'kay.
How does he SEE out of that thing?
Chief Hershey is concerned. The Psi-Judges are predicting a plague. I'm not sure how the Judges are expecting to deal with a plague. You can't arrest a disease. Maybe it's a metaphor, but you can't arrest a metaphor either.
Wait, they have 'Psi-Judges'? Sure, why not.
"Bleediing heart liberals! Time to dispense some justice."
To get the protesters to surrender, Dredd can yell an order to throw down their weapons. He's like an action figure; he's got a whole bunch of prepared phrases. One threat and the protestors chuck their signs aside and get on their knees. Press a button on them, and they're cuffed.
"There's an iso-cube with your name on it."
When you charge someone, Dredd reads out the sentence and you see their name, a list of charges and the sentence, which is neat.
"BIG MISTAKE. YOU'RE GOING AWAY FOR TEN YEARS."
And it never gets old.
"In this city, justice comes at a price. That price is freedom."
"YOU JUST EARNED YOURSELF A MONTH IN THE CUBES."
Can't arrest the unconscious. Oh well. I'm sure somebody'll scrape him up.
I've just noticed that this is the first PC FPS in ages that I've played that has music. Suitable music, to boot. There's even different music depending on the current objective!
Hey! This isn't the future of Sam & Max-world! This is just regular Jet Set Radio-world!
For assaulting a Judge:
"YOU'RE GONNA SPEND THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE IN THE CUBES."
My plan was to hide around the corner, demand their surrender, and try to shoot the guns out of the bad guys' hands. A couple of other Judges, however, decides to run into the bank and spray explosive and incendiary rounds everywhere. In seconds, the entire gang was in flames and running in circles around me.
That wasn't my plan. I'm trying to arrest people here, guys!
For the lone survivor: "LIFE IMPRISONMENT."
If you're wondering why I care about arresting people, aside from my general good-eggedness, arresting people raises your 'Law meter', which results in a better end of level score. If you shoot innocents, it goes down. If you return fire when fired upon, it doesn't move. If it goes to zero, the Special Judicial Squad appear out of nowhere and blast you to bits. And, you know, it never occurred to me to blindly fire into the unarmed crowd at the start of the level. Gosh. That was an oversight.
The vampires also like to jump at civilians, which isn't doing my Law meter any favours thanks to my choice of High-Ex ammo. The civvies are too dumb to run away, I can't order them to run either. TOO BAD.
These guys killed me a couple of times. Judge Dredd simply doesn't acknowledge pain. There's pain triangles, but there's very little in the way of sound effects. He's got a Halo-like shield, but I don't like how it works. As far as I'm concerned, a hit that fully depletes the player's shield should stop there and not affect the player's health. These guys can hit you, take off all your shield, a health pack and a chunk of your health in one hit without you even being aware of it.
I think Deus Ex: Invisible War got a lot of stick for this because it wasn't the same as Deus Ex for no reason. And the tiny fiddly ammo things always fell in places where you couldn't find them. And the guns were all awful.
The downside to using the Lawgiver is that the only way to get more ammo is from dead Judges. The other Judges are such useless, reckless idiots it's worth considering just watching themselves get killed so you can pick up their ammo and put it to better use.
You can pick up a second weapon, but I can hardly ever remember how to switch between primary and seconary weapons (mousewheel is change Lawgiver ammo type).
Yeah, at some point in the Judge Dredd timeline, four Judges from another dimension went crazy, then killed everybody ever for the crime of living, then became supernatural demons, then travelled to Dredd's dimension, then Dredd stopped them somehow and put them in a box.
Robots, mutants, psychic powers, other dimensions, demons, magic... The 22nd century has everything! And they say 90% of the population are suffering from boredom!
No. Vampires. Only vampires. Great. When I find prisoners, they die in scripted cutscenes unless I can remember to switch from Hi-Ex to something safer in time (never works, the gun has a three second delay when you switch ammo types).
I'm going to get a lousy 'total sentence' score on this level.
Shame there's nothing interesting around here to use it on.
I'm trying to think why these vampires are such boring enemies. It could be because all they do is run and jump into your face. They don't pause, hide, panic, make mistakes, make funny comments or DROP AMMO.
Or you could say I'm whining because they're too fast for me to hit accurately. (NOPE.)
Game design hint: Don't make a level that consists of identical towers.
I found a Med-Judge just around the corner casually walking away from the scene. He gave me a medkit, but he didn't care about the other guys.
Unfortunately for the citizens of Mega-City One, the Dark Judges have meanwhile mind-controlled a Psi-Judge into releasing them from their magic crystal prison device doo-dad. Judge Dredd... was nowhere near the scene, apparently.
I'll be honest. I have no idea what's going on. Pressing a key skips cutscenes, so I missed the rest of this cutscene when I took this screenshot of the Dark Judges. When the next level started, it overwrote the autosave and I didn't have any saves in the prison. There's no way I'm redoing this level just to see what happens next. If Rebellion want to write a game without a screenshot button and where I can't replay cutscenes of my choice from the main menu, then they're going to get a shitty half-arsed post.
As far as I'm concerned, Dredd half-saved the day and then got bored or something before he actually got to the part of the prison where the Dark Judges were.
Why is it always the case in fiction that ghosts want to be given corporeal form to gain MEGA POWERS, and mortals want to become ghosts in order to gain MEGA POWERS?
There's gangs of hoodlums up ahead. Dredd introduces himself by ordering them to drop their weapons, and then tilting his bike onto its side and slamming it into them.
Stumm Gas grenades for all! Either there weren't any gas grenades in the previous two levels, or the game didn't tell me that I'd found some but my inventory was full. If you don't tell me that there are grenades on the ground that I can't pick up, how am I supposed to know where to come back to when I run out of grenades? BLUH.
"WE'RE GOING TO THROW AWAY THE KEY."
What's that in the far background? Why, it's crates full of delicious, totally immersion-breaking, product placement! My mission objective is to stop the -blank- gang from smuggling in crates of illegal -blank-. Like hell they would have -blank- in the 22nd century. Who'd make it? What would it be made from?
I want to shoot people with Dredd's big gun, but there's nobody to shoot. When I do find people, I can't shoot them the way I want to. There's nothing really wrong with the game unlike, say, RoboCop, I'm just being picky.
The sad thing is that nobody will play this game. People who don't care about Judge Dredd won't play it because it's about Judge Dredd. Judge Dredd fans probably won't play it because it's not Judge Dredd enough. I'm not going to play it because I'm sick of being hit and not knowing about it.
"YOU BLEW IT, CREEP."
Wow! This was a great flavor piece on this game...thanks! Really enjoyed it (funny!)
ReplyDelete