Pickle Wars (1994)

Name:Pickle Wars
Number:264
Year:1994
Publisher:MVP Software
Developer:Redwood Games
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Systems:DOS
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:3/5
Time:8 hours
Won:Yes (117W/89L)

Of all the shareware companies those who browsed the lot of the era know about, MVP Software is the least likely candidate for most valuable player. Sure, Apogee didn't always do action and sometimes Epic MegaGames was neither epic nor mega, but you were usually in for a tolerable time. MVP Software did less interesting games than those who decided to go it alone. Say what you will about the Hugo series, but even those were more interesting than Robomaze.

I will however, add an asterisk to this. Rings of the Magi is a pretty cool puzzle game, and I can't speak to the quality of their card games, but in the action sphere? Before starting on this entry I thought they were responsible for one particularly crap top-down game that I remember crashing a ton on period hardware. In this regard, I must apologize, they aren't as bad as I thought. Heck, they published something from Redwood Games, the people responsible for Math Rescue and Word Rescue. It's not going to be that bad...I say before having to install a DOS game using a Windows installer that doesn't even work.

As I alluded to last time, this has music from Bobby Prince, and comes in boring Soundblaster, ultra rich Gravis UltraSound, and last decade rich person's Roland MT-32. Since the UltraSound one crashed my emulator, MT-32 it is. This game was also written by Ellen Guon, who wrote some novels with Mercedes Lackey and contributed to the expansions to the first two Wing Commander games, as well as the second game. Whether or not that's impressive, I don't know. Lackey co-writes a lot of novels, so for all I know she's the feminist fantasy version of James Patterson, which...might be a compliment to Guon, except that she stopped writing novels after these co-writing ventures.

The story is, on the peaceful planet of Arcadia, an evil race of aliens, who have been dubbed "the dread Pickles", have invaded and Arcadia's...Coast Guard, is powerless to defend against them. But our hero, Dave, a history student at "University", finds Lord Geric's Depository of Ancient Weapons, which contain the legendary SaladShooters®, which causes the Pickles to faint and along with the Coast Guard officer Linda, shall drive back the evil invaders once and for all.

As you might guess, this game is slightly humorous. Our heroes are using an actual, real world, licensed product...which is basically just a vegetable slicer. The evil antagonist turned his brother into a pickle. I guess his name is Rick, am I right!? (I don't care about that show and won't pretend to) It's moderately funny. I'm not going to print out one of the jokes and put it on my fridge, but I chuckled.

Once you're past the intro, the game asks you what difficulty you want. Every time you start the game, incidentally. There's the usual main menu. The instructions explains the game, options are your usual options plus saving/loading, minus the sound card select. Demo is a demo, story reopens the intro. High Scores is what you expect, and about is actually the credits. Read mail I'll explain once I start.

The game starts you off in a random-looking room. Boy, my guy looks a bit out of place, but I have to say despite the oddness of the different elements, it might just make a better whole. He doesn't quite match how he looks in cutscenes, oddly. The music's strange, it's ragtime-esque with a squarewave occasionally popping in. It's like if there was a ragtime Sonic the Hedgehog track. I...actually like this better than I was remembering. Though the protagonist has one heck of a jerky animation.

Control-wise, the game is simple, but has a few oddities. Space or alt to shoot. You shoot straight and that's it, hold it down to fire at a steady rate. Not truly automatic, but hopefully enough Ctrl is jump, and jump is tied into how long you press the button. There are blocks that you can jump through and some you can't. Yet we also get look up and down, tied to page up and down. Why not just make it up and down? Enter is the use key. It's all very easy to control and straight-forward, though I suspect this game is going to throw enemies I can't easily hit soon enough. There are also ladders, which you can climb up and down with those keys.

You can really tell that the last game from these guys was a children's game, because there's an emphasis on non-violence that feels odd. You aren't killing enemies, you're just stunning them with chopped up vegetables. You're not getting hurt, they're stealing your carrots. It's so strange and feels out of place. Why are we just stunning each other? Are they here to steal the humans' fluids?

Here are mail machines, they drop floating mail. You read it. At first it gives useful information, then it gives the game's story. Like here, where an important government official is threatening to arrest the aliens that he has no army to fight against. Clearly going for a satirical look at the government, I dig it. Shooting either the mail or the machines is penalized, with a slight score drain. As the game goes on though, it just becomes another thing you have to wait around for, but at least what you get is usually funny.

Pickles

Flying Machines

Rovers

In this first episode there are three enemies. The titular Pickles, which are slow, dumb and easy to hit. I am on medium, so maybe that's affecting something. There are also slow, dumb and barely moving flying machines which are like the mail machines...in that they fly. Then a sort of rover thing which I jumped over. None of these are creatures you need to actually shoot, which is odd, but you can. Sometimes it's wise, but I think most are ones you could get away with not shooting. They remain stunned for a long enough time that you won't have much trouble with them. I think the flying machines and the rovers die and aren't just stunned, but I never saw one moving again afterwards.

That said, there are then these. They hide in a hole, and if you get close they jump out. Except it's less like they actually do so and more like they get an animation jumping out while you got hurt the second you reached within a certain radius. I nearly died because of them, but since there don't seem to be any lives I'm not sure how much that matters. At least they seem to die when they're shot, but it's tricky to shoot them because of the jumping out thing. Tricky but possible.

This means that the only real threat are those things in the wall, because everything else you can nearly always avoid or shoot before it becomes a problem. Really sets the stakes of the game low, that and how you basically can't lose anyway. It doesn't matter how tricky everything else is if your victory is assured if you put the time in.

The objective on each level is to find all the SaladShooters®, which means explore, explore, explore. Some are behind color coded doors. Gotta say, this level is set up somewhat crappily. Most enemies don't move if they're off-screen, so there's rarely any threat from that...except if one reaches your down path on an elevator. Which contributed to my near death. The bigger part is that it's very easy to put yourself into an unwinnable situation or get in one you confuse for being unwinnable. Like falling in a pit leading to the exit. An elevator goes down just enough for you to reach...but you won't know that because it takes forever to reach there.

The level design here in general is not great. Because each level is almost entirely "find items, then the exit", this seems to have resulted in some lazy level design. Over the course of the episode, the best levels are just the ones that don't get in the way. In comparison to how Apogee titles tended to have the more item hunt levels occasionally be fun. By having each small section be its own thing or by making it tricky enough that you get frustrated by it and forget you're doing some of it over and over again. In contrast, this is all about just making sure you didn't miss a secret wall along an elevator ride the height of the level. Otherwise you just comb the whole level until its over.

Switches, warps, doors and keys are an important part of the game. Switches activate the elevators. They don't seem to do anything else and there's no point in not using them. Warps are teleports, sometimes two-way, sometimes one-way. Sometimes over a pit. Doors and keys work like you'd expect, except its one key a door, but you can carry multiple keys. The game doesn't explain this as far as I could tell, but if you've gotten far enough for that to be a concern, you're going to be used to occasionally restarting a level.

After every two levels, there are cutscenes. Shows how far I got originally when I didn't know these were a thing. They're along a funny nature, the first one's about the aliens betting how long it'll take before the Earth goes. Then it's mostly about Dave finding his way to the Repository of Ancient Weapons, which is guarded by an senile old man named Lord Geric. Which does feel odd. The story as told in the mail messages makes sense, because we get the SaladShooters® in the first level and start fighting back...but then the in-between implies that we don't and we're really looking for something else as if this isn't helping. There are canisters labelled AW which I need to collect, but it's still strange.

After several levels, we end up meeting with Ensign Linda, who is in a strange bodysuit and...wait, Dave was in armor? Why does he look like a normal dude wearing a shirt and pants. in the game? When I get to play as Linda, she too, just looks like a normal woman in a shirt and pants. Would it really have been that difficult doing the sprites in what they actually wear? The two argue a bit in cutscenes, but mostly come to terms. They have to find the Doomsday Weapon, which naturally, the aliens somehow know about and somehow want.

As the episode goes through to its conclusion, the design of these levels remain as strange as ever. There's very little challenge, except sometimes from the hazards on the ground. By now, being able to anticipate firing on the hole monsters is good enough to deal with them. All the game really does to make it harder is to make you go up and down a level dozens of times, which does not try anyone's skills, but it does try their patience. I have thirty HP in a game where one hit deals one HP, and enough ammo to take out the army myself. You've got to give me more than that!

That said, I was starting to feel a lot of the cracks in the game beyond the gameplay. Animation, most importantly the player, is wonky. Platforms have two different sprites they cycle through as they move, which is annoying, but while the hitbox of a platform is crummy, it's at least consistent. Sound effects are a weird mix of decent Soundblaster stuff and things that sound like they're PC Speaker. There's not enough music and it doesn't last that long. I think there's something like five tracks maximum and each is about half a minute.

The episode ends with all the ancient weapons obtained and with Linda finding a clue to the Doomsday Weapon. But the Pickles have been watching and kidnap her. Please buy our game. You can stop the Pickles from unleashing the Doomsday Weapon! Somehow, I doubt many people got far enough to hear that plea.

Episode 2 begins with a recap and then we see Linda on the Pickle ship. A child Pickle comes to see her, because he wants to know what a real human looks like. The Pickles think they have this in the bag so much that they've brought a child to a warzone, eh? He thinks it's a game, and after a bit of back and forth, because she's unhappy, he lets her go. Okay...this is getting weird.

For this episode, I switched up to hard for a bit just so I can have some semblance of anything other than apathy. It's not like I'm going to run out of lives or anything. This seems to just increase the Pickles speed and regeneration, but at the same time, unless you need to camp our their location, this doesn't change anything. The levels are more difficult, owing to increased fire/water/lava floors, but they're actually better. As in, hey, this is an actual level where I have to move around to avoid enemies and take them out rather than just mowing down the entire level. Like the more forgettable levels in a better game.

A caveat here is that even by the second level I have so much health and ammo that I'd have to try to run out. It also pulls out that mean trick where it hides secrets in passageways on the bottom of stairs. There's still the usual issues levels have been having, where you go past some dangerous jump only to find out that led to the exit, or having to grab items by jumping from a moving platform over lava. The more annoying stuff. Doesn't help that your hitbox, as I said before, isn't easy to understand.

The story continues with Linda eventually reaching a spaceport on the Pickle planet where she finds a phone she can use to call Dave. Unfortunately, she lacks the 350 credits she needs to make the call off-world. Considering inflation and the fact that this call would be more technologically complex than anything a human as done on Earth, I'm not sure if that's a good deal or not.

The levels between this and the next cutscene are mostly fine. Mostly. Again, they're mostly just a matter of avoiding falling into a pit, everything else is a breeze...except that Level 8 hides a SaladShooter® in a secret. Yes, I was able to figure it out, but it's still a nasty trick to do. Still, there are far worse tricks the game could be doing.

The story continues with Linda finally failing to reach Lord Geric, but instead paging Dave, which costs more. The Doomsday Weapon is on Puzzle, where it was last used. Now it's time to continue as Dave once again, whereupon we get another background. This one's very nice, the artists are really good at doing pixel renditions of forests. The level design continues as you'd expect, mostly normal levels with one nasty thing in them.

After a few levels of this, there's another cutscene where Dave presumably heads to Puzzle. Presumably, because that's where the Doomsday Weapon is. The game seemed to freeze and I skipped a cutscene. Now I'm inside some mines, which turns the game into one of those really annoying open-ended levels where you're never sure where to go, nowhere seems to make any sense, and it's only luck that I ever seem to reach the exit with all the SaladShooters®.

The second level ends with destroying some sort of strange wall block, which turns out to be the controller to the Doomsday Weapon. Naturally, this is bad news, because if the Pickles try to control the weapon without it, they could destroy the universe. Now I need to find the second controller on Trivia, but first Dave goes to rescue Linda, who is now back inside the Pickles' dungeons.

It's time for a sewer level! Now there are tiny little spots on the ground which instantly kill you! I have nearly fifty HP and I get killed in one shot. The levels themselves are as bad as you'd think. Funny how this episode went from almost being reasonable to being tedious as hell. Miss one single thing and it's a ten minute trek over the level again.

The second episode ends how you'd expect, Dave finds Linda, they escape and head for Trivia to stop the Doomsday Machine. They now have twenty four hours to find the controller, as at the end of that time, the Pickle Emperor will destroy Arcadia. This leads into the final episode, in which we see our heroes evade the Pickle fleet with some impressive moves we don't see, and now they need fuel.

How does the third episode start off? It's really not that special. It's doesn't look at that different and the level design doesn't improve like from the first to the second. There are three levels of this, more wandering around large confusing areas with little to distinguish one area from the next. I'm getting the feeling that this game shouldn't have tried having fifteen levels an episode.

This detour allows them to head for Trivia, where there's an underwater maze. Fortunately, they have suits and air tanks, neither of which will appear or have any affect during gameplay. Unfortunately Linda is afraid of drowning, since she almost did as a child. It's odd that this is a serious moment and that Dave is that okay with this. I'd be a bit nervous about this, but that's because I've seen how bad above water mazes can be. Underwater mazes sound like they should have been in Inferno somewhere, but I guess Dante thought a river of excrement was more interesting.

Fortunately, none of what was just mentioned mattered, because the game is going to proceed exactly the same way it has over the past levels. What, change the gameplay? Ha. Long and wide, confusing levels. Oh, and this time you have to explore the darn secrets to find the SaladShooters®. I suppose there has to be something new in the third episode. It just wasn't something good.

The next cutscene has Dave get trapped by a wall off-screen, and now Linda is going to have to overcome her fears to save him. This really feels like a strange thing to bring up and then have her overcome like that. Shouldn't this fear have been introduced earlier? She psyches herself up once she finds out that Dave is trapped, it doesn't feel satisfying story-wise. Shouldn't we get some kind of character arc here beyond the two of them denying their feelings for each other?

Once they get the controller, they head back for Arcadia. The Emperor is about to use the Doomsday Weapon and then Lord Geric will never get his pizza. The United Earth Force is going to head out to attack the Pickle fleet, but they won't be there in time to stop the Doomsday Weapon. They have to stop them. This just brings up more questions. What, is Arcadia supposed to be some sort of Communist Space Utopia?

These levels are more or less standard, solid levels, which would be the backbone of a better game, but are the highlight here. No hunting for secrets here...which you think would be the case. This is exposing a flaw in the game's design. There's nothing wrong with having the player hunt for something every level if it's done well. Monster Bash is a personal favorite of mine and Crystal Caves was a solid title for Apogee. The thing is, the latter was some enough to make crystal hunting very obvious and the former had a compass for finding animals. It also gave you a reason for it all the entire game. Dash was saving pets from a horror villain, while the miner in Crystal Caves was greedy enough to risk his life like that.

Here the narrative doesn't quite make sense. I know I'm supposed to find the SaladShooters®, but the game implies that until Dave and Linda found the Ancient Weapons they really were just jumping around. Even on hard, the enemy doesn't seem that difficult to deal with. I've owned more than my fair share of crappy Chinese electronics, and even they wouldn't break if I threw a sliced up cucumber at them. More to the point, while I don't object to collecting the weapons per say, it makes the later levels very easy and often it doesn't make narrative sense. At this point I should be collecting something else.

The final level throws all reason out and forces you over a long pit while jumping at SaladShooters®. The universe is about to end, but let's make sure we can take out the last bunch of flying machines! And naturally, when combined with the difficulty in landing on a moving platform, means a lot of dying. This one level has an ending cutscene when the universe explodes. Hope you like seeing that a bit.

If you go past that, you find the Doomsday Weapon, which you can now use on either Arcadia or the Pickle planet. I, being of no real thought, pressed the Pickle planet, and got a cutscene in which it explodes, and then we see our heroes talk about how they genocided billions of people on the Pickle planet. But that's okay, probably. Here I was about to make a joke about them stealing Pickle eggs for some reason and not realizing that was a war crime. This is an actual ending to the game, it sends you back to DOS when you finish it.

What you're actually supposed to do is go past those two switches and then shoot a glowing thing on the wall. This destroys the machine, and now...there are more levels. Again, I'm glad I'm picking up every SaladShooters® when I have 300 shots in reserve. In a sense, this is odd, despite not really padding itself out, by the time I reach the true ending, I hit the eight hour mark. Just natural...uh...whatever this is.

The true ending involves our heroes calling the Pickle Emperor on the phone and demanding his surrender. The Earth fleet is surrounding him and he has no Doomsday Weapon. The Emperor surrenders and finally, peace is achieved. Dave proposes to Linda, but before they can go off to their honeymoon, Lord Geric calls and tells us that someone else is in trouble, and they go off to help them. The end.

Weapons:
Your only real weapon is a straight-shooting blaster which fires as fast as you want, can only be aimed left and right, and moves so long as it's on-screen. It's technically more competent than most weapons of this simplicity, but not by much. 1

Enemies:
There are five enemies, none of which come off as a real threat and only two require any real skill to get past. If you removed your ability to attack, you could reasonably get around most levels with enough practice. With weapons, there are very few times you're actually in danger. 2

Non-Enemies:
The mail machines are more like things you avoid hitting than anything else. 0

Levels:
These range from being solid but unmemorable to tedious and annoying to go through. More of the latter than the former. So many good design principles are blatantly ignored at least once, not because it made a really cool level, but because they could. 3

Player Agency:
Count me in the group of people who find using the up key as jump as being annoying. This is a computer game, it isn't like we're running out of keys. It isn't like this is for the joystick controls, you get jump and shoot, you still need to use the keyboard to use warps and switches. Otherwise, it's mostly fine, but your hitbox is tricky to understand, even at the end I still didn't understand it. 4

Interactivity:
For a game with a use key, there's not a lot to use outside of doorways and switches, which you nearly always should use. Shootable blocks make out the rest, which are solely used to block your progress. 1

Atmosphere:
Pickle Wars is a weird game. There are a lot of disparate elements which make it feel cobbled together at times. Often, weird for weird's sake, but you also can't be sure that this wasn't just accidental. There's also no real new content in the commercial episodes, just a few new visual and music bits, nothing actually changing how the game is played. 3

Graphics:
My biggest issue is that the animation is jerky. Not in an intentional way where this is an important part of the visual profile. An unintentional thing that makes your character's place in the game world feel off. Since it primarily concerns the player, even if nearly everything has this issue. Everything else is fine despite the mismatched styles going on. It's not always the best, but it does come together for the intentional weirdness. 4

Story:
The story is primarily concerned about being funny to the point of excluding most other points beyond "the heroes beat the evil invaders." It also concerns a whole lot of things which seem to happen off-screen. The game describes Linda as having a fear of drowning, yet this doesn't actually matter in the slightest. The game's comedy is fine, but the best of it is in the various mail messages. Which you have to wait around for, and that just isn't happening. Most of them seem to repeat in the later episodes too. 4

Sound/Music:
There aren't a lot of music tracks and they're all short. Some I'm not even sure are more than a few bars. There's one track that reminds me of something, but what it is escapes me. Some are annoying, but mostly it's just disappointing. That one's probably a coincidence. The sound meanwhile, is an odd mix of PC speaker-like sounds and digitized voices, with a few real sounds thrown in. 4

That's 25, which is lower than any post-Arctic Adventure game from Apogee, but not appreciably. It definitely comes off as worse than Apogee's efforts regardless of this, though.

I don't know what I'll be doing next week, but it'll probably be some less demanding game, if I manage to have an entry out at all. Real life issues pushed my finishing up of this past my usual self-imposed deadline and they show no sign of disappearing anytime soon.

Quest of the Space Beagle (1984)

Name:Quest of the Space Beagle
Number:263
Year:1984
Publisher:Avalon Hill
Developer:Scott Lamb
Genre:Space Simulation
Systems:Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 50 minutes
Won:No (116W/89L)

The Continuing Adventures of Jupiter Mission 1999, Part II is a subtitle that really should have been looked at by an editor. The title is a pain to screenshot, it's flashing. Good thing I don't have epilepsy. In case you don't feel like going back, Jupiter Mission 1999 was about the player being randomly selected to go on a mission to Jupiter, where there was a mysterious signal. All the competent people die in an asteroid shower, and the player is forced to do the work because the sentient AI in control of the ship got damaged. I left as the game crashed after trying to figure out how to move my ship.

Explaining what happened is now a text crawl with moody music in the background. Also flashing, lovely. So the part I didn't get to was stopping an alien invasion, which I did by activating a self-destruct switch on the alien's teleport station. It exploded and teleported us to a far galaxy. Where all the aliens were that wanted to conquer the Earth...only for one that approached me to be friendly. Uh, I think we might have made a boo-boo. These are the Faunians, descendants of a great civilization from eons past. They were heading for our system not because they were conquering the universe, but because hostiles, The Gentuza, were heading after their homeworld. Now I have to help. Because the Faunians, being gentle herbivores, are unable to fight. They're not descended from hippos, I guess.

The first section is a epic space battle between these forces, with you on the Faunians and the Gentuza being your target. This is their homeworld, incidentally, so we're starting out small. You have to take out their fleet and then capture the planet. Like an on the ground view of your typical Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations game. All you have to do is individually take out every ship yourself. Have fun! Given how the last game went, I'm sure you're about to ask how bad this gets. 

Pretty bad. Simply put, enemy ships can move faster than you, and you can do nothing about that. Their shots only hit you when they're on-screen, and sometimes you can get them off-screen, other times they stick like they're already attached to you. Even in my first attempt it wasn't completely unreasonable to take one out, but it was very frustrating to do so. Still, sometimes I get lucky. Even worse, any time you get hit, you can't fire for a few seconds.

So, one time after I died, I counted how many ships were left. 32, out of what I believe is 39. (It's actually 40) Considering these guys are only inferior to the player in that they die after one shot, this is quite unbalanced against the player. Fighting against a superior number of enemies equal to your strength is not something I've encountered in any space sim I've played before. Yes, there could be a number of hostiles superior to you, but not to this degree. More grinding. There are probably a whole bunch of complicated rules to this I could possibly learn the entirety of, but I understand enough to get away from all the shots except the ones the game decides I can't.

After savescumming my way through that mess...nothing happens. Right, well, there is a strange thing on my M-scan. Which if it isn't showing up on my screenshots, is an orb on the lower right, compared to the V-scan on the lower left which shows the enemy. Clearly, I need to head to it, despite no visual on-screen. So I finally check the manual. It does explain the combat system slightly better than I previously understood, but doesn't actually explain how I'm supposed to go forward beyond heading for 000,000. Which I have no way of figuring out because the part of the GUI which has that pops up when I'm damaged, not when I'm perfectly okay. Oh, and I love this line from the manual:

IMPORTANT: Save your game frequently to prevent an undue amount of repetitive play.

The game is actually telling me to savescum. That's hilarious. Eventually, I figure out how to summon the GUI, F5, and head for the planet. It's when the blue dot is in the center of the scanner. Now I have to...wait, I guess. First time I've played a game that requires the manual to understand but it also forgets to mention half the important information. After I go off for a bit and then return...it still hasn't advanced, but after jiggling the nose a bit it works. 

I'm not writing all that down, but hopefully you get the message. Since I crushed their space navy, they consider me the strongest, but before they'll do something for me, they want me to prove myself in their labyrinth. After some trouble getting it to load, I reach the next part.

Hope you weren't reading something to pass the time, because you're on a timer. Oxygen's running out, you're going to die! Gotta say, I can't imagine having spent money and all that time on this only to end up in a slow section where you slowly walk around. Hope you read the part where the fire button moves your camera around, otherwise you'll be slowly crawling into whatever hazards are about to kill you.
 

Oh, I'm sorry, that isn't working in this port, guess I'll just watch as this thing slowly creeps up on me and drains my energy. Or it might be, it just takes me a long time to figure out how the heck it works. It only works if you hold it down as you move, which I guess makes sense. It sounds like I'm angry, but this is just annoying and tedious. You move slowly left and right, but go up or down, or dare I say it, diagonally, and you take one step at a time. The complete animation for one step. Nothing screams fun afternoon like having to navigate some annoying hellmaze. None of this layout is fun or intuitive to navigate.

There are oxygen and food pick-ups, but the actual objectives are the computers. That big thing in the first screenshot. There are three of them. One was easy to find, but the way to it involved going over a pit. As I don't have a jetpack and there's no other way, I pressed on. After a considerable amount of searching, I found the second, which just resulted in me messing with some levers. Cool, cool. Going further in the section this was found just resulted in dead ends. So...did that spawn a bridge earlier? No. Well, I tried, but between the slow movement speed and how it feels like everything I'm doing is pointless, this is where I'm stopping in this game. After this, there's supposed to be a section where you find a path to Earth via star charts. Yeah, that's going to be fun.

Weapons:
A basic laser, even if there were quirks to how it worked. 1

Enemies:
The two different mini-games I played each had their own opponents, but both were quite basic, even if their AI was fine-tuned to annoy the player. 1

Non-Enemies:
None, really.

Levels:
Take down 40 enemy fighters and endless confusing labyrinth are not my ideas of a good time. 1

Player Agency:
Everything is oddly slow, though with exception to the whole "hold down the fire button to move the camera" thing, it works as intended. 3

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
This is such a strange and alien feeling game, probably why I stuck with it despite essentially being a modern action-adventure game which forced all the different sections into one big chunk of each rather than naturally flowing over the course of a longer game. 3

Graphics:
Simple, with decent enough animation whenever a human character is on-screen. 2

Story:
The evil aliens are going to fold because you shot down their defense fleet, but first you need to traverse their labyrinth is not interesting, but at least the writing quality is tolerable. 2

Sound/Music:
Simple intro theme, then...uh...I was actually listening to other music for a lot of the gameplay, but I believe it was mostly blips and bloops. 1

That's 14, exactly the same score as Jupiter Mission 1999. Makes as much sense as anything.

In a sense, this reminds me of later action/adventure hybrids like Inca. There's a world here that because of the nature of how it's made, we're not going to see much of it, so we're just left gazing at what is mostly a mediocre action game in an attempt to see the real meat. Everything else that's going on. As I said, in a sense, Inca's a lot better even if that's a game you don't care for and this is far more grounded in reality.

Next time, you know how a lot of people were doing touching and tasteful tributes to Bobby Prince last week? Talking about his contributions to amazing games like Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and I personally hope, Bio Menace. Well, I'm going to talk about Pickle Wars, a game I remember being a male cowpie. Hopefully his contribution to that game is much better than I remember the game being.

Spear of Destiny: Mission 3 - Ultimate Challenge

Name:Ultimate Challenge
Number:6
Year:1993
Levelset for:Spear of Destiny
Publisher:Formgen
Developer:Formgen
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:5/5
Time:7 hours 00 minutes

As Greg Lake once said, welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. Well, there's no Giger cover art to draw us in here, it's just more Spear of Destiny. The same old, same old. Let's just see how much copy/pasting I could do from the last expansion, shall we? Once again, I'm playing on Bring 'em On.

Floor 1:
There's a box of bullets behind a barrel at the start. Giving me that much ammo right away. I get the feeling I'm not in Castle Wolfenstein anymore. No dogs this time, but there are a selection of corpses behind me, subtly indicating that BJ had some trouble getting in here. Mostly a decent intro level, but I did notice that there are suspicious puddles of blood near the walls, replacing the rats from last time as the obvious secret indicator.
 

Floor 2:
Did you know dogs can bite through walls if you're on the corners of tiles which you can't otherwise get across? Dunno at which part that lovely bit of gameplay was added, but I hate it, and I'm not at all regretting playing this. We've gone straight into the usual shenanigans in Wolfenstein level design too, better carefully check every room as you enter it or get sniped by a guard, repeat for every room. Oh, and there are over sixty enemies.

I also gotta say, this has been going on off and on since the original episodes, but this level really cinched this game as being a weird, surrealistic fever dream. The quasi-tactical nature of the gunplay, the bizarre usage of wall textures and more pictures of Hitler than in a neo-nazi's hard drive. Any description of this game beyond the basic sounds unhinged.

Floor 3:
I'm glad we're going straight into the annoying part of Wolfenstein level design. I swear, I feel like I'm playing SWAT 4, but with nazis...and none of the fun. When that game puts ten enemies in a room, it's the most terrifying thing ever, and there's a sense of satisfaction when you finally put them all down. Here, it's ten enemies every room, and there are a ton of rooms. It's already so bad that they've just given me the gatling gun, in an open room. Not even the illusion with a secret with a massive blood puddle outside. 

Floor 4:
Hey, we've actually gone down to having smaller groups of enemies per room. It actually feels manageable, or I've just gotten back into the habit of corner checking everything. Exploiting my ability to see around corners when there are two, or just running in and running out when there are two points of concern when I enter a room. It's almost becoming a fine science.

The secret floor entrance is weird. There are four elevators here. One you can't reach near the start, another about halfway through, doesn't need any keys to enter, another in an obvious secret, then the actual secret exit. This one isn't in an obvious secret, and needs both keys when you're inside. It's also got both a maze and a pushwall maze, because why wouldn't you do that at this point?

Floor 19:
What the heck is this wall texture supposed to be? I know what it looks like, a deliberately hideous texture from a Cruelty Squad imitator. It isn't interesting or cool, it just reminds me that I'm shooting the same enemies in the same halls again and again. The bats are back, and this level has a lot of choke point usage, funnel enemies through a tunnel or get gunned down. I'm running out of things to say and they've run out of things to do. At least the end section has enough secrets within secrets to feel like a secret level, even if I wish I was playing Blake Stone right now.

Floor 5:
The boss is the exact same one as last time, who was just a new coat of paint on the regular Spear boss, who was slightly different from the last six bosses. So once again, it's about the level, in which I have to kill dozens of dogs. After that, it turns into a maze level, so much and so long that I got lost a few times. With a map. By the time I found the boss it was just placed like a random enemy.

Floor 6:
We start with a secret maze, because why wouldn't you start with one of those? It isn't that secret, since there's no exit out of the starting room and it's obvious which walls you push, but man, come on. It's a long level, the designers here were really feeling like they needed to get absolutely everything they could out of a Wolfenstein level, much to its detriment.

Floor 7:
Most of this level is a giant spiral. You keep going forward, then left. The game throws a few guards on your right, but for most of the first half, you're just doing the exact same things over and over again. At most, there's going to be a group of enemies in front of a door. Still, I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Floor 9:
There's a tell-tale sign of a secret in the opening area, but there's no secret, not even out the door in the next room. No major enemies straight away, and a bit of confusion only leading to an empty room where a bunch of dogs are facing away from me. I practically bowl them down. This level has multiple encircling hallways around a series of rooms. One of them is a secret maze. I cannot even muster the sarcasm to say I love that, just stop doing that.

Floor 10:
I feel like tossing in a hallway with a bunch of small rooms, then not actually doing anything with them on a boss floor of all things is a bad sign. Why do so many rooms feel like dining rooms? I guess some could be offices, but this has been a persistent problem in this levelset. Same boss as the last one, the bootleg Barnacle Wil guy, he shoots bullets and rockets. I've gotten so used to this kind of fight that I handled him incredibly quickly.

Floor 11:
This one actually has a bit of fun in it. There's an oddly shaped section, two outer hallways, two inner hallways and two interior rooms, where one gunshot, at the entrance, will more or less awaken every enemy inside. Just enough that you have to worry, but not so many it's cutting them down by the dozens. It took me a few attempts to get through. It was actually nice doing something other than constant corner checking and enemies just being dumped in front of me.

Floor 12:
The opening to this level is a series of hallways with pillars where dozens of enemies are free to fire upon you. The only help you'll get until you're past them is a secret cache of ammo which is not enough. Even when you get past that, the only health for a while is in a secret door you really need to trick open to get. Fortunately, that was the tricky part, after that it's mostly a maze. Hey, at least the path to the secret exit is normal...except for the part where those bubble tiles are shoved in your face again. Huzzah!

Floor 20:
One of the oddest levels in this game. It's another one path forward the entire time, we'll through in keys even though that makes no sense. Except this time, a lot of the rooms are either shaped like Nevada or just a triangle. Most of the level is taken up by this, as in, they fill out the entire grid of the possible level. There's 8 secrets inside, somehow, and I didn't really feel like going back and looking for all of them.

Floor 13:
Quite possibly the most bizarre case of level design I've seen. I ended up finding a secret early on which ended up putting me into a path which was more or less the same experience as the last, secret level. Technically it differs because there are two paths to the end of the level, each with their own key, but this honestly irked me the first time around. This should be the kind of thing I say is clever, but somehow this levelpack manages to ruin it.

Floor 15:
Another long hauler. To start, it at least tries the actually fun part of Wolfenstein gameplay, a big area full of enemies you have to move around rather than just gun down. Since some of them open up locked doors which actually give you more options for the battle, this is quite tricky. It takes me multiple tries and it's only 18 enemies. After that, it's a lot of slowly going through a maze-like area against enemies which often get the first strike against you if you don't know they're there, with constant backtracking to health and ammo caches.

Floor 16:
68 secrets!? On a boss floor? This isn't an easy one, because the skeleton mech knight (which I'm sure isn't the right name) isn't tied down like last time, and he's fast. Very fast. He's silent except when he's shooting at you, so if you accidentally awaken him the first time you'll notice is when you hear yourself dying. Since I didn't have a cache of ammo but a cache of health, I had to look around and ended up nearly solving the rest of the level...and finding out that I missed the cache of ammo. Sigh...

When I finally make it to the end I'm perplexed. That many secrets and only four mattered? I push every single wall I can and nothing. Okay, what did I miss? Because I missed something. There are a couple in an interior wall, but that isn't the big one. The big one is...I need to explain a trick in Wolfenstein 3D for a moment. See, pushwalls are just a flag you set a regular wall as. Any wall can be a pushwall, even if it'll only move if there's space behind it. A trick, some modders use, is to have the tile a pushwall is pushed to be another pushwall. Two secrets in one. Well, that's how modders use it. This uses it as a giant wall you constantly push for the length of a level. Have fun.

Floor 18:
This level quite handily demonstrates why boss levels aren't long corridors with curves to them. Because it's unfun, and it's blatantly obvious that it isn't a test of skill. Since there are other enemies here, it's about finding those before waking the boss. Note, most the ammo is actually behind him, so I hope you weren't pistol starting these. Once I kill him, it's time to use the key...wait a minute, there's no door out of here. I HAVE TO SECRET HUNT!? I go over the entire level, I find nothing. This is actually the worst level in a FPS I've ever seen. I don't mean that in hyperbole. I haven't seen the entire level, but I know there's going to be a maze and we're going to violate every single principle of good level design.

Okay, the rest of the level, after a set of three pushblocks with no obvious indicators, is just a simple "go back and forth along shrinking hallways", but it is annoying, because at the end you have to go back to fill out your health and ammo for the final battle.

Floor 21:
Wait, what!? Did someone slip in a level from Wolfendoom? This is very strange. At least before the mobile RPGs, the whole Wolfenstein/Commander Keen/Doom connections were supposed to be easter eggs. This is the earliest actual in-canon reference to that. And it's from a dubiously canon spin-off nobody likes. Huh. Anyway, the Angel of Death has an entirely new fight. I spend three tries trying to find him, look up where he is online, then gun him down when he gets stuck on a wall. The ending cutscene is the same as before.

This gets a 1. The only time I had a smile on my face was when I was playing the final level, and that isn't even a "I won the game joke". No, that was as good as any of these boss levels ever were, the reference was cool. Everything else was just a ceaseless, unending parade of bad level design choices. All of them, often at the same time. There is no reason to play this, I have already revealed the only interesting part of this. Even if you were doing so because you were trying to learn from bad level design, you already got enough of that from the base games in their worse levels. You don't need twenty levels of that.

Next time...we see what's so special about The Quest of the Space Beagle.