Two random observations [spoilers]

Two random observations I made while playing Blade Runner:

1. In the kitchen at Chinatown, after Zuben gets scared and runs off after trying to scald you with hot... food, you chase him and he jumps down from the ceiling to kill you. You put away your gun; he gets confused but is willing to talk. McCoy then admits he's a "rep detect," and then Zuben's like "REP DETECT?!" and runs away. Apparently Zuben is one of the less intelligent models if he couldn't guess that some guy coming into his kitchen to question him about a fellow replicant (or especially requesting to VK him) isn't a blade runner, particularly since he was just about to kill him.
2. One of the DNA files you can get is at the twins' lab. Now I can understand if you decide to be a rep sympathizer and go the Lucy or Dektora routes while getting as much DNA as possible to possibly lengthen your lifespans, but if you go to the moonbus with Clovis and get every DNA except the twins, I seem to recall Clovis being a tad more optimistic if you had gotten the twins' DNA too. Considering the twins are on the moonbus (at the top, in the cockpit) then this means they forgot their whole mission as replicants trying to survive, not to mention something which is the constant subject of their research.

Knowing that currently someone is not only playing the 1997 game but actually in a thoughtful way and exploring the ending variations, puts a smile on my face. I wish I had the time to replay it, just like the old days. I agree that it is awkward to hear Zuben say "rep detect?" in that way... I suppose that besides him being a C-mental, all he ever heard was "the hunter/s". About the DNA, it would have been so cool if endings on the game were longer, giving more information in subtke ways. Alas, rendering those animations back in the day was not as cheap as it is now, and it shows that the developers "made it as well as they could make it". I wish we can someday see another BR game made with the same passion, plus the benefit of the 2000's gaming technology evolution.

The fact that you can find tons of files in the game's memory (e.g. conversations) that you never actually see in the game itself shows that the designers had a lot of ambition for the project but couldn't fit it all in. I notice that a lot with 90's games; Goldeneye has tons of beta/alpha stuff in its memory. Nowadays as games are more "professionally" created (and also mass-produced) you don't see that sort of thing nearly as often.

Another thing I find neat about the game is that the graphics, outside the pixelated characters, do a very good job of setting the ambiance even today. As one guy who did a "let's play" of the game put it, "The thing that's impressive about the graphics in this game is that the background is constantly shifting. I don't know whether it's because of the voxel engine or if it's prerendered or what, but the lights, the fans, and the fog effects are on a loop in the background, so not only does the world look alive, it actually looks busy. I still haven't seen a game that managed to match it since. These days, whenever a game is trying to look 'busy', it usually means they try to stuff however many low poly people milling about in the background they can without sacrificing framerates. But doing it with just lights and fog? "

I totally agree with that game wordl feeling alive. I remember that after I got all endings (or main variations, if not all) I used to start a saved game and just leave McCoy standing idle in some areas, just to get an awesome screensaver and fill my room with 2019.