Games for Lunch: Merchants of Brooklyn
In a nutshell: The best first-person shooter of early 1993
7/8/2009 12:27 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 4
Developer: Paleo Entertainment
Publisher: Paleo Entertainment
Release Date: March 17, 2009
System: PC
ESRB Rating:
Official Web site
0:00 I believe I played this game for five minutes or so when cruising the CES show floor in January. I wasn't terribly impressed with my short demo then, but I wasn't terribly unimpressed either.
0:01 Crazy hip-hop infused beats play from my speakers like it's the mid-'90s, and a bare-bones title screen reads DRUG WARS BETA. I can find/create servers for the new
Drug Wars online game or play the
Merchants of Brooklyn single-player. I choose the latter.
0:02 Selectable difficulties are Lame, Normal, Brutal and "Oh Shi..." They don't actually type out "shit," they just use the three dots. Uh ... Normal, please?
0:03 A decently long loading screen precedes swelling string music against an oddly black screen. "In 3100 AD, global warming caused the polar ice caps to completely melt." Brooklyn becomes "a watery grave of an old civilization." Humanity connected the tops of the buildings through a network of sky bridges. Law enforcement abandoned the poor people in the "lower city." Clones from Brooklyn Institute of Technology are being used as a new working class, but they made too many and they rebelled or something. I can't make out the words ... it sounds like the narrator is speaking from an underwater phone booth.
0:05 VERY choppy cut-scene animation as a guy is led out of a cell in chains. The graphics look super-smooth, like this was a cut scene from an early-'90s game. Anyway, the big guy (me?) is led to a battle arena, where he's bloodied by the opponent. Fade to black as I hear a chainsaw. The dude cut off my hand? Holy hell! Now I'm looking up at ceiling lights as I'm wheeled into a hospital room. A big cigar-chomping guy in a suit pushes a frail doctor out of the way and fits me with a shiny, silver bionic hand. Driving rock metal guitar comes in as I'm led through a glass sky bridge. The camera pans up to show hover-cars and futuristic buildings in the sky. My shackles are undone as I step onto the open elevator and hear gentle bells from somewhere.
0:09 A quick trip to the options menu resets the resolution downward and the graphical effects back to "low." Stupid out-of-date computer. Maybe I should go
the XKCD route and just play old games.
0:10 Well, everything looks really grainy and dark now, but at least it's a smooth-ish frame rate. "Hey killer. Looks like your systems are all up and running," says a robotic unseen voice. "Let's kick some ass."
0:13 The past three minutes have been spent fighting in a big black room, with hazy black enemies that look like shadows. I can barely make out their outline against the dark background. I'm thinking something is wrong here.
0:15 Hmm ... upping the brightness and contrast on the monitor doesn't help. It's still kind of playable ... I'm moving around and punching the guys jerkily, but it's not really enjoyable when I have to squint to see them.
0:16 OK, I go back into the options, lower the resolution yet again, and turn off "full screen mode." Only then, playing the game in a tiny 640x480 window, do I get the full-color display of my surroundings. And it's STILL pretty choppy. I need a new video card, that's all there is to it.
