Syndicate At A Glance

Syndicate is an old DOS game by Bullfrog. It's an action RTS where you went deep into what I'll call "soldier development" where you can choose your soldiers' weapons and augmentations. This game was actually pretty controversial back in the day for the game's drug use. Now because this is the game at a glance, I don't get far enough into the game to explain, but here it goes...
The game opens with a bleep and some militaristic synth percussion followed by some… not so good synth that starts with a random set arpeggio and then some organ that sounds like it belongs in Castlevania and then it moves to like 8 different things, like… is this the same song?
The visuals in this intro are pretty good. Just some animated cinematics of what's going on in a city. Cut to Some guy getting a metal leg implant. Cut back to the opening visuals and I wondered if the opening cinematic was on loop and I was expected to skip it. It literally repeats the same three scenes in the opening, but then it cuts to a red haired guy with dark shades and a trenchcoat. He pulls out a pistol with laser sights. He aims his pistol at the player and then the title pops up.
When that is over a green laser outlines the screen and the main menu shows up. Nothing special here. No music. Your options are to configure your company, begin the mission, load or save the game, restart the game, or quit to DOS. Let's start with Begin Mission.
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I bet that right now you're going, "but Connor you have to configure your company!!!!" well when you press begin mission you are given this Command and Conquer-esque map of the world. You click on the designated territory and you are given a mission briefing and THEN you can configure your company.
The briefing gives your your mission type (i.e. Assassination, Persuade, etc) and then does the whole briefing thing. To the right of that are three sets of numbers and a box with flashing lights, which I have no idea what those mean. It couldn't be a map of the mission, and if it is, that lacks a lot of detail.
You find out the first set of numbers (starts at 30000) is your money you can use to enhance your soldiers. You can enhance them through implants, weapons, and I guess research? I don't really know what research does.
So you equip your team and begin your mission. The first mission begins with your team just outside a small base. When you select a unit or their weapon they say, "selected" in this very robotic voice. Now when you begin each mission remember to select your team's weapons because for some reason they aren't already equipped.
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why? Why would you not have your teammates weapon already equipped? If you didn't read this you wouldn't know about the weapons not being equipped until the enemy is shooting at you and your soldier just wants to walk up to them and hug them or something. The music is very simple and uninspired, but it works. I wouldn't download the soundtrack, it's too empty. So you finish the mission by doing whatever task you are given and you are given a cinematic of people in a city cheering and rejoicing while a hover car flies by. One thing you'll notice pretty fast about these missions is that constant boop that will get faster or slower. That would be your radar, and yes it is very annoying. I'd like to tune it out, BUT IT'S LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME!
Another thing that pisses me off is the AI, when you are on the persuade missions the AI you persuade cannot follow you for shit. They always get hung up on a fucking wall or something and then when you go back for them they seem way to interested in that fucking wall! Look, if you persuade someone you should be able to control them. The second level is a persuasion mission, so guess how fucked you are in that one!?!?!?! I lost that mission about 4 times, thrice from shooting and once because the AI is retarded, yes, I'm making that a cause. The only upside to the second mission is the police who when they spot you shout, "Police, put your weapons down!" It's also fun when your whole squad has a shotgun and you do one click on on the enemy and he goes flying. Oh, there's another thing I forgot to mention. This game is set up like an RTS, so naturally you'd think left click works all the magic, but no, right click does all the shooting and left click moves. Or if you're on a mac, two finger click does the shooting and one finger click does the moving. What is cool about this is that you can shoot wherever and whenever. So you could shoot the ground, or a building, or a set of stairs, or whatever.
So that's Syndicate at a glance. Was it as good as I was hoping for it to be? Fuck no. I thought this game would make me completely forget about Command & Conquer, but it made me wish I was playing that instead. Maybe I'll post a full review when I manage to get passed the idiotic AI... yeah... maybe.

Duke Nukem 3D Review

(At long last, I decided to screw the video portion of this review so.... here it is.)

Remember Duke Nukem 3D? Of course you do, but in case you don't you probably just know it as the predecessor to gaming's biggest punchline Duke Nukem Forever or Duke Nukem Never, or Duke Nukem Forever in Development, the jokes go on, but back in the day Duke Nukem 3D was on every system, it was on DOS, MAC, Windows, Genesis, Game Boy Color, Playstation 1, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and now it's on the iPhone and Xbox Live Arcade. With that many releases you know the game was and still is a big deal.



Now it's not necessarily 3D like the other big shooter to come out that year, Quake. There were 3D environments, but the characters and props were all in 2D, so I guess you could say it was 2.5D like earlier shooters Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. This is my first review of an old game so I wouldn't really know what to tell you about the graphics aside from the fact that, yes they're dated, but they still look good to me, but then again, I don't really care about a game's graphics.


So when you start the game you are greeted by the awesome theme song called "Grab Bag" and some gameplay footage. When you go start the game you can actually pick any one of the three episodes to start on, which is pretty cool, but this kind of backfires on you whenever you finish an episode. Once you finish an episode you get a picture with some text giving you some plot advancement and then it takes you right back to the main menu, so when you start a new episode you start it with a blank slate. Why can't I continue from LA Meltdown to Lunar Apocolypse? Aren't you supposed to go through the whole game?


There is one issue I have and that's the lighting in this game. Most of the time the lights are either strobing or nonexistent. Some of the levels in the second episode are pretty much just that where you'll be in a room with strobing lights and then when you get out of the strobe room you can't see a damn thing. I checked the manual to see if there was a headlamp or something and their isn't. So, I just dealt with it. It was always a relief to walk into a room and see a light switch so I could flip it and actually see things. The poor lighting really affected me in the second level of LA Meltdown where I'd go into a hallway that had literally no lighting, but the enemies can see me so suddenly I'm getting shot and I don't know where from so I had to shoot randomly until I heard the enemy die and what sucks is that you have to go through this hall twice and on the second travel a Pig Cop spawns so you get ambushed in the dark.


The AI is pretty typical, when they see you they're ruthless, but when they don't they just kind of wander around and make growls or in the case of the assault commando they say "suck it down" in this ring modulated Barry White voice and believe me that gets really annoying until Duke says it at one point. That's probably one of the best parts of Duke Nukem 3D is every word that comes out of Duke's mouth. When I started the game I would smile at everything he would say, but the effect would sort of die later in the game after about the thousandth time you heard Duke say "Cool" or "Groovy". They capitalized on Duke's amazing quotes by adding a feature to taunt your opponents by pressing alt and then f1 through f10. By doing this you can hear some pretty good taunts. My favorite being, "You're an inspiration for birth control!"


Another important sound aspect is the music. Aside from the great theme song that plays at the menu screen the music didn't really leave an impression on me and as I got closer to the end of the game I totally forgot that there was even music playing until I paused the game to go to the bathroom.


So I talked about all of the bad things, but what is it about this game that makes it so awesome aside from Duke's amazing quotes? The action, it's almost non-stop unless you are stuck at a certain point looking for that key. Not only can you give money to the strippers, but if you shoot them money comes exploding out of them. When you go into the bathrooms it's always funny to open a stall door and catch an alien dropping a deuce. I had one incident on Lunar Apocolypse where on the floor of one occupied stall was a porn magazine. The game also created some great scenes of intensity, again on Lunar Apocolypse you are in an examination room and suddenly a ton of the slime enemies start coming out of the walls making me leg it. The whole Lunar Apocolypse episode sort of reminds me of the movie Aliens where the base on LV-426 has been taken over by the aliens and they have their hive filled with eggs, this gave me moments of dreading any advancement in the level, but in a good way. The enemy design is great and actually inspired me a little with my game ideas and come on, a pig cop? that's just hilarious and his vest even says LARD. I smell bacon for real. The end of episode cinematics are great too. At the beginning of a boss battle Duke says, "I'm gonna rip of your head and shit down your neck," and just hearing that is awesome, but what's even better is in the ending cinematic Duke literally does that. After another boss battle he kicks the boss' eye through a field goal announcing, "it's good!"


So Duke Nukem 3D, overall it's a kick ass game, something I feel like I could pick up and play again and again, sure it had lighting issues and the fact that you can't continue to the next episode with all your weapons and items is a bummer, and yes the music isn't really memorable aside from the theme song, but everything else makes up for it. If you haven't played this game yet I highly recommend you do, I mean come on, it's practically on every console!