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Comment count is 16
StanleyPain - 2016-01-12

I really liked this game a lot. I played it all the way through on the Dreamcast and 2 or 3 times on PC. It's cheap on Steam, but it has never been updated to run in a 4:3 resolution so it looks like shit and it's tricky to fix it. (unless this has been dealt with recently)

It had problems, but in general the setting, atmosphere and writing were all really interesting and Bowie's presence in the game felt like something really cool as opposed to just a cheesy, quick gimmick. (he also appears as the lead singer of a fictional in-game band whose concerts you can locate and watch playing material from his album "Hours.") The sound design and music was really amazing too. Quantic Dream really made a mistake in just abandoning this game and barely recognizing it anymore in order to move on Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, etc... This is by far the strongest thing David Cage ever worked on, IMHO.


Sanest Man Alive - 2016-01-12

I was kinda interested in getting this game back then, but worried it was just like Blasto having Phil Hartman, or that one crummy shooter narrated by Bruce Willis, where the celebrity guest is just there to excuse an otherwise crappy game.

Forgot it was a Quantic Dream title, though. Tell me Stanley, without spoiling too much: does it also fall apart laughably in its final act?


infinite zest - 2016-01-12

If you're talking about Apocalypse that game was really fun for what it was.


StanleyPain - 2016-01-12

I don't think so, no. The story makes sense and progresses the way you would expect.
the "gimmick" of Omikron is that you are a "nomad soul" and can possess the bodies of other NPCs in the game. The NPCs you can possess are limited, but changing bodies is an important mechanic to the game (and it's not possible to finish without body changing).
Where Omikron got its harshest reaction was the fact that it had multiple game styles which didn't really work well. The FPS sections were pretty awful (even for the time) and the fighting game parts were also kind of awful. Thankfully, the majority of the game is exploration and puzzle solving, but getting past some of the action-y parts is a bit rough. For the time, Omikron was pretty bold in that it allowed you a lot of freedom to explore and such. The city was fairly large and interesting to look around. Of course, to play it today, it's nothing compared to the open world games we have now, but back then it was pretty mind-blowing. The story is linear, but there are a few places where progression can be done in a couple different ways.


infinite zest - 2016-01-12

Celebrity gimmicks were a relatively new thing then, so I was skeptical too. Like this could turn out to be another Hell: Cyberpunk Adventure Starring Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones or Peter Gabriel's Secret World, both of which were pretty terrible. In a lot of ways Apocalypse and Omikron sort of changed that pessimism into pretty good games, for me anyway, and now you don't even really notice or care when some Oscar-winning celeb shows up in a game.


lotsmoreorcs - 2016-01-12

Omikron...come lay by meeeee....


This was a hugely ambitious game


infinite zest - 2016-01-12

Yeah I should revisit it sometime. I had to review it really quickly during the Dreamcast's tits-up phase, and maybe played an hour of it, so I didn't really give it a fair review. But at the time one of the things I noticed that was cool was that the player was well aware that they were playing a video game. This had been done before in novels and games, but usually it was a character within a character, being played by a character, like Solid Snake's battle with Psychic Mantis, or the Assassin's Creed series, not just someone telling you that you're playing a game. Anyway I thought that was pretty cool.


Sanest Man Alive - 2016-01-12

Goddammit Zest if your review had been more positive you could have saved the Dreamcast

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU HAVE RUINED??!?


infinite zest - 2016-01-12

Ha! Main thing wrong with DC was the GD-Rom instead of a DVD-Rom, where you could watch movies on with a PS2. DC had a much better lineup of games overall, especially at launch. If the website still existed I'd share my review; it wasn't critical, just rushed, like I didn't have time to get into the experience enough.

But fine, it was me that killed the Dreamcast and not Bernie. :)


lotsmoreorcs - 2016-01-12

We can GO WHERE WE WANT TO....omikronn...


StanleyPain - 2016-01-13

I recommend playing the PC version if you can. (obviously you will need to tweak with your monitor or TV to get it to look normal) The DC version is a bit rough. The graphics are much lower quality than the PC version and for some weird reason there's a good chunk of music and ambient sound missing from the DC version. The ambient music for each sector of the city, for example, is totally missing on the DC, there's just the ambient soundscape.
Supposedly Quantic was seriously planning a PSX version, but they cancelled it. I cannot even imagine what kind of technical shortcuts they would have had to take to get that to run on a PSX.


Two Jar Slave - 2016-01-12

Is it too early to say, "Enough with the Bowie already"?


lotsmoreorcs - 2016-01-12

this site has always been notorious for old fucks so strap in buddy most of these guys were 29 in 2002


Sanest Man Alive - 2016-01-12

Bowie's death has unintentionally dealt a severe blow to "hard to find Mormon videos" week.


infinite zest - 2016-01-13

The news broke around bar time in my neck of the woods, so I was awake for all of the early stuff on FB, including a friend of mine who said pretty much the same thing, but then deleted it. I don't see it much on here; people aren't destroyed or anything, just writing their own eulogies to a person who meant a lot to them, whether it was the music itself or the man behind it, but Facebook's gotten pretty much out of control. Glad we're all Bowie fans, but a good way to make ourselves feel better is with Hard to find Mormon Videos week, or something. But hopefully more Hard to find Mormon Videos.


bongoprophet - 2016-01-13

we can't all be a collective of interesting people gathered under a username, orcs.

I think around the time that Smash Mouth released a tribute tweet and song (look them up, it is just amazingly horrendous), saying "R.I.P. Bowie" lost all meaning.


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