Star Road

Even though I played the original Syphon Filter a lot back in the day, for some reason I was never tempted by parts 2 and 3. They were both on the $19.99 Greatest Hits line, could be found used for under ten bucks at any Gamestop in town, and yet I never even considered them. After recently re-playing Syphon Filter, I decided to finally pick up 2 and 3 and see what they’re like. Let’s start with Syphon Filter 2.

The start is promising. This was the direct sequel, released one year after the original, and you can tell they were definitely going for “bigger and badder” with the opening cinematics.

Gabe Logan, cool as ever.

All of the sudden we look over and–what!? Is that an F22 flying next to us??

Apparently Gabe’s wanted level is so high that they’re sending fighter jets after us that cost $70,000 per hour to fly. It’s about to get serious.

Of course, we bail out. We’re the main character, they can’t kill us yet!

The main gameplay difference between Syphon Filter 1 and 2 is that you can jump across short gaps in SF2. There’s a strange animation, and ultimately it’s used sparingly, but now it is possible to jump across things instead of just climb upwards.

Finally, we get to play as Lian Xing in a classic “sneak out of the hospital” scene. The timer starts: we have about an hour and a half to escape from here. Thankfully, it doesn’t take anywhere near that long.

Considering the target demographic and the era they made this, a full scene of Lian Xing changing outfits with artful lighting totally makes sense. It definitely feels hilariously dated, though.

Does it seem like there are a lot of FMV snaps here? That’s because this game is filled with FMV.

The is a fairly short game–it took about 10 hours for me to finish–but it comes on two discs because it’s loaded with these crappy FMV’s that bookend every level. They were crappy back then too, but people just expected that level of voice acting and animation quality in video games. Electronic Gaming Monthly, for example, panned the game but mentioned nothing about the FMV’s or voice acting. Next Generation raved about the game and shockingly claimed “the voice acting is mostly excellent.”

Wow, the game just started and I’m already torching fools with a flamethrower? They’re pulling out all the stops with cinema and gameplay right at the beginning. This does not bode well for the rest of the game.

I normally play with “True Color Rendering” turned on in Duckstation, which swaps out the dithering pattern for a smoother gradient.

However, there are certain cases where the dithering actually adds a nice gritty effect, especially if you play at 1x (original) internal resolution.

What are you lookin’ at? You don’t like dithering? It is kinda funny to play at 5x internal resolution but keep the unscaled dithering.

Scenes like this are peak Syphon Filter, feeling like a mashup of Metal Gear Solid and Tomb Raider.

So…many…ugly…FMV’s. Ugh! In general I love the PS1 aesthetic, but these low resolution, ugly FMV’s are just painful to watch.

The ugly FMV’s are in stark contrast to the really cool looking levels. The layouts are a bit milquetoast, but the color palette, use of lighting, and texture quality are impressive for the era.

Of course I’m using some emulator enhancements, like 5x internal resolution, PGXP, widescreen hack, and true color rendering, but still: look at the detail in the models and textures. They even drew shadows underneath the metal bars on the wall!

The F22, which happens to be my favorite modern plane, looks a bit wonky in this game, but I see this as the good type of jank, where it looks crappy in a charming way. This is the year 2000 that I want to remember: appreciative of the past and hopeful for the future.

Accessibility options, as we call them now, didn’t really exist back in the PS1 era. Even though I don’t use subtitles when I watch movies or shows, I do appreciate them in video games where there can be a lot of jargon or just made-up terms. In addition, the lack of subtitles is very apparent in screenshots, which get reduced down to “a scene with people” instead of a snapshot of a particular dialog. There were so many stupid pieces of dialog that I wished I could have saved for posterity.

I played SF1 without the widescreen hack because it messes with the auto-aim reticule; the further off-center the target, the further off-target the reticule is. But when I started SF2 I realized that issue was pretty irrelevant, or at least less of a concern than getting the benefit of widescreen rendering.

As bad as they are, I feel somewhat duty-bound to post a lot of FMV screenshots just to emphasize their prevalence.

Yet again, the graphics and scenery of the actual gameplay are more interesting than the pre-rendered video that preceded it.

Why does he jump like that? It looks like he’s jumping out of a plane, but he’s just going forward.

Next we are are treated to an amazingly poor interpretation of the classic cliche: jumping from a moving train to a helicopter. They did this in Syphon Filter and it was ridiculous: the helicopter was flying next to the train in a tunnel! For this one, Lian–who is apparently a great helicopter pilot–waits at the end of the tunnel, hovering stationary.

Then Gabe jumps from the moving train to the stationary helicopter! I can suspend disbelief for cinematic effect, but it’s hard to ignore such an egregious violation of physics. Like many of the FMV’s in this game, the action turns to indecipherable nonsense, so you’ll just have to trust that’s what you’re seeing in the shot above.

The next level is an epic burning hellscape. Eye candy was definitely a bigger selling point back then, which helps explain why there was such high praise for this game that keeps proving itself to be more and more mediocre.

Oh hey, we’re on the news! And that’s the end of Disc 1.

Straight into more action cliches: the ol’ rappel-down-and-cut-a-circle-in-the-glass trick.

This game is so unoriginal that I’m not sure if this area was a Metal Gear Solid homage, or just a generic climbing-in-a-vent cliche.

I think game developers love museums because it’s an opportunity for them to just put literally any objects they wish into a simple box.

A reminder of the original resolution of the graphics. Charming or horrendous?

Interesting ugly-weird van. I wonder if this is based on some obscure thing I’ve never heard of, or if someone came up with this funky design on their own.

There’s an entertaining shootout in here, which you need to do so you can safely climb down.

Here’s another original versus enhanced comparison. The top one has the widescreen hack on, but in software mode so everything else is as original. At the bottom there is true color rendering which removes the dithering; PGXP which fixes the crooked geometry (or at least attempts to); and the 5x internal resolution which removes all the jaggies but most impressively brings out so much detail from the textures.

Just look at the telephone in both examples. The PS1 could store much higher quality textures than it could display so it always feels pretty cool to find these lovely examples where the emulator brings out hidden detail.

Anyway, back to this crappy game. The graphics remain interesting, even if the level design is uninspiring.

Ooh yeah, a Lada police car.

Whoa…Silent Filter? Syphon Hill? All of the sudden it gets foggy, and we get to play “Homage or Shameless Ripoff?” once again.

I understand that computer generated animation was tough back then, and people are difficult to animate in motion. Still, the characters move so unnaturally in this game and those stubby arms are kinda creepy.

Another cool looking level, elevated by the textures and baked-in lighting. New techniques for real time ray tracing and such are very cool and produce an awesome effect, but the simple lighting techniques of the PS1 were pretty effective.

Pretty cool camera angle for this scene, and it works perfectly in widescreen.

This whole section is a sneaking mission, which is a super cool concept. However, in practice it’s so tightly scripted that you’ll just end up failing over and over until you figure out exactly what the game wants you to do. I leaned heavily on save states to complete this mess of a scene. It would be incredibly frustrating playing this on an original console.

Why are there still three cars parked on the roof at this hour? Especially one that kinda looks like a Miata.

You have to lead this guy out at gunpoint. Careful with the trigger, let’s not pull a Pulp Fiction here.

Multilevel room with wide open spaces and lots of objects for cover…is there going to be a giant shootout here? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

Would you like a Junior Mint?

This is the beginning of another scripted scene that I failed way too many times. I think the creators got so caught up in the idea of a very specific experience that they forgot they were creating a game that various people would play through; they created these sequences where if you don’t do it exactly their way, you just die. There’s little to no room for interpretation–which is the opposite approach of something like Metal Gear Solid, which usually gives you multiple ways to tackle any given situation.

Well…it is raining.

We meet a soldier after a particularly brutal scene. Finally we meet someone who isn’t out to kill us.

Another weird scripted scene. You may have noticed my always-full armor and health in the last few screens. At some point I just got frustrated with the strictness of the game; if you don’t do exactly what the game wants you to do, you die. With max armor you can at least mitigate that a bit, allowing you to figure out what the game wants you to do without dying immediately. But only a bit, because the enemies can headshot you now.

That reflection in the blood…dang.

And uh, yeah. There’s a twist.

Then it ends, with yet another cliche about visiting your ally who didn’t make it out.

But of course, since there needs to be a part 3, there’s a post-credits scene. Get ready for another sequel!

Even though that game was somewhat frustrating, I can’t stop there. I need to see what Syphon Filter 3 is all about. Not because I care at all about the confusing story, but because I want to see what they did with the series. Compared to the period from SF1 to SF2, there were an additional six months between SF2 and SF3. Reviews of the time suggest that it got even worse, so I’m expecting the worst (quite literally) and yet, ever an optimist, hoping for the best.