Midway Games. It couldn’t have been more perfect, could it? Never ‘Fullway Games’ or ‘All The Way Games’, but a publisher seemingly destined to a Double-A legacy in namesake. And one of its greatest gifts is Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, a game which celebrates walls and floors, railings and barrels, fans and boxes.
To the uninitiated, Psi-Ops is a third-person action game where you control a bloke with psionic powers, and you use these powers to yank people off the ground and set them ablaze. Admittedly, my memory of the game is both hazy, and paradoxically, very specific. Having played the legendary Psi-Ops demo many years ago, I can clearly recall gorging on the opening mission over and over again. A timer would tick down, and I’d have just fifteen minutes to jog through the game’s grey confines, tap into Psychic Man’s mind powers and chuck enemies around. When I finally encountered the full game, I kind of missed that timer.