Sin Episodes: Emergence Review

|Tap-Repeatedly|FFC Archives

            Sin Episodes: Emergence

Review by SteerpikeJune 2006

Sort of Like the Mortal Kombat Movie

You’ve got a problem when the best thing about your game is its theme song. And that’s certainly the case in Sin Episodes: Emergence, Ritual’s first installment of the planned nine-part epic that follows up 1998’s critically acclaimed but dismally selling Sin.  Greeted at the main menu by sound designer Zak Belica’s haunting “What’s the World Come To,” you can’t help but feel optimistic about the game. Then you play it.

Despite intergalactic hype, Emergence can’t quite deliver.  Its biggest crime is that it promises six hours of play and weighs in a lot closer to three, which is unacceptable for $20. Those three hours are reasonably fun; as shooters go, Emergence is satisfactory, ridiculously challenging, and unoriginal. Level design is competent, storyline is competent, gameplay is … competent. And Ritual, despite making my beloved Heavy Metal FAKK2, has never really been more than competent.

Not having played Sin, I was coming into this somewhat blind.  It’s the future, and you’re a quasi-military lawman with dreadlocks, a soul patch, weird glasses and the unlikely name of John Blade.  This musclebound fellow has spent much of his career battling the criminal element in Freeport City, a futuristic demilitarized zone that’s a little bit Metropolis, a little bit City-17 and a lot Gary, Indiana.

Colonel Blade heads up an elite unit called—ahem—HardCorps.  I’m guessing this organization’s motto is “enforcing the law in ten million bullets or less,” because though there’s a brief and fruitless discussion of warrants at the beginning (along the lines of “you don’t have one”), no one in HardCorps ever actually bothers to arrest anybody. In fairness, the villains don’t seem like the type to surrender if ordered to.

HardCorps’s principal targets are scientist-cum-businesswoman Elexis Sinclaire and her company, SinTEK Industries. Elexis has invented a green fluid that causes a variety of hideous effects when injected into a human host, and in her enormous-boobed lunacy (more on boobs in a second), she’s on a mission to reshape humanity in a way that would horrify any legitimate plastic surgeon or chiropractor. Freeport City drug kingpin Viktor Radek is also involved, though exactly how is unclear at this point. As Emergence begins, Blade has been taken hostage and injected with one of Sinclaire’s bubbly concoctions. Most of this episode deals with your escape and subsequent quest to depoison yourself before you grow flippers or something.

Nice Cannons

The story, while not exactly Tolstoy, has some nice stuff going for it. Emergence, and Sin before it, explores the dangerous vulgarities of runaway science—a theme common in video games—and does so more effectively than some. The great risk of science, of course, is that when coupled with hubris and a lack of restraint it ceases to become a pursuit of something and becomes merely a pursuit, a blind race to an imaginary finish without pause to contemplate the benefits and drawbacks of innovation or indeed the wisdom of peeping into the toothy maw of the undiscovered. SinTEK, with Elexis at the helm, has lost its Ernst Blofeld “let’s take over the world” direction. It’s just doing evil science in a general sort of way, because with each new evil discovery, something even more evil beckons on the horizon.  But none of it is really put to evil use according to a master plan; Elexis just unleashes whatever her most recent abomination happens to be. Even principal villains like Radek frankly admit that they have no idea what SinTEK is doing, beyond the vague sense that it’s green and will change the world for the worse.

Unfortunately, the potential thematic enormity of this plotline is rather diluted by some of the most sophomoric writing and juvenile characterization this side of Dan Brown. Ritual has what it takes to come up with a rich concept, but the flower is prevented from opening by shoddy characters and amateurish narrative mistakes.  Heavy Metal was supposed to be sexist and puerile—it wouldn’t have been Heavy Metal otherwise, and there was a great game in there as well. Emergence is sexist, puerile, and mediocre.

Elexis Sinclaire, the supposedly sinister villain of the game, is apparently both the CEO of a multinational corporation and a streetwalker. Between the bra-exposing business suit, the bizarre bikini dream sequence and the Pussycat Girl demeanor, it’s not easy to take Elexis seriously as a threat to the human race. Why a male villain can be frightening in a full suit but a female villain has to wear something like this (that’s Elexis in her Sin incarnation) is well beyond my small mind’s ability to comprehend.

And there’s more. Blade’s partner in crimefighting is a flame-haired, potty-mouthed, trigger-happy little firecracker of a rookie named Jessica Cannon (I am not making these names up). Jessica rescues you at the beginning of the game, cracks wise on your communicator throughout and turns up periodically to dispense a most unpolicelike hail of bullets and vulgarity at your enemies. Like Elexis, she’s also everything that’s wrong with today’s games industry.

Break it down with me: young cop, barely out of training. A bit short-tempered. Knows words a sailor wouldn’t. Enjoys shooting people.  Rock-solid sense of right and wrong. Eager to do well on the job.  Assigned, through some freak of providence, to partner with the commander of a super-elite unit: a stroke of fortune that gives her a leading role in the criminal investigation of the century.

Just like the overall plot, that’s not going to win any awards, but we’ve got something to work with. We have the ingredients there for a pretty interesting character with some internal conflict and a thirst to prove herself peppered liberally by self-doubt. Instead, we got a latex-clad, midriffy silicone model in platform combat boots and whale-tail panties.

Look, as a guy, I’m in favor of hot women. And if you want hot female characters who don’t wear much, I’m all for it. But give me a reason. Explain it. Create purpose. What is Jessica’s motivation for dressing like an S&M cosmonaut? Elexis’s motivation for displaying her lacies when it’s not casual Friday? Truth is, there isn’t one. It’s just that the guys at Ritual have apparently never, ever been laid and manifest their lust by drawing women this way. This is sadly true of much of the game development industry.  I can’t help but wonder how much better Emergence would have been if they’d spent more time discussing level design and less time wistfully pondering what the characters looked like naked.

Jessica Cannon escapes total ruin thanks to the power of actress Jen Taylor’s voice, and Ritual should be thanking its stars that they signed her. Taylor—best known to gamers as Halo’s wry digital vixen Cortana—is frankly too talented to be working in video games, and her performance in Emergence saves Jessica from offensive insipitude and actually creates a pretty likable individual with whom you can somewhat identify. Jessica is an important enough character that by paying attention to Taylor’s performance you can ignore the crappy acting and self-referentially infantile goo slathering the rest of the game.

Unoriginal Sin

Ritual has been around for quite some time despite a long record of retail mediocrity. Much like the equally second-rate Raven Software, their survival is based on a savvy nose for recognizing and partnering with industry bigwigs like Valve and id. As a business strategy, it keeps them alive, but it does little to counter the fact that they’re not wildly talented as game designers.

Every scene, every section of every level, in Emergence shows signs of liberal borrowing from other games. There’s a fight in a crumbling dock/warehouse zone straight out of Painkiller.  A top-of-skyscraper running gun battle that Max Payne did first. A climactic encounter with an aerodynamically dubious fighter plane lifted from Half Life. A series of collapsing-catwalk/crane-use puzzles originally found in Half Life 2. At the end of the day, there is almost nothing in Emergence that’s unique.

Level design is good but lacks brilliance. The designers of Emergence made fine use of large outdoor environments, and their work shows lovely attention to detail and a willingness to develop complex, nonlinear levels that take advantage of elevation and hidden secrets.  But there’s almost no manipulation of the environment, no use of physics, and few if any original locales to be found.

It’s also insanely hard if you move the difficulty slider even a micron to the right. Enemies shoot with such accuracy, and do so much damage, that in many cases you’re dead before you realize you’re being shot at. There’s an advanced statistical system designed to dynamically reduce difficulty when you’re getting your ass kicked and increase it when you’re dominating, but it never seemed to do anything for me.

It’s important to recognize that there’s nothing truly bad about gameplay. The problem lies in the fact that there’s nothing memorably good, either. Sin Episodes is going to have to deliver much more if it hopes to be remembered as one of the first games of the episodic content age. All eyes are now on Half Life 2: Episode 1, and the Sin people had the opportunity to steal a little of that game’s thunder. They failed, delivering instead a capable episode that is astounding mostly in its averageness.

If They’d Made Their Own, It’d Be Called the “Singine”

Sin Episodes is powered by Valve’s Source engine, a versatile codebase that we’ve also seen in Half Life 2 and Vampire: Bloodlines. That latter demonstrated pretty compellingly that if you lack solid artistic capability you’ll turn out an ugly game despite the engine’s capabilities. This is a big mark in Ritual’s plus column, because Emergence is a very pretty game that uses the graphic prowess of Source to great effect.

Wide, sweeping outdoor sequences are interspersed with highly claustrophobic interiors, all packed with vivid colors and rich textures. Though Emergence is serious, the artists managed to put little touches of visual humor here and there to remind us that it is still a game.  And they also dodged the drabby metalism of so many science fiction games without making it Fantasy Zone day-glo.

The game’s available for purchase over Valve’s Steam network, and the entire process was so easy that I’m now sold on episodic content for games. Click, click, credit card number, preload, click, click, wait until the official release, click, play. It’s that simple. Luddites can also buy the game in a quaint boxed form.

Emergence is perfectly stable and will run quite nicely on any computer that managed Half Life 2—which itself was very forgiving of midrange systems.

Steam purchasers have the option to download the first Sin, now optimized for XP. This game was beloved by critics, rich people and few others; that is, those who had the jobs or money that allowed them to play on the supercomputer it required. That’s amusing now, when you consider that Sin used Quake 2 technology, but for the time Ritual pushed the engine farther than anyone had expected it to go. The result was apparently a great game that no one could play. One of these days, I may have to give it a try to see what all the fuss was about.

Steerpike, Who Can Write Five Pages About a Three-Hour Game

You may have sensed, despite my obliqueness and wordy, recursive sentence structure, that I feel ambivalent about Emergence. The only true disappointment, aside from the brevity, is that it was apparently written by a thirteen-year-old boy. There’s otherwise nothing broken, flawed or even unpleasant about the game … nor is there anything that will curl your toes. It is tofu. It is unbuttered, unsalted popcorn. It is oatmeal. The first Sin episode is flavorless but also quite harmless.

Yet despite that, or perhaps because of it, I will buy the second, and the third, and so on, meaning Sin Episodes will wind up setting me back nearly two hundred dollars. I’ll be doing it because I’m a sucker; once I get involved in a story, no matter how clichéd and awful, it’s almost impossible for me to stop until I see how it comes out. This is a personality foible that has condemned me to a life of insipid television dramas, bad web comics, blatheringly pretentious novels and dull video games.

There’s also just something so bite-sized about episodic content, so consumably appealing, like little binary Vienna sausages. Digital distribution may never replace retail sales, and episodic content may never become the standard for all games, but the future of both is startlingly bright. Sin Episodes is among the first to fling itself into that future. Though common in its gameplay, it is also enjoyable: had it been ten bucks instead of twenty, I’d be raving. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Ritual Entertainment Publisher: Valve Release Date: May 10, 2006

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

System Requirements

1.2 GHz Processor (2.4 GHz preferred) 256 MB RAM (512 MB preferred) DirectX 7 capable graphics card (DirectX 9 capable preferred) Windows 2000/XP/ME/98 Mouse, keyboard Internet connection

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

Pages

Top

Category Archives

Top

Blog Posts

Top

14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.