Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992)

Name:Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure
Number:239
Year:1992
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Apogee
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:4 hours 30 minutes
Won:No (104W/77L)

For the most part, Apogee's titles have generally not felt like direct analogues to the console games that dominated side-scrollers from the late '80s to the early '90s. Keen or Duke might have bits that are similar, but there's nothing about them that felt like they were inferior copies of Megaman or Contra. In fact there's been a pretty clear progression from the old single-screen titles to finally throwing off the shackles of poor screen scrolling. Cosmo is different, because Cosmo has that whiff of copying about it.

The story is, Cosmo's birthday is coming up tomorrow and his parents are taking him to Disney World, but a comet crashes into their ship, forcing them to make an emergency landing on an uncharted planet, which the episode's title helpfully calls Forbidden Planet. Which, when I think about it, feels like shoehorning a reference to a famous sci-fi film than an actual name. After landing, Cosmo's father repairs the ship while Cosmo then decides to go wandering off, because Cosmo is a small, dumb child. Only, it turns out that when he returns, his parents are missing, and there's only strange footprints there. Cosmo worries that monsterous aliens are going to eat his parents and he needs to rescue them.

In contrast to most Apogee characters, Cosmo is unable to shoot things, because he is a small child with suction cup hands. However, he can jump on enemies and can climb walls. Jumping on anything, be it enemies or crates with goodies inside, cause Cosmo to jump up a little. The instructions also tell me that he can find and use bombs, because shooting people is bad, but using hi-powered explosives is good. They work like you'd think, slow timer until they explode, so you shouldn't be using them willy-nilly.

Bombs are comparatively high-powered. Anything that I had trouble killing with it was less because it couldn't damage it, but rather because it was hard to actually land one on it. It spawns a little in front of Cosmo, so you can't deploy it if that isn't possible , and you have to safely get close. One it explodes, seemingly any non-wall object touching it dies with it. Random eyes on the ground, and basically every scenery trap. Even spikes. To say it's useful is understating it, the bomb is a tool more clever than any gun could be.

Cosmo is actually a kind of crappy protagonist from a playability standpoint. He moves slowly, possibly because the screen scrolling isn't all that smooth. His jump has one of those thin arcs that feels annoying to jump around with because you don't get enough horizontal reach. I've had the problem more than once. The wall climbing is also quite weird, rather than walking up it, you stick to the wall until you decide to jump off. It's also a bit disconcerting to have to do it, but gradually it's validness as an option becomes second nature At least he can look up and down, a very handy skill with some of these areas, and a health bar. Which can be increased, but is quite rare to find and almost always is in a secret area.

The DNA of proceeding Apogee games is very obvious. While Cosmo isn't just Duke with a few changes going on, the menus and probably a significant chunk of the underlying game logic was taken from there. Judging by Cosmo's occasional appearance in Commander Keen source ports, I suspect the two were frankensteined together. Since it has more handcrafted backgrounds along with free floating objects, as opposed to being on a grid.

There are also crates and barrels with stuff in them. Usually the barrels are better, bombs and health pickups are inside.Crates usually just have fruit inside, which just give points, something there is no shortage of. Rounding out the pickups are stars.

The opening level does a good job of introducing the game's central design in a clear way. To start with, there's a hint orb, which really looks like a trap of some sort, and the first one activates when you automatically go into it. Future ones you have to press up on in order to use.

But there's that whiff of what I dislike in plain platformers. Just plain old going left to right, with the occasional branch upwards. It's Apogee, so there's a bit more to it, a hidden secret in a pit, a little bit of verticality required and some unusual monster designs. I must admit, I wasn't expecting what I thought of as a children's game to have enemies which stopped to roar once in a while. But that said, it's another game where you're supposed to get enjoyment from collecting hundreds of pieces of fruit.

Every two levels you get a bonus stage, which I must admit feels pointless at first. You get unlimited lives, and while it does drop health and bombs occasionally, I was in no danger of running low on the former, and the later was not very helpful in a bonus stage. You also see enemies which can suck out the fruit you collect. Of course, later on I appreciated them, since health and bombs were not rationed out quite so generously.

Here are the enemies, unlike Keen, there's no easy names for these guys, so I made up my own. Enemies take variable amounts of hits.

• Croc Heads, red walking enemies with giant teeth. Stops to roar occasionally, don't do anything else. Your basic enemy, even if the roars add a little character.
• Purple Worms, also walk around, but if you stomp on them, you create a little puddle of acid where they once were. Which is as unpleasant as it sounds. Touching them beforehand isn't actually lethal, only the acid is.
• Blue Balls, which come to think of it, might be an inappropriate reference. They roll back and forth, but if they fall off an edge, they parachute down.
• Cyan Balls, more like obstacles than enemies, because they don't move and stand in the air. I don't think they're killable, but I didn't try. Basically there to allow Cosmo to jump to places he wouldn't be able to otherwise.
• Butterfly Worm, segmented worms with wings. Like the Cyan balls, they're more obstacles than enemies. You use them to reach areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
• Flying Worms, which are the enemies in the bonus stages. They steal points, and don't cause much trouble otherwise.
• Climbing Vines, segmented green plants. They don't move around, but you can't kill them. Jumping just causes Cosmo to bounce off, and bombing just momentarily causes them to retreat into the ground.

• Gob Blasters, blue monsters with yellow spots and a tube. They shoot at you with pinpoint accuracy. Which sucks in one way, but makes them rigidly easy to avoid on the other.
• Jump Flowers, less an enemy and more an obstacle. It grabs whatever enters it and then spits it out like a spring pad.
• Blue birds, which fly around in a set pattern. Not a pattern at you, just a pattern near you.

• Muscle ghosts, cyan enemies that look like ghosts. They hang around, then fly a really short distance in the direction you're in. If you're not looking at them. Of course, if you're stomping on them, it doesn't matter, they won't do squat. Once you do it enough, they turn into smaller forms which are easy enough to avoid.
• Tube Sponge, yellow sponge-like enemies with two sets of legs, on the top and on the bottom. You have to use bombs on these guys, you can't jump on them.
• Bootleg Thwomp, basically just stone Thwomps. Considering the Muscle Ghosts are boos, I wonder how many enemies in this game are just reskinned Mario ones that I haven't played enough to understand? Oh, and they have no range limit, hope there isn't one on the ceiling five floors up.

• Face Plants, look like the Cyan Balls, except they're attached to a wall. You can't stomp on them, and they shoot at you. Basically wall guns.
• Spring Bot, robots with guns on the front and springs on top. Stomping on them causes you to jump up, like you jumped on a springpad. They'll only shoot at you if they're within light, as in a lit up lightbulb.
• Spike Bot, moving spikes. Jumping on them has fairly obvious results.
• Shadow Bot, a robot which, until you get close to it, is in shadow. Get close and it punches you away. Basically the only robot you can actually stomp on.
• Lightning bot, a set of wheels which shoots lightning up until it reaches the ceiling. Again, you can't stomp on them, so you need bombs.
• Cursed Cabbage, a green enemy which appears as a cabbage when not moving. Once you know what it is, it's not that difficult, it just has short, occasional jumps and dies in one hit.
• Flying Bullet, a bullet-like object that jumps between two points. So high that you can't jump on top of it in the middle of one.

• Spiked Demon, a big, jumping red foot with spikes all over. Has enough of an arc and a frequent enough jump that you can't easily just stomp it to death. Which is hard to even do because it takes so many hits.

The game quickly introduces most of the roster. It feels like they're just not pacing them out, instead just getting it over with as quickly as possible. Which is odd, because early on it seems to be imitating Sonic's level design choices. Two stages set in a certain environment. No bosses, just a bonus stage. The second odd bit, beyond the obvious Mario parallels, is how the theme seems to be creepy and bug-like. Wasn't this supposed to be a children's game?

Things start getting active at Episode 1 Level 4. Things were already ramping up, but I start dying a lot here. It's not necessarily the enemies, although being casual about enemies is likely going to get you slaughtered. The real threat is how many bottomless pits this level has. It's not so much that they're there, in that the game feels like it's a bit deceptive about them. Verticality comes into play more than your typical platformer, and unless you look down a lot, it's very easy to get blindsided with what seems to be just a drop slightly down but is actually a bottomless pit.

Level 5 starts off a bit off the rails before revealing it's straightforward, if annoying. It's an underground cave which is the worst kind of maze. You're not sure which direction you're supposed to go in and it's not quite clear if you're supposed to go back up. Once it's clear where you're supposed to be going, it just turns into a game of going down, each level in turn. It's actually getting awkward to have to stop to look down, the game is constantly hiding things just out of sight, so sometimes things within your sight are easy to ignore. Like say, spear traps in the wall or ceiling.

Level 6 is an ice level. Oddly, this avoids most of the usual annoyances in favor of making itself known in weird ways. Rather than sliding, slopes act as conveyor belts and hanging onto pockets of ice causes you to slip down. For the first time, you actually have to take advantage of this wall-crawling in a meaningful way to advance, by jumping between the sides of platforms. It makes sense, but at first it can feel like you're missing something else.

Level 8 throws in a completely new mechanic, a flying platform. As in, one the player controls. Naturally there are enough environmental hazards to make things tricky. It's actually quite hard to get around them, because pressing down goes down, it doesn't look down. The second is that there are a lot of electrical barriers blocking your path. Stopping this involves a switch, but unlike how this would normally work, you have to drop a bomb on it, then jump on it, because jumping on it causes Cosmo to get hit by spikes above. It doesn't help that the design goes against everything the levels have previously been, being extremely back and forth in how you're supposed to win.

Level 9 is weird. The game's been shifting between more themes in a single episode than most do across their entire running time and I'm left scratching my head at how we've got an oil field in bug-infested planet. The various oil spouts can be jumped on, but go through the stream and you get hurt. It's a very simple level, just one with some weird concepts.

Level 10 is another frustrating exercise. It's one thing to have a keyhunt. It's another thing to have a keyhunt when the keys are springs hidden in the walls. See, in this game there are colored springs and doors. Push the spring, the door opens. These are not the most obvious thing, since years of of side-scrollers have trained me to ignore random bits of wall standing out.

After a long and hard journey to get all the springs and not die by the unexpected, I meet the boss. Who looks like Robotik in his Egg Machine, just with a metal dome on top. You just stomp on top of it until it dies. It tries to stomp you from doing this by going back and forth and by having sliding tiles to prevent you from just hanging above it. It isn't very difficult, it just feels a bit tricky after such a long jaunt.

Episode 1 ends with Cosmo falling down a large shaft into the mouth of a monster. That is, your standard level, Cosmo falling down, then an image which flashes by and the usual, what will happen to our hero now cliffhanger that ends all shareware episodes. Episode 2 starts the same way, only revealing that Cosmo has entered inside the monster. I'm starting to doubt whether or not this is a children's game.

Level 2, the real first level is...charming. It really hammers home how you're inside some sort of creature. It's simple in theory, you're mostly just jumping across tiny pillars. The game enforces an inability to use the wall climbing ability by making most walls ones that Cosmo can't stick to. It's not necessarily difficult, just tedious doing dozens of these things.

Level 3 and 4, a mushroom forest. The thing about the Croc Heads, the not Goombas, is that getting hurt by them is usually a dumb move on the player's part. Unfortunately, the game conspires to make this not the case here. Instead, you're constantly going up and down slopes, and hitboxes are square, not cut to an enemy. So you constantly have to give enemies a wide berth just to avoid getting hit because you didn't jump at the right angle to kill them.

Some very tedious but otherwise unnotable levels pass by. Most of the tricks the game has seem to have been used by now. Look at all the tiny bits of platform we make you jump on. Or the ice level where you have to climb up a slippery wall above a pit. Then the game gets nasty in the forest section. Rather than the polite jumping on stationary enemies, we get the Muscle Ghosts, you have to jump across a pit on them. Which is possible, but man, I do not want to see what fan mods do with that.

Level 10 is an exercise in frustration. It's a long tedious level in which you basically have to just grind out the correct path. Even when I was getting it right, sometimes I would get it wrong, the game going off in such a way that my previously correct path messed up in some way. The balls going in a direction I didn't expect, or a shooting enemy going in a direction I would have rathered it didn't. That's not even getting into how health pickups are placed so that when they fall or fly out of a barrel, you have to chase them across the map. Then there are the enemies placed in such a way so Cosmo jumps off them, to another platform. To get to the end, you literally have to rush and hope that you don't get killed by either a Blue Ball or a Spiked Demon.

For this, Cosmo gets out of the cave he was in. (He was in a cave?) Then he assumes his family are in a distant city and we get the lead-in to Episode 3.

Episode 3 starts off with basically no indication of this, instead being set in another forest. And with no sign that it's the start of an Episode, because this first level is already pulling all the tricks and annoyances that the last level of Episode 2 did. Followed by another level set inside a creature. Most of this feels like repeats of earlier levels but with more of the annoying parts.

Level 6 shifts it up in an annoying way. You get a starting section where you have to navigate across a series of platforms which are step-through for a moment after you land on them. Only, this is the only area around and you need to avoid the Spiked Demons and get a spring activated. Then the level reveals just what the game can do with Spiked Demons, regular spikes and fire tubes. I'm not really caring for it.

I gave up on Level 8. It's another spring hunt in a game that's full of spring hunts. This might be the 15th or so. After a while they blur together. The problem is that the spring in question is very tedious to find. I didn't find it. There are just so many traps you can easily get hurt by forgetting to pay attention for one second and the level is just so long. There are so many places it could be hiding that I feel like I can never actually find it, and so I didn't.

Fortunately, if I were to make it to the end, I would discover that Cosmo's parents were safe all along, he was worried for nothing, and he gets to go to Disney World, which is on Earth. Apparently nobody notices that an alien with suction cup hands is around. With that, the rating.

Weapons:
The bombs were very cleverly utilized weapons, feeling like they had limitations and required thought in their use. Even in a game with a dozen more weapons, they'd be the star. 2/10

Enemies:
There's a good variety even if there are certain enemies the game gravitates towards. I do dislike how many enemies are naked copies of Mario enemies, but other times it does make up for it. 4/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Cosmo seems to rely on most of Apogee's worst traits, switching between confusing maze levels and the occasional, get past that you little crap. There was very little that made me go, aha, that was clever, just mostly grateful on the more forgettable ones. 3/10

Player Agency:
In of himself, Cosmo moves okay. Wall hugging takes some getting used to and there's always a bit of jank to it, but the camera is something you'll be fighting against all the time. Moreso than enemies, what's stopping you from winning is the camera. 4/10

Interactivity:
There is a lot you can blow up with a bomb. Maybe it isn't dramatic level changing stuff, but you can screw around quite a bit. 2/10

Atmosphere:
This is certainly a weird, alien planet, even when your lead is a naked alien with suction cup hands. If nothing else, this game manages to keep throwing weird stuff at you even when it's doing something as mundane as a robot city. 5/10

Graphics:
Probably Apogee's best in-house effort yet. Tons of effects, excellent backgrounds and animation. 7/10

Story:
I feel like the story is unnecessarily nasty towards Cosmo. Every episode start begins with Cosmo in some pickle he needs to get out of, and then it all turns out to have been pointless. Try selling that one on TV. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Bobby Prince made some nice tunes, but little sticks out and I had the music off most of the time. Sound effects are solid and are PC speaker. 3/10

That's 31. Which seems unreasonably high, so let's bring that down to 30. It's amazing what having some decent graphics can do for an otherwise mixed bag.

There are good ideas, but it's hurt by just how frustrating it is getting around the harder levels. Though I must admit, from a practical, we need to provide value for money factor, I nearly beat it in under 5 hours. That's not exactly a good chunk of time. Considering that the commercial part is even less, I can understand why they made the choices they did even if I don't like them.

Next time, we'll see something from 1984.

Ashes of Empire (1992)

Name:Ashes of Empire
Number:238
Year:1992
Publisher:GameTek
Developer:Midnight
Genre:FPS/Strategy
Difficulty:5/5
Time:8 hours 50 minutes
Won:No (104W/76L)

Ashes of Empire presents a more complex version of what Midwinter 2 was trying to do, gain control of a territory before an opposing force decides to attack you. In contrast to the slightly goofier post-apocalyptic setting of Midwinter, this time it's in a vast country called the Confederation of Syndicalist Republics, which is somewhere between the Soviet Union, in size and having a massive nuclear arsenal, and the Yugoslavia in having 5 distinct ethnicities that all hate each others guts and would like to see those guts spilled on the streets. (Well, that's what the CSR has, anyway)

I note that I'm reconstructing the information about the game as best I can from what resources I have. See, this game has a truly massive amount of background materials. It's a bit difficult to find the manual, but even so, this manual is incomplete, it doesn't have anything from chapters 4-7, which are possibly not essentially to winning the game, but do provide important background information. Knowing the Midwinter 2, "Regional Profiles" sounds absolutely vital to actually winning the game. And the rest of it sounds like useful background information. I do understand why nobody bothered to upload what is 100+ pages of something that's of little interest to even most DOS gamers, even if it hurts. On the plus side, there is a VHS tape that a few people were kind enough to upload to the internet.

It's not difficult to see why. What the manual has paints it as more valuable than the game itself in terms of actually playing it. I'll explain some of it later, but even in this cut down form it contains vital information for success. The player is the commander of the United Community (Obvious take off the UN) forces. What these are is vague, but you're leading a force to bring peace and harmony to the CSR by pacifying each sub-Republic. This is accomplished by performing four tasks. Building, Demolition, Pacification and Ethnic Harmony. As the UN's major failures in Yugoslavia were yet to happen, I believe this was not intended to be satirical, but rather completely serious.

Selecting where you start off.

Getting away from the Yugoslavia comparisons, we ARE talking about a power which has nukes, and has elements in what remains of the government who aren't afraid to use them. Time is a factor in the game, you need to go through things as quickly as you can. There are hard limits and soft limits. The game has a time limit of 150 days, owing to how the state of nuclear alert goes up every 50 days. You're likely to get less than that, since that's the high limit. Soft limits are things like time in a province or republic, dictated by how many "morale" buildings you get under your control or by capturing provinces.

Further soft limits include the people in power deciding to nuke the region you're in or partisans deciding to set fire to forests. You get fire-fighting teams for the latter, but there's nothing you can do about the nukes. From what I understand, having never had either happen, they destroy resources you get for freeing a province rather than killing you.

So...it's almost a famine?

Despite being a game with goofy gameplay, I don't believe I've ever played a game that's captured quite a feeling of despair in warfare before. You're not fighting against some evil empire, you're just fighting against desperate people doing desperate things. Yes, the top brass are willing to nuke themselves, but the country is literally collapsing around them. We're not dealing with people who are all there.

Civilian cars, because even in fictional communist republics, some people are more equal than others.

To win the game, one needs to get all the Republics pacified, which requires pacifying two provinces and the capital province, or a considerable number of other provinces. I never got far enough to deal with a capital province, so maybe it's considerably more difficult. The specifics of each pacification programme in each province is different, the buildings you need to build/capture, the buildings you destroy, the enemies you need to eliminate and the votes you get all depend on various factors.

Negotiating, and being told when some local Professionals will return.

The way you accomplish this doesn't change much though. You start off in a plane, flying from village to village, negotiating with the owners of various buildings. You're not getting buildings for the sake of getting buildings, because resources play a role in the game. You get a number of trade goods, combat items and then campaign goodies. You can trade these to get the buildings, along with other goods. You can also negotiate for the building, trying one of eight persuasion options in order to get it to change hands. This instead costs time. What can you afford to lose more of? Or you could just know that buildings of a certain type in a certain area all work via the same persuasion method.

The heads rotate around on the neck, because that isn't off-putting at all.

Then there are Professionals, individuals which travel across the map and offer various things in exchange for more. Sometimes it's just more simple goods, other times it's something like various teams, which function as people goods, get enough Professionals on your side and you can make new ones. For the most part, Professionals don't offer anything you can't get elsewhere, they just make it considerably easier. That said, they also offer votes, which you cannot get in any other method. There's seemingly more available votes than Professionals than you need, but I didn't get very far by necessity.

A map which has been filled out with a lot of towns, but not much in the ways of enemies.

Most of the gameplay for me consisted of traveling between villages, capturing Radar Stations, which allow you to see more of the map, capturing vital buildings, and capturing the building pairs which allow you infinite vital resources within a certain region. Ammo, fuel and food are the primary ones, which are incredibly useful to have. There are buildings which allow you unlimited vehicles of certain types, as well. Then recording the locations of various Professionals, and possibly giving them the goods they ask for if it's a good deal.

Engaging in a little air-to-air combat.

You'll note that most of this does not describe shooting things. For the most part, you can just fly past enemies. Combat is odd. There are two weapons, missiles and bullets, most vehicles have them. (There's also a stun weapon for when you're on foot, but I was never in that situation) I feel like by the end of the game, I didn't have any issue whatsoever with the mouse aiming, even if at the start I had to turn my mouse sensitivity down. Because enemies can be removed by Professionals, you only want to do this when necessary.

About to shoot at a tank in a fighter, something which just won't work in this game.

But what you can shoot and be shot at is decided with a somewhat complex system. Everyone is in a vehicle, except possibly you, and that vehicle can attack certain other types of vehicles, and a few are the only ones which can take out buildings. So if you're flying a fighter, you can only shoot other aircraft, and can only be hit by enemies which shoot at aircraft. In practice, because flying is faster than driving, and there's always a building which offers unlimited aircraft, it's picking out one kind of plane for that moment.

Driving in a tank. Note the HUD, which is nearly flawless outside of the compass being apart from the radar.

It's fine, nothing fancy, no flight sim developers are soiling themselves in terror. Guns are actually easier to aim than missiles, because they are given quite a generous hitbox. I'm talking as long as you hit the tile something is in, you've killed them. Missiles have this problem where the enemies shoot missiles at you and both explode. You can avoid this if you're really high above them, but this can be impractical. Side note, bombers shoot bullets, presumably this was to make things easier on the development side.

If you get shot down, you either use up medical treatments you've traded for or get to wait longer. Because everything is a question of time, not health. You get another vehicle by pressing a button and selecting a new vehicle. It costs you resources, fuel, the vehicle in question and an airlift, so not getting shot down is good. If you run out of ammo, you get more by pressing a button to restock your ammo, which costs you fuel, ammo and an airlift. If you're out of fuel or airlifts, good luck.

And that is the entire game, repeated probably 30 times. The idea is very clever, but at the same time, Singleton has this design philosophy which makes these things feel like an insurmountable problem that can't be managed without knowing everything ahead of time. If you don't know how to do everything perfectly, then you won't have much chance at winning at all. Which means that through every province you go through, you've have to do it at least twice. Once to figure out where most of the important stuff is, again in order to handle it quickly. You don't quite have to plan out your route that much, but there's just no playing around.

There's basically no reason not to want this particular deal.

Which is not helped by the game setting itself up so that any actual fighting seems like it's counterproductive to your objective. Yes, you are supposed to take out enemy troops, but there are professionals which allow you to turn a lot of them to your side. That combined with the whole peace vibe the game is going for, makes the act of fighting itself feel wrong. In odd irony, this is the most a game has ever actually done to make the war is hell theme work as opposed to window dressing or something hamfisted. Fighting is always possible, but these are not bad people, and just as easily they could be fighting alongside you. They're not even fighting against you for any reason other than survival.

The problem is no amount of clever ideas can make a game that just doesn't feel fun to play work. Yes, it feels counterproductive to shoot enemies, but it also just isn't that fun flying around in a small area slowly whittling down a group of 14 enemies, who spawn 1 at a time, among many other groups of enemies, none of which you can fight at the same time, in a wide open area which looks like nothing much at all. It succeeds at being anti-war by making fighting feel like a complete waste of time. This isn't to insult real world peace efforts, but it's just too much like the real thing to be fun at all.

There are probably hundreds of these across the country, and you might just have to enter every one.

And it also doesn't help that the game doesn't really feel like either genre it is, just a weird trading sim. Yes, it's a FPS. They might be vehicles but the difference feels like a moot point. Yes, it's a strategy game, but it doesn't feel like I'm really thinking long term that much outside of time. It plays like a really messed up game of Elite where the most valuable resource you have is time.

The game is also very slow. If you don't know what a particular building is, you have to climb down in your plane. Actually VTOL, because there are small mercies. Check your GUI to see if it's the one you want, exit with a button press, enter the building with another. Wait for the building to load, because every transition, be it a building or a menu, takes a few seconds, do what you need to do. Switch to the village, go through the rest, exit, return to the plane, then fly back up. Yes, the exiting of the plane is necessary, because if you don't, it disappears and that's a vital resource.

Then of course, to get to the next village, you open up the map, go in the general direction, and just stare at the screen, which has a short viewing distance, occasionally returning to your map to check you're headed in the right direction, or opening the expanded radar screen to see if the village you're looking for is within range. Assuming it's in the current cell, because if it isn't, it'll suddenly load in when you change cells.

Between these factors and the general seriousness of the game's subject matter, I keep wondering. Is this game intended to be fun or a learning experience?  The former shows up in a considerable amount of the game's gaminess. There are underwater cities in places with lakes, which took me out of the game for a moment. In the latter, well, while yes, this is a terrible situation, it is not down to one man to literally fix a country himself. No one does anything without your okay. This was fine in games like Lords of Midnight and Midwinter when you were an abstract entity controling various characters. In a game where nobody seems to do anything that isn't at the behest of a man going around bombing every building and killing every enemy himself, during a situation where delay means certain death, it's weird. Then again, we are talking about a game where you can bomb a bombproof factory.

Weapons:
Gun or missile. There's some strategy to them, and they actually felt kind of satisfying once I got used to them. 2/10

Enemies:
The vehicle system aside, enemy AI is very questionable, almost never providing a real threat, just the odd bit of good luck. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
You can actually order in friendly troops, and they'll take out enemies at a 1-to-1 ratio, but it's incredibly wasteful. 1/10

Levels:
Behold, endless tiles and endless villages full of endless people. 1/10

Player Agency:
It takes a lot of time to figure out the various keys you need to enter buildings and check your objectives, and even when you do each transition is slow, but it's very functional. 6/10

Interactivity:
You can destroy buildings, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. 1/10

Atmosphere:
I have never played a game that managed to so successfully impart the awfulness of war and famine. Alas, this is not conductive to it being fun. 5/10

Graphics:
The 3D is kind of hard to distinguish. The 2D is...fine. I don't object to it, but it does remain that it's not very interesting. 2/10

Story:
The game hammers home as much as possible the whole fall of an empire aspect as much as possible, but you're focused completely on the big picture rather than details, so there's not much of an actual story. 2/10

Sound/Music:
I don't know how much music there is, but it's incredibly repetitive for a game that's going to last hundreds of hours. The sound effects are nice, but it doesn't matter when you want to turn your speakers off just to get away from that constant pounding. 1/10

That's 22.

As a game, I can't recommend it. As an experience, it's certainly given me something to think about. I'm not really sure what Singleton was going for here, but I must admit, that could be said of Midwinter 2 as well. Was this fun with added realism? Or something intended as serious look at the collapse of a Soviet Union-like state? Complicating matters more is I can easily see this as a Midwinter 3 - How the Bombs Fell. Those underwater cities are more Midwinter than reality, after all.

Next time, a bit of an off-topic track in Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, which will hopefully provide a bit of contrast to a game which dances around the edge of ethnic genocide and nuclear war.

Ashes of Empire: Cutting One's Losses (Lost)

I finished the last entry, asking myself a question. Restart or continue onward in what might just be a doomed state? The answer came when I looked over the map again. Can I even *win* in this province? No. I can't, there simply aren't enough forts to do so. Since that was a bust, it made my decision easy. Restart in a new place. Also, turn off the sound via the install menu, because that was getting annoying. You really can't be bothered to have an in-game music toggle?

This time, I go for one in Ossia. Or rather the one the game seems to let me pick, Temir, where instead of a famine, the economy is the problem. Only smugglers and gangsters are moving stuff, there's nothing in the shops and rebels have taken the gold. In practical terms, I have to get Vaults, Mines, Well Heads and Refineries. I have to take out Forts, Barracks and Communication Centres. This is an interesting realization, I didn't know that what buildings you had to build/destroy were conditional. I also realize that this means I can't get unlimited ammo in this province. There are a lot more troops I'll have to deal with, but I'm confident that I'll be able to deal with that one way or another. The votes are considerably easier, just Ossian and Moldenes, with a tiny Ruzakh minority.

Fighters spawn close enough to my starting position that I end up fighting some the second I switch away from my map screen. Two towns also pop up right within walking distance. This is not what I'm concerned with right away. I'm concerned with filling out the map so I can know where I need to go, and that means going around without getting into combat, just exploring towns and recording Professionals' requirements. And also this time checking that I can actually, you know, win this province.

The province is very small, but full of a lot of enemies. Not in the sense of there being big concentrations, but of them being spread out all across the map. This makes things tricky to properly eliminate. Does this mean I need to get half a dozen pacifying professionals to get through this with a minimal amount of fuss? I decide that ultimately combat is something I should be avoiding.

My campaign here starts at Kilodar near the starting position. I trade goods for a Depot and Pump Head. Now I just need to find a Processing Plant and I have unlimited food. There's an Engineer Builder here, who just wants goods for goods and votes, not really something I need just yet. A Professor is expected, so I negotiate at a mine until he comes. This turns out to be the wise choice, as the Professor knows where everyone in the province is, and is willing to give me 30 airlifts, plus medication and votes besides. All he wants is 10 fuel, 10 goods and 10 gold.

I head east, going through, but ignoring Trotchenko, nothing I need. My real objective here is Brivrilsk. I negotiate for a Control Tower and a Fort. I might have to blow up the latter later, but until I need to do so, it's going to provide vital resources. Then there are two professionals, a Doctor and a Strike Marshal. The former just gives me medical treatment and some votes, not yet necessary. The Strike Marshal, meanwhile, is incredibly powerful, so I decide that it's actually a better option to allow him to reach a different town, he recruits all CSR forces with 50 km, which is a waste near the border.

That isn't actually where I wanted to go, but as I've mentioned, it's hard to have an exact idea of where you're going in this game. So, I head southwest to Vistev, which is a small town with a Vault and a Radar Station. Which opens up my knowledge of the area without having to rely on the guy who told me where everyone is.

I continue southeast to Drigoran, which has a Mosque, a Well Head and a Hospital. I grab the Mosque and Well Head, since I need the latter. There's a Surgeon and Superintendant Administrator here, both of which just want various goods rather than anything harder to replace. Against my better judgement, I give both the necessary resources, and get medical treatment, papers and enough Moldene votes to finish that. Which now leaves a good question of where to go next, as most of the towns that have anything I want seem to be pinned down by some battalion I'd need ground attack capability to deal with, and I'm trying to stick to a fighter unless absolutely necessary.

This turns out to have been an unwise decision, as I head southeast, to Jilgevo, which only has a Well Head and a Bombproof Warehouse. It's guarded by tanks and I just decide to ignore them. They shoot the Well Head. I'm glad that enemies can destroy buildings as well as friendlies. This game wasn't hard enough as-is. The manual also states that bombproof buildings are destructible too, but that doesn't matter.

Out of an interest in capturing a Refinery, I head southwest to Batchyl, which is practically a one-stop shop for most of the important bits. A Well Head and a Refinery. Unfortunately, there's a tank battalion there too, which means that this fighter is going to be more trouble than its worth for a moment. Still, just because they spawn there sometimes doesn't mean I should change just yet. Enemies have to be right on top of the town, not just wandering around it. There are two nurses here, who just offer a paltry amount of medical treatment and votes that I don't yet need. I negotiate for a Vault, and the two important buildings.

Southeast of that is Dedlagan, which has a Control Tower and a Farmhouse, not important right now. What is interesting is that another Strike Marshal is here. The end result is the same, he wants diamonds and 2 medical teams, demolishes the forts (Apparently there are more than the required number to destroy in this province, or he can destroy ones I have) and recruits nearby CSR forces. This doesn't seem that much better, but I know there's some more south that I haven't encountered yet.

My next target is west, Elgalsk. There's a Refinery and a Factory here, the later produces ground vehicles. The big news is that there's a Captain of Works here willing to build Mines and Well Heads for me. I think there are enough Well Heads, but I'm not sure on Mines. He pushes the number of Well Heads into the target reached, and now I only need to find a few Mines to succeed there. Votes are also becoming quite easy to finish.

I head east-southeast to Taskagan, which has a Vault, an already built Well Head and two Engineer Builders travelling to there. One's a Ruzakh and both have little to offer me, so I just give the Ruzakh what he wants so that part of the votes are over. I decide now to head to the little outcroping in the southern part of the region, going west to Cregomsk. Owing to a mountain southwest of Taskagan, I end up making an accidental detour back to Elgalsk, which I've already cleaned out. Going the right way around, turns out that mountain wasn't supposed to be blocking me, I actually reach my destination. The buildings there are unimportant, there are more Professionals here. A Lieutenant Administrator offers me just air lifts and votes. It's not really something I feel is too worth the cost, but at the same time, it wins me the voting programme, so I take it. The other is a Medical Coordinator who offers me nothing I need at this point.

I engage in a little combat at this point, no reason not to. More or less just shooting whatever little I can before moving onward, I'm not doing serious cleanup just yet. I then head west to Rupirsk, which has a Radar Station and a Mine, winning both via negotiation. No Professionals here, so I continue south to Zutol, where there is a Professional, a Nurse, who offers me nothing I actually need at this point. Otherwise, there's a Vault, Well Head and Radar Station, with exception to the Radar Station (I just give the required wine), I negotiate for.

Continuing further south, I go to those three towns in a sort of triangle shape. Grelyl has a Mine and a Radar Station. Second, Digrevsk, which is actually one I didn't know of before, has a Refinery, and Processing Plant, as well as two Professionals. The first is a Highway Master, who will build most of the rest of what I need, but needs a Medical team I don't have. The second is a Lieutenant Administrator who can offer me nothing I need. I lose my Groundhawk here, but that doesn't work entirely against me, as I needed a bomber for Frogorno, which has a Barracks I need to take out. There's a Well Head, Fuel Dump and Windmill here that I negotiate for while waiting for an Engineering Coordinator. For three gold, he'll give me all the ammo and fuel I'll need in this area. Then it's just east to Memeanka, which has a Factory, Warehouse and Refinery, but more importantly, a Professional. It's just the Highway Master again, and I need to get another medical team somehow before grabbing him.

Since there's a Communications Center in Saprorsk, I head there next. There's also no required buildings there, so, indiscriminate fire is not a problem here. Then it's back south for a series of towns with Well Heads, Vaults, Refineries and one Radar Station. I'm going around the edge, just grabbing what I can. Including medical Professionals so I can maybe build a team out of them.

Once I'm out of the hole, so to speak, I head west to the mountains. It's fairly clear skies, but of course the areas that do have enemies are the towns. Still, there are plenty of Well Heads (I no longer need them if I did before), the final Mine I need and a few Vaults, so I'm slowly but surely finishing things up. At least, until I find a Radar Station revealing most of the north, and quite a few enemies. At least once I've returned to the starting section my issues are now down to enemies, Vaults and one building I need to take out. The number of Vaults I manage to get gives me hope that I can do this. Because I now have only 2 left to get.

The last building I need to destroy is in the northeast, and now I have to hope that there are two Vaults on the easternmost part of the area. And then to my shock, the hope rang true. All that was left was the big fight against the hordes of the CSR. The big one. Sixty four units to take out. Because that's what you have to do....and then I reload an earlier save after a stupid combat incident, only to discover that every time I enter the game world the screen goes black.

This is about as far as I'm going to go for this game. I wanted to save a province at least, but it seems even that option has been taken from me. I'm not that sad about it. I don't feel like I'm really doing anything. As a combat game, I'm extremely discouraged from shooting most people by virtue of the game's attempts at promoting peace. As a strategy game, it's a very simple trading game where at any point you can sacrifice time to gain resources, be it just negotiating or traveling to another province. By the time one starts to feel consequences of anything, the causes are so far gone that they're forgotten.

This Session: 4 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 8 hours 50 minutes

Ashes of Empire: Survival Horror Political Sim

Such a strange design, pipe going off horizontally, then just stopping for a small pipe down.

Last time I was heading towards a Pump Head to get unlimited food for the province of Moldenia I was in. This turns out to be quite simple, because all the guy in charge of it wants is food. Giving food to get unlimited food seems like cheating the system, even if it's only in this province. Every problem's going to have to repeat itself over time. 

Next up, there's an administrative block here, which I need to blow up. Because of the way attacks work, I need to leave my previous vehicle, order up a bomber, blow it up, exit the bomber, then return to my previous vehicle. There's no special attack there, it's just point and shoot. Like a gun, not even a missile. I suppose not having to aim that much is good news.

Mezzanine floor feels like a bit too purple for this game.

I continue south, and find myself at Yevrograd, which has a refinery, which with an oil well I get unlimited fuel in this province. I haven't seen an oil well just yet, but that should mean I have no problems replacing vehicles. Should, being the operative word, since there might be a component beyond vehicle + fuel for airdropping them. I can't see one from where I'm at, so that'll have to wait.

No wonder we're trying to save this place if they've built habitable underwater cities!

 But I do spot a town in the middle of the lake, which has several useful facilities and no enemies nearby. Which is fairly important considering that once I get near to the eye of evil, I'm going to be fighting wall-to-wall enemies. So I go south, and forget to consider that the game didn't just set the town in the middle of a lake, it's underwater. Damn it, Singleton, why did you add underwater towns to your realistic Yugoslavic conflict game? You were doing so well. This really is a reskinned Midwinter 2.

Down the coast is an Admin Block, and I still have a bomber, so that's a good choice. Just a nice, gentle, flight, identify the building, easy enough because the other options are a Loading Dock and a Mosque, blow up the block, and check the others for what they can offer. Loading Dock wants a barrel of wine for a ton of goods, Loading Dock gets a barrel of wine. Now what? Therein lies the trouble, because while I have an unlimited amount of air vehicles, I don't have unlimited air drops and there's no other way to get your unlimited vehicles. So I really need to find that oil well or I'm going to have to use the batteries I've picked up a supply of to get something to fight my way through the horde of enemies.

It's a bit odd seeing backgrounds which seemingly have no relation to what's going on around things.

I go north two towns, one only had a farmhouse, to Crokrara. Where there's a Well Head, which is the aforementioned oil well. Did I misread Well Head as oil well or did the game mess with me? I'll probably figure it out eventually. I of course, negotiate for it, simply because I also have to wait for the Captain of Works. I manage to negotiate myself both the Well Head and the Pump Head while waiting. Unfortunately, the Captain of Works wants a military team, and I'm out of those.

There's no fatigue, like Midwinter, so I can run across the entire country if I wanted. Like an European version of Africa Trail.

My next course of action is to head northwest, to Prernalsk, a town with a Depot. At this point, two bad things happen. Despite having unlimited fuel and aircraft, I can't have another airdrop, guess I need to track down another factory or something. The second is my bomber blows up. This may be related to how I don't seem to get what I needed in a moment. As I have to destroy the Depot, this presents a big problem. I can get there in a reasonable amount of time, but I can't do much other than just negotiate for places I've already won. There's no way to get more vehicles if I'm out of airdrops, short of running up to a tank and using a ECM battery, which when I have to run there, sounds unfun. I really hate to resort to this so soon, but I foresee if I try to restart the game this is just going to turn into a series of restarts until I get sick. In other words, time to cheat, this time, hex editing, since I can't negotiate airdrops any other way.

From top left, emergency medical treatment, firefighting teams, batteries, time before partisans attack, military teams, air drops.

Giving myself 255 airdrops is trivializing an important aspect of the gameplay...but if I lose this game I kind of want it to be because I did something wrong and not because I fumbled my resources without realizing this was a survival horror political sim. Actually, that might be on me. Now that I can actually move, I start taking out buildings I need to take out, dodging most of the enemy patrols on the north side of the circle, since most enemies can't hit planes, they just sort of follow me.

Despite being Eastern European, there sure are a lot of Italian, French and English names around here.

Heading north, towards where I started, I discover a couple of Well Heads, which I thankfully don't crash into this time. I basically just grab any Processing Plants or Pumping Stations I missed, and take out any Depots or Barracks I didn't before. After a while, the distance between towns starts becoming more and more pronounced as I start exploring the northwest side of the province. Enemies are there, but scarce enough and not in fighters or AA vehicles, so my bomber is safe enough. I meet an Ossian nurse, who gives me the needed votes to solve that side of the voting equation.

Come to think of it, there's probably more guys over there, but why tempt fate?

Deciding I need to better figure out this part of the area, I head to a radar station on the lake. That seems to reveal the rest of the towns and enough of the enemy forces that I don't need to worry about getting another. There's nothing I need on the western side anyway, and when I eventually move on, I'm headed south anyway. Some of the purple dots over water are enemies. Which means they're basically irrelevant to my objectives, underwater towns don't have build objectives and I don't need to kill them to advance. That means...it's time to go east. Well, first a bit of bombing, then the big fight.

Radar is actually the most important way of detecting enemies, light red are flying enemies, bright red are ground enemies.

It's not quite like Midwinter 2. There's more consideration than just circling around pressing the fire button until everything near you is dead. You can crash into other vehicles, which renders this tactic dangerous. Aiming, on the other hand, is easier and enemy numbers are usually modest...which actually results in encounters being longer, since you have to gun them all down over a longer period.

You get two weapons, missiles and gun. Missiles are fire and forget if you've aimed them well enough. Enemy missiles hit them, but you are limited by firing rate, not number of projectiles on-screen. In a confrontation, you win...assuming you have superior ammo. Even knowing where they are ahead of time thanks to the radar, they'll still be a threat if you shoot just one missile, you need to drop a couple. The gun's surprisingly easy to aim, even against flying enemies. You just have to make sure you aren't in a circling pattern. Which despite the great speed at which you can go, is hard to avoid doing if you mess up the initial salvo.

Then there are friendly assault groups, which do take out some enemies, but you can't really rely on them, you have to be using them as a supplement. So you can't use them to take out ground units while you're in a fighter, you have to be taking out ground units with them. Considering that this game runs off of limited resources, they're not much good. Less cost effective than just burning through the ammo yourself, or heck, just taking a shot and having to spend a couple hours in the hospital.

The battle lasts for in-game days. I'm reluctant to switch to the map, so sometimes I get away from the enemy group I'm trying to take down. They never retreat until they're down to the last man. It's grueling, but by day 3, I decide I should clear out around a town. Seriously, you spend so much time chasing down enemies that you end up having to run back to the primary group and it's just a lot. It's not even grinding down the enemy numbers I need to pacify that much, when it starts really thinning out I still have work to do.

Still, I take a break to go to Stotroran, which has some mostly unnecessary buildings. At this point I view food and a barrel of wine as nothing worth holding back. Pretty sure I don't have unlimited wine, but it sure feels like it. The most important of what I grabbed is a Communications Centre, which allows me to see all the professionals in the area. Which I'll need to fill out the votes, nearly there, but I think I need it for the building programme. Seems like there aren't 9 forts around on the map. One of the guys I spotted was an Engineer Builder, so I go there.

And he doesn't have anything I want. There's a certain irony in him offering me the kind of building I do not need at all, since there are more than double the number of Control Towers I need. The votes are a little important, but for what else he's offering, I'm not buying it. The other guy...also offers a Control Tower. Is nobody going to offer to build a Fort? Well, at least the area is starting to be clear enough for me to fly around with a little freedom. There's still a big chunk under enemy patrol, but I'm cutting through.

Reagan was wrong, these are the nine most terrifying words in the English language.

I finally reach into one of the more central towns and meet this fine Doctor. The votes and the treatment don't matter. The only thing that matters is that this guy is the answer to everything I've been avoiding for the past two entries. The big battle. And it isn't even the answer, because I should have just run past the hordes and headed for a town. Because that way I wouldn't have to grind them all down. Equal parts genius and cruel. If I had just headed this way to begin with, so many problems that I had would have been solved. Not the lack of forts thing, that much I can't avoid, but this. I'm impressed.

Next time, I don't know if I'm going to restart or just keep on. In favor of restarting, I'm just now on day 10, and I'm not that close to solving the province. Most of the building programme is unfinished, but the other three need a little push to finish. As I said in the introduction, since I have a time limit of 150 days, that means that spending more than 10 days in a small province like this one is setting myself up for the doom spiral. If I do it again, I'll know where to go to deal with the big ticket things, but am I really going to be doing this for all 15 or so provinces I'll have to go through to win the game? It doesn't help that most of the places that have obvious designs are not that important. Churches and Mosques give you extra time before partisans attack, only one Well Head is needed for fuel, the rest are blocks of varying designs. I keep having to stop to check my targets, which means getting out of my plane, getting within entering range, then returning.

Bear in mind, restarting feels like the only thing I can do, since you only get one save slot short of copying the save elsewhere. I get the feeling this was either intended to force games to be played without restoring outside of extraordinary circumstances or for the player to go through long periods of the game without saving. Technically you can save scum, but some situations make it less useful than others. To have multiple saves, I need to physically copy the save folder to somewhere else.

This Session: 3 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 4 hours 20 minutes