Almost done with
Bedlam and I'm kind of glad it's only five-ish hours long. It's kind of a nebulous thing to say but the game's got heart and I've sort of enjoyed it but I don't know if it's something I would strongly recommend people buy. Definitely not at full price.
Bedlam takes you through various games that are similar but not too legally close to Quake, Medal of Honor, Left 4 Dead, Hexen, Halo, some tank/war game I can't pin down, Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Gradius but in the most shallow ways possible. These trips through other games is purely aesthetic. The various levels don't emulate the style of gameplay or level design of the fps games they're aping. You're always in these massive sprawling environments that are filled with a lot of cut and paste geometry that are sparsely populated with some truly brain dead enemies. The only advantage the A.I. has is the distance from which it can start shooting you, this advantage gets quickly erased based off of the weapons you pick up, specifically the rocket and grenade launchers. That's another issue, you start in a Quake-like and got to the MoH-like with Quake-like weapons. After the MoH-like you're in a Hexen-like facing off against melee enemies with shotguns. It's not a competition, it's not challenging. You just mow your way through some spawn waves and move to the next waypoint. Once you get the rail gun, which has plentiful ammo, it's pretty much over. You can one-shot virtually everything in the game. On top of all of this you can rocket jump without penalty, no self-damage, which puts the A.I. at more of a disadvantage but also allows for some ridiculously fast level traversal.
The story is kind of enjoyable and is probably what pushed me through the game, which you can't really discuss at all without potentially spoiling it. There's two achievements that I missed earlier in the game to 100% it but I don't think I'll bother to replay the game to get them once I do beat it. Not a bad game but something I'd recommend only picking up in a sale.
Sega has owned Atlus for two-and-a-half years now. Barring a sudden change of policy, it's clear Sega has no intention of forcing anything on Atlus or of former Atlus properties. Essentially, Atlus receives the "golden goose" treatment a la R*, only for no discernible reason.
Sega's probably not interfering with Atlus because it has a successful niche and there's no reason to mess with it. Also companies aren't necessarily as agile as we sometimes think they can be so the two year time frame doesn't worry me as much as Sega's potential evaluation that Atlus' games might simply be too niche to merit the cost/risk/effort of porting them to PC. Like I don't know how large an audience there is for something like Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs The Soulless Army on PC but then a Harvest Moon-like is pushing half a million copies, so who knows.