Download No Respect

No Respect is one of those games which are never worth full price, but suddenly become good games when released under a budget label. Unfortunately, No Respect never got the chance to be released under a budget line, because Ocean had been acquired by Infogrames and the game basically got ignored. If it hadn't been ignored and had been released as a budget game, it would have been regarded by many, and especially by those who scorned it when it first came out, as a darn fun game.

First and foremost, the graphics, while nothing impressive by today's standards, are very different from many games of its era. Its main downfall is the low 320x240 resolution that it uses, as opposed to the common default of 640x480 in its time, but it does use an innovative voxel landscape that makes each arena intricately detailed, although it falls prey to the usual voxel fault of blockyness (masked quite well by the low resolution). The ship models are also well made, animated and textured, and the game produces a variety of colorful special effects.

The sound is nothing special either. The music is, while quite strange, strangely suitable to the industrialized theme of the game, and the sound consists mainly of a low-voiced alien-like announcer and a variety of explosions, whooshes and firing sounds. It is however, quite good quality sound, and the music is read straight off the CD, so there are no compression errors.
The storyline offers no real impact to the gameplay. You are a mercenary protecting the mining grounds of TransMine, a has-been mining company holding on to Sector E3, which consists of four planets. In order to protect them, you must face and defeat mercenaries from other mining companies in arena style combat. Basically, it comes down to destroying everything that moves. There is no real story progression throughout the game: only more opponents to blow away.

As such, the gameplay gets quite repetitive. Choose a character and annihilate everything that moves in lots of rounds filled with mad fire-button pressing. This does make for a very fast-paced game, especially if you are using one of the faster ships. The AI, while basic, is quite effective and mainly consists of 'head for the nearest powerup while strafing and shooting you'. This is the reason for my earlier comment that the game doesn't really hold enough variation for a full price game, but is still very fun for a quick ten- or fifteen-minute blastfest.

Each of the selectable characters in the game has one of four basic types of ship, modified to their own liking, having more fuel, shield, handling or weapons power than other characters' ships, as well as a different paint job. This adds a little variation to the game, but because the same character has to be used for the entire game (21 stages or so) instead of allowing a mid-campaign change, the choice of ship made earlier can sometimes condemn you later.

Overall, this game is not the best ever made. It has the advantages of a detailed but low-res graphics engine and fun gameplay, but the disadvantages of running out of gaming steam quite quickly. Thankfully, the game is savable mid-campaign, but this is not the sort of game that you would stay up all night playing for a long period of time. Overall, I think that, all of its good and bad points considered, that this game deserves a 3 - good for a quick blast, but not for a gaming marathon.

- No Respect must be run under compatiblity mode for Windows 95, because otherwise the keyboard and mouse will stop responding to anything (including Ctrl+Alt+Delete).

- This version of the game is also cracked by Tommyboy in order to provide a reasonable download size. If you want to hear the music, download the full CD image from the ISO Cellar.

- The menu will likely run far too fast, especially in the character selection menu. Just be careful with your key presses, because the game itself will run fine.

You can use either the NR.EXE or NR11.EXE files to run the game. NR11 is a patched version, so it is probably preferrable to use it.