The Best PC Games You Never Played
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To some of you I'm going to be preaching to the choir here I know more than a few regular bit-tech readers who are big fans of Bloodlines, but there's still a lot of people out there who passed by this underappreciated wonder because of the reported technical issues. Those people need to be put straight.Spotted on RPGWatch.
Made by the most talented people from Black Isle when the company ran into financial problems and the developers fled to form their own company, Bloodlines is a classically gothic FPS RPG based in modern day Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, it was also the first game to be developed using the Source Engine and had a litter of bugs as a result crippling itself with load times and stability problems. Thankfully, the game still enjoys a fan following and many of the more obsessive geeks out there have taken it upon themselves to patch the game up to spec, adding in features that were cut from the final release and reducing load times on capable PCs.
What we're left with in the fully patched version (final version is Ver 4.4) is a deeply adult game which tackles issues like sex, drugs and buggery head-on. Remarkably, the game didn't generate the massive outcry you might expect though and for good reason while games like Grand Theft Auto use similar themes in an exaggerated or unrealistic manner to glorify themselves and their content, Bloodlines approaches the material from a responsible standpoint.
True, there are strippers and drug users, sadism is featured heavily and there's plenty of missions that cross over from morally ambiguous to just plain wrong all of it with racial undertones on the side. The key is that these elements are always featured in a reasonable context and never used just for the sake it. The smut and obscenity complement the game design rather than fight against it.
Still occasionally annoying because of the too-regular load times and unbalanced melee and ranged combat modes, Bloodlines is worth playing purely because no other game will let you take a human blood-slave for your vampiric alter-ego to use, abuse and devour as you wish.
