Beyond the woke shit they do EA has been an anti-consumer dumpster fire for as long as I've been aware of them (about 12 years now). I was (and still am) a huge Sims 3 player, and there's all kinds of unethical shit they did with that over a decade ago even if it doesn't hold a candle to the shit they do now. They also destroyed the SimCity franchise by sabotaging SimCity 2013 and then scapegoating Maxis so they would have an excuse to destroy it. I played SimCity 4 which was decent, and SimCity 2000 was released before Maxis was bought out. For those of you who are older or have been following this stuff longer than I have, was EA ever a good company or have they been scamming their customers from the beginning?
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Yup, the original Road Rash trilogy was amazing, along with games like Skitchin'.
Their Mutant League games were also awesome and different from everything else out at the time. Even their sports titles used to be good. The Strike trilogy, consisting of Desert, Jungle, and Urban Strike, were all solid games and pushed the boundaries of the hardware with each outing.
They got kind of stale toward the end of the 90s and early aughts, but they also had one of the best third-person, action-stealth, cinematic adventure games ever made: 007: Everything or Nothing.
If you can find a copy of that gem it's pure 007 bliss. It's everything a James Bond game should be, hot birds like Shannon Elizabeth and Heidi Klum, a cool villain with Willem Dafoe, and they combined a lot of their tech into one game, utilising Need For Speed's driving mechanics for the driving sections.
The Pontchartrain Bridge level is still one of the best action set pieces ever devised in any video game. I would definitely advise you to play the game instead of just looking it up on YouTube because playing it is well worth it.
Plus, I really liked the melee combat and co-op mode. The co-op was actually about as good as Splinter Cell Chaos Theory's co-op, since it had its own unique set of levels that played adjacent to the main Everything or Nothing story.
Oh, and it had a ton of unlockables and hidden secrets you could acquire just by playing through the game. That was peak EA right there -- great graphics, great gameplay, great level design, awesome cinematics, and highly replayable.
After that is when EA kind of nestled back into their typical evil ways. They made a lacklustre and completely pointless remake of From Russia With Love; it's more polished than Everything or Nothing but also more soulless, boring, and less mechanically diverse. I can't remember, but I think they axed the co-op too.
From there it was a steady decline into boring annual sports ball titles, usurping popular studios and gutting them after having them churn out soulless cash grabs, and some occasional licenced products that no one cared about. But to answer your question, no... EA was not always evil and crappy. They used to make high-quality and innovative games for a short time, including some counter-culture titles. A real shame about what happened to them after Riccitiello took over in the mid-to-late aughts.
Kudos for mentioning the Strike games. Soviet Strike was also excellent but I never got to play Nuclear Strike.
EA was largely a byword for quality in the 90s, publisher or in-house.
Oh I forgot about the Strike games on the other systems, you're right. Soviet Strike was on the PSX? Or was that Nuclear Strike? I lost track of them after the newer consoles came out back in the 90s.
PSX and Saturn, yeah, I played SS on the Saturn. Saturn usually had the inferior versions of 3D games, but sometimes was superior when it came to 2D. [EDIT looked it up and apparently the Saturn version was the later, superior version, due to bugfixes and additions. Although I have my doubts about that when it comes to frame rate] I've been on a bit of an emulating kick lately, so I'm tempted to go back and revisit the series. Nuclear never made it to Saturn.
The game Future Cop: LAPD also supposedly started life in development as Future Strike, a final unreleased Strike game. I've never played it.
Soviet Strike was underrated imo. The 3D was a bit jank and jerky, but you got used to it in that era. They made up for it with the effort that went into the mission presentation. Every campaign and every mission had their own little bit of live acted FMV featuring your team of helper operatives. But not only that, even every enemy and resource pickup had their own FMV vids explaining them and those changed every mission, eg. on a mission in russia you might get 15 seconds of general grizzleface warning about the soviet chopper fuel you'll have to resort to picking up. 45 minutes total of fmvs, I loved shit like that back in the day.
Oh that's a good call. I use my Steamdeck mostly for emulation, I might get a copy of the Strike games and Future Cop LAPD for the PSX emu (I originally didn't like Future Cop when it first released, but I, too, have been replaying a ton of older games and revisiting my impressions on them, so I might enjoy it this time around after I finish Oni).
And it's also funny because I used to have a love/hate relationship with FMV back in the day (loved how it featured real people but didn't really like the grainy look), but I really appreciate it a lot more now than before due to how soulless and uninspired a lot of cinematics are these days. It's one of the reasons I've really enjoyed Ross' Game Dungeon as he plays plenty classic games that really made a mark back in the 1990s with the grainy yet inviting FMV sequencing. It really gives me a great sense of nostalgia.