 times in a second. The enemies are targeted automatically, which means you have a little less hassle when jumping around the place, but it does mean that moving enemies are difficult to hit unless they’re moving right towards you. The Y button makes Vanessa duck, sticking her arse up in the air for you to stare at, and you can then roll forwards or backwards, or left or right using L or R. And of course you can jump with B, flipping impressively when you jump forwards or backwards. The game isn’t simply about blowing stuff up and dodging lasers. It’s about looking good when you do it. The only thing that really feels like it’s missing is the ability to jump to the sides. The basic L and R dodges already serve that purpose I suppose, but the first dodge doesn’t move very far, and the cartwheel moves perhaps a bit too far, so it’d be nice to have something in between.

The overall feel of the control scheme is therefore quite rigid, and it seems strange at first, but then you realised that things like martial arts and the dance moves Vanessa uses are supposed to have very rigid patterns to them, and it’s how you work with the moves you have at your disposal and make them flow together that really makes the game enjoyable. Not dodging a laser rushing towards you until the last second to get those few extra shots in, running straight at a nasty robot so that you can vault straight over it, spin round and shoot it in the back, or diving effectively into cover when you’re about to be overwhelmed, they’re all things that you learn to do both to keep yourself alive and… Well to make yourself feel cool. Because that’s what shooting lasers is all about really. The enemies in the game also have quite rigid patterns and so the game is as much about learning to effectively use your own moves as it is about learning enemy patterns, predicting them and eventually exploiting them. While the controls may seem clunky and downright weird to begin with, the more you play the more you come to fall into the rhythm of Vanessa’s moves and the more you’ll be able to run through entire levels without getting touched my a single laser. It’s quite rare to find a game in this day and age that you can actually be good at using skill and the first time you make it through a level without getting hit it feels bloody brilliant.


Special moves or ‘Energy Drives’ (All named after various flying things) are done using combinations of buttons on the D-Pad and the A button. Each one uses up a different amount of energy from the orange energy bar below the health bar, which can be replenished by picking up strange glowing things from fallen enemies. Well who am I to argue, she does shoot lasers from her hands. At the beginning of the game the only one available is ‘Swan’, which involves firing multiple homing lasers from Vanessa’s back, which home in on any enemies in the room. You can upgrade your Aegis suit to gain more Energy Drives as well as upgrading Health (Extending your health bar), Shield (Making you take less damage from hits), Palm Shot (Making your hand-lasers do more damage to enemies) and Automatic, which comes in two levels of varying speeds and allows you to simply hold the A button to fire instead of destroying your thumb and controller. I’d recommend getting it where possible, as it might make your controller hate you less. Upgrading your suit in this way, as well as purchasing new suits which can be upgraded even further, and purchasing new Energy Drives is essential to getting through the game without dying. Each suit has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, such as higher firepower but lower defence and vice-versa, and each suit has specific Energy Drives that it can use, so choosing a suit is a case of choosing whether you’d prefer to play more defensively or not as well as choosing the Energy Drives that you like, or find more useful. Not long into the game you’ll be throwing giant glowing energy balls that rebound off walls, or shooting lasers out of every orifice, all of which looks spectacular lighting up the screen and cutting through the silly robots like a hot machete through one of those little butter packets you get with bread at a B&B.

Currency you say? Well the currency in this game is points. Yes it doesn’t really make any sense (At all) but it’s more encouragement to play the game well. The better you play the game the more crazy laser-spewing goodness you can afford, and isn’t that all we really want? Each robot you destroy will gain you a certain amount of points, depending on the difficult of the enemy, and you can rack up combos by destroying several enemies in rapid succession (A timer is shown in the corner of the screen to let you know how long you have before you lose your combo). Destroying the first few is usually easy, but as your combo increases the time in which you have to destroy the next enemy gets smaller and smaller, as well as smaller enemies giving you less time to blow up the next one and vice versa. This adds further enjoyment to the game, challenging yourself to keep a combo going for every enemy in a room, and again the first time you see that number 20 in the corner of the screen you feel like a God. Or a Goddess I suppose… Of course the real reason you want to get a big combo is because of the big point boost you get, which will let you buy more laser-related death traps, or continues if you’re playing on Hard mode.

Now the main game itself isn’t particularly long, with only 12 relatively short levels, so each level has a set of 5 Trial Missions, which you can use to rack up your score to upgrade your Aegis suit and make the next level possible, or just to try out new suits and Energy Drives. The trial missions get increasingly harder both throughout the game and in each set of 5 so that by the end they’re devilishly difficult and probably harder than parts of the main game. Completing all five gives you a big bonus score and you can then go back and play each one as many times as you like to further boost your score. Of course the fact that you can play these levels as many times as you like would make it a bit too easy to boost your score, so you’ll get far less points for destroying each enemy than you would in the main game to make it a bit more fair. Each trial mission is actually randomly generated from any of the rooms that you’ve entered so far in the main game and I think it must be here that people complain about the repetitiveness of the levels, because as far as I could see many of the game’s main 12 levels were quite varied in looks with some sandy outdoor areas to break up the white corridors, and many larger rooms which forced you to dodge rather than look for cover. The trial missions are of course optional, so if you find yourself getting bored with re-use of scenery you can simply skip them out and continue with the main game, though it will mean sacrificing some points. Personally I found it quite fun to memorise the layout of the labyrinth-like hallways and make sure that I’d checked every room for enemies but… I am a bit strange to say the least.

Unfortunately there isn’t much else that the game will throw at you other than the large boss robot at the end of each level, which usually requires a bit more thought than the rest of the game to prevent yourself getting killed. There are some secrets to unlock, such as two suits which allow you to use any Energy Drive you want, provided you can remember how to execute it and you have enough energy to do so (One of which is basically a thong. It has no shield, meaning if you get hit you die, but if you complete Hard mode with it you’re rewarded with a shower scene, which apparently adds to the story, not that I think anyone really cares. It seems CAPCOM like fan service). Throughout the levels the enemies don’t change much, with maybe 1 new enemy being added at each level (None on some) and old enemies occasionally getting new weapons such as missiles which have to be taken into account accordingly. They give you a little extra to think about, but there’s nothing which will really drastically change your strategy for success one you have one, other than the fact that it’s probably slightly better to keep distance from enemies later in the game as they become faster and a little bit more intelligent. That means that if you don’t really take to the game right away there probably won’t be too much to keep you going later on. If, however, it’s love at first sight and you can’t get enough of it you can expect much more of the same throughout the game. It can get a little repetitive as you progress through the levels, but if repetition is lasers, blowing up robots and a woman in a thong I think we could all use a bit more repetition in our lives. Don’t you?