I’ve had a funny old day today.
I’ve spent it mostly on here doing ArtRage paintings, on YouTube looking at old videogames, and in my head, thinking about stuff. I learned that NiGHTS into Dreams is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade on Friday, and that got me thinking about the old Sega Saturn – and what an amazing console it was. I’ve owned two in my time, one was packed off to make way for an N64 (such a bad move looking back now), and the second one was sold because I felt I never played it enough to warrant keeping it. Oh, and because we were moving into The Big House and we’d have nowhere near enough room to even think about having all my consoles set up. Jane bought me the second one for Valentines Day one year, she is so awesome. It’s weird thinking back about all those old consoles, I’d love to still own them, but they, along with all their games, take up so much space. I know I could download emulators and ROMs and play all these old games again, but there’s something special, some intangible feeling, about playing a physical copy on an actual console, something that digital copies can’t emulate.
I’ll leave talking about NiGHTS until I’ve played it again, but here are some of my favourite games for the Sega Saturn.
Ah, Syndicate. This is based on an old Amiga game, you know. I used to love it, I think, my memory is hazy – but I do remember I was absolutely awful at it. I loved going in, all guns blazing, then running out of ammo or failing missions for accidentally killing civilians. Syndicate had one of the most original weapons ever: The Persuadatron. You just run around with it, and it convinces people to follow you around. I vaguely remember using it to gather up twenty or so meat-shields then rushing into enemy territory and getting bummed. I was way too impatient and impetuous in my younger days to be playing strategy games. Despite growing as a person and becoming quite calm and calculating, I still don’t really like strategy games. So, it’s pretty good that this re-booted re-make is re-imagined as a first person shooter then!
I’ll tackle the story first, while it’s still fresh in my mind. It was awful. Just coming off of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I may be judging it a tad too harshly when I say that as far as comparisons go, Deus Ex is highbrow literature whereas Syndicate is Saturday morning cartoon adaptation. I’m not a fan of disrespecting creative endeavours that people have quite obviously poured their heart and soul into, but the story lacked emotion, I never felt the motivation behind any of the characters actions, and it was over far too quickly. If you want to make me care about a character, let me spend some time getting to know them. The campaign being so short contributed to the abrupt nature of the story, but I’ll write about that a bit later.
This is a spoiler, by the way, but at one point your avatar is holding the lead female character down, with a gun pointed at her head, and you are prompted to pull the trigger. I didn’t hesitate because I cared for the character, or because I thought that shooting a not-real lady with an imaginary gun was wrong, but because I was intrigued as to how the developers would deal with the repercussions. If I shot this lady in the face, would I be taking a different path through the game? Or is she only important up to this point? Do I really have a choice? As it turns out, if you don’t pull the trigger, you momentarily malfunction and she is able to walk away while telling you that she designed your chip and had programmed a few safeguards in there, and if you do pull the trigger, you momentarily malfunction and she is able to walk away while telling you that she designed your chip and had programmed a few safeguards in there.
