Well the only difference between watching somebody else "play" and "playing" it yourself is that with the former you won't have to suffer through the gazillion of QTE that constitute 99% of the game :)

Actually, more seriously, I had a lot more fun watching somebody else playing that I had when I did it myself, I remember especially some video of a guy who spent most of the game without touching the controller at all or doing stupid thing still managed to get the good ending. (except the very few QTEs sequences where you can actually die, failing most of them doesn't have any impact whatsoever except getting or not some achievement)

Wow, is it that bad? Because I heard praise for this game, like it being an interactive movie done right.

Hmm, maybe, but BL wasn't PS3 exclusive. :P

Well personally I hated it (I played it only because it was sold with my PS3) and yet I enjoyed Fahrenheit, it's everything I didn't like in Fahrenheit multiplied by a thousands.

Most of the game is QTE and often obscure QTEs, you have the choice between "left" "right" "up" but you don't really know what each will do, sometime it's obvious but often it's not, you have to choose blind hopping your character won't do anything stupid (for example if I press "up" is my character going to "stand up", put on his classes, or pick his nose... ).

There is a sequence (and it's not the only one) that drove me crazy where you must escape some peoples chasing you (I remain vague to avoid spoilers) and you have the choice of direction during the chase... but you have no way of knowing the correct one, chose "left" and you get instantaneously caught, chose "right" and you escape... for some seconds until the next direction choice where you have to chose between "up" and "down" with one getting you caught and the other continuing the sequence slightly further.

Also like I mentioned most of the QTE are meaningless, fight with a guy, do it perfectly and you win, screw up and you lose... but in the end it won't change anything in the story except for the "life or death" QTE sequences later in the game, and even those there is only one or two QTE in whole sequence that you must succeed to survive all the others are optional.

So most of the time you can simply cross you arms and wait for the sequence to finish on iit's own.

There are some "non-QTE" parts, but I am tempted to say that those are even worse. You have some "investigation", clue searching/analysis part going on with the FBI agent, but it's a lot less interesting that it sound. Basically you spam a button that will trigger some "sonar" wave highlighting all nearby clues, once you find all the clues, the chapter finish.

Usually in a later chapter you must investigate those clues... which means selecting the clues one by one in the virtual wold'ish interface that the FBI agent use, press a button to "analyses" them and move to the next one until the game tells you that you done enough. You can't fail, you can't miss, just select them one by one and move to the next chapter.

And the clunky characters control, making Resident Evil 1 characters looking like hyper agile monkeys in comparison, doesn't help making those sequences anymore enjoyable.

So in the end I would say that if you play the game only for the "story" and don't care at all about the gameplay (i.e. play with the QTE in very easy) then you might like... personally I didn't... at all.

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. Thankfully, the default setting of using right shift to run also allows you to use left shift for the same purpose (which is even more bizarre considering that explicitly setting it to left shift will result in left shift not working at all).

Btw, the default resolution of the GOG version is 1440x900 - was it this high even back in 1999? Or did the original version use a lower resolution like 800x600 or 1024x768?

I always had to run it in 640x480 back in the day, my system couldn't manage any higher!


I am just running with the 1440x900 resolution, if I up it any higher it looks exactly the same, only difference is the text is extremely small

Oh, yes - I'd LOVE to see that. :D

EDIT:
Oh, I am so glad to see Omikron hit GOG. I missed this game, for some reason - and been hoping it would hit GOG.
FINALLY, it's here! Great news!

Well, of course I am interested in the story, which is better than in Fahrenheit (didn´t played neither of those games yet), from what I heard - no far-fetched ending explanation as in Fahrenheit.

I´ve played a bit of the game on a game expo we had back in 2010 and I saw others playing it. To me those QTE moments seemed within reasonable boundaries (for a console game), what made me unsettled was thinking how they gonna, if ever, port it to PC (I hate those console moments, for example, in Aliens versus Predator from 2010, where you have to literally smash E keyboard letter and there´s no right way of doing it, you just have to smash that button and kinda hope that game will let you continue) to make it playable by keyboard + mouse.

I would be disappointed if they´d release a PC version and I would know the story already because I saw somebody other playing it.
So I´d probably won´t be watching it on Youtube. I only watch those games I already played and finished.

Omikron doesn't get better the longer it goes on, either, sadly.

The shooting parts are a huge part of the end of the game and much of the adventure stuff falls by the wayside. Once you leave the first two zones and go into Jaunpur, the game takes a HUGE nosedive. The town becomes confusing to navigate, the game turns into an almost full-on FPS, the story never does anything interesting and the games loses all sense of cohesion.

Back in the day, I never played past the first two areas and I loved the game, but it quickly starts to go downhill real fast.

The concept is awesome, the game is atmospheric, there are original ideas everywhere... but the gameplay isn't great and the game fails to really take those ideas and do something amazing with them. And yea, the adventure part of the game, in particular the conversations, are horrible -- it will happen time and time again that your character has knowledge of things that no one had told you yet. Or that you'll tell a character something and the game will ignore it, like telling Talis right away "I'm from another dimension." No matter how many times you tell her, she just ignores it.

The more I play, the more disappointed I become.

If you are already not liking the game, it's not going to get any better for you... in fact, it will more than likely get worse. It all goes downhill once you get to Jaunpur, imo.

You can forget keyboard and mouse; the game is full of "gimmicky" QTE like use the six-axis motion sensor, shake the pad, move the stick at a specific speed, or even press five or six buttons at the same time (the game really loves that), and of course smashing a button for a set period of time. At best if they get rid of the motion sensor stuff they can do most of it on the Xbox pad.

Concerning the story, well it's ok I guess, it's not as crazy as Fahrenheit but still with its share of plot holes. It's at the level of an average episode of any recent crime drama TV series.

I'll be more forgiving...

On the overall, I think Omikron is good to play. It has to be considered as a conceptual innovative game. The counterpart of the incredible daringness of this project is that it was bound to be imperfect, somehow. Omikron was an attempt to do an adventure-action game in a free universe. Some aspects are undeniably flawed, but you feel that everything was done for the player. I guess developers faced thousands of challenging technical issues.

In 99, this game was outstanding. As a gamer, I appreciated the effort to produce something new, never-seen before and daring.

I wish there were more adventure games featuring a huge universe and a total freedom. There are some action games like GTA, RPGs, shooters... but not many adventures. In this respect, Omikron set the bar very high. Many adventures games that followed, even lately, are disappointing. This includes Dreamfall or even Fahrenheit in which the actions takes place on tiny settings, for instance.

I mentioned Dreamfall because developers tried to use gameplays from other genres as well, and failed too.

And as regards Fahrenheit, Quantic Dream tried to innovate once again, but I found the latter awful, mainly because of a far-fetched plot.

I want to love Omikron as much as I want to love Fahrenheit; because at first sight they really look like awesome adventure games with immersive setting and great freedom of choice. But somehow it isn't working, they both let me down pretty quickly ... :(

I'm not even talking about the story, I'm talking about the "Action" sequences in both games getting into the way of an enjoyable gameplay experience. I think both of these games could have been much more fun without them. I restarted Omikron yesterday (set the resolution to a lower one, it felt more natural) and with the new key configuration the FPS level was okay, but the Beat-Em-Up part was still annoying, even on Easy difficulty, at least with a keyboard (I'll have to try and see if the game will accept a PS2 controller).

And what I don't get is how you can conceive a game that gives a lot of freedom to the players without taking into consideration that the players will make use of it. I know how hard it is to keep track of everything the player says and does and always base the game's reaction on those details, but it feels like they didn't even try to do that and that's just weird for such a game. They give you the freedom to choose whatever dialogue option you want, at the cost of missing other options, and then the game acts as if you had fully explored the whole dialogue tree.

Mind you, I don't regret buying it, it's an interesting experiment with historical value, but I'm leaning towards considering it a failure. Or maybe it's just not my kind of game, dunno. I think I'm going to try Anachronox instead. :)

EDIT: Btw, are you even required to beat the action parts in Omikron? Are they essential for beating the game? At least in the beginning it doesn't seem to make much of a difference if you win or lose, if you lose the game just moves on as if nothing important had happened ... you are not required to reload a savegame nor are you able to repeat the action sequence. Does that mean that you can complete the game without winning a single Action sequence or will this maneuver unskilled players into unwinnable situations and failure in the end?

Except once you get to Jaunpur, the "free roaming" element of the game is pretty much non-existent. The game quickly becomes sub-par FPS level after sub-par FPS level and turns into an on-rails game. The only adventure elements that come into play is searching the city for an item the game gives you no clue on where to find (Drops of Shadow come to mind...) In fact, I'd say the last half of the game becomes more akin to a puzzle game than anything.

The first half of the game is great, I enjoyed it! Once you get to Jaunpur, the game nosedives in quality. The city becomes confusing and the game just starts dragging on and on. To me, the story took a stupid twist as well and the ending... meh. The story focuses on probably the most least interesting thing in all of Omikron.

The problems Leroux mentions are huge, especially the dialogue options. The main problem with the game is that the game just assumes you took the "right" dialogue path and that you know certain information, even when you don't.

The concept of the game is great, you're right, but the execution just sucks. The tools are there for a really awesome game set in this universe but Quantic Dream by and large squandered them. By the end of the game, I just wanted it to be over because it went so far from its initial premise. I loved Fahrenheit and even Heavy Rain, and loved what I played of Omikron in 99, but time hasn't been kind to this game.

Leroux, later on, the FPS and fighting parts MUST be beaten to proceed. The game will put up "checkpoints," costing you one magic ring each time you need to retry, that look like save points but are blue. If you fail, go back to the checkpoint, keep trying. The beginning action sequences are tutorials so the game will go on if you lose but after that, you must win in most situations. There are some enemies (no spoilers here) that you fight and, if you lose, the game is over immediately no matter how many magic rings you have. And yea, the fighting segments are horrible even on easy, the computer frequently uses 7 hit combos and will just pummel the crap out of you while you wrestle with bad controls.

As much as I didn't like the game, I do feel it was worth the $10 because there are a lot of good ideas here and not everyone will have the same feelings as me -- it is definitely a love it or hate it sort of game. I can't really get too in-depth without spoilers but the saying "jack of all trades, master of none" comes to mind. The game just keeps introducing more and more gameplay elements but then never uses any of them beyond one or two forced occasions to move the story forward. It's a shame, really.

Meh, in that case I'll put it back on the shelf for now. There are just too many probably more enjoyable games waiting for me to try them, so I guess it's a waste to play this just for "historical reference" or for mourning over the wasted potential. :/

In any case, it was an ... interesting experience.