Re: "8 Classic Games You Haven't Played (but should)"

On Sat, 1 Feb 2025 13:14:51 -0800, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

The main thing I remember from playing Syndicate was that almost every
mission reached a "stand in an intersection and kill everything in the
city" point.  Which at that age it was kind of cool to watch your
operatives on continuous autofire for several minutes doing exactly that.

My strategy was always just to Persuadatron (that is, use a gadget
that let you hack people's brains and control them) the populace until
I could just brainwash the enemy agents. Five civilians let you
brainwash a cop; with at least three cops in your army you could
brainwash an enemy agent. Then you'd simply hide inside a building and
when the enemies ran inside they entered your 'brainwash radius' and
immediately fell into your thrall.

Later levels worked against this strategy by
    a) limiting how many civilians were available to brainwash,
    b) having you get attacked IMMEDIATELY so you couldn't 'level
       up' your Persuadatron so it could take over the agents,
    c) made it so there were fewer buildings to hide inside, and
    d) made KILLING the agents a mandatory part of completing
       the level.
Once that started happening, THAT'S when you broke out the miniguns
and gyrojets.

Also fun, in a very 90s way, was setting people on fire and watching
them run around aflame, screaming. It was a level of realistic
violence that really hadn't been seen in video games up to that point,
and the sheer audacity of it made it extremely memorable. U.S. Senator
Lieberman (a very vocal activist against video game violence who
campaigned against "Mortal Kombat", "Doom" and <sigh> "Night Trap")
used that event as an example of how video games had 'gone too far'.
Although all I thought about it at the time was, "This is so cool,
"Syndicate" is being talked about in the US Congress!" ;-)