Reception
Critical reception for SiN was mixed. While PC Zone 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 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 and glitches 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's 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 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).
Read more about this topic: Sin (video game)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)