SiN
Encyclopedia
SiN is a computer game first-person shooter
First-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

 based on a modified version of the Quake II engine developed by Ritual Entertainment
Ritual Entertainment
Ritual Entertainment was a computer game software developer established in 1996 by Robert Atkins, Mark Dochtermann, Jim Dosé, Richard 'Levelord' Gray, Michael Hadwin, Harry Miller and Tom Mustaine...

 and published by Activision
Activision
Activision is an American publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. Its current CEO is Robert Kotick. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles...

 in late 1998. The game was later released over Valve Software's Steam Platform on April 5, 2006, either as a standalone product, or bundled together with its sequel, SiN Episodes
SiN Episodes
SiN Episodes is the title of a series of episodic games for the PC that would have expanded upon the 1998 computer game SiN. A total of nine episodes were planned with only the first one released...

.

Plot

Set in the near future of 2037, many of the levels and locations are reminiscent of their current day equivalents. Banks, building sites, sewage works and other everyday recognisable buildings form the basis of many of the levels in SiN. One major difference in the world of SiN is the lack of a police force. Ten years prior to the game, it is revealed that the police force collapsed due to inefficiency and ineffectiveness against the rising tide of crime. Private security companies have taken their place, some patrolling the streets like the former police, some in charge of protecting their employer's assets.

One of these companies which employ their own armed security forces are SiNtek, a large multi-national biotechnology
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

 firm owned by the beautiful and charismatic Elexis Sinclaire
Elexis Sinclaire
Elexis Sinclaire is a fictional character and main villain in the SiN video games series by Ritual Entertainment and SiN the Movie, a 60-minute anime OVA by ADV Films and Ritual Entertainment.-In video games:...

. Elexis took over the firm following the disappearance of her father, Dr. Thrall Sinclaire, who formed it in 2005.

The protagonist of the game, Col. John Blade, is the commander of one of the largest security forces in the city of Freeport, HardCorps. Prior to the beginning of the game, John is working to rid the streets of a potent new recreational drug named U4, which is gaining in popularity in Freeport. Yet, the source of the drug is still unknown, and its effects not entirely studied. As the game begins, the player is placed into the shoes of John Blade as he responds to a full scale bank heist and hostage situation perpetrated by a well known criminal, Mancini. But as the player progresses and pursues the criminals behind the heist, further questions are raised: Who is really behind the heist? And is this linked to the reported appearance of mutants in the city?

Throughout the missions, Blade is aided via radio link by a computer cracker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...

 working at HardCorps: JC, a skilled cracker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...

, capable of breaking into even the tightest of networks. In fact, Blade first found out about JC when investigating a cracker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...

 who had broken into the HardCorps system. After tracking down the hacker, Blade, recognizing the perpetrator's talents, decided to make him a job offer at HardCorps instead of arresting him. Thus, JC became one of HardCorps most valuable assets.

Gameplay

SiN introduced many then-new features to the First Person Shooter genre like weapon reloading, secondary firing modes, area-specific damage, the ability to knock the weapon off an opponent's hand and many more. It also featured three different types of body armor - for the legs, for the torso and for the head. Most of the Single player levels were real-life locations like power plants, dams, banks, subway stations, oilrigs etc. Besides them, there were also more sci-fi oriented levels like genetic laboratories, missile silos and more. They were all part ot SinTek's empire.
SiN featured one of the highest levels of interactivity of any first-person shooter at that time. Much of the environment could be interacted with, computer terminals could be manipulated through a DOS-like command prompt, and various objects could be destroyed.
Besides, a player's progression through SiN was not entirely linear. Many levels had multiple ways in which to complete them, and actions could trigger drastic changes in future levels. This feature was intended to add a level of replayability to the game and force the player to think before acting.

Development

The game demo was found to have a CIH virus
CIH (computer virus)
CIH, also known as Chernobyl or Spacefiller, is a Microsoft Windows computer virus written by Chen Ing Hau of Travian...

 infection in one of its mirror links. Activision has advised gamers only to download the game demo from their website.

Reception

Critical reception for SiN was mixed. While PC Zone
PC Zone
PC Zone was the first magazine dedicated to games for IBM-compatible personal computers to be published in the United Kingdom. Earlier PC magazines such as PC Leisure, PC Format and PC Plus had covered games but only as part of a wider remit. PC Zone was founded in 1993.The magazine was published...

gave the game 91% and a "Classic" award, praising its inventive level design and engaging plot, most other publications did not have such a glowing view towards it. According to GameRankings, the game's average review score was 73%.

One common complaint was the long load times, which measured in the minutes between each level, death, or quickload. With later patches
Patch (computing)
A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...

 the long load times were greatly shortened, although compatibility with old save games was lost, forcing players to play through the game from the beginning or use cheats to progress to their previous point in the game. Another major concern was the abundance of bugs
Software bug
A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...

 and glitch
Glitch
A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot...

es littered throughout the game. Some of the more widely reported bugs include a total lack of sound in the game, an end of chapter boss which couldn't move, a level on one path through the game not being finishable and general game crashes. Although these bugs were quickly patched up, the damage of the negative publicity had already been done, especially with the majority of the gaming press reviewing the unpatched version. The patch was exceptionally large; at the time it was normal to expect a game patch file to be up to 5 MB in size, whereas SiN first patch was over 31 MB. This was at a time when a substantial percentage of internet access was via dial-up, causing Activision to take the unusual step of offering to send CDs containing the patch to any owners of the game who did not have sufficient bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

 to download it from the Internet. A likely explanation for the multitude of bugs is that the game may have been rushed to meet the 1998 Christmas season, possibly as an attempt to beat Half-Life to market. These shortcomings, coupled with the great success of Half-Life, resulted in SiN not achieving as much success as the developers had hoped, although it did attain a moderate amount of sales during the 1998 Christmas period.

In 2010, UGO included the game in the articles "25 Sexy Video Game Secrets" (as the #20) and "The 11 Weirdest Game Endings" (as the #4).

Legacy

A mission pack was released for the game in 1999 by 2015, Inc.
2015, Inc.
2015 is a video game development studio founded in 1997 by its President and CEO, Tom Kudirka. Currently, 2015 is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. 2015 is perhaps most famous for the development of the highly successful PC game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault...

, entitled SiN: Wages of Sin
SiN: Wages of Sin
Wages of Sin is an expansion pack for the computer game SiN from late 1998. Wages of Sin was released in late February 1999 by a then relatively unknown game production studio known as 2015, who later became famous for their critically acclaimed game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault...

. The player reprises the role of John Blade, and the story picks up after the conclusion of the main game, pitting the player against Gianni Manero, a notorious crime boss looking to take over Freeport city.

In 2000, ADV Films released their 60-minute anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

 film, Sin: The Movie. Although loosely based on the game, with similar characters and plot elements, there are some big differences. For example, a major character from the game is killed off in the first few moments of the film and it takes place in the 2070s, in stark contrast to the games, which take place in the late 2030s- early 2040s and it acts like a OVA.

A sequel, SiN Episodes
SiN Episodes
SiN Episodes is the title of a series of episodic games for the PC that would have expanded upon the 1998 computer game SiN. A total of nine episodes were planned with only the first one released...

, was made by Ritual and was intended to be released episodically over Valve's Steam network. The only episode, titled "Emergence" was released on May 10, 2006.

An alternate reality game
Alternate reality game
An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions....

 based in the SiN universe was launched in 2005 to promote the announcement of SiN Episodes. Various cryptic puzzles could be found on the website, and solving these would lead to new pieces of media and art. However, support for this piece of viral marketing
Viral marketing
Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses...

by Ritual Entertainment did not last, although it has been claimed by Ritual that the final puzzles still remained unsolved.

SiN was also re-released on the Steam platform on April 5, 2006 bundled together with SiN Episodes: Emergence. This version of SiN (version 1.12) includes fixes for audio and video playback problems as well as integration with the Steam multiplayer server browser. Several textures have been modified in this release apparently due to copyright issues (the original images of many being replaced with SiN Episodes artwork) and all instances of nudity and drug references in the game have been censored.

External links

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