Post
by Grabthehoopka » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:35 pm
Winback: Covert Operations will always be this for me. It hasn't aged well at all. It has those weird, ghastly, empty-office-buildings-and-astroturf early 3D environments that feel really empty and make my skin crawl. I don't know what it is exactly, I only get that feeling in games made during one very precise time period, when arcades and dreamcasts still walked the earth, roughly around the transition between the playstation/N64 and PS2/xbox/gamecube generations. Something about being in those clean, vacant rooms and being under that big skybox makes me feel really agoraphobic, I don't know why. And just when I thought I'd never have to get that feeling playing a game again, Deadly Premonition comes out...
The AI is terrible, the character design is absolutely ridiculous, and the voice acting...good god, the voice acting...Still, I first played it when I was a young lad, and it holds a special place in my heart. The story's alright, but terribly written, sort of a Tom Clancy meets Resident Evil tale about terrorists taking over the facility for a laserbeam satellite, the counterterrorist operation immediately goes haywire before it even starts when their helicopter gets shot down, and the rookie of the squad has to carry out the mission while looking for his missing teammates as they get picked off one by one. Looking back, it actually had a lot of ideas that were ahead of its time. It had cover-based combat before Gears of War, and 360 degree laser pointer free aiming before Resident Evil 4. Although those games did their respective ideas about a hundred times better than Winback did, the ideas are still there.
Also, I would count Siren as this, for me. Although I didn't 100% it, I did beat it, which is quite an ordeal and took me 24 hours on my first playthrough (12 hours on my second playthrough, knowing the solutions to beating each stage. Still not a walk in the park, though). As such, I will be the first to admit that it's not an amazing game. It's not a great game, either, and it might not even be a good game. But, it's a very unique and special game, unlike anything else I've ever played before or since, and I latched right onto that with the veracity of a face hugger.