Zero Punctuation: Syndicate

Andy of Comix Inc

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Mr.Tea said:
Andy of Comix Inc said:
...ah well. Every review for this game I see makes me slightly less mad that it got banned in Australia. Speaking of which.... Yaaahtzeee wheree'd you get yoour cooppy from? Sneaky bugger.
Probably at GAMETRADERS ROBINA, just like SSBB.
Gametraders Robina shut down. It no longer exists. As I rudely found out when I visited Robina during a Queensland holiday to find it deserted and in the process of being constructed into what I can only assume is a Starbucks. =_=
 

Antari

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Nov 4, 2009
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6SteW6 said:
The sad fact is, half the people supporting this game are going to be the people who remember the original fondly and, through nostalgia coloured glasses (Yes nostalgia is a colour) will pick this up AND THEN realize it's a piece of shit. Making EA think it was popular and make a sequel!

Next up, Dungeon keeper, but instead of being evil and building your own devious dungeon you play the good guys, and it's a first person open world RPG, cause, you know, Skyrim's popular.
Ummmmm No .... Just No. I love the old Syndicate. I wouldn't support this piece of pandering crap if they were giving it away. Not to mention the fact of its being released by Electronic Arses.
 

ThunderCavalier

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Sooooo... another generic modern shooter that fails to have any type of gameplay or story to have it compete with the big FPS franchises like CoD and Battlefield that has a brand recognition that reaches fanbases that don't exist or will want to ostracize and protest the game as loudly as possible, ensuring a minimal, if no profit.

If it wasn't for Battlefield and BioWare, I'm sure EA would have drowned in its own drool from all of the retarded decisions its been making regarding these reboots.
 

DanDeFool

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Aug 19, 2009
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Renegrade said:
I like the part around five minutes where he describes the two groups who might be interested in this title.

It's spot on. I'm part of the latter "setting the publisher's office on fire" group. I expect a re-imaging of a game to improve it, flesh it out, etc. Not dumb it down.

The people in the former "too young to remember it" group won't give a damn about any of that, so EA might as well just give it another name that doesn't involve any licensing issues.

I'm glad the X-Com shooter got pushed back and (hopefully) replaced with a more appropriate remake. If they go ahead with the shooter in the long run, they should ditch all the X-Com references. A clean slate would give them more creative freedom in the shooter, and avoid angering those of us who remember the old strategic game. Heck, if it works out under it's own franchise, that's another franchise for gamers to enjoy, and the publisher to sell.

Why can't more re-imagings be like Battlezone (1998) or Battlezone II? (problems with bugs and forward compatibility aside)
Sad and true. But if you think about it, there wasn't any reason to expect anything else. Since the PC exclusive is dead, and it'd be nigh on impossible to replicate old school Syndicate's gameplay on the home console, another bloody FPS is about all they could do with the property.

Besides, it's not like the transition to FPS didn't work for Fallout, right? It's just too bad EA didn't follow Fallout's example of maintaining the depth and complexity of the original.
 

Metalrocks

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just to hear ?A makes me want to kill someone. its so obvious that this game will suck as a shooter. i dint had any interest in it at all.
damn, already mass effect 3 with its bad ending makes me wonder if it was ?As idea so they can cash in.
anyway, i will not get any ?A title anymore. ME3 was the last game with their logo on.
 

6SteW6

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Antari said:
6SteW6 said:
The sad fact is, half the people supporting this game are going to be the people who remember the original fondly and, through nostalgia coloured glasses (Yes nostalgia is a colour) will pick this up AND THEN realize it's a piece of shit. Making EA think it was popular and make a sequel!

Next up, Dungeon keeper, but instead of being evil and building your own devious dungeon you play the good guys, and it's a first person open world RPG, cause, you know, Skyrim's popular.
Ummmmm No .... Just No. I love the old Syndicate. I wouldn't support this piece of pandering crap if they were giving it away. Not to mention the fact of its being released by Electronic Arses.
Ummmmm Yeah......so good you are not the half I was talking about, congrats! The sad fact remains though, there are a bunch of folks who will see the Syndicate brand, fondly remember Syndicate, pick it up out of nostalgic glee and then only realise it's crap. Not all gamers do their homework you know.
 

Renegrade

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DanDeFool said:
Renegrade said:
I like the part around five minutes where he describes the two groups who might be interested in this title.

It's spot on. I'm part of the latter "setting the publisher's office on fire" group. I expect a re-imaging of a game to improve it, flesh it out, etc. Not dumb it down.

The people in the former "too young to remember it" group won't give a damn about any of that, so EA might as well just give it another name that doesn't involve any licensing issues.

I'm glad the X-Com shooter got pushed back and (hopefully) replaced with a more appropriate remake. If they go ahead with the shooter in the long run, they should ditch all the X-Com references. A clean slate would give them more creative freedom in the shooter, and avoid angering those of us who remember the old strategic game. Heck, if it works out under it's own franchise, that's another franchise for gamers to enjoy, and the publisher to sell.

Why can't more re-imagings be like Battlezone (1998) or Battlezone II? (problems with bugs and forward compatibility aside)
Sad and true. But if you think about it, there wasn't any reason to expect anything else. Since the PC exclusive is dead, and it'd be nigh on impossible to replicate old school Syndicate's gameplay on the home console, another bloody FPS is about all they could do with the property.

Besides, it's not like the transition to FPS didn't work for Fallout, right? It's just too bad EA didn't follow Fallout's example of maintaining the depth and complexity of the original.
To be honest, Fallout is still on my "to play" list. I heard horrible reports of bugs in an otherwise cool game, so I held off to give 'em time to patch, and um, the procrastination sort of got out of control. I wasn't aware they dumbed it down though :(

I'm actually hoping to see a revival of sorts in the PC scene with things like Steam. Obviously we're not going to see "AAA" titles anytime soon, but I can see up and coming studios releasing PC-exclusive games, especially if they can twig on to things like Steam and "not charging $79.95 for what's basically Quake 1 with higher res textures and a few mods thrown in for free".

If a developer could price something cheaply, and make a good effort that doesn't involve an art department that's better funded than most movie studios, I think we could see a resurgence in quality, complex gaming on the PC side, while leaving the playable-movie big-budget, lowest-common-denominator crud on the consoles.

In fact, I noticed that Carrier Command is getting a remake, and so far from the brief clips they've shown, it looks like a spiffied up version of the original, rather than a dumbed down FPS. The mantas and walruses (is that how you say that? walrus? walruses? walrii?) go under full AI control when you're not operating them, instead of just a very limited autopilot... If they distribute properly, for a reasonable price, and it even vaguely lives up to expectation, it could do very well. Especially if people would stop pirating everything that's made out of bits.

I wonder if we could start a grass-roots movement for this purpose?

Anyhow..I just hope they learn about forward compatibility this time -- it's not impossible, I still play around with a DirectX 3 game (that I wrote in the mid-late nineties) on a Win7/64 system. Even though somehow Star Trek Armada, which is what, DX7+? won't run on anything past Win98.
 

JohnnyDelRay

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Atmos Duality said:
Hmm. Random thoughts.

When Fallout gets remade into a shooter, it's accepted with blind fan glee, accolades and awards (to some small amount of polarizing controversy).

When X-COM gets remade into a shooter, it's rebuked by a chorus of hate so strong that it forced 2k to give Firaxis the task of making a much more awesome looking game.

When Syndicate gets remade into a shooter, it's accompanied by another chorus of hate, said hate is ignored, and nobody is surprised when it turns out to be a bland forgettable mess that virtually nobody likes or wants.

What a shock.

Now we just have to see how the X-COM games turn out.
I was wondering about that myself actually. Why is it that everyone is up in arms about Syndicate, when Fallout 3, went in the opposite direction. When I first heard about VATS and all this FPS nonsense, I was plenty butthurt in the outset. Fallout Tactics being one of my favourite games, turned into an FPS game, I wanted to see blood.

I guess they just got off easier because Fallout turned out to be a pretty good game, and Syndicate was just as you said, a bland forgettable mess. Unfortunate timing as well, since Deus Ex actually managed to live up to some expectations, and is also kind of a modern entry of a classic, that just does the cyberpunk action/FPS that much better.

I don't even want to look up news about X-com. I just hope that this FPS remake will die off eventually, and they'll make remakes at least closer to the genre of the games they were originally. I'm going to get the new Jagged Alliance when the price drops a bit, fingers crossed they at least kept the atmosphere in that.
 

theultimateend

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The original syndicate was a strange game for me. One day I was looking at the PC games on my shelf and it was there (I was in my early teens at the time so you gotta figure around 10-11 years ago).

Now you might say to yourself "so?" but my point is I don't know how it got there. If my parents put it there they never told me. I never purchased it. I sure as heck don't have friends who just leave me unopened games in big cardboard boxes.

I remember reading the box and thinking "This sounds so neat!" and wanting to give it a run. Except the problem was it wouldn't run on my computer.

I don't know what the minimum requirements were but for whatever reason I couldn't figure out how to get it to install and run on my XP. It's been so long I can't really remember what I tried or if it was just that Derpy eggshell PC I had for a bit that was only good at bluescreening.

But regardless, this is the only game to have ever spontaneously appeared on my shelves. I have never figured out how I got it and now that this reminded me of it I want to ask my parents and see if they even remember. Doubtful since its been over a decade since it happened.

Man...just googling it brings back some odd memories. It's from 93, that seems to explain what my problems might have been.

JohnnyDelRay said:
I don't even want to look up news about X-com. I just hope that this FPS remake will die off eventually, and they'll make remakes at least closer to the genre of the games they were originally. I'm going to get the new Jagged Alliance when the price drops a bit, fingers crossed they at least kept the atmosphere in that.
Already are for Xcom and I'm cautiously optimistic :).

Firaxis is making it I believe.
 

Andy of Comix Inc

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doggie015 said:
You've still got more gametraders stores than us over in Western Australia! We've only got the one in Centro Galleria in Morley

OT: The more I see game remakes into FPS, the more I dread the day when they decide to make MLP into an FPS
We don't have any here in Tasmania. Hell, we only have one Starbucks I think. WHAT KIND OF BACKWARDS STATE IS THIS D:<

Also, MLP is already a fighting game [http://www.mane6.com/] so stop dreading and start counting the days. Doomsday clock at 5 minutes to midnight... death by ponies... :(
 

ACman

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It seem that EA's good decisions regarding Syndicate were all peripheral to the actual game such as hyping the Big-name musicians and writer and forgetting that they might have to put something imaginative into the actual game.

I think they missed out by ditching the original Syndicate's mindless automatons controlled by corporation chips. In this mode as a Coporation Executive you'd be floating above a zone controlling FOUR agents not one. Yes in first person mode you could really only control one agent at a time but you could switch between them while the rest could be controlled by AI that you manage with the Adrenaline/Perception/Intelligence drugs from the original game.
 

ViewFinder

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Jan 27, 2012
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targren said:
ViewFinder said:
The end summed these reboots up quite nicely.
You mean the part of about the target audience being the ones who would either not know about the original, or just not have been the ones who liked it?
Mostly that part, yes.

I've wondered that myself. Do these marketroids honestly expect nostalgia to carry them through beyond the first sucker with a web show getting tricked, then making enough noise to warn his contemporaries of the scam?

I'm seriously curious. Do they actually promote this sort of "thinking" to the soulless hordes going for marketing degrees?
I'm not entirely sure what you are getting at, English not being my first language and all that, but I suppose yes, some could think that way.
 

kingmob

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Jan 20, 2010
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The ending words is exactly what I've been wondering all this time (same with the xcom shooter). Who is responsible for this clearly stupid decision?
 

kingmob

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JohnnyDelRay said:
Atmos Duality said:
I was wondering about that myself actually. Why is it that everyone is up in arms about Syndicate, when Fallout 3, went in the opposite direction. When I first heard about VATS and all this FPS nonsense, I was plenty butthurt in the outset. Fallout Tactics being one of my favourite games, turned into an FPS game, I wanted to see blood.

I guess they just got off easier because Fallout turned out to be a pretty good game, and Syndicate was just as you said, a bland forgettable mess. Unfortunate timing as well, since Deus Ex actually managed to live up to some expectations, and is also kind of a modern entry of a classic, that just does the cyberpunk action/FPS that much better.

I don't even want to look up news about X-com. I just hope that this FPS remake will die off eventually, and they'll make remakes at least closer to the genre of the games they were originally. I'm going to get the new Jagged Alliance when the price drops a bit, fingers crossed they at least kept the atmosphere in that.
Probably because Fallout clearly isn't an FPS, but an RPG. An RPG that is in First person and where you shoot things yes, but that is not really the definition of an FPS now is it?
The change in perspective didn't really fundamentally change why people played fallout that much.
I can't believe I've read this several times in this thread already, since the situations are so clearly different. Some people may not like where Fallout 3 went, but it was clearly made with Fallout in mind. Fallout tactics is more the odd-man out in this universe.
 

Denamic

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Atmos Duality said:
Hmm. Random thoughts.

When Fallout gets remade into a shooter, it's accepted with blind fan glee, accolades and awards (to some small amount of polarizing controversy).

When X-COM gets remade into a shooter, it's rebuked by a chorus of hate so strong that it forced 2k to give Firaxis the task of making a much more awesome looking game.

When Syndicate gets remade into a shooter, it's accompanied by another chorus of hate, said hate is ignored, and nobody is surprised when it turns out to be a bland forgettable mess that virtually nobody likes or wants.

What a shock.

Now we just have to see how the X-COM games turn out.
Fallout didn't manage the transition to first person without flak.
In fact, it weathered a shitstorm before it got released.
It managed to stick to its roots and was good enough to endear most of Fallout 1 and 2's fanbase.
Besides, it's not a generic FPS; it's still an RPG, only with guns and in first person perspective.

Syndicate gets shit because people expected it to be another it to be another victim of FPSitis.
And they were right.
All that made Sydicate good was completely scrapped.

And X-COM is getting shit because the game looks like yet another victim of FPSitis.

Why developers take old and loved games and then rape them is beyond me.
"Hey guys, let's make a sequel to Freelancer! And let's remove the space stuff and make it an FPS!"