|
Oh man, Omikron. I've actually still got my boxed copy of the PC version sitting on the shelf behind me. A friend got it for me for my birthday (or Christmas - can't remember) when it was pretty new. Wow... those heady days before we knew that David Cage was David Cage. I did finish Omikron back then, but only once. Once was enough. Even at the time, reviews (in actual physical magazines, because that's how long ago it was) described it as being pretty clunky. It was ambitious and doing some interesting things technically (for the time)... but the results speak for themselves. I enjoyed the Bowie music from it at the time (love the bootleg Bowie, by the way), but it's definitely not an album I've gone back to. Marshal Radisic posted:I just wanted to thank you for that little discussion on the voice actors in the second episode. I'm a huge fan of the obscure alternate-history FPS Iron Storm, the only game French developer 4X Studios ever made back in 2002, and as it turns out Gay Marshall and David Gasman were on the voice cast as well. For another Quantic Dream connection, Paul Bandey was the only other English speaker on IS's cast, and he's been in a few Quantic Dreams games as well, including Omikron. Oof, I remember Iron Storm. Speaking of physical magazines, I remember a review of Iron Storm in PC Powerplay that was absolutely glowing, going so far as to say it was better than Half-Life (as far as I remember it). So I was super-hyped, but then the game turned out to be awful. It was so different to the impression I got from the review that at the time I genuinely wondered if the reviewer had taken some kind of dodgy deal to be positive about it.
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 08:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 19:23 |
|
|
The weirdly sampled Bowie voice in the fight music is kind of what I imagine David Bowie doing Simlish vocals to sound like. It's kind of amazing to think about : I haven't heard that fight music in twenty years, but it plays so often in Omikron that the instant it started up in the videos, the whole thing was dredged up out of my memory. Where in my brain was that hiding for two decades? Like, physically; which particular neurons were secretively holding on to that for all this time? I only remember bits and pieces of the game, but with the reincarnation mechanic, I do vaguely remember a general loop that I'd go through if my current character died. I seem to recall you'd typically reincarnate in a weak character with bad stats, so then I'd go find a big burly guy, possess him, then grind up some skills/money via fighting in the arena. Then I'd continue the story until my character died again - and repeat.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2021 01:11
|
|
|
drat, did you make that Street Fighter style intro? That... seems like a lot more effort than this game deserves. (But it was great.) As short as it is, I really like the music loop that plays in the Awakened base. (Heard at the start of the video.) For some reason it made me think of Queen of the Damned; incredibly average movie with a fantastic soundtrack. I guess it's as simple as that; another thing from vaguely the same period where the music is about the only good thing about it. Not sure why my brain went to that rather than Spawn - a much worse movie with an even better soundtrack that (I think?) came out even closer to Omikron - but there you go. Ugh, hard to believe they got David Bowie to lend his likeness and voice to a character, and then wasted him on lines like "they have transformed you into puppets that are manipulated by Ix and the demons".  inscrutable horse posted:I subconsciously substitute every instance of Namtar with Ratman, and now I constantly expect him to double-cross us. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2021 10:51
|
|
|
I know I liked at least some of that Bowie album at the time, but... man. Has it just not aged well? Oof. Also that character that was described with a "yum yum, nice body" was listed as being seventeen years old. Stay classy, Cage.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2021 05:32
|
|
|
When I was a kid, FPS games in general didn't scare me... but I was definitely too young at the time to be playing Doom. The gore in that did bother me. I can't remember if I've ever actually completed Doom 1 because of that. (Definitely Doom 2 though.) Also, man... I have no memory of any of the shooter sections in Omikron beyond the first couple in the game. (Or much of the rest of the game, to be fair, though I know I finished it.) This is maybe an unfair comparison, but all that really needs to be said about the quality of the shooter parts of Omikron is that both Half-Life and Unreal came out a year earlier than it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2021 05:44
|
|
|
I assumed (since I still don't remember this part of the game) that the solution to getting out of that cell was going to be to possess the body of the guard standing outside. Not... reflecting a weird pacification beam with a convenient dinner plate. I guess you do end up possessing a guard anyway, but... I don't know, it feels like using the game's unique body-hopping feature to escape a prison cell would have been more interesting. And then there's "use acid on hatch" later on, apropos of nothing. Ugh... adventure games.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2021 05:34
|
|
|
Of course there's a coin-operated stripper dance scene in this David Cage game. I do remember the bit where you meet David Bowie as Boz, though I'd misremembered and thought he was the incarnation of the Internet, rather than some kind of digital ghost. But no, Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy is the one in which you punch the Internet in the face. (... As far as I recall.) Fahrenheit was the last Quantic Dream game I played. Never again. The Dreamers concerts are (relatively speaking) my favourite part of Omikron, I think. It says a lot that completely non-interactive sections of the game are the best part.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2021 05:36
|
|
|
Maybe if they had a healthy disdain for the original; kind of like what happened with Thief 2014, which seemed to have been made by people who didn't like or understand the original Thief games. You'd just have to hope for the opposite outcome: that instead of making good games bad, they'd make a bad game good. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2021 12:53
|
|
|
Okay, even given that this was twenty years ago and we all had better attention spans back then, there's no way I had the patience for puzzles as bullshit as these. I must have used a walkthrough for this part.Ignatius M. Meen posted:also your muffled voice is my vote for best voice so far
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2021 10:25
|
|
|
davidspackage posted:(this one has my personal favorite opening skit) Man, I'm glad I don't have a glitchy instant-death trigger volume in my hallway.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2021 05:41
|
|
|
I know I said I finished Omikron (twenty years ago), but the closer we get to the end, the less sure I am of that, because wow I don't remember any of this. Traditionally I finish the games I start, though - especially back then. When you're young and don't get many games, you finish what you get. So maybe it's just because the latter two-thirds of this game (at least) is just a mush of bad, generic late-nineties game design. It all blends together with other crappy, forgettable games I played back then. I guess we'll see if I remember the ending when we get to it!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2021 09:01
|
|
|
Hey, thanks for the LP! It was a flawless and entertaining look at a game that's neither of those things. And yep... I don't remember any of that ending. Did I actually finish Omikron twenty years ago? I think the answer is lost to time now. Maybe I gave up halfway through and then just listened to Hours a bunch of times. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2021 06:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 19:23 |
|
|
Kangra posted:I recently installed Thief Gold from the original disks, and noticed as I often do the ad for Omikron. Inspired by this LP, I decided to load up the Eidos demo disk and see just what it was like to play this, at least in demo form. I lasted about two minutes and one crash to desktop before giving up. This game was years behind its time, and I can only salute you for showing it off as best you could. When this LP popped up, I got the box for Omikron off my shelf to have a look inside it (opening it for probably the first time in decades), and it has kind of a catalogue of other contemporary Eidos-published games in it too. A lot of them are very well known, even today; alongside Thief: The Dark Project, there are games like Tomb Raider 1-3, Legacy of Kain, Daikatana, Final Fantasy VII, Commandos and Shadow Warrior.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2021 07:15
|
|