It's Better to Give Than Receive
Moburma
Hello Syndicate fans,
Christmas is coming, so here are some Syndicate Wars related presents to put under your proverbial tree.
Over the past year I tracked down and dumped the Asian releases of Syndicate Wars. This might not sound that interesting or useful, but in fact both the Japanese and Korean releases have a lot more going on than meets the eye.
It turns out the Japanese version was actually a WINDOWS release of the game and does not run under DOS. It also oddly has English and French language files included, as well as Japanese, suggesting it was actually originally a version of the game intended to be released in the rest of world (making of articles on the game suggest a Windows version of the game was started by Bullfrog but unreleased).
Unfortunately, it's a pig to get running under modern Windows (DGVoodoo gets it to the menus but crashes in-game), but works in e.g. PCEM (good thing there’s already a much better modern Windows port available now, eh?).
It also weirdly has all the adverts in-game replaced with ads for a CD-ROM edition of manga artist Hiroki Mafuyu's art book Louise. The reason for this is he contributed the notorious Japanese box art with a Madonna-esque lady cavorting to music in front of minigun-toting agents. This has had minor play on Twitter (or whatever it is called these days) with people trying to spruce up various low-res photos of the box to get a better version of this artwork. What they didn't realise was that this art was reproduced in full in his 2000 art book Etiquette of Violence. It's actually called "Memories" and I took the liberties of uploading a high-quality scan of it here if you'd like a copy: https://imgbb.com/bFnkjjy.
You can download the Japanese version of Syndicate Wars here: https://archive.org/details/synwars-win
The Korean version is a real enigma. Not actually Korean at all (it's all in English), it includes different early versions of some game maps, as well as difficulty changes to some levels. Even weirder, someone has included all the levels for the PlayStation version as well (which of course don't work on the PC version). Strangest of all, these are in the format of an earlier currently unreleased PlayStation version, and has 27 levels not even included in the final PS1 version.
It already works fine using the modern fan port, so it's definitely worth checking out if you're a hardcore fan.
You can download the Korean version of Syndicate Wars here: https://archive.org/details/syn-wars-korea
For a detailed write-up on what’s different in these versions, see: https://tcrf.net/Syndicate_Wars_(DOS)#Regional_Differences
Finally, there is a new release of the Syndicate Wars fan port out.
Some very nice bug fixes here, most importantly a fix for a game-breaking bug to do with unlocking campaign levels, so if you are on the previous release it's recommended you update ASAP. There are also fixes for things like the in-game shadows being broken and some text formatting issues. You can just download the patch version and unzip the contents of the swars directory over your existing syndicate wars install folder.
The new Korean and Japanese versions both work fine with the port, just be sure to choose English during install for both.
Download page:
https://github.com/swfans/swars/releases/tag/0.3.6.1624
Merry Christmas!
