In the latter half of 2004, if you wanted a third-person shooter full of psychic abilities on a home console, your choices were pretty much Second Sight or Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.
At the time, these two games were highlighted for their similarities, in the same way that Armageddon and Deep Impact are brought together for being the same film. In a nod to that, I must assume, the 1001 list puts these two titles back to back so that we can see which one pokes their head out just that little bit higher than the other - or else knocks it out of the park.
What conspiracies are we going to uncover in Psi-Ops? Will our brains hurt just as much trying to find out?
Fun Times
Right from the start, we can see that Psi-Ops sets itself up as a more straight-faced, serious affair, compared to Second Sight. Where that game opened with cartoony characters joking with each other, this begins with the darkest of rooms and the shadiest of unknown figures.
We are Nick Scryer (he wouldn't have the ability to scry, now, would he?), a psychic soldier who is about to have his mind wiped so that he can infiltrate a terrorist organisation and take them down from within.
It sounds like a rather silly idea, and the intro only gets dumber from here.
We're sent to some base or something, and that gets attacked by an entire army of zombie-like, mind-controlled men. They get their limbs blown off and still keep coming. The ultimate military, perhaps - as long as you're on the side of all these psychic folks.
We're not quite sure what their intent is, but they're rounding up the survivors - ourselves included - and taking them elsewhere as a fresh batch of new recruits. Not sure how effective such a recruitment strategy is, but then mind-control probably has something to do with its success rate.
We are taken to 'The Movement', a terrorist organisation lead by the apparently highly decorated 'The General', and his psychic sidekicks.
Having the brains of a mind-wiped super-soldier, Nick sees this - being held at gunpoint deep inside the enemy base, surrounded by psychics - as the perfect opportunity to try and grab a gun and make a name for himself.
We, seemingly the only man skilled enough for a super-secret undercover job, are only alive at this point because of a coin toss. What a good start, Nick. Let's hope Sara can sort out this mess. Oh, sorry. Sara is a double agent, if I recall, who will help us out on the inside.
She's the one with the brains.
She opens our cell, gives us a silenced pistol and disappears into thin air, leaving us to escape this place in true, third-person, psychically-skilled, action-adventure style.
Frustrations
Once I sort out, and indeed, update my emulation options. I've no idea how it all works, but when it works, it's fantastic, and when it doesn't, you're hopefully only a Google search or two away from a solution, as I was here.
Let's see what Nick's capable of when he's not green.
Like Second Sight before it, controlling yourself in Psi-Ops is a little weird. Nick can crouch around to stay quiet and hug the walls and peek around corners. He's also got a lock-on button for his pistol and the ability to fine-tune the targeting. Here, however, it's a little weird in that I think it snaps to a significant target for you, quite generously, allowing you to spam the R1 button to fire bullets downrange.
The guards are absolute sponges, though, and it's just not satisfying gameplay. It's going to be something that'll come in time, but it's awkward until then.
Also awkward is this map, which has to rank up there as one of the most useless maps in the history of gaming. But moving on.
Unlocking a door shows us a central control room of some sort. Guards move prisoners, and Nick looks on with some kind of determined look on his face. How shall we approach this?
I crouch down and am near-immediately spotted and shot at from the other side of the room. I guess I'm going loud then. How do the controls work with the action?
A lot of wasted shots and health loss is the answer. I'm playing on Normal difficulty, and even if I try for headshots, it seems these guards take an eternity to die. Yet that can't be telling me that stealth is the only option because I've not been introduced to stealth as an option. I've a silenced weapon in my hands, sure, but if I can't line up a headshot and guarantee a kill, it's no good to me.
It's not long before I'm killed - and kicked in the head for good measure - which allows me a chance to reassess the situation. I do better, but am still just as loud as before. Explosively loud, even, as I blow up barrels to save ammo.
I meet up with Sara again, who sure knows me but I don't know her. She seems to know an awful lot about this place and is giving us pointers on how to get out of here, but she's not joining us in doing so. She really does know how to be an undercover agent, unlike us.
She also triggers something within us.
No, I mean our brain.
Just like that, we remember that we can move things with our mind, and are whisked away to a tutorial flashback to teach us how.
With a target in our sights - and it seems a lot more can be targetted here than in Second Sight - we can lift it up with a press of L1 and move it around (slowly) with the right analogue stick. It certainly feels more comfortable to do all this in Psi-Ops, so that's good.
What's not good is having the entire power manifest itself differently based on how much pressure I put on the L1 button when you're using a controller that doesn't support it. Score one for playing on original hardware versus emulation. Maybe I can sort that out later. For now, it just means I'll have to skip the tutorial, rather than fail to move crates through holes in the wall.
We head to the generator, enter the room, get spotted by seemingly everyone instantly, and have to fight our way through. Only this time, we've got telekinesis.
Psi-Ops is more of a physics playground than Second Sight and spotting a load of fire in the corner, I get the idea of dropping a poor guard into it for an easy kill.
The flames immediately disappear, the guard is unaffected, and I have to spend another magazine worth of machine-gun rounds to kill him. They just eat lead for breakfast, it's insane. That or the bullet spread is.
Anyway, we turn off the generators using the comically obvious switches and move on with our escape.
It doesn't go well, and I call it quits.
Final Word
Psi-Ops and Second Sight are both ambitious games, and with that ambition comes unusual control schemes that need to cater for unusual in-game skills. I'm not a fan of either game's controls, but I think Psi-Ops edges it. Just. Like, Second Sight may do some things better, but I've not played anywhere near enough of either game to know for sure. I just get the feeling that Psi-Ops is a little more manageable - and still a dog to control.
So it's potentially got the gameplay advantage, and with gameplay like this, it probably has the physics advantage as well. This was one of the poster-boys for the Havoc physics engine, at least on consoles. Again, not played enough to know for sure, I have to say.
What it doesn't have is an exciting plot. What a mess this is. The villains are more interesting than the protagonist, which is a bit of a concern when you spend, you know, the entire game as the protagonist.
Maybe he gets better in time, as more marbles find their way back into his head. Right now, he is literally a generic military-minded amnesiac following an objective marker. "But he's got psychic abilities!" Well, yeah, he does, but they're not enough to save the situation for me.
I'm more likely to watch Psi-Ops than play it, and I think I'll probably give it at least that because I do want to see just where this bonkers plot will go. Unless I get a mind-wipe.
Fun Facts
Psi-Ops was caught up in a lawsuit regarding ideas and characters stolen from a screenplay. The courts concluded no such copyright infringement had occurred. Who'd want this weird plot for their own anyway?
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, developed by Midway Games, first released in 2004.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2004, via emulation.