Syndicate (1993)

Why it was great:Cybernetics-enhanced trained operatives with big guns making a mess of things. Violence in 1993, or, Violence? In 1993?

Syndicate tasked you with more or less taking over the whole world in a highly corporate, cyber-punk future. To accomplish this you got to earn money from various missions and upgrade your operatives with new body parts and weapons. The game was great because these upgrades usually corresponded with very appreciable feedback. If you put some new legs on an operative he or she would easily outrun her un-upgraded counterparts. If you added a rocket launcher to your arsenal, it became a lot easier to make things go away. It also let you jack your operatives full of drugs, in effect trading short-term gains for the negative effects of dependency you acquired later.

The style of the game was also very memorable. Hover cars floated around the streets, obeying traffic laws. Video billboards hawked products and the streets would actually be populated by innocents. The game made good use of the isometric perspective, allowing for a three-dimensional feel while still being sprite-based. Pre-rendered cutscenes of the city and situation rooms provided more depth to the atmosphere, and were welcome in a game that weighed in at under 7 megabytes.

As much fun as the system was, it was not without frustrations. The missions would sometimes get a little repetitive. Also, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of your various operatives if they were spread out over the map. Nothing was more frustrating than taking care of a hard mission only to have one of your stragglers be run over by a hover car when you are not paying attention. Overall, the depth and style of Syndicate kept me coming back to it. It was always fun to watch the world map be gradually taken over by your syndicate. It definitely spurred the desire to keep playing and getting more upgrades. They had such a tangible effect on your game that it was hard to not keep playing 'Just one more mission'.