Review: Omikron: The Nomad Soul
Posted: Tue May 07, 2002 9:22 pm
The medium install for this game is 580 megabytes. That's not bad these days, though this game did come out in 1999. Mankind has yet to deliver technology capable of moving 580 megabytes from compact disc(s) to my computer in an appropriately speedy manner. But we accept this because we are into computer games.
580 megabytes, you may note, is less than the standard 650MB a CD from 1999 was likely to hold. It would stand to reason that during the game's install, it would make sense to put the install files on one CD, so swapping would not have to occur during installation. To the credit of most everyone else, things like that happens all the time now. They didn't back then. You have to go through three discs to install Omikron: The Noman Soul.
It will take five seconds for my DVD-ROM to recognize a new CD placed inside itself. When I was 52% of the way through the 588MB install, the installer asked for disc two. It had a "Browse" button up in case I had multiple CD-ROMs. I was going to hit the "Browse" button so that I could check to see that the next disc was recognized.
Doing that crashed the installer.
Due to an (independent) motherboard death, I installed W98 on my computer less than 48 hours ago. It doesn't get much fresher than that. Way to go, Eidos. Nice installer you chose there.
So I tried it again. The second time was the charm. (Credit it that, I guess. When I re-installed Freedom Force on my computer yesterday I learned that the game will not install if you elect to throw the custom characters over from the disc to your PC. I didn't notice it the very first time I installed Freedom Force a month ago, because I already had all the custom characters on my system (they were released well before the game was). Of course, having the custom characters in the install is the DEFAULT option. By DEFAULT, the FF installer doesn't work. From 1999 with Omikron to 2002 with FF there has been nothing improved -- installing PC games is still the incredible fucking hassle it's always been. The Microsoft X-box team should do a series of ads on that and that alone.)
Omikron then has some fruit loop tell you that you can interface with his "dimension" through your "computer." You get to possess his body for a bit. I know the game is from 1999 and available polygons were sparse, but they could not have done a better job making me despise this whiny little nutcramp if they had tapped directly into the hate cells of my rage-infested brain. The guy looks like he is wearing some outfit that is a combination of an original "Fantastic Four" jersey and that of the Carolina Panthers. He is wearing a headband and has his carefully-blowdried hair falling over said headband in a most wannabe-fetching manner. If I may be so bold, I think it's safe to say that of the 20,000 people or so (I'm guessing here) who purchased "Omikron" for their PC, approximately two of them were female. (And one on record as a transgender shemale.) He looks like he belongs in Daikatana, funnily enough -- not because you'll want to beat the shit out of him, just like your buddy Superfly, but because Eidos appeared to have wanted a consistent "look" for their protagonists back in the day.
Anyway.
My point to all that is this: I am thrown into another game that purports to be open-ended... and I don't give a damn about the main character.
You cannot appear to save whenever you like. Certainly you could not save at the beginning. Does my future hold trusty save gems? Hope so! This is absolutely reprehensible. I just don't have the energy to slag this game because of it.
What I do have the energy to slag, is the decision to allow the player to move his character from an empty room to some sort of town square, and then be hit with "opening credits."
Unbypassable opening credits.
Unbypassable, three minutes and thirty-seconds long opening credits.
But first:
o It takes six or seven minutes to install Omikron.
o The CGI intro is about two minutes long
o The part where you enter your name and hear the N'Sync refugee say things that makes you hate him takes about a minute
o The non-rendered in-game intro where you get beat up is about thirty seconds long.
With me? So far I have entered my name and answered in the affirmative two questions that I could not answer any other way.
You then get introduced to the shitty controls, and move from the room to the square. Right then, do you know what happens next? Oh, right, I already mentioned -- three fucking minutes of OPENING MOTHERFUCKING CREDITS.
See, they got a hold of David Bowie to do some music for them. All the songs in the game are apparently his. After spending ten minutes getting to some place where I can interact with this little masterpiece, the game shifts to a non-interactive mode modelled after the first couple of minutes in every movie we have all ever seen in a theatre.
I wonder, while writing this -- am I expressing my disbelief appropriately? Have I made it perfectly clear that the beginning of this game appears to be created by a bunch of fucking idiot feces-hurling man-apes in marketing who have never picked up a gamepad in their entire, miserable lives? Opening credits you can't fucking escape out of?!?!? Opening credits, period? Is this some kind of fucking joke?!
I have yet to find a game that starts off worse than Omikron. This is as far as I'll probably end up playing. I mean, hell, I can either waste my time looking for some save gems, hoping that another Bowie video doesn't show up with ESC-key defeating powers or I can go help Ben get his text adventure finished. I think I'm making the correct decision here.
580 megabytes, you may note, is less than the standard 650MB a CD from 1999 was likely to hold. It would stand to reason that during the game's install, it would make sense to put the install files on one CD, so swapping would not have to occur during installation. To the credit of most everyone else, things like that happens all the time now. They didn't back then. You have to go through three discs to install Omikron: The Noman Soul.
It will take five seconds for my DVD-ROM to recognize a new CD placed inside itself. When I was 52% of the way through the 588MB install, the installer asked for disc two. It had a "Browse" button up in case I had multiple CD-ROMs. I was going to hit the "Browse" button so that I could check to see that the next disc was recognized.
Doing that crashed the installer.
Due to an (independent) motherboard death, I installed W98 on my computer less than 48 hours ago. It doesn't get much fresher than that. Way to go, Eidos. Nice installer you chose there.
So I tried it again. The second time was the charm. (Credit it that, I guess. When I re-installed Freedom Force on my computer yesterday I learned that the game will not install if you elect to throw the custom characters over from the disc to your PC. I didn't notice it the very first time I installed Freedom Force a month ago, because I already had all the custom characters on my system (they were released well before the game was). Of course, having the custom characters in the install is the DEFAULT option. By DEFAULT, the FF installer doesn't work. From 1999 with Omikron to 2002 with FF there has been nothing improved -- installing PC games is still the incredible fucking hassle it's always been. The Microsoft X-box team should do a series of ads on that and that alone.)
Omikron then has some fruit loop tell you that you can interface with his "dimension" through your "computer." You get to possess his body for a bit. I know the game is from 1999 and available polygons were sparse, but they could not have done a better job making me despise this whiny little nutcramp if they had tapped directly into the hate cells of my rage-infested brain. The guy looks like he is wearing some outfit that is a combination of an original "Fantastic Four" jersey and that of the Carolina Panthers. He is wearing a headband and has his carefully-blowdried hair falling over said headband in a most wannabe-fetching manner. If I may be so bold, I think it's safe to say that of the 20,000 people or so (I'm guessing here) who purchased "Omikron" for their PC, approximately two of them were female. (And one on record as a transgender shemale.) He looks like he belongs in Daikatana, funnily enough -- not because you'll want to beat the shit out of him, just like your buddy Superfly, but because Eidos appeared to have wanted a consistent "look" for their protagonists back in the day.
Anyway.
My point to all that is this: I am thrown into another game that purports to be open-ended... and I don't give a damn about the main character.
You cannot appear to save whenever you like. Certainly you could not save at the beginning. Does my future hold trusty save gems? Hope so! This is absolutely reprehensible. I just don't have the energy to slag this game because of it.
What I do have the energy to slag, is the decision to allow the player to move his character from an empty room to some sort of town square, and then be hit with "opening credits."
Unbypassable opening credits.
Unbypassable, three minutes and thirty-seconds long opening credits.
But first:
o It takes six or seven minutes to install Omikron.
o The CGI intro is about two minutes long
o The part where you enter your name and hear the N'Sync refugee say things that makes you hate him takes about a minute
o The non-rendered in-game intro where you get beat up is about thirty seconds long.
With me? So far I have entered my name and answered in the affirmative two questions that I could not answer any other way.
You then get introduced to the shitty controls, and move from the room to the square. Right then, do you know what happens next? Oh, right, I already mentioned -- three fucking minutes of OPENING MOTHERFUCKING CREDITS.
See, they got a hold of David Bowie to do some music for them. All the songs in the game are apparently his. After spending ten minutes getting to some place where I can interact with this little masterpiece, the game shifts to a non-interactive mode modelled after the first couple of minutes in every movie we have all ever seen in a theatre.
I wonder, while writing this -- am I expressing my disbelief appropriately? Have I made it perfectly clear that the beginning of this game appears to be created by a bunch of fucking idiot feces-hurling man-apes in marketing who have never picked up a gamepad in their entire, miserable lives? Opening credits you can't fucking escape out of?!?!? Opening credits, period? Is this some kind of fucking joke?!
I have yet to find a game that starts off worse than Omikron. This is as far as I'll probably end up playing. I mean, hell, I can either waste my time looking for some save gems, hoping that another Bowie video doesn't show up with ESC-key defeating powers or I can go help Ben get his text adventure finished. I think I'm making the correct decision here.