I do not care for shoot 'em ups in a broad sense. It seems to be that the genre tends to indulge in the worst part of hardcore Japanese design tendencies. Make it so that the only way you can ever beat the game is to replay it until you have everything more or less memorized. I realize that not everything in the genre is a bullet hell, but it does seem like most of the genre past the '80s indulge in this to some extent. The exceptions being a small window in time when for some reason Apogee and Epic both decided to publish games where instead of fishing for upgrades, you can just buy them.
Unfortunately, this is neither Raptor nor Tyrian, so instead we're going to get ourselves a regular old shoot 'em up, this time on DOS. That title screen and this cool little picture that pops up if you wait are writing checks that the gameplay cannot possibly cash. Sure, they overuse dithering, but god that's rad as hell. That's the kind of picture that you use when your game's character is musing about his use of force in wrecking the Orion homeworld, not a game where you just shoot things until the game says you've won.
One of the strangest ways this differentiates itself from the competition is that it has music using a Roland MT-32. It's always a treat hearing this thing, but the actual music feels strangely out of place, and the sound is PC Speaker anyway. People mock Ultima Underworld for having piano footsteps, but it's better than spending hundreds for a high end piece of musical equipment only to get blips and bloops for laser shots.
The game was of course shareware, and came with one out of six planets. There are three difficulties, which mostly affect how fast enemies are and how much health you have. Since these stages are short and they need to pad this game out, this doesn't help you too much. There's no backstory in-game, but the accompanying text file explains that everyone else has been killed by psychotic and xenophobic aliens, so kill all of them. Okay, that does fit the opening images, even if there could be a bit more to it than that. Also, I'm not sure the music fits the theme, considering it sounds like the jaunty tune.
Starting up the game and everything is quite mundane for a a shmup. It's vertical scrolling, which means a bit less playing area. Arrows move, and you move kind of slowly. Except diagonally, which is annoying. Ctrl shoots. These keys are all rebindable. Where it gets strange is with the equipment/upgrades. Tab activates your current number of upgrades. See that thing in the lower right? Well, for each upgrade package you pick up, you go one category lower on that side. (There are also health and fuel pickups, the later of which I'll explain at some point)
While it seems like this system should be straight-forward, it isn't. It's quite esoteric and incomprehensible. I think it's designed like a pyramid, you need a certain amount of upgrades from a previous tier before you can get the next in the next tier...but that doesn't always seem to bear out. Sometimes you need more in a previous tier than you should need for the next. Sometimes you can get something from the later tiers without losing out on something with your basic weapon. There's nothing in-game explaining the system, the closest you get is a demo screen showing the various upgrades. You just have to remember which combinations might result in you wasting an upgrade.
The most basic upgrades are to the lasers. Which go from basic, to double/rapid fire, to diagonal, move left or right to shoot in that direction, works oddly, then go through laser. The double fire is actually the best option until you get some upgrades which give you various side bits to your fighter. A nose piece or side bots which increase your firepower. How these work is again, beyond me. Even the missiles I don't understand much beyond "get missile and missiles start firing".
One fun thing is that those two bits I just mentioned can get damaged instead of you, and then destroyed. The side bots are particularly interesting, because during the tighter sections, they're going to get damaged, and if one on one side gets destroyed, you start leaning towards the other. It's a nice touch despite being annoying.
There's also a fuel system, which at first isn't much of a concern. As you get upgrades though, it requires more and more to the point that you actually need to worry about it when you have more upgrades. This is primarily concerned with ship size, but it might be linked to how much you're firing at a time. Generally speaking, this isn't too much trouble, but be careful.
Each stage goes along similar lines, even if there's some differences between them. Each starts with a quasi-Galaga set of enemies spawning in, which you have to kill, and you can theoretically stop before they all pop up if you kill the lead ship. Theoretically, because even if you have a bunch of upgraded weapons, they don't activate here and the lead ship is tough. It's a test of skill.
Not all sections in the middle are exact copies of one another in design and in order, but there's always a general type. Your basic corridor; The tight area where there are turrets on the wall you need special weapons to take out; The one where missiles get thrown at you from an area you can't shoot. Enemies too, in addition to the turrets and missile shooters, there are enemies which move around like a slinky, up and down; Ones which walk up and down the walls taking potshots at you; Random flying rocks; Enemies which shoot a million bullets at you; And regular enemy fighters.
The end of each stage is usually some kind of asteroid field or group of enemies which go on for much longer than they should. Before you get any real power-ups, it's kind of nice. Having a pure dodging section makes me feel clever. Shmups are generally more about positioning than actually shooting things down, and having that feeling without having to dodge ten thousand things at once is nice.
Stages are meant to be played in sequence, and picking a later one kind of feels like using a level select code. This sounds odd, I must admit, but compared to other games where 1 credit clearing is the ideal, this is one live clear as the hopeful standard. As you can imagine, the basic laser is quite useless against some of the later enemies, even in the first stage getting killed could put you in a bit of a death loop. Although that said, I tried for the true ending starting at the fifth stage, and I never had any actual trouble, so this could be me talking out of my butt.
In all my plays of the game, nothing really sticks out to me in the stages beyond visual changes. Oh, this one has spikes shooting out of the walls and monsters you have to destroy three sections of. Well, that means more power-ups. Obviously there are more enemies on-screen as you go further, but for the most part, it kept up with the amount of damage I was outputting.
The final level has a boss and it's okay. It's big, it moves around some, and I never had any trouble with it. It exists and I shot it down. Then the game seemingly ends the same way as the other levels, with the player entering the main ship and getting his stuff, but there is an ending.
Are you kidding me? It loops? Is this one of those situations where it only counts if you beat the game on the highest difficulty? Well, I tried my hand at beating a second loop a couple of times, but I actually managed to get myself killed after a certain amount of upgrades. Not because I got killed, but because I ran out of fuel. Which is an instant game over. Since there isn't anything new in these replays that I can tell and I generally don't replay games which place their endings like this, this is where I end.
Weapons: The gradual increase in firepower and number of upgrades are cool, but there's very little practical strategy to picking them out. Some upgrades hurt you, and sometimes you just have to hold onto the upgrades until later. 4
Enemies: A nice selection of the usual sort of enemies you would expect, but nothing memorable. 3 Non-Enemies: None.
Levels: Were it not for different graphics I could scarsely tell the difference in level design. 2
Player Agency: Very basic. You move a bit slower than I'd like, but considering how big you get, this is probably intentional. As usual with this genre, it annoys me that there's a firing rate difference between hammering the fire key and holding it down. What I'd really like is the option to just put my upgrades into a particular group instead of having it as one key. 4
Interactivity: Anything that isn't trying to kill you somehow just doesn't really matter. 0
Atmosphere: It's strange. The backstory says fighting back after a horrific genocide, everything else says jaunty space adventure. 3
Graphics: Once again, I genuinely can't tell if this is EGA or VGA, though considering the massive amount of dithering, I lean towards the former. Either way, the variety between the stages works out, and because it's a space game, it doesn't matter that it doesn't have that much animation. 5
Story: The backstory and the in-game ending seem somewhat at odds. If you're not going to bother, why contradict yourself? And if you're going to lazily copy names from better known franchises, why would you not throw in a Star Trek reference? 0
Sound/Music: It's fine, but unmemorable. It strongly benefits from using a MT-32 for music. Otherwise, the sounds are PC Speaker, and by this point that's not acceptable. 4
That's 25.
It feels generous, it's more than Electro Man but less than Epic's other titles. I can also tell you right away that unless Major Stryker has some issue I'm not aware of, it's probably going to be the worst rated title out of all the DOS shmups from the shareware era. (That I'm inclined enough to play) As a shareware experience, this would have made me not inclined to buy it, and if I did, I would have felt robbed. There is a certain amount of me not being a fan of the genre, but at the same time, being me, I beat it in under an hour. Yes, there are harder options, but even that wouldn't last that much longer.
Oddly enough, Tech-Noir isn't just some in-house developer, it's an actual British coder, Ste Cork, who did the DOS ports of Obitus and Armour-Geddon. Technically, the company is just him, both of those games were developed by other people and the only other game the company is credited on doesn't involve anyone else from this game. These days, he works for Raven Software, being one of the thousands who work in the Call of Duty mines. Oddly, he's been there since 2000, starting with Soldier of Fortune. Which is quite impressive given the scores of developers who seem to be constantly let go after games are released in AAA studios.
Next time is Spear of Destiny - Ultimate Challenge, because I might as well get it over with.
Name:Return to Danger Number:5 Year:1993 Levelset for:Spear of Destiny Publisher:Formgen Developer:Formgen Genre:FPS Difficulty:5/5 Time:6 hours
Welcome to the first expansion pack to Spear of Destiny, Return to Danger. Forgive me if I don't go much into this beyond, "and clear out twenty more floors to get the Spear of Destiny", because the title screen isn't trying. It's the exact same title screen as the original. Could be because I copy/pasted the files over the original Spear's files in ECWolf, but I doubt it. You know the drill, Formgen smells money, decides to sell expansions to the game they have the rights to, ID doesn't care anymore because they're working on Doom. Same settings as last time, ECWolf, Bring 'em On.
Floor 1: To start off, I'm flashbanged by the graphics. I'm not sure what it is that's making it feel so weird. I've seen scanned pictures from this era, and none of them cause quite the same level of "what am I looking at" as these. Too bright? They did some weird effect? Too zoomed in? Too zoomed out? Perhaps just the strange feeling that the game tried to make updated textures for everything but they don't quite work? I don't know, but what I do know is that the developers violated the level design rule where enemies can't attack you at the very start. They are the dogs, but still. It's more troublesome that you don't have any ammo for a while.
Oh, what the heck is that? Did BJ just go through an industrial sewage plant or something? What is that supposed to be? Yeugh. That's certainly a choice of design. It's just so...strange. This is actually a hard level regardless of what the dogs are here for. Barely any ammo for a bit, and barely any health for longer. For a while, the only ammo you get is off the now green suited guards.
This isn't a case of me missing a secret, because the game has a trick to its secrets, which I kind of appreciate in comparison to the randomness of previous games. Every pushwall is next to a rat. Which also means that every secret is a gimme by default. Hey, at least now I won't be complaining if I have to enter a secret to advance. Also, the SMG is now a blue AK-47 for some strange reason. The artist really loves the color blue.
Incidentally, the only thing that hasn't been revamped for this expansion is the music. There are mostly new sounds for everything, including enemies. (treasure items are now bombs, for some reason) They're not bad, just...odd. Perhaps it is that everything's been given a makeover, but everything plays the same. That said, this level is quite difficult, to the point that I only won after multiple attempts. Two secrets lead into each other, and they're there just to waste your ammo. That's not a good sign.
Floor 2: For a moment, I had some hopes that this was going to be an easy level, since there are quite a few empty rooms. These are lies intended to lull you into a sense of tranquility. Once again, we're fighting against endless hordes. It's pretty clear that the developers of this one know what they're doing and some of the flaws of the original game. Hence the bizarre secret giveaways. Yet, I'm still banging my head against the wall fruitlessly, hoping that sooner or later I'll actually make it through.
Floor 3: Remember way back in the first game's secret levels? One of the secrets was in a desert rock-styled diamond room where you had to go the right way to avoid battling something like 44 Officers. This level is based around a similar principle, only instead of Officers, it's just endless Guards with a few SS thrown in. This only has 66 enemies spread across a wide area, but this opening section, which is really just nine blocks leading to the rest of the level, is by far the most tedious.
This level also reveals a particularly nasty bit of information, both that some secrets won't take advantage of the rat trick and that they may sometimes be vital ones. The key to the floor exit is behind one such secret, and you can bet that this is going to come up again later. I wonder what awful thing is going to happen next? Not even tempting fate at this point, that's just how this game is rolling.
Floor 4: Just because you involve something doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen anyway, I'm just surprised at how much worse it gets. At first this starts up like a normal level. A few guards, an obvious secret which leads to a room with...doors that open to verboten warnings. Well, I did miss a door back in the non-secret area...which leads to more doors with those warnings. You ain't getting anywhere without hunting for secrets. Good. Just what I needed.
I'm just impressed that they managed to make my opinion of them 180. I thought they understood some of the flaws of the past levels. No, they viewed those as strengths, and decided to double down. Because I can't figure out why else you'd place a door that leads to nowhere at the end of a long, winding hallway full of enemies.
This is where the first secret level can be entered, and it's actually kind of strange. See, there are two keys in the level and two exits, but the secret exit is actually easier to find. Since, you know, you have to find secrets to get through the level. I don't understand what the developers were thinking during this process.
I realize this franchise left reality a while ago, but even in the alternative history this game has been going for, giant bats with machine guns is a bit of a shift. They're just as annoying as the mutants were, perhaps moreso. It seems like they're somehow stronger and more powerful than the mutants, but it could just be the game feeling worse since I keep getting hit around corners this time around.
Floor 5: The first boss floor. What terrible things will happen this time? Outside of the now expected difficulty, this is just a regular level with a boss appended at the end. Like how Spear was going, and we've picked up where Spear left off. Well, Spear left off just before we got to have to deal with a maze before getting to the boss. There are also 18 secrets, which are just so excessive. Especially since they aren't optional. One is even a way you can screw yourself, which is just the cherry at the top of this game.
Basically, this entire level is me going through a slog of a level before I get to fight the boss. A reskin of the submarine guy from last time. He's...actually, he might just be even easier than previous bosses. That or it could be the easy cover setup. In my serious attempt at the boss, I didn't even need to run away for health or ammo to get him.
Floor 6: Something occurred to me while playing this level, the art direction might actually be better. Yeah, it's garish, but so was the base game, and a lot more places in this game feel like actual places as opposed to the endless prisons and stone structures the original had. There's a secret lab here, and a lot of the map is dedicated to a food room. Nothing really special here otherwise.
Floor 7: In the absolute final statement on swastika-styled floors, the entire level is one giant swastika. The way this level is done overall is somewhat lazy. Instead of having four different sections, there are two sets of room which are more or less copy/pastes of each other. Also, the exit is basically right at the level start, if you know which hallway to go down. You could do it without ever engaging in anything at all on this level.
Floor 8: Oh, look, a level-sized maze. My favorite. My absolute favorite. Oddly enough there are more...normal sections, but they're in the middle of a big maze. Which has not only secrets which allow you to cut across wide amounts of it, but the level exit. Without anything to stop you from just taking it short of your own luck in finding it. This expansion, man, this expansion.
Floor 9: It's another maze leading to big rooms with stuff and enemies in them. Sure, it's simpler than the last one, but it still follows most of the same tropes as the last level. These guys were really struggling to fill out 21 levels, weren't they?
Floor 10: Boss number two. This one starts off intriguing, there's this massive wraparound hallway with no enemies, but plenty of doors and one of the keys. One of the areas won't open with the new key, but one does, and it leads to a particularly annoying maze. The kind where you have to move around static objects while figuring out who's shooting at you. There's also a key in there you can't reach, but this is one of those levels where a boss drops a key, so that isn't important. Instead, I start clearing the rooms on the north side, big mistake, because these really just contain enemies. No real treasure, ammo or health. Just a drain on resources.
The far right room has a semi-secret, including ammo...and the boss. I'm not even upset, this is at least a clever play on the usual boss level. It's better than just throwing the boss at the end of a mediocre level, because, hey, it doesn't make the fight any worse and I actually feel like I got killed for a good reason for once.
Floor 11: What maniac is designing this crap? Two paths out of the starting area, one leads to an AK and a key, the other leads to the rest of the level. Including, once again, the level exit with barely anything stopping you from just gunning it. At least this time there are some enemies there. Also, all the doors out of this area are locked, the first key opens a room inside this area which has the second key. Look, I get making some stuff optional, but at this point a significant chunk of the game is turning out to be ENTIRELY optional. Even modern day open-world games with optional content aren't making you avoid the main chunk of the game!
Floor 12: Twenty-five secrets and the exit to the second secret level. I'll say one thing at least, the actual exit out is obvious, especially since there's only two pseudo-secrets between the start and the exit. Most of those secrets are just pushwalls in a long corridor which by technical definition is a pushwall maze.
The actual meat of the level are four rooms, three of which are corner rooms with a small amount of enemies and the fourth is a central room with a significant chunk. That fourth room has so many enemies that you realistically can't get through it with anything less than full ammo. Naturally, this is where the secret exit is. Good thing you can funnel them through a small corridor. That and the ability for some guards to become awake but not all of them saved my bacon for the last charge.
Floor 20: This level is more or less a straight shot from the level start to the level exit, save for the two keys. Not in the sense it has been, but there's only ever one path forward, past the hordes of Nazis you have to kill. Not really much to talk about, but the second key is in an annoying secret, non-obvious and near the middle of the level.
Floor 14: Every level at this point is starting to become the same. Floor 13 and Floor 14 are basically the same, except this one has two mazes in it. Open door in corridor to room full of 10-20 enemies, funnel them through corridor, repeat until you fall asleep. Oh, but this level has something even better, this time, you have a fifty percent chance of finding the level exit before the rest of the level. Why do this every level?
Floor 16: The last floor was just a completed game of tic-tac-toe with a few side rooms, which was about as interesting as it sounds. This one, instead, is another floor with a bunch of rooms where a bunch of enemies stand at the door waiting for you. To be fair it's not all like that, but this game is getting tiresome in how much it repeats itself. This one's a giant swastika, but at least it's sort of clever in how each room is laid out...most of the time.
The boss is actually kind of clever in its location. There's plenty of ammo and health next to him, but positioning is actually tricky. Unlike other levels, there's just a whole bunch of stuff in the way of you and him, and while you get plenty of cover, one lucky burst could end you. Which gets us back into the real deadly foe of these boss floors, the rest of the level.
The real nastiest enemies around are the mutant replacements, the bats with machineguns. I don't know if they're at all changed from the regular mutants, but they feel faster. Every time I fight one, it's only luck that results in me not losing health. Screw the rest of the secret projects they've been working on in this game, deploy a battalion of these guys in London and the tide of the war will change over night.
Floor 18: For the most part, this follows the usual boss floor stuff, save for the health and ammo merely being in side rooms. Go out one door at the start, and you're face to face with the boss, go out another and you can slowly pick off the rest of the guards before taking him on. The layout of the room is a bit janky, he can get caught in a big niche and fighting back can be tricky. After this the final level is more or less the same as the last one, just with a bit more trouble finding the boss.
I've going to give this a 2 and not explain it any further. I'll save that for the second expansion, of which I am definitely looking forward to. For the time being, I'm going to head for an entirely different game. For some reason, I picked out a game at random and ended up with Legend of the Hero Tonma, a Turbografx/PC Engine game from 1989. Gotta say, played a bit and discovered that it was certainly a game. So, none of that, we'll just be seeing the next game I was going to play anyways, Overkill, a shmup from Epic MegaGames.
Name:Jupiter Mission 1999 Number:261 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 Won:No (115W/88L)
Avalon Hill is one of the stranger publishers I've covered games from. It's been a million years ago since Voyager I as one of the first FPS games, and most of their oveure have been very strange. Especially since Avalon Hill is the computer arm of a board game publisher. That they keep coming up is just so odd to me. Here we have a space simulation, multi-game adventure. At least, this is how it's been described to me.
The game was released on the Atari 8-bit range and Commodore 64. Both are very unwieldy to play. I'm not good enough at Atari BASIC to figure out the former and the C64 version has a lot of loading. A lot. I hope I'm getting the authentic experience and not the sped up version, because otherwise, I really wonder how this sold anything at all back in the day.
Shockingly, unlike most games from this era, not only is the story in-game, it's more than you get in the freaking manual. Not quite a wall of text, but dozens of pages of four lines of text. It isn't an improvement. It's a small story detailing how I was awakened one cold night to more or less shanghaied by government agents to a space port. I've been selected to go on a manned space mission to Jupiter. As in, the moment we arrive, they're injecting me with stuff and handing me manuals for space flight. Which is at odds with the cheery tone the game's prose takes, because this seems less triumphant rando gets the chance of a lifetime and more random schmuck gets used as a guinea pig.
The ship the game will be on, the Space Beagle, has an artificial intelligence of some fancy, schmancy classification which I'm sure I'll remember two minutes after I stop typing. The important thing is, it's a true AI, which I would think would be the bigger step forward compared to going to Jupiter. There are two other people on the ship, the commander, along with the navigator/engineer.
Now, the game doesn't start yet, because the trip to Jupiter takes place in the prose. Instead, we get the backstory of why this trip is happening. A strange signal was received back in '97, one that was obviously sent by intelligent life. Not from some faraway star, but from Jupiter. Two of the best astronauts would be sent along with some rando, which feeds back into game feeling at odds with what's actually happening. Because I'm being told this by the AI, who could either be told a lie to keep it docile, or it could be lying to me because it doesn't want to spook me. Considering that I'm supposed to be a wildcard and the success of the mission might hinge based on my reactions, it feels like someone isn't being completely honest.
Finally, we get some gameplay. The ship is rocked by explosions, because we're in an asteroid shower. The initial attack was so damaging that it killed the two astronauts and destroyed the Beagle's command circuits. I have to do manual control. Manually control the ship's defenses to prevent further asteroid hits. I'm reasonably certain there's nothing in the solar system like this, except if the ship is deliberately trying to kill us. You could have altered our course a million miles back so we don't get smashed to pieces. Fuel is at a premium, but dying isn't going to help our mission.
This works like most Missile Command style games, except there's only one missile spawning in at a time. Oh, and you sort of shoot missiles back. It's a giant asterisk, so it might be a plasma blast. Lead your target, and shoot them down. Survive long enough for the ship to get out. Sounds easy, right? Right? Right? Right!?
I hope you went to the rest room before playing this section, because when I completed the section, there were 91 meteors. The second time I played this as a test, I was wondering what the hell was going on by the 30th. How long do you plan on sitting in the middle of a meteor shower, Beagle? You said command circuits were disabled, not that the ship was lying dead in space. Are you trying to kill me Beagle?
I hope you went to the rest room before playing this section, because when I completed the section, there were 91 meteors. The second time I played this as a test, I was wondering what the hell was going on by the 30th. How long do you plan on sitting in the middle of a meteor shower, Beagle? You said command circuits were disabled, not that the ship was lying dead in space. Are you trying to kill me Beagle?
Because merely being tedious and long wouldn't be enough, the whole experience is difficult too. Aiming the cursor is as fun as any joystick aiming exercise. Which is to say, it isn't. Whatever, some games can make it work. Except that the cursor is inaccurate and the way your blasts arc is...well, you see that dot at the bottom? That's your gun. Shots come from that and there are multiple places where shots don't work the way they should work. Worst of all, the hitboxes of your shots and the asteroids are confusing and difficult to understand. I've seen multiple shots just fly past an asteroid.
After abusing save states and finally making it through, the Beagle congratulates me for somehow managing to survive. I took two meteors, less because I wanted to and more because I just couldn't kill them/suspected I needed some damage for the next section. (No one is getting through this without getting hit, no one) Because his command circuits are damaged, I now need to manually select which sections the robots will repair.
This is slow work, but at least at this point, you can save. Slowly move your cursor to the right, repairing any systems that were damaged. At first this seems simple, but no, it's a very bizarre mini-game where you have to match colors. You selection one color to match to the primary flashing color which...doesn't actually make sense since the colors aren't flashing, they're changing. Which one's the primary color. The keys in this section are not quite registering, so I really don't know what it is I'm doing here.
To help, the game issues a series of tones, which tell you roughly how long you have before you either win or lose at this particular mini-game. It's very annoying. Very, very annoying. It's not the worst thing I've heard or the worst thing I've played, but it is aggravating. As I tried to figure the game out, the only thing that seemed to happen was the sound slowly getting higher and higher. The sounds seem to be roughly tied into the colors, but after every action you need to relearn which sound goes to which color, so this isn't any help. Nothing I do seems to work, so I eventually just take the opportunity the game provides me to just ignore this and go onto the next section. Sure as heck not doing the first one again.
Section three is all about navigation. That is, the computer's down, so you have to do everything. To say I wasn't expecting to manually do this particular task or that I'd get so much data that I genuinely wonder if it's useful or not, is an understatement. That said, in order to advance to the next section, you need to scan the system, so Jupiter shows up, simulate your trajectory, then, using eyeballing it, change your course in the burn menu, hoping you get it right in one whole action. Assuming you don't save in-game, this will take about ten seconds each menu change. Which is every button you press.
The intended method of doing this, therefore is to slowly and methodically burn through your fuel hoping to find the right course to Jupiter. You could, of course, also just abuse this, then reload when you find the right path. Or get lucky like I did and get it in one. The game doesn't automatically advance when you do this, you also have to select the next section you play.
I picked science lab, because why not? I'm now told I need to send a probe to Jupiter in advance of my arrival. You get some scanning and programming functions, but all of them are useless before you fire off the probe. Even setting the course, which I would think would be the most important. You fire it off, then place it near one of the many orbs that pop up and have it scan. At which point, what I do next is not easy to understand. Because the data doesn't transmit back automatically, which is realistic, but not very fun.
At this point, when switching to another "program" so to speak, the game asks me to switch to side B. Unfortunately for me, because I'm playing this in Denise through WINE, this is not actually possible. Every time I enter the menus, when I exit, the game just doesn't reload. (Previously, Linux emulators for the system haven't worked and VICE has...issues with a lot of games) I can edit the settings so that the other side appears in another drive, but since this is a one floppy game, this isn't going to work. Since I really wasn't doing much shooting or really playing a game at this point, I'll leave it here.
Weapons: A basic gun. 1 Enemies: Uh, rocks and the interface, I guess. 1
Non-Enemies: None.
Levels: Treating each little minigame, or program as the manual calls it, as a level. I appreciate what the game is trying to do, but each one felt like I was fighting against it in new and unexciting ways. It says something that the only one I was able to understand was a badly designed asteroid defense mission. 2 Player Agency: It's rare for a game's menus to be so unusable as to be tedious to sort through, but somehow, Jupiter Mission 1999 manages. Nothing ever worked right, and I think even in 1983 this would have been unpleasant to work with. At least the game always tells you what you're supposed to be doing. 2
Interactivity: I guess some of the stuff in the menus is nice for flavor. 1
Atmosphere: There's certainly a dark mood to the game, starting from the off as a dark and moody game, something aided by how little information the game actually gives you. (despite the game telling you the contrary) 2 Graphics: Crude and brutish. I at least understand what I'm looking at, but often times it fails to properly give the scope of what I'm looking at or generally just provides a laughable image. 1
Story: Despite the game not being very good, it's neat that the game tries to deliver a cohesive story and set it up with individual sections. I do wish that the story didn't come off quite as creepy as it does though. 3 Sound/Music: Loud brutish and noisy, for the most part. There's a moody intro tune, but it doesn't last long enough for the extreme length of of the opening text crawl. Otherwise, the game just uses the C64's SID chip like something off an Atari 2600 game. 1
That's 14. Not bad for a game which seemed quite lax on the actual shooting.
I don't know yet if I'll be covering the sequel, since I didn't exactly know what I was doing here and that promises to be no easier. I have gotten an actual working Linux C64 emulator now, which should mean that all future titles will work. Should, but I know there'll be a problem sooner or later. Next time, the first Spear of Destiny expansion pack, because at least there I won't have any issues figuring it out.
The briefing starts with Conner admitting they screwed up. The problem isn't that there's a metanode in Washington DC which is becoming the next Skynet, the problem is all the metanodes are working together and we need to disrupt communications. That's what this next mission is all about, and the briefing is already telling me that the enemies are going to be as thick as the dictionary. A tower I'll need to destroy, others use an item on, to hack into their communications. I guess I'll go back to having two fusion grenade launchers, just in case.
It turns out that, at first at least, the enemies are less thick than advertised. If I can walk through an area without bumping into an enemy, that's not as thick as it's been. Which means I'll need to wait for the other shoe to drop. Starting off, the issue is that the starting area is so far off any of the locations you need to reach that it's actually annoying how far off I am. Two places before I reach one with any objectives.
This is actually easier than it has been for a while. The new fliers included in this expansion may hit hard, but three of them alone aren't actually as much trouble as say, a dozen terminators and mechs. Because in a wide area, you can just run away from one group if you're in the middle of a repair. I made it through two of my item targets easy because of this.
The final two targets are in the same section as the exit. Which is suspicious, yet no major wave of enemies arrive. Oh, sure, there are the turrets, but by now I can get past them with minimal damage. As minimal as this game gives. Rush past them, then the hostiles, then repair. Why is the game letting me do this? It hasn't been this generous at all in this expansion. Something bad has to happen at some point.
When I head towards the final target, the one I have to destroy, I get hurt by some of the nasty fliers. I decide to take out the tower first, then repair. Which works, after I nearly burn through my grenades, but as I'm doing so, I get attacked again. In my rush to evade, I end up finding the level exit...so I take that chance. It works out. The mission they hyped up so much? Yeah, not that hard. The end briefing is just them confirming that we hacked into their communications and stating that the guy I saved last time is doing okay.
Thanks to my work last mission, they've discovered a lot of stuff, like where their equipment is being processed and that they even have a satelite in development. What my objective is to head to one of its labs and destroy every database inside. To that end, they have a very high powered explosive which Technician Sterner alleges will send me into orbit if it goes off in my hand. Breaching the facility is the more difficult bit, since they'll only be able to give me one code, and first I should hack into a communications tower to see if it'll work and if any other elevators need a different code. New changes to my equipment include a launcher carrying capcity increase and a missile autolock. Which might be useful in a different mission.
No real directions as far as my orders go, just head for the base...where ever that is. The code they've given me is W7O4D9. As I scrolled through these orders, I had to deal with two groups of those darned floating mine things. Not off to a very nice start, but last time things went easier than I expected. Outside of one fight with some of the mechs, everything goes swimmingly.
The inside is an absolute maddening maze of corridors. For all the crap I give Wolfenstein about being mazey, this is harkening back to the early days where a maze was the only thing the developers had to give a playtime, and you felt every block. The enemies might as well not even be here, I'm not getting hit by many, even if they do seem to spawn in a big number. The real issue is finding my objectives.
So, I need to find communications arrays and then databases. I think, the game didn't imply that things that gave me codes needs to be destroyed. What's another hour in here? The first one I find, one section in, gives me a code to enter Skynet, 4HOU6S1. I give you the codes not so you can find them useful, merely so they'll exist in some form outside of the game. This is not the code I need to advance further, I missed it somewhere.
After a tedious search of the previous sector, in which I express several inappropriate phrases, I find the first communication array I was supposed to have reached. It gives me...the same code I got from the other one. I decide to do a bit of digging in the game's files to see if this is a mistake...no, no it isn't. That's the only code I get here, so maybe I misinputed the code? No, I just didn't realize the one I got at the start was for this elevator as well. That was a waste of time.
Skynet central, I guess, is even worse. Find the right path, and you get to the one target you can dump a mine on in relative peace. Don't find it, or don't realize you can only go to one of the two targets via each trip down through the elevator, and waste ten minutes fighting pointless battles once again. These missions have never been that bad in terms of difficulty since the first, but they sure are getting incredibly tedious.
After placing the mines in front of both pieces in Skynet...my objectives haven't been finished. Meaning I was either supposed to blow up those communication arrays or one mine wasn't enough. After a considerable amount of time, I did both and neither was achieved. So, I hope that just meant the objective's completion state is bugged, and I'll return to the start where the exit is.
If you guessed that I did something wrong, boy, you sure know how these things go for me. At least I get a fancy way of saying I'm dead. What should I have done? Just hang around for a few moments before it automatically detonates. For the world's most powerful explosives, it sure has a small explosive radius.
Taking out the two things I needed to take out results in many knock-on effects. Apparently this thing was already interfaced with a thousand different things, and now the effects are visible worldwide. In the meantime, we've figured out where the metanode is, in the Washington Mall between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials. Everything has had that sort of thing mentioned, but since none of that really matters in-game I've been neglecting to mention. Just something clever that happens because Bethesda is based in the DC area.
It's time to go after the metanode's communications grid. My objective is Mercury Center, the toughest and hardiest of the bases. My objective is to go to the center, use a keycard on its listening device, then disable the entire base, and hopefully we'll be able to go after the metanode itself.
After all I've done to get here...there's nothing worth talking about here. It's the usual running away from enemies while focusing on objectives. A few stationary turrets blocked my progress here and there, and the final target does constantly spawn enemies, but at the same time...eh. None of it was especially difficult by this point.
Random chance has just given me a picture of John Conner being tired of someone's crap.
The end briefing confirms that I've disabled the enemy's ability to listen into the rest of the world. It's isolated, but not danger free. Since it likely has heavy forces, including some enemy, dubbed Guardian, I've never fought before. He suggests I hit the training sim before trying the next mission, which suggests that the developers believe it's going to be bad, but who knows.
The last mission's briefing was talking about a high end weapon that I'll need to take out the metanode. This mission is about recovering the downed helicopter taking it to the base. Not only do I have to recover the weapon, but I have to recover friendlies and possibly avoid, not fight, a Guardian. There's another new item, which doubles plasma damage. Since I don't need to blow up anything, I decide to see how it works, along with a heat reduction item.
The heat reduction item alone is insanely overpowered. To the point that you might actually be better off having one 100 Watt plasma rifle with it instead of sacrificing a grenade launcher. I fire off a couple shots and it's like I haven't fired at all. The damage increase item means that with two plasma rifles, I'm basically slaughtering everything I come across.
Like a real search and rescue mission, you don't get the locations of your rescuees right away. Instead, you wait a moment, and then while under plasma fire, you get the rough locations of them. Not the exact locations, but somewhere roughly near where it says, there they are. They're also four guys across three different sections, which strikes me as odd, but I guess we can't just have it be easy.
The middle two of these guys are an absolute pain in the butt to find. Near is incredibly vague. Five tiles? Ten tiles? The third guy I found, which was near the south end of the second section, was actually behind a wall from where he was supposed to be. I might be able to take out any hostiles, but that doesn't mean it's not tedious to be fighting the same respawning group over and over again in the same place. Nor does that mean I don't have to repair, it's just that we both die really quickly.
When I finally head for the final soldier, I find the APC first. Both were far easier than the previous two to find, since I stumbled on the APC searching for the soldier, and this time there's no big wall blocking it off that I have to go halfway across the section to find. The weapon is a bit north of the APC, at which point...the Guardian spawns in. A tense confrontation begins. It eyes me from behind a wall, and I shoot two plasma beams at it. It explodes and I go back on my merry way.
The ending briefing, perhaps trying to oversell this enemy, explains how there were two, one of which exploded in the attempt to bring down the APC. Everyone is fine, the weapon is fine, and now we have to go after the metanode with the knowledge that it still somehow knows what we're doing.
It's time for the final mission. We don't have a lot of information, but they're going to do all they can to help me. The first is an emission scanner, whenever the number gets high enough, I'm close to the metanode. The second is a terminator ID chip, not useful against hostiles, but it'll get me into the base. Get in, place the high powered weapon, then get out. At least I have my exit coordinates. I'll be taking the same selection of equipment in, since I don't want to gamble on the Guardians actually being a serious threat.
There's actually a short little cutscene beforehand showing the infiltration of the base with two "APCs" entering the interior.Since this is the last mission, and nobody's uploaded anything about this, I thought I'd make a video of it. Well, five or so attempts, actually. The first...uh...yeah, the game kept screwing up on me. I suspect this is because the F5 key is bound to one of the weapon keys, and it kept removing my plasma rifle from my attack buttons. The second I just went too far before the metanode itself and hit the exit...not getting another game over, just dying to some Guardians. Then that developed into a consistent theme even after I found the metanode.
I'm not entirely sure what warnings would actually apply, but this video is mostly stretches of nothing in-between me running through a level like a maniac. The latter parts of which are offensive to people with eyes who are looking at the game view and not the mini-map. While doing this over and over again, I realized something. Despite the game making you fragile as hell, you're still running around at a speed that could lap Doomguy with guns capable of destroying turrets. Imagine a guy in full power armor, with guns that can vaporize you and your entire car, running at you at 100 MPH. Also, because the sound kept glitching, the mission intro screwed up, sorry about that.
As I replayed this over and over again, I discovered that the Guardians are an interesting foe at this point. See, you can kill them in 1/2 shots, and they'll take more to kill you. But, if they take out your damage item, then you might as well be peeing on them for all the good it'll do. Even though they aren't in great number, they're still going to be in situations where you can't easily disengage, which results in them usually winning.
When I finally got the ending, despite being the usual "text on a fancy background" that feels wasteful, it didn't actually feel that wasteful. There's a bit of a movie beforehand, even if it's just showing a few slightly moving still images, but man, that ending image is rad as hell, and I don't care if it's somewhat lazy. That's just really freaking cool. It's what those boomer-esque pictures of "America, heck yeah", images are trying to be. It's helped by how far you have to get to see this...normally.
As an expansion, I have mixed feelings on this. Obviously, I loathed the defense missions and how they never gave me the tools to fight back, but a lot of the other missions were fun despite the difficulty. There are still bits where I'm not quite sure the right way to beat them, but the eventual easing up of these things made for a fun experience. I'd say I'd put this right in the middle with a 5, worth it if you liked the base game, but you're not going to change your mind if you didn't. For the harder missions, I feel pretty good about beating them, even if they're no Strike Base, and the easier ones were pretty fun.
Next time, I'm feeling pretty good about myself, so let's change that, next time, from 1984 or possibly 1983, Jupiter Mission 1999.
