You do know that that was what the developers wanted? It was a modern dystopian tale that would show us what could come ahead. You were never supposed to feel sympathy for the coorparation that employs you. A quite mutual feeling, considering the game over screen. The whole concept of "people" as "drones" and mindless coorparations tools only working for a bigger net profit was one of the major fears that people have/had about the future. Countries losing relevance and the population losing itself in some "alternate reality" and losing the grasp on real live an it's important issues. The game was from a time where people like Peter Molyneux tried more than to just entertain, they wanted to create an art form.

And it was relatively tame on violence. Yes, it might have been the first "real violent strategy game". But that's saying Bea Arthur was the sexiest of the Golden Girls. There were loads of more violent action games released during that time (Or even RPGs like Ultima 7).

The game was somewhat "late to the party" as that were mostly 80s themes. On the other hand it was quite "spot on" predicting the "Unwort des Jahres" of 2004. But it still is a masterpiece in my opinion. Bleak, violent, hopeless.

And Syndicate Wars turned this up to eleven!

I have to disagree. As someone who played very few games as a child, and only really started getting into gaming maybe 5 or 6 years back, I'm playing many old titles for the very first time. And I've found that the vast majority of "classics" are just as good playing them for the first time today as I assume they were "back in the day." Sure, there are many cases where you need to adjust to mechanics or philosophies that are different from the "silky smooth rollercoaster" approach of modern games. But if you're willing to do that, most older titles that honestly did things well (as opposed to just being the first to do them. It's the difference between, say, Metroid and Super Metroid) turn out to have aged quite gracefully.

Isn't that the main reason most come here? Nostalgia?

Syndicate is fantastic because it did something interesting, and it was dark, bleak, and very violent. Anybody who has never played it, that wants to check out this piece of history totally should.

That's just the way it is, most gamers like to stay up to date, and simply don't understand why anyone would want to stick with the older titles.

I'm just saying I think the majority of people here signed up because they saw a game or many games they used to play all the time and really enjoyed. Wanting to re-live those days and talk about them again and all that. I'm not doubting there are people who have never played many or any of the titles here.

Which is the main reason why GOG is great, they give you a chance to play the classics (legally), even if it has not aged all that well, like Ultima 1-4. The historic purpose is still there.

Yeah, I was just overreacting for no discernible reason. Sorry :P

Well ... you'll probably disagree with me (which is quite okay ;) ), but in that case I'd regard the game's premise and design as fundamentally flawed. If you want to let the recipient of a work of art experience the bleakness and harshness of a dystopian future, then you put the player in a role where he is either the victim of these forces (see 1984), or where he's at least forced to think about them. What you _don't_ do is putting the player in the role of a doer who commits all kinds of atrocities, is even _forced_ to do so in order to advance the story, gets rewarded for doing so, and has neither a reason nor an opportunity to question them.

I'll take a risk and use a controversial setting in a rather overblown example that demonstrates my point well imho. Please don't call a Godwin on me, okay? Now ... think about the following. I'm creating a game in which the player works a s the manager of a concentration camp. The plot requires the player to organize killings and forced labor, deal with revolts, etc. The player gets rewarded for doing these things "successfully". There is no other option to progress in the game, and the morality of the player's actions is never questioned. If asked, the game's designer explains that his goals were to recreate the bleak and cruel atnosphere of a concentration camp and to create a work of art. What would you think about that?

Again, I _know_ that this example is overblown. And I explicitly do _not_ want to link Syndicate in any way to the cruelty of concentration camps, that would be utterly unfair to both the game and the victims. However, imho this example demonstrates quite well while the explanation that you offered for the game's design doesn't really work. If they designers really wanted to do what you think they wanted, then they would either ave done it differently, or they failed due to very fundamental and basic design flaws,

Im not saying that your wrong about that, but its not me you describe. I like old games because they offer far different experiences than modern ones do. I love variety. somewhere around 80% of the games on my GOG shelf are things I never played until I bought them off of GOG.

The games people remember and talk about are usually the outstanding games, the ones that did that extra bit that made them great, and those are the ones that have stood the test of time well. Magic Carpet, Might & Magic 3-5, Ultima 7, Civilization 2, they are all great games, well worth the time of even a modern gamer, but what about Might & Magic 1? While that game has its charm, sure, but if you don't have any nostalgic ties to 80's CRPGs, it is a hard game to get into. I recently got some first hand experience with one of the most important CRPG series of all time: Wizardry. I found the usually super expensive Wizardry collection for 1€ (I'm a lucky git), and tried the first game. And I just found myself thinking "well, this game is not very good". Things like tooltips for displaying what the heck items actually do, less artificial lengthening of the game in the form of grind and more variety, I was really missing it.
Metroid 1 was a smash hit back in the days when it was released, most NES owners loved it, it was great. I have enough nostalgic ties to that game that I can't hate it (I still remember the day I got it, it was early summer, I was sitting in the kitchen and I was 5 years old. My father told me that he had a surprise for me, and told me to close my eyes. When I opened my eyes again, Metroid was on the kitchen table. I did not go out for a week, I was glued in front of the TV. Sure, the copy was used, it lacked the box & manual, but I did not care, it was the game I wanted), but I "know" that Super Metroid is the better game. The genre had evolved, it had cut away some of the annoying bits, tightened up the gameplay a bit and so on. So why would anyone really go back to Metroid 1, apart from either nostalgia or historical reasons?
And look at King's Quest. While the early entries in the series do have their charm, and they are genuinely funny from time to time, they also suffer from some gameplay mechanics that are very hard to accept, even by early 90's standards. Things like dead ends were perfectly acceptable back then, but unless you have nostalgic ties to the games, you will probably not enjoy them very much, not without a walkthrough.
Civ 1 just suffers from being surpassed. It is not a horrendous game, but as there are so many games that are better than this game, why would you play it?

Nostalgia doesn't cover it. Syndicate has many qualities that make it perfectly playable today, although some might find it simplistic for being non-3D isometric and low-res.

The graphics are low-res as I said, very small characters, but pretty sharp. The color palette is somewhat limited (the cities and structures are always in shades of gray, green or some pale brown), but perhaps that was supposed to add to atmosphere, a grim vision of future (or it was just limited). Explosions do look nice though, cutscenes too (but there aren't many).

You can research technologies so you have access to better weapons and your agents can be augmented (to shoot faster, better aim, resist longer). That managerial aspect of the game is simple, but not too bad, nor too complicated.

The mission gameplay is simple too. You move your agents around, shoot people, shoot other agents (which is cool, they're well equiped like your own agents), shoot police officers, get other people to follow you, drive cars. It's all very simple (you shoot once or twice and they stop moving, cars only move to one direction), but it works. If you ask me, works better than its sequel Syndicate wars.

Gameplay has problems too. Sometimes it's hard to navigate through the isometric cities. It's easy to get lost behind walls and inside buildings. Annoying.

I think the sound, although obviously repetitive, is great. Most people might disagree because most people hate game music anyway. Music is atmospheric, shooting sounds are average, voices are ok (repetitive but well done for a DOS game). There's only two speeches I can recall now: a voice says "selected" in a robotic voice when you select something, and when a police officer sees you with guns blazing he tells you to holster your weapon.

Nowadays I suppose the main qualities of the game are both the consistency of gameplay and the challenge. You know what to expect of the game, and the escalating challenge makes it better while you get better and better weapons. It's exciting to shoot agents dead with a minigun, because they have miniguns of their own and you have to be quick about it.

People who don't mind this being a non-3D game (i.e.: people who like good DOS games in general) are sure to like this classic, because that's what it is. It's solid fun.

Hm. I think I'll post this as a review now.

Ok, I think I get what you're saying. But I think it's important to distinguish that "change" is not always the same as "improvement." Although older games certainly succeed and fail at different things than newer games do, it doesn't necessarily follow that the newer games are automatically better.

But we're basically in agreement, so...

Most of the games on my GOG shelf is games I never played before either, as I was purely an Amiga man up to '97, when I got myself a PS1. Had only played the occasional PC game around that time. I never got to play Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate when they were new, something I deeply regret because I suspect the experience would be even better than it is now. I finished Baldur's Gate 1 in less than a year ago for the first time, and got started on BG2 right away.

Most of the games I had already played were games I played on the Amiga, so they're kinda new to me as well, despite many of them being inferior to the Amiga version.

Yes, we do basically agree.

And it is a shame that newer games are not always better than older ones. Imagine what you could do with some of the older concepts and with modern technology! Imagine tactical games where the terrain works more realistically, and with a far better AI than the older games. I really hope the new Jagged Alliance actually gets things right, and lets the new technology actually add something meaningful to the game, instead of it being just a simplification of Jagged Alliance 2. *Dreams about a world where the best of the modern games meets the best of older games*

*drool*

*co-drool*