Ok, the movie Blade Runner has the character Roy Batty who was essentially the leader of the replicant resistance.
If you played the computer game Blade Runner, his character was replaced by a more suave version.
In the end sequence of the game when you make it to the moonbus, this character is reading poetry out of a book…one of the verses goes something like “I labor not, I love less.” Anyone know what this poem is and where it’s from?
Man that’s a tough one. That was just one of about 5 different endings you can get btw. I’d have to reinstall it and hope I still have a save up to there. Do you remember anything else in the poem that google might help? :)
No…sadly. I did try to google it, with no luck.
I wonder if perhaps they wrote that poem specifically for the game.
One of these days I’ll reinstall and see if I can find out the exact quote.
part of To Thomas Butts, in Poems From Letters,
Chapter 10 of William Blake: Collected Poems,
“My hands are labour day and night
And ease comes never in my sight
My wife has no indulgence given
Except what comes to her from heaven
We eat little, we drink less
This earth breathing out our happiness
Another sun feeds our life’s dreams
We are not warm with thy beams
The measure is not the time to me
Though yet the space that I do see
Me mind is not with thy light array
And terror shall not make me afraid”
-William Blake
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/9429/chap-10.html
This it?
Yay!
You guys are brilliant.
Return to the dismal dystopian future of November 2019!
One of the best adventure games of all time. If you’re a fan of the genre, or Blade Runner, and haven’t played it-- you should.
At the time, it was advertised as having pre-randomized human/replicant versions of the major characters, but I think it really only applied to 2-3 story characters, and the rest were ambiguous until you took certain actions (so that the endings would make sense).
I know this because at least one of the endings involves you double-crossing the replicants, but the game can’t know in advance whether you’re going for a pro/anti-replicant ending, so it retroactively messes with the story-explanation of why people were shooting at you.
I would dispute this assertion. It’s an ok game, but very immersive in terms of the visuals and sounds from the movie.
Well that’s just like, your opinion, man.
OK then. Please tell me what makes it a great adventure game. Is it the puzzles? Is it the amazing plot? Is it the vivid descriptions of the environments? None of that exists. It’s a casual walk through a plot that’s very similar to the movie, with a tiny bit of branching thrown in. It aimed much higher than that, but most of that vision wasn’t realized (probably due to funding issues). What was realized was a very strong feeling of being in the movie due to the awesome environments and sound, that still hold up.
Hell yes! I bought this on CD a couple of years ago, but never got around to actually playing it due to how much of a hassle it’s to get working on modern machines. Will very happily buy it again from GOG.
I just want to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
So you don’t find immersion makes games better?
I really don’t play adventure games for the puzzles, I play for the story, characters, and yes, immersion. But YMMV, this is obviously a very subjective thing.
I’m with you, this ranks in my trinity of best adventure games ever along Gabriel Knight and Fate of Atlantis.
I found the lack of real puzzles here (and instead the way you solve things changing the plot) truly revolutionary and extremely effective
Immersion is good, and I noted it as a plus. It’s really closer in design to today’s Telltale games than other point and click adventures, in that there are no puzzles. You don’t even choose which objects to show certain people as there is no real inventory. Instead, it’s a collection of videos and sounds, and you just go from place to place and click on people and objects. A 2 year old could beat most of the game through random clicking (with the exception of a few times you need to shoot people).
Back when I played this game when it came out, I really wanted to like it. However, it suffers from one of the big problems of Westwood adventure games: you can’t look at stuff. I want to know what these cool things are in the animated background, but they won’t let me get any sort of description of them. They’re there in the graphics, and that’s all there is (If you want a game with a similar vibe that’s much better, check out the Tex Murphy series).
The second problem is that the dialog is extremely stilted – and remember that dialog is almost all you have in this game. It’s all rather generic, never going into depth on any topic or about any relationship. The main reason for this IMO is the randomness thrown into the game. Since you can solve the game a few different ways and character can be in different places, NPCs can’t comment on anything that happened or emote about anything, because it may not have happened that way in this iteration. So forget the emotional depth of The Walking Dead – none of that is in here either. Westwood were planning on having a lot more randomness in the game, but it didn’t pan out, so what we’re left with is a tiny bit of randomness, and the dialog is still weirdly disconnected and stilted.
But if you like cool looking animated backgrounds and some authentic sounds, with a strong Blade Runner vibe, this game is the bomb.
It’s not true there’s no inventory, there’s a huge clue inventory you interact with both by showing clues and systemically (by messing with it). The puzzle you solve is how to navigate the story to a new conclusion by being selective in how you use your inventory. NOT using something by is a meaningful choice. It’s brilliant. But it’s best qualities don’t show up until you start aiming for different endings.
Right, if you only play it one time you aren’t exposed to that stuff.
As far as I recall, you con’t actually show anything to anyone – it happens automatically. The clues are there in your ‘inventory’ for you to look at, but do nothing with. And 90% of the endings can be achieved by rewinding 5 minutes from the end and doing different things, like most games, unfortunately.
There was a far more sophisticated and interesting design here – the manual speaks of other field agents competing with you, for example, but it was never implemented. What we got was a bunch of vestigial organs of that design, and a simplistic, trimmed-down game.
EDIT: I’m still happy GOG is selling the game. But play it again and pay attention to the actual mechanics, as opposed to what you think is happening behind the scenes, but isn’t.
I haven’t played it recently, but I remember there being a lot of neat features in Blade Runner (the “Enhance” machine puzzle, the randomized plot points), but I also remember being generally disappointed in it. The story didn’t end up being particularly clear, as I recall (despite somehow also being almost identical to the film?). Was there also a real-time component to the game? Like, you could miss events if you weren’t there in time? I seem to recall something like that too, and I’ve never known that to work, even in a real classic like Last Express.
No. This was another thing they advertised that didn’t happen, and like you say, it was probably for the best. The Last Express is the only game I know that actually did this, with pretty good results (TLE is a true classic IMO).
EDIT:
This was a result of the minimal dialog, as I mentioned. Almost certainly to allow for major randomization to happen (which never happened, at least not at that scale). This plus the fact that you couldn’t examine anything around you to any degree – the screenshot is all you got.
This was probably the coolest part of the game.