The Matrix Online
I think the first Matrix film was just about perfect. I also think people forget how incredibly anti-establishment it was. Morpheus looked Neo dead in the eyes and said “One day, you’re gonna have to merc some real human feds to free everyone from this capitalistic prison.” Then Neo went out and did exactly that.
But I’m assuming blasting authority figures wouldn’t pass post 9/11, so the 2003 sequels give us ghostly minions of a French dandy and endless clones of Hugo Weaving. Instead of deciding to “hang up this phone and show these people what you don’t want them to see,” Neo just… didn’t? Instead of asking “how many people too attached to the system are you willing to sacrifice?” we got “what if the subroutines that control mundane parts of the simulation also had faces and feelings and desires?” It’s all of the original’s cyber and none of the original’s punk.
So when The Matrix Online finally released in 2005 – two years after the third film hit theaters – there was some trepidation. I know I was far less enthusiastic about continuing the series’ story after walking out of the third movie than I was when slow motion cartwheeling out of the first. On top of this, Enter The Matrix – the first mega-hyped Matrix game – hadn’t exactly been a crowd-pleaser either. Would any Matrix story live up to the first film? Did the series even have anything left? And now they wanted to release an MMO, meant to hold audiences and their cash for years?
They at least made it sound good. Billed as the interactive, multiplayer continuation of the film’s trilogy, promises were quickly made that this wouldn’t be your average online game. Alongside thousands of other players, you would directly participate in shaping the ongoing, official storyline, blessed by the Wachowskis themselves. You could talk to and fight alongside characters from the movies! Do kung-fu in trademarked Bullet-Time™! Battle with Agents! Have your name recognized alongside legends like Trinity and Niobe! Plus, some parts of the Matrix series were still cool. Maybe this could work?
We know, of course, that it didn’t. Matrix Online is instead remembered as one of the highest-profile MMO failures. It was criticized as a dull, janky and repetitive game with a perpetually low player count and a sandbox design that World of Warcraft immediately made obsolete. Warner Brothers dumped off publishing rights to Sony Online Entertainment just three months after its release. It allegedly had less than 500 players before being shut down. Its most famous video is probably Giant Bomb clowning on its final hours. Oh, and it killed Morpheus in a lame cutscene with an assassin made of flies (don’t worry, it gets weirder).
Unfortunately, this dismissive reputation completely ignores that – for a brief window from March to June of 2005 – The Matrix Online really was the most ambitious and interactive online role-playing game ever made – even today. What Warner Bros. and Monolith tried was brilliant and totally on-brand for that early era of MMOs, but was equally a victim of unfortunate timing as much as any flaws in its design. MxO didn’t last – but it’s still fascinating to look at an experiment of this scale that, almost certainly, will never be tried again.
The Matrix Online’s story starts a few months after the end of the film trilogy. Zion was saved, Smith was defeated, Neo is dead. The truce he brokered to keep the Matrix running is in effect, but it’s already feeling some strain – the Machines won’t return Neo’s body, Zion is freeing too many humans, and the Merovingian is constantly twisting schemes for the benefit of his exiled programs. You started as a human “redpill” freed by Zion, but could later ally with any of these three factions, affecting the missions you ran and who you fought in PvP. Some “gamey” parts got introduced as well – namely new safety mechanisms that mean death inside the Matrix no longer kills anyone for real.
To match the look of the films’ lauded fight scenes, Monolith developed a new combat system dubbed “Interlock.” In simplest terms, right-clicking a nearby enemy would pin you both together in a turn-based duel. Movement controls no longer worked; instead your attention was focused on battle tactics. Selected combat styles (Strong, Fast, Grab) would hopefully trigger debilitating states on your foe, which powerful attacks on your toolbar used as prerequisites. For example, once your enemy was stunned, you could spend recharging stamina to deploy your mighty Piston Kicks.
Locking characters together also meant that the game’s touted 4,000 combat animations would sync together for you and everyone watching nearby. Unlike other MMOs of the time, you weren’t whiffing a sword inches away from your oblivious enemy, watching for a particle effect denoting a hit. Instead, blows connected, enemies would be knocked back, and slow-motion wire-fu acrobatics could be convincingly pulled off. Grapples and throws were possible. You could set your stance to Block and watch punches get pushed aside. Flashy, slow motion finishing moves could dramatically KO a weakened foe (mostly, a lot of kicks to the dick).
There was also some technical innovation here. Mega City was stunningly vast – easily the largest city in a game yet. You’d only see a loading screen during fast travel – beyond that, running through districts was seamless. Four neighborhoods and 55 districts defined general zones of NPC difficulty, but also the style of the architecture. You’d start in the slums and industrial zones and eventually work your way to the towering glass monoliths of Downtown, the unique decorations of the International District, or even find your way to arenas based on previous versions of the Matrix – each much different than Mega City’s 1990s urban decay.
Not only did Mega City cover a lot of land, but every building could be entered and took up (simulated) physical space. Want to get to the rooftops? Hop in an elevator, take it to the top, and you’d indeed find yourself on the roof of that building. Alternatively, you could super-jump your way to the roof for the same effect. Had a mission somewhere inside? Not only would you see the accurate surrounding streets through windows, but the view on the 20th floor would be different than the view on the second. Single-player games didn’t even offer an open world on this scale. Floors relied heavily on instancing, of course, with only a handful of reused floorplans – but it convincingly pulled off the effect that these streets, buildings and rooms were all realistically connected.
The look of the Matrix was also well-realized, from the subtle green tint to all textures, to the bounty of vinyl and sunglasses. You could dual-fist Uzis, dodge so fast your movements left ghostly afterimages, and learn four different styles of martial arts. Streetlights set the mood of an active city at night, while traffic zipped by and civilian NPCs strolled the sidewalks. If you stayed too long in an unauthorized area, invincible Agents would spawn and chase you. You could talk to mission handlers over cell phones, but you had to get to phone booths to safely log out, upload mission goals, or fast travel. The city even loaded around you in the form of cascading green code every time you logged in, resolving to the finished city as your entry completed.
“$info” acted as the game’s currency, letting you purchase new weapons, abilities, and clothing from NPC vendors. Info was given as mission rewards, or could be tapped at special nodes, acting as a side activity you could invest skills in. Crafting was also present. Code fragments could be dropped by enemies or found in furniture. Leveling up skills (and the right equipment) let you combine code bits into fragments until you could assemble a recipe for a specific gun or fashionable piece of clothing. These items could be imbued with high-level effects and sold on a player market accessible from the login screen. If you didn’t care about crafting, you could still sell looted code bits there to help someone else build an item.
Fighting and completing missions earned you XP, which let you access more abilities. Once you unlocked a power, it lived in a swappable bank of abilities. You couldn’t whip out a Nokia and have Tank instantly teach you to fly a helicopter, but you could move abilities in and out at the login screen, allowing you to customize your role for the mission or group ahead. This let you be a healer, DPS, crowd control, or crafter – never at the same time – but all on one character. You could even try to juggle how much of a skill tree you loaded into your “memory” and run some hybrid classes. This meant you never needed to roll an alt, which was not at all common back then.
None of this was the brilliant part. MxO’s crown jewel was its Live Events Team. One of the consistent high points of every early MMO was when the dev team showed up in-game as famous characters of lore. Think Lord Nasher appearing in AOL’s Neverwinter Nights, Darth Vader in Star Wars Galaxies, or Asheron’s Call’s entire Shard of the Herald event. These moments rallied the community, often inspired unscripted game events, and would be talked about in the days and weeks after. The killing of Lord British is still a legend 26 years later.
The Matrix Online was developed, then, with a simple premise: What if these interactions were the focus of the entire game? The Live Events team were dedicated staff who both monitored the community and played storyline characters within the world. Imagine getting a tell from a guild mate that the Morpheus is requesting a meeting. You hustle over to the location and there he is – not an NPC – but someone you can talk to and ask questions of. He tells you that some humans working for the Machines are planning to strike soon. He wants your guild to take out the leader of another PvP guild before they can act, giving you the target (another player) by name. This kind of stuff would actually happen on a random hour of any given day. It’s a tabletop RPG writ large.
Consider this comment from an old Joystiq piece on MxO’s roleplay:
MxO provided me with my most memorable moment in MMOs. It was not long after the game launched, perhaps a week, and I killed a Red Eye Agent and uncovered a code bit that seemed odd. I asked my new faction mates if they had seen one of these bits, and they all said no. We all knew that the official Live Event for the first chapter was due to start that night, so we figured it must have something to do with that. It turned out that we were right. As the Event began on the Linenoise server, a message was broadcast to the Matrix, seemingly from the Architect, “Gabri3l is in possession of illegal code. Hand over the code immediately or face the consequences. Discomfort will be extreme.” A burst of adrenaline hit me. I had just been named as a major player in this event, despite being a lowbie of barely 20!
I began to receive /tells from players all over the server inquiring as to my whereabouts. I was a Zionite, but Merovingian and Machinists players were offering to come to my aid as well. I was near the usual hangout of Mara Central Hardline, and relayed that message to everyone who sent me a /tell. Unsure of how to turn over these “illegal code bits”, and pretty positive that I wouldn’t have anyway, I braced for the coming discomfort. I didn’t have to wait long.
Suddenly, Red Eye Agents began to spawn en masse, some my level, and some way higher. Luckily, the cavalry rode in at the same time. In an instant, around 100 players hardlined over to Mara C, and the biggest non-PVP fight I’ve ever seen in an MMO broke out. Together, all 100 of us repelled the Red Eye threat. We took a breather and congratulated each other. But then it happened again. A Machinist friend whose name I can no longer remember was announced to be in possession of the same codes I had. We found her position and rushed to her rescue. All in all, this happened half a dozen times over the course of the 4 day event. And it was awesome.
That’s impressive stuff. Event recaps and an in-game newspaper called The Sentinel would highlight some of the major plot points and drop actual player names when describing the action (Here’s the official news post for the story above). The player-run Radio Free Zion was one of the first in-game streaming radio stations, with live DJs commenting on the night’s antics. Things got a little hard to track with multiple servers running, (Did Neurophyte live or die? Depends on the server) but it was an all-in investment in roleplaying and player interaction that just hadn’t been done at this level before.
Descriptions of these early events sound like “best of” examples of why anyone would want to play an MMO. PvP guilds would take over buildings as impromptu headquarters and fight over them. Swarms of Sleepwalkers or corrupted programs would pop up around the city, drawing crowds of players to fight them. You might find an item as loot and know your organization is looking for it – send them to your faction coordinator via in-game email and you might get a reply that drew you into a roleplaying event. You might turn a corner and run into the villain of the week, leading to an elaborate chase and possible duels as you messaged your friends for backup. One event used clues in posters and billboards in-game that revealed a password and an email address to mail it to – doing so meant the live team might bring you to chat directly with the Oracle (cookies presumably were provided).
Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Griefers would try to interrupt the events when they could, spamming chat, blocking story characters, or otherwise trying to be a nuisance. There were the players that just didn’t get it – like this goof asking a very patient Oracle how she got to level 50. Faction “spies” were common, passing info outside the game and setting up ambushes. There was no protection when loading in from a hardline, so enemy crews could simply stand around a popular phone booth (like Mara Central) and gank anyone who appeared. Most of the early events asked factions to work together against a greater threat – players ignored a comical number of prodding hints in favor of continuing to PvP. And of course, in-game conflict led to out-of-game toxic drama that inevitably turns up when real human egos get involved.
Then there were logistical issues. Complaints about missing events due to work, school, or time zones were common. Complaints about not being included at all were too, along with accusations that the events team had “their favorites” and ignored anyone that wasn’t vocal enough, personable enough, or active enough on the forums. To be fair, I would understand if the Live Team actively sought out players that were likely to talk publicly what they saw. Pick a random player to perform for and you might waste your time on xXNEO_420Xx who declares roleplaying is “ghey.” But as I never experienced any live RP when I briefly played, so I also understand feeling left out.
Still, it’s impressive that WB and Monolith tried. Without the multi-million dollar backing of the Matrix name and a major Hollywood studio, this would never have been attempted. Until AI advances significantly, (and before it traps us all in a simulation to use as batteries, natch) this probably will never be re-attempted – I can’t see any game hiring a full-time Live Events Team ever again. So why wasn’t the biggest role-playing game ever embraced by gaming at large? Why isn’t it better known today? Well, as said way back at the beginning, a lot is timing.
First, it bears repeating, the movie sequels sucked. You can argue the degrees to which they did, but undeniably, The Matrix was no longer the shit hot property it was in 1999. MxO was first announced during E3 2002, during a period where I’m sure the Wachowskis had free rein to try whatever they wanted. Warner Bros. legitimately thought The Matrix would be their own Star Wars franchise and believed it would print money for them forever. Instead, the two film sequels kinda killed the franchise – then Matrix Online wouldn’t come out for two years after we all walked out of Revolutions wondering what the fuck we just watched. They were never going to see the subscribers they thought they would at the start.
Building off this, Matrix Online leaned exceptionally hard into the whole “living in a simulation” bit. This might be personal preference, but like I said at the start of the article, this is where I feel the series lost its way. You’d take missions from endless “The [Noun]” NPCs, like “The Chessman,” and “The Effectuator.” When the plotlines weren’t dealing with system vulnerabilities and drinkable cheat codes (oh, yes!), they were dealing with Exile politics. One set of Exiles kidnapped the program that maybe controls the weather, so the sky got all funky for a few weeks. The Merovingian kept inventing zany ways to kill The Oracle. An Exile called “The Apothecary” could gin up kill codes for other programs. One of the final plots started introducing “The Oligarchs” who were basically server admins? It all just feels… goofy. Sentient programs worked when it was just the Agents – it made them special. Pack a whole system full of them, and now it’s basically Tron.
Second, MxO’s design was firmly in the sandbox genre of the early 2000s. Living in the world, chatting with real people, organically creating events – these were all considered novel highlights. Developers of the time were intentionally trying not to replicate single-player RPGs and agonized over how to do that. Then, Guild Wars, EverQuest 2, and the mighty World of Warcraft all released around the same time as Matrix Online, sucking up pretty much every potential MMO player in sight by offering exactly the kind of “you are the hero!” single player stories the sandboxes had tried to avoid. A new era of flashy “themepark” MMOs had begun.
Third, combat was never that great. This is where most of the “janky” complaints come from, and I get it. The films’ award-winning choreography set up expectations that video game animations were never going to meet. Interlock looked stiff instead of fluid or organic. Clicking a stance and waiting for the results disconnected you from the action. You had time to type in chat while a fight was playing out! Invisible dice were rolled for the next attack, with the largest number getting to act – originally this meant that you either hit or you missed entirely, with no in-between. Stats influenced your performance, but you could still lose a round to a bad RNG roll.
There was also the mistaken belief that combat was a “rock paper scissors” system, despite the manual clearly laying out that stances were for triggering debuffs. I think the original interface was a contributor, showing the stance you picked set directly against your opponent’s, as if one attack was “winning.” I believed this too – intentionally trying to guess what attack my opponent would pick so I could “counter” it, when I was really just scrambling my chances to set up stronger attacks. I remember having a terrible time with combat and feeling totally ineffective. Now I wonder how much of that was because I fundamentally didn’t understand the system, and how many others thought the same.
But combat was also slow in how elaborate it was, all the time. Every NPC at your level could keep up with your supernatural reflexes. Security guards, janitors, and random street toughs all knew kung-fu and could all sidestep your punches or throw scorpion kicks of their own. Mission enemies, from faction NPCs to fake Agents, always spawned at your level and put up a long fight. I got to the point that I started to dread Interlock, hoping I could run through a mission in a way that let me avoid enemies entirely. Unless you wanted to fight gangs way under your level for no XP, you never got to feel like a superhero womping ass. Combat was never the famous lobby shootout, instead, it was always the noodle bar fight from Reloaded. There’s a reason the movies aren’t two straight hours of fight scenes.
Ranged combat existed, but was even slower and weaker. The same lab technician that practices akido on his days off could absorb seven shotgun blasts to the chest. Tab targeting enemies and clicking to shoot also felt like a worse version of other MMOs’ combat systems, with Interlock definitely feeling like the star. Not to mention, enemies were programmed to pull you into Interlock at every opportunity, so I don’t remember ever being able to stay ranged for long. Also worth mentioning is that “multilock,” or one player vs many opponents, never really got worked out. It always seemed like a dogpile with one guy’s buddies dumping bullets and debuffs into his opponent’s back.
Finally, we have the real killer – MxO bet everything on the live team and the sandbox gameplay. There wasn’t much to occupy your time outside of those live events. You could fight enemy gangs for XP and gear. There was a basic, repeating mission generator – you could call your faction handler and get a customizable Mad Libs style quest of “go here, pick up this, take it here” kinds of objectives. These would reward you with token amounts of XP and funds, but were always meant to be filler content. The real action was going to be getting involved with the current week’s story – fighting Lupines and Blood-Drinkers, solving puzzles hidden within Neo’s code fragments, or stopping Morpheus from planting bombs around the city – all spawned and controlled by the LET.
So when WoW came out posting record-breaking subscriber numbers – two million and growing, all paying monthly fees – it shook the industry. I imagine Matrix Online was intended for around 200k subscribers – what would have been a major hit in 2004 – but was only pulling around 50k with a more established name. You almost can’t blame Warner Bros. for wanting out. Meanwhile, SOE clearly weren’t on board with running MxO as anything other than another plug-and-play MMO receiving an update once a month or so. They kept it going for another four years, so fair play to them. But the era of nonstop live events was done.
Sony sacked the Live Events Team pretty much upon handoff. They were “replaced” by a Live Events Special Interests Group (LESIG) – volunteers acting as liaisons between players and the major characters – but this never worked the same as a full-time team watching and researching its own player base. LESIG also never got the keys to the story characters – those were always controlled by devs – making their appearances limited. More and more side plots got pushed off to the forums. The mission system started taking up the brunt of the major storytelling, with a weekly “critical mission” playing similar to the generated ones. Take this week’s special mission from the phone. Go to a place. Beat up NPC enemies until you get a clue. Read some flavor text and wait for next week’s mission. Even this would decline, until the entire design and live team was run by just one guy for the final years.
There were still live events, mind you, at the pace of about one per weeknight. But it seems to have been one faction, one server, per night. There just wasn’t the staff to go around. That overall plot also got pretty complicated and involved as the years went on. Reading over a summary, dropping into the middle as a new player would have been like starting a CW show in the fifth season. Who’s “E Pluribus Neo?” What’s the deal with wireframe guy? Why do we have a sexy Agent now? And throughout, Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus are all teased as “totally alive and coming back” more times than Lucy pulled the football from Charlie Brown.
This is what I mean when I say Matrix Online was a role-playing marvel only for a very specific window of about three months. After Sony took over, it was an ever-declining shadow of itself for the remainder of its run. Naturally, this is around when I played (midway into Enigma of Cryptos, so Nov. 2005). My impression matched all the middling review scores, and – just a few months after release – I’m not sure I ever saw a live event or a developer-controlled character. All I saw was a grindy treadmill of recycled phone missions, so I noped back to my then Tek of choice, Star Wars Galaxies.
Now I’m left kicking myself that I missed out on the actual cool part. The game I played was already a grotesque skeleton of what it was supposed to be, but the situation just got worse over the years. There were fewer live events, story cutscene quality took a noticeable dive, and no new districts or mechanics were released. Replayable story missions, a few new PvP arenas, and a set of Pandora’s Box quests were basically it for new content. There was no endgame because none had been designed. Again, this wasn’t an expectation for an early 2000s sandbox title, but it definitely became an issue as the game stumbled on. WoW refugees looking for raids or dungeons were confounded that the Matrix had none. The live events were supposed to be the endgame, if not the entire reason to play.
To their credit, fans did their best to fill the void with solid guilds, PvP wars, and fan-fiction on the boards – using the sandbox the way it was meant to be used. YouTube wasn’t around yet, so videos are rather rare, but players produced the kind of machinima you’d expect from a Matrix game. However, most people aren’t roleplayers by nature. They’re not going to post on the forums or seek out players in-game. But if you didn’t make an impact in this clique, or didn’t want to try, you were missing out on the best of what MxO had left to offer.
Again, more than anything, I think it comes down to timing. By all accounts, live events worked. The game was being improved. Combat was being worked on, to be faster and more engaging. The setting did make for a nice sandbox, so long as there were actual toys to play with. Calling it a fundamentally broken game isn’t fair – I think the wrinkles could have been ironed out, if it weren’t for World of Warcraft and a pair a confusing movie sequels that just had to bring back Agent Smith because he tested really well with audiences.
But, I’ll admit, maybe I’m wrong. No other Matrix story has captured the intensity of the first film, so maybe the idea really only had one good movie in it. Mega City as a location admittedly doesn’t inspire as much exploration as other MMOs. Sure, you could enter every building and every room, but there was nothing to find in them. Streets and slums blurred together without much delineation. There were some hidden quests to find, but the rewards weren’t worth fighting trash mobs for semi-rare drops. There were rare weapons or clothing styles to go for – either through crafting or grind quests – but these just made you slightly better at playing the same content.
Matrix Online is one of the rare “major” MMOs that hasn’t seen a successful rogue server, which is further proof that interest in the series has basically evaporated. There’s a running server where you can check out the world and take screenshots for your 20-year old blog retrospective, but no way to test out combat for yourself. Ironically, this probably heightens the game’s mystique – if everyone could try it, they probably wouldn’t be impressed – but it means that words remain the major record of the game’s experience.
I think it would have been fascinating to see how The Matrix Online would have continued with a Live Events team intact, but I still have my doubts about a massive, modern MMO that essentially required Dungeon Masters to concoct and execute new stories for its players. I don’t imagine there are enough serious roleplayers to keep such a service going. Regardless, all its promises were quickly and quietly dropped when the cash wasn’t immediately rolling in. It was the official continuation of the Matrix story, until it wasn’t. It was a bastion of live events, until the Live Events team was fired. Fans of The Matrix got their city, pleather outfits, and acrobatic fight animations, but the socially avoidant just got a mostly empty world, repeated content, and not much of the expected power fantasy.
The Good
A major experiment in online role-playing, with Hollywood money behind it. Built to be a revolution in video game storytelling, it featured an official continuation of the film’s storyline with about 100 developers jumping in to interact with players as major franchise characters.
The Bad
Released at maybe the worst possible time. The sequels tanked interest in the franchise, while a new style of quest-based MMO was far more appealing that what was on offer here. With no money coming in, the unique live event team was sacked, leaving no significant additions and few reasons to play.
You’d think they wouldn’t label important documents with the words ‘Secret Plan!’ No wonder you aren’t working for Zion anymore” — Flood
But the Matrix sequels were quite good, weren’t they?
😀
Trying to recall my own feelings upon leaving the cinema in 2003 – I think for Reloaded it was the same sort of ‘that was good, wasn’t it? Or was it?’ type confusion that I had with the Star Wars prequels. Then Revolutions left me doubting whether I’d understood anything about what had happened in the entire trilogy.
I could have been imagining it, but I do remember having the distinct feeling during Revolutions that the main actors either seemed quite tired or quite bored (or both) at various points.
Not sure when I last re-watched them, but don’t recall anything seeming much better during subsequent viewings. It’s been a while though.
Interesting to read about this game, which – not being into MMOs – I had mentally filed away as ‘just another 00s Matrix spin-off game that wasn’t that good and didn’t do very well’.
(I think I mentioned before, I toyed with Enter The Matrix a few times before writing it off as a bad deal. There was also Path of Neo, which I never considered after PC Zone gave it a terrible score and dubbed it ‘The Shite-trix: Path of Shite-o’…)
I thought Path of Neo was supposed to be the best Matrix game, solely because they leaned fully into the power fantasy. Course that doesn’t mean it’s a good game.
Reloaded introduced strange elements, but could pass I guess. Revolutions was just bleh. Oddly the thing I remember most of it is endless shots of people in mech suits going “RAAAAGGGHHH” while shooting ribbons of metal jellyfish. Couldn’t be bothered to watch the fourth movie.
Glad you enjoyed reading and thank you! This is the review I’ve done the most research on by far, mostly from not being able to actually play the game and talk about what I experienced. Not sure if I’ll do more like this. I don’t really have any more defunct MMO stories/memories anyway, though I’m considering Star Wars Galaxies.
Also, the best Matrix game is SUPERHOT. Change my mind.
SUPERHOT? That’s far too recent for me, being released… [checks notes] 8 years ago?
I do of course have a copy in the backlog, maybe I’ll dig it out.
I’d have gone for Max Payne, even though I guess it doesn’t have the ‘I know Kung Fu’ angle.
Here’s my thinking. Max Payne looks great, but is mostly reactionary. Door opens, guys run in, you do a shootdodge to give yourself time to react.
SUPERHOT does more with the strategy of slow motion. Grab a nearby bottle and throw it at the guy in front of you to make him drop his gun. Grab gun from mid-air. Shoot the guy running up behind him with the shotgun, because he’s a bigger threat. Throw the gun in first guy’s face because you won’t have time for a second shot. Finish him off with two quick punches. Etc etc.
I love how it plays back each short micro level in real time after you’ve finished. So you see the action movie reflexes at work. And it’s got fisticuffs and the whole “no time to reload, throw the whole gun away and grab another” bit.
The standalone expansion Mind Control Delete adds “hacks”/upgrades and what are basically Agents. You can’t kill them, so have to take out everyone else while avoiding them. And a whole meta commentary about gaming in general.
Definitely repetitive, but does the action movie fantasy quite well. And you can hurt your back in the VR version!
Path of Neo seems to have achieved middling scores when it was released, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. Probably still falls short on my current ‘is this average/not good game interesting enough to battle through’ scale though.
Matrix Resurrections was okay. Very much in the tradition of ‘fourth films made years after what was supposed to be a trilogy’. Couldn’t quite figure out if it was an interesting and clever take on things or just a lot of twisting and turning to come up with a reason for itself to exist.
Even by JManJGR standards, I’d say diving into now-obsolete MMOs such as this and piecing together a detailed overview is impressive work! And a great read, even to someone who isn’t a fan of the genre (and even if I was, I’m still the type who would have shelled out for the boxed game and initial subscription back in the 00s and then not installed anything until the game was dead anyway).
From the perspective of game preservation, in an ideal world anything from the past would be available to gamers today. It’s important that we can experience them for ourselves and see their contribution to gaming history (even if they weren’t all that great). So it’s a shame that some games just disappear, basically because they require some sort of external mechanism to function which no longer exists.
MMOs are one. Their servers switched off, their worlds erased. Now no-one can go back and see what fans were excited about 20 years ago.
It occurs to me that mobile games will be another – how many of the first wave of smartphone games are long gone from the apple and android app stores? So they’re lost forever, unless some sort of installer exists that can be sideloaded.
Yeah, mobile games seem like some of the most intentionally disposable games ever developed. Remember when Apple just stopped allowing 32-bit programs to run from then on? Plus, even if you installed an offline backup, so many of them need to connect to active servers to work.
At the same time, I’m guilty of a big “nothing of value was lost” feeling about them. I get that they’re not all Chinese Clone of Candy Crush #149 but it’s hard not to feel like they’re totally forgettable. Maybe because they’re so many of them? Maybe humans can’t emotionally comprehend preservation of current things? The old “don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
hmm yes there are mountains of shovelware that immediately challenge the argument that we should preserve absolutely everything.
But I’m thnking of the rather wonderful Spider: The Legend of Bryce Manor, released on IOS in 2009 and android a couple of years later, now gone from both app stores. Even for people who’s already bought it, I can’t see it on my list of owned apps on google so I guess it just got removed due to being too out of date for current android. So now it’s just… lost. I’m not sure the devs even still exist to update it.
Pretty much all the games I’ve ever bought on Android (which isn’t many, probably fewer than 10) are now kind of erased from existence. Including some point and clickers that I also have on PC but were kind of cool to play on mobile – just… gone.