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Re: Syndicate Wars by Black Hitler 07/29/2004, 11:43pm PDT
curst wrote:

Bitter wrote:

Not as good as Syndicate, especially the awesome mission pack.


I DISAGREE. Syndicate was damn fun for a long time, but the final mission's ridiculous difficulty basically made me quit. A friend of mine bought the mission pack and said that the expansion pack did nothing to alleviate the difficulty, so I never bothered.


It didn't simply not alleviate it, it pumped it up to insane and basically unplayable levels. Remember the Atlantic Accelerator mission from the original, where you had to start moving and firing within .5ms of the start of the mission, otherwise a swarm of enemy agents would rush you out of nowhere and gun down your entire squad in about three seconds? Half the missions in the expansion pack are like that. I was obsessed with the original Syndicate to the point that I even bought the Genesis port so I could play it on my Nomad (even though it was totally uncontrollable, like all the other console versions) but the expansion pack broke me pretty damn quickly.

The one thing that I think sucked about it: I liked the feeling you got that you were running a corporation that in turn was taking over the world. As you bumped off rival syndicates' agents and your influence spread, your profits increased, leading to more advanced technologies. In Syndicate Wars, you get money by destroying banks, carjacking armored vehicles, or brainwashing civilians (some of whom were a little richer than others). Yes, this is a stupid intangible thing, but with Syndicate you actually felt like you were running a ruthless corporation that was willing to resort to slaughtering civilians if they got in the way of rising profits, rather than a desperate terrorist organization doing whatever it could just to stay alive. You were a cross between Gordon Gekko and Charles Joseph Whitman.


The problem is that the money-raising system in the original Syndicate became pointless pretty quickly. Complete a mission, conquer a new territory, collect their taxes, watch the money roll in. Raise their taxes too high and they revolt, keep them too low and you eventually go bankrupt. But it's even more underdeveloped than it sounds -- there's no variation between different territories in terms of what tax levels they're willing to accept, so once you figure out the ideal rate (i.e. the highest rate you can levy without provoking unrest) the entire fundraising aspect of the game pretty much flies out the window. Complete a mission, set the tax rate to 30% or so (I don't remember the exact figure I came up with), and never worry about that territory again. Not much fun, really. In contrast, I liked robbing banks in Syndicate Wars because the rewards seemed more immediate. It's fun blowing up an entire bank and grabbing the little briefcase full of money conveniently left lying around in the rubble. In the original Syndicate you'd finish a mission, go to a menu screen, and learn that you'd collected $500,000 in taxes since the last mission. So what?

Of course, the entire reason they went with the terrorist approach in SW is because if you played as the other side (the Church), that's basically what you were. Rather than come up with different play styles for each side, all they really did was give you a different default weapon, change the names of some of the items (i.e. "Persuadertron" becomes "Indoctrinator," "Nuclear Grenade" becomes "Apocalypse"), and split the difference when it came to everything else, the result being that you could either control a Church with its own multi-million-dollar research labs or a global megacorporation whose entire income is apparently derived from bank robberies and kidnappings. A bit of a wasted opportunity.

I tried to play it on both Win98 and WinXP machines, only to watch it uncerimoniously crash to the desktop constantly at the same point. I want to say it's after I won a level and it tried to play the fireworks-celebration movie. Hopefully it's just my CD or some bizarre conflict on my PC that wouldn't affect others.


I had the same problem. At one point I tried copying the entire game CD to my hard drive, installing it from there, and deleting the movie file from the CD directory. I don't remember if it actually worked though, in all likelihood it just gave me an error message along the lines of "MXCD02.SMK not found" and kicked me back to the desktop.

My other big complaint about Syndicate Wars: apparently the society of the future is so debased that the only advertising allowed is for anime. No matter where you're supposed to be in the world, there's always dozens of trucks with the Manga Entertainment logo driving around, and every Jumbotron on earth is set to an endless loop of the Ghost in the Shell trailer, complete with a loudspeaker announcement to the effect of "Classic animation from the 20th century!" The upshot is that you can blow up the trucks, presumably incinerating thousands of copies of Ninja Scroll and Urotsukidoji in the process.
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        that run on sentence needs trimming NT by FABIO 07/28/2004, 12:11am PDT NEW
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        Re: Syndicate Wars by curst 07/29/2004, 9:44am PDT NEW
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            Re: Syndicate Wars by Black Hitler 07/29/2004, 11:43pm PDT NEW
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    Re: FABIO's forum arrogance article by Mischief Maker 07/29/2004, 11:54pm PDT NEW
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