Overview: Sometimes cheese can be enjoyable. Michael Crichton’s movie, Runaway, is filled with too many straight-up Hollywood clichés to be taken seriously, but it’s still fun. Maybe it’s just because I’m a Die-Hard Magnum PI fan, or perhaps I love to see Gene Simmons’ evil glare. Runaway has some fun ideas, but the movie’s not great. It’s one of those movies where the bad guy can magically get anywhere and automatically knows everything. It is more fun than it deserves to be though.
The Story: In near-future, society has taken full advantage of micro-electronics and robot technology. Many basic jobs, such as taking care of corn fields, are now carried out by robots. Robots even fulfill surrogate nanny roles for children stuck at home. In this world, Sgt. Jack Ramsay (Tom Selleck) is a specialist on disabling malfunction robots. Ramsay and his new partner, Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) get enmeshed in a series of incidents where robots have gone wild, sometimes with deadly results.
In investigating the faulty robots, they find that they have been modified with a special “assassin” computer chip that turns normal robots into man-killing death machines. The trail leads to Dr. Charles Luther (enjoyably played by Kiss rock star, Gene Simmons), and over-the-top evil genius who will stop at nothing to develop and sell these chips to the highest bidder. Ramsay and Thompson stop Dr. Luther by intercepting a chip delivery from his girlfriend, played by Kirstie Alley, and capture Luther’s chip design template for making new copies.
As the plot thickens, Dr. Luther brings out his toys. The most impressive gadget which the movie is most known for are mini-spiders that can jump 6 feet in the air, and deliver shots of acid. Luther also has heat-seeking bullets that can be targeted to an individual body heat profile, and mini-homing bombs on wheels called “lock-ons.” Things get tense when Luther kidnaps Ramsay’s kid to exchange for the chip template.
The Acting: The acting is nothing special in Runaway, and certainly lacks originality in any of the assigned roles – virtually every character is cookie cutter Hollywood fare. Tom Selleck basically plays his Magnum PI character, so if you like that guy, you’ll probably like his performance here. Cynthia Rhodes plays a shallow but cute sidekick who wants nothing more than to get it on with Selleck. Kirstie Alley’s role consists mostly of looking hawt. With that said, Gene Simmons is the really fun one to watch. All he really does well is “look evil” but he does this so well! This coupled with the fact that Simmons’ character is almost magical – he always knows where everyone is, and can infiltrate any location including a busy police station to log on to Ramsay’s computer with virtually no disguise. Again, we’re not talking high quality here, but it is fun.
The FX: Runaway provides us with a number of low-budget cyberpunk toys, but probably the best effect employed was the use of the fish-eye lens to give us the perspective of the missile bullet. This simple camera effect makes the heat-seeking bullet far more believable than it should. But it’s the spiders which everyone recognizes. For some reason, these seemed far more believable to me when I watched this movie in the 80s. Now, they just sort of seem to sit there and wiggle. Still, when watching the ending sequence in Matrix Revolutions, where Neo walks through the tunnel with the high-quality CG spider-bots traveling everywhere, I was reminded of Runaway. So in that sense, Runaway’s toys have outlasted the movie itself.
Evil Chips: I’m not really sure what this even means, but Runaway is predicated on the idea that “assassin” chips can be made. These chips provide an alternate instruction set which appears generic enough to work on virtually any robot. In looking at this, the idea reeks of Hollywood cheese. Wouldn’t it be cool though if someone could design an instruction set that could self-organize its commands based on its environment? I suppose Java does this in some ways in that its platform independent, but robot independent seems a bit more complicated.
Dr. Luther is just another Dr. Evil: It’s amazing how a character can change the world of film. Ever since Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil character came onto the stage, it’s virtually impossible to take incoherent evil guys seriously. The moral of this story is had Dr. Charles Luther just paid off his henchmen, he would have escaped scott free. But since he had to come up with craaazy deaths for them, our hero had to come to the rescue.
Full and Free Access by the Newsies: In Runaway’s future, the news organizations have the right to wherever they want, whenever they want. So much so that they’re allowed access during a police operation to save an infant from a crazed robot. This comes off as being fairly silly in the movie, as its hard to imagine them ever getting this type of access. This is more an indication of the perception folks had of news organizations in the 80s. How time changes things. Now the perception is that news organizations pretty hang out to wait for their stories to be hand-fed. They still excitedly arrive at standoffs and the like, but outside of a few brave souls who prowl the streets outside the green zone in Iraq, it’s hard to imagine news organizations today even bothering to investigate the most obvious of events.
The Bottom Line: One has to wonder how a decent story teller like Crichton ends up taking some interesting ideas on technology and society and embedding them into a cookie-cutter Hollywood storyline. Things certainly happen in the production so who knows. Watching Runaway, you get the feeling that this should have been a better flick. But while the movie isn’t great, the spiders are fun, as is Gene Simmons’ glare. And if you’re a Magnum PI fan, chances are you’ll like it even better than one of the weekly episodes.
OK, it’s that time again. I’ve been using a Wordpress theme from the previous release of Semiologic. Unfortunately, when I initially used this back last January, I didn’t know what I was doing, so I ended up kludging my own look into the existing theme. This has made it difficult to upgrade to get lots of cool new functionality. Additionally, with the latest version of Wordpress, I now have these ugly error messages at the bottom of the page.
After many days of toying around, I think I’m finally ready to upgrade. If perchance site looks totally hosed in a few short hours, chances are either I’m still in the process, or more likely, I’ve horribly destroyed CPR. If so, I’ll be begging my ISP to load up my saved versions. If successful, the site will be a tad wider, and look slightly different. Other than that, you shouldn’t notice significant differences.
This was too funny not to post. On the Daily Show last week, John Oliver posited that the explanation for Cheney’s seemingly contradictory positions is because he’s really a bunch of cyborgs. Whether or not you like or hate the current administration, you’ll probably find this funny. But enjoy it while it lasts, as it gets pulled from Comedy Central at the end of the month, and has already been pulled from YouTube. Truly, I’m sure that ongoing buzz and publicity is bad for a TV show so I certainly understand their desire to get this off the air quickly.
Strangely enough, the “Cheney as Cyborg” mantra seems to be picking up steam as we look around the web. There are pictures, lots of political posts, and even a comment from Scott Adams a number of years back. Hopefully this has more to do with his suspect intellect than just his body replacements. Then again, propping up Dick Cheney as an example of superior cyborg thinking isn’t going to endure the world to transhumanity, now is it?
Sci Fi Wire relays an interview with Lena Headey (in the shot above, from the Brother’s Grimm movie), star of the upcoming Sarah Conner Chronicles, where she mentions that they have just finished shooting its pilot episode. Apparently, the Sarah Connor Chronicles takes place right after T2, and will have male and female terminator characters.
Lena Headey, who stars in the the Fox SF drama pilot The Sarah Connor Chronicles, told SCI FI Wire that the show will begin with a confrontation between Headey’s title character; her son, John Connor (Heroes’ Thomas Dekker); and two new Terminators: a female model, played by Serenity’s Summer Glau, and a male one, which she called Cromartie, played by Owain Yeoman. One is good and one is bad; she didn’t say which is which. (Glau’s character is named Cameron, an apparent nod to Terminator franchise creator James Cameron.)
The pilot, which picks up the story from the end of the feature film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, begins in the desert, and “it ends with them landing in L.A., having run and escaped. Or maybe not,” Headey said in an interview at WonderCon in San Francisco on March 3.
“We just finished [shooting],” Headey (300) said. “We were in Albuquerque [N.M.] for a month. And it was very intense, because TV is crazy. I mean, it’s long days. It’s like boom, boom, boom. You don’t get any respite. But … I think it’s going to be great. I don’t know if its going to be picked up, because it’s only in pilot stage right now. But I learned to shoot many weapons and how to recognize a Terminator. So it was a good experience.”
Even if you didn’t know anything about this, chances are you could guess the plot. Sure enough, its just what you thought it would be:
The pilot “begins, and it’s them basically running, hiding, trying to live,” Headey said. “Trying to carve out a normal life for themselves, but always being watched and trying to locate Skynet, trying to stop [it]. But there are many, many issues in their way.”
Considering the mess of a story in T3, I’m not too worried about continuity issues. And all things considered, I’d probably spot this as a clunker from the start, but, um, it co-stars Summer Glau as the Terminatrix! Any of you brown coats out there will know her River from the most awesome SciFi show Firefly and its companion movie, Serenity (and no, I don’t consider these to be cyberpunk). This alone will have me tuning in to the pilot.
Uneven, satirical, and oddly prophetic in its own half-baked way, Michael Crichton’s 1981 film Looker takes place in a terrifying universe of glamour, dehumanization, corporate deception, and Susan Dey hooking up with Albert Finney.
SFAM NOTE: We welcome new reviewer Dan Swensen, who also runs a terrific Sci-Fi blog called the Dimfuture.net. If others are interested in joining the review team, please post a message in the review forum.
Overview: The year is 1981, and pudgy, befuddled plastic surgeon Larry Roberts (Finney) becomes involved in a mystery when one of his models, dissolved in tears, arrives in his office raving hysterically about mysterious people trying to kill her. Hours later, the model inexplicably falls from the window of her high-rise apartment, and evidence of foul play points to Roberts himself. Justifiably concerned, Roberts begins playing amateur detective, teaming up with his patient (the vapid and insecure Cindy Fairmont, played by Susan Dey) to find out what’s really happening to these models, who seem to be dying off in droves shortly after visiting Roberts’ office to be “perfected.”
Mostly relying on the incompetence of the antagonists and the near-complete apathy of the cops, Roberts eventually tracks the clues back to a company called Digital Matrix, a computer graphics and advertising firm that specializes in creating digital replicas of top commercial models. While these models are given lucrative contracts in exchange for their digital likenesses, they seem to mysteriously die shortly thereafter, their handsome royalties left unpaid. It doesn’t take long for Roberts to figure out that Digital Matrix is duplicating these models, then killing them off, as their “digital doubles” will do their job better — and for free.
Machines and Misogyny: In an age where digital replacement and enhancement of actors is now extremely commonplace, Looker seems both surprisingly relevant and woefully dated at the same time. Penned in by Hollywood’s desire for complete perfection, the models of Looker fret over millimeter-sized flaws, consumed with self-loathing over even the slightest imperfection. As the story progresses, the audience finds this to be more than mere vanity — in Crichton’s world, Digital Matrix has reduced human behavior to a set of algorithms, able to determine (and manipulate) the focus of a viewer’s attention with ultimate precision to maximize product exposure and desire.
Because these manipulations require inhuman accuracy, the models themselves soon become not only obsolete, but liabilities to the company. The theme of dehumanization — the models looked upon by the corporations, and themselves, not as human beings but commodities to be used up and thrown away — is very strong in the first half of the film, underlined by a casual misogyny that may or may not have been intentional (it was 1981, after all).
In addition to the prophetic “digital doubles” of the film, Looker’s most science-fiction invention is the L.O.O.K.E.R. device (short for Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses), a “light gun” that stuns and paralyzes the target using light. Anyone exposed to this weapon experiences a sort of “missing time” as they stand paralyzed, allowing the weapon’s user to move around, invisible and undetected, for short periods. Digital Matrix uses the device to cover their tracks, making the models’ deaths appear as suicides.
While Looker is more than a bit plodding at times, the film’s use of this device is undoubtedly the most clever effect in the film, as characters find themselves losing time without knowing how or why. (It’s also worth mentioning that the L.O.O.K.E.R. device is the movie’s only real special effect, and provides the film’s most interesting visuals.) The L.O.O.K.E.R. device is a neat little concept, one I wish could have gotten better treatment in a better film.
The Bottom Line: Unfortunately, Looker is a movie with a few good ideas that don’t quite survive the runtime. The last half-hour of the movie is an extended game of “humorous” cat-and-mouse in which the heroes and villains chase each other through a virtual landscape of digitized commercials — the best of which is a genuinely macabre moment featuring digitized kids complaining about their breakfast cereal as a real human lies dead on the prop kitchen table.
While these scenes are mildly funny on a multitude of levels (the style of commercials, for all their “digital” glory, are more akin to something out of the Fifties than anything out of science fiction), they’re out of tone with the rest of the film. Albert Finney is no action hero, and doesn’t even have the charisma necessary to be a good everyman. Susan Dey’s character is too insecure and flat to be anything but an object of pity, and James Coburn’s turn as the villain, while passable, is too brief to be interesting.
A mustachioed Eighties thug gets a taste of the L.O.O.K.E.R. device.
That’s not to say that the film can’t be enjoyed as good cheese, however — there are some amusingly inept moments (watch for the car “crashing” into the fountain), and the few special effects are decent enough. Overall, Looker is probably more interesting as a historical piece than as a thriller — though it’s dated badly on a number of levels, the ideas of dehumanization and artifice that it puts forth were, for 1981, surprisingly forward-thinking. It might also be interesting to note that Looker made the first real attempt at a realistic CGI character, as well as the first movie to used 3-D computer shading.
After its release in theaters, Looker haunted the bleak hinterlands of early Eighties cable television for awhile (probably sandwiched somewhere between showings of Krull and The Entity), and is out on DVD now. Oh, and if you care about that sort of thing, Susan Dey is naked in it.
SFAM NOTE: We welcome new reviewer “Rover,” who uploaded this music album review into the Review Forum. If others are interested in joining the review team, please post a message in the review forum.
Overview: I guess that everybody has heard about this album? It was released in 93, under the title Cyberpunk by a guy who had until here made only rock’n roll stuff. Some said that Billy used the Cyberpunk thing only for the hype effect, some cyberpunks enjoy this album…Personally, this is how I discovered CP, so I’ll always cherish this album Razz
Well, the question is, is this album CP or not?
Let’s analyze each of the songs…
1) Wasteland: ~lyrics~ a few lines are clearly CP, and promote hacking: “In VR law, computer crime, so sublime…” but the rest of the song has a lot of possible interpretations. It’s about a sort of missionary who wants to bring religion and hope into ‘the wasteland’…This reminds me of this street preacher in the movie Johnny Mnemonic. Perhaps the wasteland is supposed to be a futuristic shanty town, or to symbolize the fall of human relations because of the rise of technology? Anyway, I don’t really think that religion and CP have a lot of things in common. Here, I have the feeling that Billy wants to bring back to human life the cyberpunks??
Tune: not CP…maybe a few elcetronical sounds.
2) Shock to the System : ~lyrics~ Yeah, Billy wants to make a revolution! Don’t forget that in cyberpunk there’s punk…
Tune: Billy added some sounds (flamethrower, police sirens…) to a guitar tune, and this sounds inventive enough to be CP to me.
Music Video: if this is not CP, then what the hell is CP? Machines, riot, cops, special effects made by Stan Winston (he worked on the Terminator movies)…
3) Tomorrow People: ~lyrics~ this song evokes to me a post-apocalyptic future (World War III, a scifi story/a dirt colored sky…), but it could also be about video games: “I like to fight, I kill global oppression, if I quit, no hope of redemption”…Anyway, the sadness and the despair are CP: “blue eyes crying in the rain”, “I lost my love, lost my hold, I lost my heaven too”…I can picture a replicant from Blade Runner saying that.
Tune: Some strange sounds and voices in the beginning which could be considered CP…
4) Adam in Chains: ~lyrics~ The long intro of the song reminds me of zen philosophy, and the rest doesn’t make much sense…
Music video: Sorry, I can’t find any links anymore, but there was a music video where you saw a guy jacked into virtual reality: that’s CP, but this doesn’t explain the lyrics ^^
Tune: The sounds fit with the music video, and it’s appropriated to listen while surfing
5) Neuromancer: ~lyrics~ The song is a reference to Gibson’t book…the lyrics deliver the same message, so, yep, that’s CP.
Tune: Some strange voice (that remind me of Deus Ex Machina in Matrix), and some electronical sounds…yes, this could be CP, but it sounds less CP than any techno song.
6) Power Junkie: ~lyrics~ A song about drugs…Drugs are important in CP, most of the characters are addicted. But to make a true CP song, I think that Billy should have mixed drugs and technology for example.
Tune: it doesn’t really sound CP. Billy made a big creativity effort toward the end, where you hear a very strange voice, and he also played with the right-left effect (gotta listen to this with headphones)
7) Love Labours On: ~lyrics~ Title says it all, it’s a song about love….I tried really hard, but I can’t see the link with CP
Tune: it sounds like an emo songs…I dunno many Cp guys who are emos, though.
8 ) Heroin: ~lyrics~ Another song about drugs. The line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” matches with the Cp philosophy, and near the end of the song you can hear Billy say something like “VR hell heroin”: what if he wasn’t talking about drug addiction, but about computer addiction?
Tune: Some parts of it have a strong techno influence
9) Shangrila: ~lyrics~ A song full of hope and love: somewhere there’s a magic place where we can live and love forever. That’s not CP. But….maybe this magic place is supposed to be cyberspace? If Billy’s seeking this heaven, maybe that’s because his real life is an urban hell?
Tune: a strong oriental influence, but it doesn’t sound CP
10) Concrete Kingdom: ~lyrics~ No hope, no love in our modern world…This is CP. Plus, at one moment, Billy sings “what’s for my son?”: it means that he fears the future, because he knows it’ll be even darker than our world…
tune: Billy worked with the voices once again, making them sound like in a techno song by moments
11) Venus: ~lyrics~ Venus was a goddess…well, how is this supposed to be CP? It’s a personal interpretation, but from a CP point of view, Venus could be an A.I.
Tune: this sounds too classic to be CP
12) Then the Night Comes: ~lyrics~ Err…I can’t see any clear link with CP. Maybe with the underground thing? You know, CP have fun at night and go crazy because they don’t give a damn about authority…I’m not sure that it was what Billy meant however^^
Tune: strange rock’n roll…it sounds cool, but not CP
13) Mother Dawn: ~lyrics~ A sort of hymn to the Nature…this sounds more like a Disney movie than anything CP related.
Tune: a soft song, nothing related with any form of CP music…
Is it Cyberpunk? In the end, 8 songs out of 13 could be considered as CP…that’s more than half, so for me, this album is CP. But I agree that this conception mainly depend on the personal interpretation: I think that some songs unintentionally sounded CP (Venus for example). A few musical elements could be CP, but when you listen to the whole album, the feeling that remain toward the tune isn’t really CP. I don’t think that Billy used the word cyberpunk for the commercial effect because of the Shock to the system music video, which is the proof that he had understood and believed in cyberpunk.
Any opinions about this album? I know that a lot of people hate it.
Thanks to ETM’s wonderful suggestion to separate the words in the title (from cyberpunkreview to Cyberpunk Review), this site has climbed from page 3 on Google’s search results for the word “Cyberpunk” to the first page! Currently, Cyberpunk Review (CPR) is sitting at #9 or #10 in the North American Google search results for the word “Cyberpunk.” This changes around pretty frequently, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see CPR bounce back and forth between the top of page 2 and the bottom of page 1. Why does this matter? Because traffic increases dramatically as the site moves up in the rankings. This translates into more people commenting on the posts, more interaction in the forums, and hopefully more assistance on the Wiki!
Site Statistics Update
CPR has been on a pretty steady climb every since its inception in January, 2006. The addition of the forum definitely increased traffic, as did the more recent Wiki. The other contributor has been all those wonderful sites that now link to CPR. Technorati now shows 182 links from 91 blogs linking to CPR. Additionally, the decision not to stop others from using images directly from CPR has allowed many to find the site through various MySpace image linkages and Google Image searches. For instance, if you want to find images for Tetsuo (The Iron Man), CPR shows up on the first line. Here’s the overall statistics so far.
From 2006:
From 2007:
Notice the steady climb. February, which has 3 less days than January also lost a day due to a server change at my ISP, and still continued the climb.
Access by Country for the month of February, 2007:
The improved search results have changed the country composition. Previously, international access comprised about 40% overall. Now its closer to 30%. This is somewhat sad in that I love the international participation here at CPR. Lets get those search results up in Eastern Europe, ey?
Japan, the epicenter of cyborgs in anime, is also a leader in robotics. In the Tech News of the Day thread, r3plikazt47 provides this gem from CYBERDYNE, Inc. No, it’s not a Cyberdyne Systems model T-800 (that’s a different company); Yoshiyuki Sankai’s Hybrid Assistive Limb or “HAL” gives us the beginnings of a mecha type suit we see so often in animes. The proto-mecha suit that gives its wearer cyborg-like potential, including the ability to lift an extra 88 pounds or walk long distances without tiring (at least until the battery runs out).
Cyberdyne describes the method of movement enacted in their Cyberneic Voluntary Control system this way:
Cybernic Voluntary Control( Bio-Cybernic Control System)
When a person attempts to walk, for instance, the brain sends electrical impulses to muscles. when they arrive at muscles, faint bio-electrical signals appear on skin surfaces. HAL’s system works as described below:
the bio-electrical sensors attached to the skin read the signals
the computer immediately analyzes how much power the wearer intends to generate
calculates the adequate amount of power assist and command power units
power units generate torque and put limbs into action.
These process is completed a fraction of a second earlier than the muscles actually move…
Most interesting are is the multiple advances underway in attempting to “sense” the human nervous system. HAL isn’t an invasive approach to cyborg connectivity, but given the number of research efforts going on in this area, its only a matter of time before cyborg implants make their way into our society. The era of the posthuman will be arriving in the very near-future. More closer to this year though are the applications Cyberdyne already sees for its product:
… HAL is a robot suit which can expand and improve physical capabilities of human being. By wearing HAL-5, you can hold up to 40 kg load by arms and can increase the maximum weight of leg press from 100 kg to 180 kg.
Various applications for following purposes are expected.
Heavy physical labor supports at factories, plants
Rescue supports at disaster site
Care personnel supports
Entertainments
and more ….
We all know what the “and more..” part is - the hope that we too can become anime cyborg characters. From an entertainment standpoint, HAL adds a whole new dimension to Cosplay. I can’t wait to see the pictures!
THE FIRST TRUE HACKING SIM: Some might argue that hacking simulations have been around long before Uplink. Activision’s Hacker can be called one, but the “hacking” there is only a pretext for the real game within. Uplink, on the other hand, is all hacking. OK, the hacking is more reminiscent of Hollywood’s idea of hacking from WarGames and such, but the hacking is what Uplink is all about; No lame pretext to “save the world.”
OVERVIEW: March, 2010. After hearing rumors and searching the Internet, you finally found a public access server for the secretive Uplink Corporation, whose “agents” are hackers hired to break into systems to accomplish different goals. After registering as an agent, you need to prove your skills with a test mission, then you can pick from different missions with different difficulties, and work your way up the agent ranks to become a Terminal hacker.
The missions range from simply breaking into systems to steal or delete a file. Then, you get to crash mainframes, commit identity fraud, and make secret bank transfers. At the highest levels, you get to swipe entire databases off high-security LANs and frame innocent people for cybercrimes. There are banking systems, LANs, a Social Security database, a Global Academic database, and a Global Criminal database to hack. Fortunately, Uplink has a “corporate store” where agents can buy needed software like password breakers, security bypassers, decyphering and decryption tools, and hardware upgrades for their gateways.
Choose your missions, and hack your way to the elite ranks.
A STORY BEHIND THE HACKING: About mid-March, you receive a message from the now-deceased top agent that the Andromeda Research Corporation, or ARC, is working on a project called Revelation. If you act on the information in the message, you get to take part in the storyline and even can choose the fate of the Internet. ARC wants to destroy the Net, while a rival company, Arunmor, wants to stop them. Whose side will you choose?
HACKING… HOLLYWOOD STYLE: As mentioned before, the “hacking” is more out of the movies than any real hacking, which offten involves quite a bit of research and social engineering. You work with a Windows-like point-click-drag interface to get your work done, though taking down mainframes requires use of the system’s command-line console . Some hacker purists would probably take exception with the way hacking is depicted in Uplink, but whose to say what hacking will be like in 2010 as opposed to, say, 1995. The focus is what you do on the inside of targeted systems.
A TRIBUTE TO CYBERPUNK: There are many secrets in Uplink to discover, such as the many secret systems that pay homage to cyberpunk culture: Steve Jackson Games, OCP, Protovision,… even Introversion. Even the voice recognition on some high-security systems pays tribute: My voice is my passport, verify me.
Lost yourself in a LAN? The admin will find you soon enough…
MODIFICATIONS: Introversion has been selling a CD with the Uplink source code for a while, and fans have been able to make mods and add-ons since version 1.31 came out. Add-ons include custom gateways, additional company and agent names, agent photos, and modifications to the basic game including the F.B.I. mod that replaces the Global Criminal Database with the “Fubared, Bungling Idiots” agency, and uMP3 where users can create a custom MP3 playlist to replace the in-game music.
Some people may have seen a version of Uplink in stores called “Uplink: Hacker Elite” from Strategy First. This is the exact same game as Uplink, but due to a bankruptcy filing by Strategy First resulting in non-payment of royalties to Introversion, plus their alteration of the code to make U:HE incompatible with mods, Uplink fans and Introversion itself do not support Hacker Elite and advise to not buy it.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Uplink is one of those rare games that does more than redefine a genre, it actually creates one. Since its release in 2001, there have been several others that attempted to duplicate Uplink’s cult success. Unfortunately, they can’t hold a candle to Uplink, not even to light its farts. (One hacking sim, Street Hacker, comes a distant second to Uplink.)
I would have given Uplink a perfect 10 if had more variety of missions, but that’s what fan mods are for. Uplink is one game that is a MUST HAVE for any cyberpunk fan. Its many secrets should keep any hacker-agent occupied for some time, and the modifications out there only add to its replayability. Just make sure you steer clear of the Strategy First version and get it directly from Introversion or Ambrosia.
Happy hacking, agents!
This post has been filed under Cyberpunk Games by Mr. Roboto.
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(One hacking sim, Street Hacker, comes a distant second to Uplink.)
