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.

Overkill (1992)

Name:Overkill
Number:262
Year:1992
Publisher:Epic MegaGames
Developer:Tech-Noir
Genre:Shoot 'em Up
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour
Won:Yes (116W/88L)

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.

Spear of Destiny: Mission 2 - Return to Danger

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.

 

 

Jupiter Mission 1999 (1983)

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.