Tag Archives: retro

Bullfrog Time Machine: Syndicate

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On holiday this week, so here’s the second of my recent excursions into Bullfrog’s glory days.

My love for Syndicate is something that I find difficult to express in words. It’s a game expressly calculated to appeal to both the 10 year-old version of me and the current gnarled oak of a man I have become. It’s all about trenchcoat-clad cyborgs fighting gang wars with weaponry ranging from Uzis to rocket launchers, all in the middle of a living city where innocent bystanders are routinely incinerated in the crossfire from your obscenely powerful guns — and if that idea doesn’t at least catch a glimmer of your interest then I don’t know what to tell you. Probably you’re not going to be very interested in Syndicate. Probably you’ve also had the joy surgically removed from every other aspect of your life, but I try not to judge.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Giddyup, Dobbin!

After being harangued by the Voice of God for taking the wrong exit out of Trinsic, I get Cate’s map of Britannia out to try and find out where she should be going. The map isn’t immediately helpful but, operating on the assumptions that the big built up area is Britain, that it’s reachable without having to get on a boat, and that Trinsic doesn’t appear to be in the middle of the desert, I conclude that she is currently somewhere to the south of Britain and that she should start heading northwards. This is a skill called orienteering long thought lost in this age of dynamic map markers and fast travel.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Whodunnit?

For a game set in a pastoral medieval fantasy idyll Ultima VII sure doesn’t pull any punches. Cate the Avatar travels to Britannia from our world (long story, best not to think about how stupid it is) and immediately upon popping out of the dimensional portal is accosted by some guy called Iolo, who apparently knows her of old. Iolo is talking to a cringing, cap-wringing peasant about a gruesome murder that has taken place in the stables. Ha, “gruesome”. This is a 1992 game and everything is so clean and pleasant! What could possibly qualify as gruesome in a place like thi-

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In Praise Of: Syndicate Wars.

The news that GoG are going to be adding the original Syndicate to their store on Thursday caused many parts of the internet to explode in an orgy of fangasmic joy. Syndicate is rightfully regarded as one of the all-time classics of gaming, which is one of the reasons why the news of the FPS reboot has gone down like a cold cup of sick with most of the gaming community. It’s a fairly simple top-down shooter at heart, but its masterstroke was putting the shooter bits into context by setting them as individual missions on a vast, world-spanning strategic map. This strategic layer let you tax your captured territories and plow the resulting funds into researching ever more lethal weapons and bionic body parts for your team of drugged-up cyborgs, providing the sort of wholesome family entertainment that led to entirely-predictable calls for it to be banned1.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: The Wall.

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a series of posts that detail my experiences with an RPG I have often heard praised but never played: Ultima VII.

One of the hazards of playing older games is that you tend to run into paleolithic design elements that have, for better or worse, disappeared as games have become increasingly streamlined and user-friendly. To our modern gamer sensibilities, coddled as they are by elaborate in-game tutorials that hold our hands as they teach us to play the game — often infuriatingly integrated into the first half-hour of the campaign so that we are unable to avoid them — these design elements can often seem bizarre and unreasonable. We are no longer expected to Read The Manual; instead, a game should set the barrier to entry as low as it can in order to include as many people as possible. And if that results in the loss of some nuance and complexity from the overall design of the game, then so be it.

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