The voice acting is terrible, where common pronunciations of proper nouns from the Dune universe are cast aside for free form jazz, but the script is a jarring afterthought. What gameplay exists feels tacked on, clumsy, and often just not there. Even for the time, it was clunky and visually underwhelming. It’s a 2001 character action/3D adventure game with glaring flaws. The first published title by (doomed) French developer Widescreen Games, it’s easy to write Frank Herbert’s Dune off as simply an expensive blunder. Klepacki clearly pushed the Ad-Lib music synthesizer to its limits, not willing to simply bide his time until the explosion of Red Book Audio on home PCs. It’s alien and ambient but also pounding and raucous when it needs to be. And driving it all along is an eerie score by Westwood luminary and future composer of the Command & Conquer soundtracks Frank Klepacki. It wraps it all up in a bulky, but themed UI, where players can select the types of buildings and units to create from a full-screen catalog, or consult their Mentats at the push of a button. This is where PC RTS games finally take shape, weaving ideas and interfaces together from Technosoft’s Herzog Zwei and Peter Molyneux’s weird ass god simulator, Populous. It’s a more rudimentary game than contemporary players would probably expect from even “retro RTS games,” but it also predates Warcraft: Orcs & Humans by two years. And that they’re all good in their own ways.īefore Command & Conquer, there was Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, featuring three factions (House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and House Ordos), each with their own unique tactical component (Atreides can recruit Fremen, Ordos get mind-control gas missiles, and Harkonnen can nuke you from orbit). What if I told you there were videogames. Maybe you even tried some of the SyFy miniseries (they’re rough, I know, but you’ll take what you can get at this point-you need your fix like the Imperium’s melange addicts need their extremely on-the-nose metaphor for fossil fuels, and young James McAvoy is a delight). You came home and burned through David Lynch’s (fuck him and fuck NFTs) substantially weirder version. You snuck away to an IMAX in the middle of a pandemic and gorged yourself on the latest adaptation. It’s the kind of shit that inspires concept artists and writers to go balls to the wall with their most monumentalist impulses. It’s the desert adventure of Lawrence of Arabia, with the maximalist fantasy world-building of The Lord of the Rings, but it’s also extremely 1960s sci-fi bullshit. It seems like a white savior colonial fantasy, but then it goes all tits up. You take turns exploring the world as scientists Sam and Hannah, who must find out what happened to the previous scientific research team that, of course, vanished.I know, I know. Players have two roles to play during the course of this science fiction adventure on the apparently uninhabited planet Argilius. The environments look great, but the story is a flimsy artifice on which to string a series of puzzles and the acting sequences are generally atrocious.īut people who like puzzles should enjoy the game despite its drawbacks. Schizm: Mysterious Journey is a developmental nephew of the now-classic graphic puzzler. Moody atmosphere, colorfully rendered environments, challenging puzzles: It's the stuff Myst was made from. Much more enjoyment can be found in games such as Emperor: Battle for Dune and Dune 2000. The game takes place during Paul's time among the Fremen and involves lots of roaming around, falling into quicksand and fighting with guards who have all the artificial intelligence of a yo-yo.Īs if the game's dullness weren't enough to cure insomnia, it takes a long time to load the various levels. I'd rather spend time watching the incomprehensible David Lynch theatrical movie. Too bad this game isn't half as rich or enjoyable as the book or the miniseries.
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