Page 19 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #43 FREE Edition

because of how mysterious it was.
If nothing else, the execution of the game’s plot delivered in the exact way it needed to. Unmistakably noir and gritty, it catered perfectly to the style of the gameplay and never outstayed its welcome. While the game’s main character tells the gamer he “made a mistake” as soon as the game is fired up, everything else in the narrative is smoke and mirrors and added to the mystery of finishing each level for clues. Looking to get into something
for a few days without a huge investment? This was perfect for that. Even the ending of the game left everything up to you to figure out... and there was, indeed, a lot to sort out. Why did Cain go through all of this? What was the point of it all? What was next?
“This will either be my first log,
or my last. I don’t know yet,” Cain (voiced by Terry Torok) says during the game’s ending. “But I’ll have to assume it’s my last. After everything, I’ve destroyed what
I believe to be the source of this madness. I doubt that the facility will survive the blast. I can only hope that the ship dies with it. My
memory is real sketchy, but I’m slowly piecing
it back together. The voices keep calling to me. I’ve gotta find her. John Cain. Out.”
One of those games that didn’t sell huge numbers on the PlayStation, but definitely did well in used sales and rentals, One
is a classic that ultimately was re-released on
the PlayStation Network because of its ability to captivate gamers.
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN:
Grand Theft Auto
Just for the record, this isn’t a knock on the original GTA; it’s just proof that no one knew what this game was going to become when it was originally released. Not even the people who worked
on it, or the people who were originally assigned to it.
“BMG was just throwing money around,” the game’s producer Don Traeger said. “Then they hired me to come and settle everything down and
figure it all out. There were a bunch of projects that were just crazy,
that just were never going to get finished and weren’t that good. There were some that had promise and I started a few more. One that really stood out was Grand Theft Auto out of Scotland.
“So I went out there and their graphics were crude, even for the time. It wasn’t state of the art. Their engine was top-down driving, kind of like Spy Hunter, but the ideas were really cool. Getting into a truck and pulling it over and stealing stuff. The whole open-world setting they were creating. One thing I really enjoyed was being able to change the radio station when
you were in a car. I just remember thinking that was awesome. My thought at the time was if they could get this working in a real
3D engine, they’d really have something.”
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