Steamships Ahoy: SiN Episodes: Emergence

The SiN Episodes Website has word that Emergence, the first installment in Ritual's episodic shooter sequel series, is now available via Steam:
Emergence, the first in a series of episodic games, casts players as HardCorps commander John Blade, stepping into the living world of Freeport City to defend humankind against Elexis Sinclaire, a beautiful and ruthless scientist out to remake humanity according to her own twisted vision. The law has failed to bring Elexis and her SiNTEK empire to justice, so you and your allies, the secretive hacker JC and fiery rookie Jessica Cannon, must bring down Sinclaire and her mutants before she can set her deadly plan in motion and forever alter the shape of humanity.

The Sin Episodes series is built on Source, the same engine Valve created for Half-LifeĀ® 2. Source offers state of the art graphics, physics simulation technology, an advanced character animation system and more. In the creation of Emergence, Ritual has taken the award-winning Source engine into new realms. As an example, the game adapts and tunes itself to each player's skill level and play style through the Personal Challenge System, which measures player's abilities, behavior, and reactions to the game world and then adjusts the gameplay and enemy prowess to match. Ruthless foes such as jetpack soldiers and mutants will thus evolve as you fight them, adapting to challenge the strengths of skilled players while seeking not to overwhelm inexperienced gamers. In addition, Emergence features advanced AI where enemies cooperate with each other, highly interactive environments that allow players to set traps, location-based damage, and fast-paced vehicle combat.

Providing a complete game with 4-6 hours of gameplay for players of all skill levels, Emergence's self-contained story fits into an overarching story arc populated with strong characters driven by believable motivations that will be further revealed in future episodes. Featuring the new Context Look System, thoughtful players can choose to dig into the deeper aspects of the story while players who want to enjoy the destruction can charge ahead with only the 'mission critical' story points, advanced through choreographed sequences.

"SiN Episodes: Emergence provides a high quality, immersive experience in a compact and affordable package that is accessible to players of all skill levels," said Steve Nix, Ritual CEO. "Emergence is a true step forward built on our ten years of growth and learning at Ritual, and the structure of SiN Episodes allows our team to continue to create gameplay innovation and evolve the storyline as the episodes continue."

SiN Episodes: Emergence for the PC is available now for $19.95, and carries an ESRB rating of "M" (Mature). For more information, please visit the game's official site at www.SinEpisodes.com.
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Re: rip off
May 16, 2006, 13:28
Re: rip off May 16, 2006, 13:28
May 16, 2006, 13:28
 
Getting the exact time to complete is easy. Go into the stats viewer. In the first block they list total deaths and deaths per hour. Divide total deaths by deaths per hour to get total play time.

I wound up with 5.5 hours of play.

Also, with regards to the mini-gun baddies, use the zoom function on the machine gun. The machine gun is completely stable in this mode and accurate (at full auto) over a large distance. With the machine gun it becomes relativly trivial to drop the mini-gunners even when there are four or more of them.

As to value for play? I pre-ordered for $17 and I felt that while it was a bit short, I really enjoyed the experience overall. SiN isn't the best shooter out there, but it is certainly the most enjoyable to come out recently.

With retail $50-$60 FPS titles clocking in at 10-20 hours on average, 5.5 hours of play isn't a terrible value at $34-$80 for the same amount of game. If you pre-ordered each episode (assuming $17 becomes the norm) your cost to play time ratio would actually be a bit better for SiN than a number of recent AAA titles. It works out even better assuming that you don't pay tax for your Steam games (I didn't have to) and do for your retail boxes.

I would have liked to see a _little_ more content for the $17 (the game was also a little too restrictively linear), but I think that the current pricing scheme is acceptable if the quality of content continues to improve and the length of play remains the same (or increases slightly).

Edit: Removed some redundant statements and fixed some typos.
This comment was edited on May 16, 13:32.
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