By Jim Rossignol on December 3rd, 2010 at 9:00 am.
Can it really be almost a decade since the original Emergency game? If you think about it, a tactical management game based around manipulating the emergency services – putting out fires, taking people to hospital, rescuing the stricken – is the kind of thing that not only makes sense as a game, but would largely act as a positive image for games as a whole. Well, if it was any good. You can judge whether this modernised making of Emergency 2012 is any good by checking out the demo.
Emergency 2012 is out now. Game footage below.
03/12/2010 at 09:08 Monchberter says:
Does it contain ‘UK PARALYSED BY INCH OF SNOW – MILLIONS IN MORAL DANGER’ scenario?
03/12/2010 at 09:09 Monchberter says:
Well, maybe moral by Daily Mail standards, but what I meant was ‘mortal danger’
03/12/2010 at 09:49 battles_atlas says:
Don’t you realise how many padeophiles each snow drift contains?
03/12/2010 at 09:50 Babs says:
More like ‘UK PARALYSED BY SNOW – PEOPLE HAVING TO WALK TO THE SHOPS!’
03/12/2010 at 11:43 frymaster says:
an inch of snow? I wish….
God knows how many inches of snow have fallen, but there’s a least a foot lying in my back garden, and I’m in a city… in rural areas, where it’s colder and less will melt in the day, it’s got to be much higher.
Also don’t forget we don’t normally get _ANY_ snow this early.
03/12/2010 at 15:41 Archonsod says:
There’s around 3 foot of snow around here. It’s only the South which seem to panic in it, I think the most serious change around here was spotting the odd lass who’d conceded to tights or a shirt last Saturday night.
03/12/2010 at 16:36 Xercies says:
I think its traditional by now that new sites think that snow is a mortal danger because they are based in the south while everyone who is normal just shrugs it off.
I love Britain sometimes
(By the way no bloody snow where i am!)
03/12/2010 at 16:40 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
@Monchberter
It’s the second mission, though it’s more like “UK PARALYSED BY SINGLE ICICLE FALLING ON A TRUCK”
03/12/2010 at 20:56 Dozer says:
The UK scenario is “FIREMEN ON STRIKE – VANDALS CALL FIRE BRIGADE TO SEE ARMY’S GREEN FIRE ENGINES”
03/12/2010 at 23:58 ORYLY says:
Did I just see policemen shoot at dogs/wolves in the snowy level?
CITY OVERRUN BY WOLVES
03/12/2010 at 09:15 Schaulustiger says:
Well, judging by the looks it seems to be a bit clunky but not uninteresting, though I’m still haunted by memories of me playing an old Emergency ten years or so ago. It was a horrible mess.
So, did anyone actually bother to try one of the newer iterations? The concept is still pretty cool.
03/12/2010 at 09:38 Skurmedel says:
I tried to buy Emergency 4, because it looked fun. But it’s nigh on impossible where I live. Direct 2 Drive’s got it, but they have some kind of regional restriction on it. I only played the demo of it. It didn’t seem bad, but hard to make up your mind from what seemed like a demo mission.
03/12/2010 at 09:58 Wilson says:
@Schaulustiger – I really enjoyed EM4, and still go back to it every so often. The game feels clunky at times, but it’s nice to be helping people rather than just shooting them (though you can shoot criminals sometimes). The base game is pretty good, but the LA mod (http://www.losangelesmod.com/) vastly improves it. Though I seem to recall I had some issues finding a place to buy it as well.
I’ll be interested to see how this new version does. There were a lot of things that could have been improved with EM4, so we’ll see how they did. You can play EM4 cooperative with friends, but for some insane reason you can’t all call in vehicles as you like based on your individual budgets, you have to swap a ‘buying vehicles’ state back and forth before anyone can buy anything.
03/12/2010 at 09:50 battles_atlas says:
Fair dos, that is a shit trailer.
03/12/2010 at 09:51 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
Don’t bother.
Emergency 2012 is not an improvement over Emergency 4 in any way.
03/12/2010 at 09:59 Wilson says:
@Malawi Frontier Guard – Could you elaborate on that? I’ll try the demo, but I’d like your opinion if you know more about it.
03/12/2010 at 11:48 Skurmedel says:
Would like to know as well really.
03/12/2010 at 12:05 Palodin says:
It’s a bit prettier, but otherwise it is exactly the sad as EM4 in terms of gameplay. More like an expansion pack than anything else, from what I’ve played
03/12/2010 at 12:06 Palodin says:
Sad? Same. Bloody iPhone keyboard.
03/12/2010 at 12:43 Wilson says:
@Palodin – Thanks for that. I’ll wait until any good mods come out then, and when it’ll be a bit cheaper. I think the concept behind the game has such huge potential, I don’t think they’re doing the best they could do.
03/12/2010 at 13:47 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
It’s still the same emergency-services-themed arcade RTS where you micromanage every little unit. Click on the car, move the car, make the man leave the car, click on the man, equip the man, move the man, etc. It gets old really fast. The campaign improves a bit with the real-world locations, but otherwise it’s just the same damn game. Literally the only thing better about this compared to Emergency 4 is the ability to give a person equipment right when you select them, instead of clicking around the relevant vehicle.
Maybe there’s some fun to be had in co-op like in 4, but I’m not counting on it. You can’t even shoot random pedestrians or gas tanks anymore.
03/12/2010 at 10:00 K says:
Does it have double jumps?
I don’t think it has double jumps.
If there are not double jumps, I don’t want to play it.
03/12/2010 at 10:26 Sinomatic says:
Positive image for gaming hm? I’ve spent most of my gaming life trying to defeat evil and save the world but apparently I’m some sort of immoral, violent lunatic-in-waiting.
Emergency 2012 is clearly just our MASS HUMAN TRAGEDY SIMULATOR, depraved souls that we are….
03/12/2010 at 13:23 Pani says:
Framerate looks choppy in them trailers. Shame.
03/12/2010 at 15:25 Kizor says:
Emergency 4 was the first game in the series where the player would occasionally fight the disaster more than the interface. Its missions rapidly turned from rescue ops to coreography. Multiple restarts and a constant stream of quicksaves and quickloads reqired. to find all the bodies, catch all the gas tanks, catch firefighters running in the wrong direction or just find out how the objectives are supposed to be fulfilled.
I’ve played through it several times. Bless its little heart, even though its endgame doesn’t hold a candle to Emergency 3′s catastrophic winter (police snipers get to take down wolf packs) and nuclear terrorism.
03/12/2010 at 23:17 Rugged Malone says:
I can’t help but think this is a great idea for a game.
Really poor implementation (even just judging from that trailer…eww) but hopefully someone with better game design skills will tackle an “emergency services management game” and do it justice.
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04/12/2010 at 20:51 Damian says:
EM4 is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good game. Whoever said that you fight the interface more than the disasters was spot on. However, doing the Free Play with a 4-year-old who is deeply into emergency vehicles is a great way to spend videogame time together without attracting they typical tedious comments about such activities.
I’ll probably buy this just so I don’t have to play in Crayola-mode any more.
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