keyser Soeze said:
Ratty who said that TES quote?
Very nicely put!
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls:_Oblivious
14. Syndicate Wars - Bullfrog Productions / Electronic Arts (1996)
"Good morning, citizen. Congratulations on your promotion. Welcome to UTOPIA Today. I am Detroit A.I., and this is UTOPIA Level Nine. Have a profitable day, executive."
A popular hit from Bullfrog's heyday, Syndicate Wars is an immensely fun tactical shooter set in the distopian future. After the events of the original Syndicate and American Revolt, the world is dominated by Eurocorp, a powerful multinational corporation. Eurocorp assert their dominance using a network of special spinally implanted chips called UTOPIA (an acronym for Universally Transferred Organic Processing Interface Architecture, which sounds incredibly cool, especially when you are twelve and playing your first cyberpunk game), which ensure universal contentment and obedience by literally altering people's perception of (otherwise grim) reality.
The game begins when a religious cult known as the Church of the New Epoch introduces a virus into the UTOPIA network. The disruption inflicted by the virus causes millions of citizens to rebel against Eurocorp, either as acolytes of the Church or as members of an anarchist group known as "U-Citizens" or "Unguided". The player may choose either Eurocorp (and assume leadership of a team of elite agents) or the Church (and be granted control of a group of acolytes), upon which they are tasked with performing various missions for their side throughout the globe. Most missions are mandatory, but some are optional, and many have more than one objective. Objectives vary from simple assassinations and abductions to wiping out entire enemy garrisons. By successfully performing missions, the player gains funds which can be spent between missions on purchase and development of new weapons and cybernetic enhancements.
In case it isn't obvious, Syndicate Wars is a game that contains a lot of Awesome. It's as if Bullfrog developers somehow found an unlimited source of concentrated Awesome and generously applied it to every element of their game. Though it's quite difficult to describe in words the amount of pure, unfiltered Awesome the player encounters while playing Syndicate Wars, I'm still going to try. Here we go:
1) Syndicate Wars puts you in control of a team of nigh-invincible, minigun-wielding, menacing-trenchcoat-wearing superagents. Or, if you are playing as the Church, you get to control a team of giant one-eyed priests who have massive high-tech weapons attached to stumps of their arms and hover around using jetpacks fueled from huge tanks built into their shoulders.
2) Syndicate Wars lets you mow down crowds of innocent civilians with miniguns, or throw a tank of psychosis-inducing gas at them, causing them to riot and start killing each other.
3) Syndicate Wars lets you destroy *anything*. Everything, absolutely *everything* in the game is destructible, from street lights to skyscrapers.
4) In Syndicate Wars you can wield a huge gun that fires a graviton beam powerful enough to destroy buildings and vaporize any fool that gets caught in its wake.
5) In Syndicate Wars you can blow up city blocks with portable nukes, or obliterate entire districts with a rain of orbital missiles.
6) Syndicate Wars features driveable vehicles, including a massive hovering tank with a mounted multi-barreled rocket launcher.
7) In Syndicate Wars you can use a device called Persuadertron to brainwash bystanders into joining you. Your newly-recruited followers will even loot weapons off corpses and fight on your behalf. Alternatively, Persuadertron can be used to abduct scientists and enemy agents.
8) Syndicate Wars has great atmosphere a lá Blade Runner, thanks to the perpetually nocturnal ambient and excellent visual design of technology and urban architecture.
9) Syndicate Wars is rife with cyberpunk themes, concepts and techno-babble, many of them obviously lifted from William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, books universally acknowledged as apotheoses of Awesome.
If none of the things I mentioned above are enough to convince you to go find a copy of Syndicate Wars right away, then you are obviously Awesomely-challenged. As an Awesomely-challenged person, you are inherently unable to comprehend the Awesome in Syndicate Wars, or any other game on this list. I therefore suggest you do yourself a favor and go back to playing whatever mediocre game has your attention at the moment (I suspect its title begins with "G" and ends with "ears Of War"), and leave Awesome to those who can appreciate it.
