Name:Pickle Wars
Number:264
Year:1994
Publisher:MVP Software
Developer:Redwood Games
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Systems:DOS
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:3/5
Time:8 hours
Won:Yes (117W/89L)
Of all the shareware companies those who browsed the lot of the era know about, MVP Software is the least likely candidate for most valuable player. Sure, Apogee didn't always do action and sometimes Epic MegaGames was neither epic nor mega, but you were usually in for a tolerable time. MVP Software did less interesting games than those who decided to go it alone. Say what you will about the Hugo series, but even those were more interesting than Robomaze.
I will however, add an asterisk to this. Rings of the Magi is a pretty cool puzzle game, and I can't speak to the quality of their card games, but in the action sphere? Before starting on this entry I thought they were responsible for one particularly crap top-down game that I remember crashing a ton on period hardware. In this regard, I must apologize, they aren't as bad as I thought. Heck, they published something from Redwood Games, the people responsible for Math Rescue and Word Rescue. It's not going to be that bad...I say before having to install a DOS game using a Windows installer that doesn't even work.
As I alluded to last time, this has music from Bobby Prince, and comes in boring Soundblaster, ultra rich Gravis UltraSound, and last decade rich person's Roland MT-32. Since the UltraSound one crashed my emulator, MT-32 it is. This game was also written by Ellen Guon, who wrote some novels with Mercedes Lackey and contributed to the expansions to the first two Wing Commander games, as well as the second game. Whether or not that's impressive, I don't know. Lackey co-writes a lot of novels, so for all I know she's the feminist fantasy version of James Patterson, which...might be a compliment to Guon, except that she stopped writing novels after these co-writing ventures.
The story is, on the peaceful planet of Arcadia, an evil race of aliens, who have been dubbed "the dread Pickles", have invaded and Arcadia's...Coast Guard, is powerless to defend against them. But our hero, Dave, a history student at "University", finds Lord Geric's Depository of Ancient Weapons, which contain the legendary SaladShooters®, which causes the Pickles to faint and along with the Coast Guard officer Linda, shall drive back the evil invaders once and for all.
As you might guess, this game is slightly humorous. Our heroes are using an actual, real world, licensed product...which is basically just a vegetable slicer. The evil antagonist turned his brother into a pickle. I guess his name is Rick, am I right!? (I don't care about that show and won't pretend to) It's moderately funny. I'm not going to print out one of the jokes and put it on my fridge, but I chuckled.
Once you're past the intro, the game asks you what difficulty you want. Every time you start the game, incidentally. There's the usual main menu. The instructions explains the game, options are your usual options plus saving/loading, minus the sound card select. Demo is a demo, story reopens the intro. High Scores is what you expect, and about is actually the credits. Read mail I'll explain once I start.
The game starts you off in a random-looking room. Boy, my guy looks a bit out of place, but I have to say despite the oddness of the different elements, it might just make a better whole. He doesn't quite match how he looks in cutscenes, oddly. The music's strange, it's ragtime-esque with a squarewave occasionally popping in. It's like if there was a ragtime
Sonic the Hedgehog track. I...actually like this better than I was remembering. Though the protagonist has one heck of a jerky animation.
Control-wise, the game is simple, but has a few oddities. Space or alt to shoot. You shoot straight and that's it, hold it down to fire at a steady rate. Not truly automatic, but hopefully enough Ctrl is jump, and jump is tied into how long you press the button. There are blocks that you can jump through and some you can't. Yet we also get look up and down, tied to page up and down. Why not just make it up and down? Enter is the use key. It's all very easy to control and straight-forward, though I suspect this game is going to throw enemies I can't easily hit soon enough. There are also ladders, which you can climb up and down with those keys.
You can really tell that the last game from these guys was a children's game, because there's an emphasis on non-violence that feels odd. You aren't killing enemies, you're just stunning them with chopped up vegetables. You're not getting hurt, they're stealing your carrots. It's so strange and feels out of place. Why are we just stunning each other? Are they here to steal the humans' fluids?
Here are mail machines, they drop floating mail. You read it. At first it gives useful information, then it gives the game's story. Like here, where an important government official is threatening to arrest the aliens that he has no army to fight against. Clearly going for a satirical look at the government, I dig it. Shooting either the mail or the machines is penalized, with a slight score drain. As the game goes on though, it just becomes another thing you have to wait around for, but at least what you get is usually funny.
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| Pickles |
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| Flying Machines |
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| Rovers |
In this first episode there are three enemies. The titular Pickles, which are slow, dumb and easy to hit. I am on medium, so maybe that's affecting something. There are also slow, dumb and barely moving flying machines which are like the mail machines...in that they fly. Then a sort of rover thing which I jumped over. None of these are creatures you need to actually shoot, which is odd, but you can. Sometimes it's wise, but I think most are ones you could get away with not shooting. They remain stunned for a long enough time that you won't have much trouble with them. I think the flying machines and the rovers die and aren't just stunned, but I never saw one moving again afterwards.
That said, there are then these. They hide in a hole, and if you get close they jump out. Except it's less like they actually do so and more like they get an animation jumping out while you got hurt the second you reached within a certain radius. I nearly died because of them, but since there don't seem to be any lives I'm not sure how much that matters. At least they seem to die when they're shot, but it's tricky to shoot them because of the jumping out thing. Tricky but possible.
This means that the only real threat are those things in the wall, because everything else you can nearly always avoid or shoot before it becomes a problem. Really sets the stakes of the game low, that and how you basically can't lose anyway. It doesn't matter how tricky everything else is if your victory is assured if you put the time in.
The objective on each level is to find all the SaladShooters®, which means explore, explore, explore. Some are behind color coded doors. Gotta say, this level is set up somewhat crappily. Most enemies don't move if they're off-screen, so there's rarely any threat from that...except if one reaches your down path on an elevator. Which contributed to my near death. The bigger part is that it's very easy to put yourself into an unwinnable situation or get in one you confuse for being unwinnable. Like falling in a pit leading to the exit. An elevator goes down just enough for you to reach...but you won't know that because it takes forever to reach there.
The level design here in general is not great. Because each level is almost entirely "find items, then the exit", this seems to have resulted in some lazy level design. Over the course of the episode, the best levels are just the ones that don't get in the way. In comparison to how Apogee titles tended to have the more item hunt levels occasionally be fun. By having each small section be its own thing or by making it tricky enough that you get frustrated by it and forget you're doing some of it over and over again. In contrast, this is all about just making sure you didn't miss a secret wall along an elevator ride the height of the level. Otherwise you just comb the whole level until its over.
Switches, warps, doors and keys are an important part of the game. Switches activate the elevators. They don't seem to do anything else and there's no point in not using them. Warps are teleports, sometimes two-way, sometimes one-way. Sometimes over a pit. Doors and keys work like you'd expect, except its one key a door, but you can carry multiple keys. The game doesn't explain this as far as I could tell, but if you've gotten far enough for that to be a concern, you're going to be used to occasionally restarting a level.
After every two levels, there are cutscenes. Shows how far I got originally when I didn't know these were a thing. They're along a funny nature, the first one's about the aliens betting how long it'll take before the Earth goes. Then it's mostly about Dave finding his way to the Repository of Ancient Weapons, which is guarded by an senile old man named Lord Geric. Which does feel odd. The story as told in the mail messages makes sense, because we get the SaladShooters® in the first level and start fighting back...but then the in-between implies that we don't and we're really looking for something else as if this isn't helping. There are canisters labelled AW which I need to collect, but it's still strange.
After several levels, we end up meeting with Ensign Linda, who is in a strange bodysuit and...wait, Dave was in armor? Why does he look like a normal dude wearing a shirt and pants. in the game? When I get to play as Linda, she too, just looks like a normal woman in a shirt and pants. Would it really have been that difficult doing the sprites in what they actually wear? The two argue a bit in cutscenes, but mostly come to terms. They have to find the Doomsday Weapon, which naturally, the aliens somehow know about and somehow want.
As the episode goes through to its conclusion, the design of these levels remain as strange as ever. There's very little challenge, except sometimes from the hazards on the ground. By now, being able to anticipate firing on the hole monsters is good enough to deal with them. All the game really does to make it harder is to make you go up and down a level dozens of times, which does not try anyone's skills, but it does try their patience. I have thirty HP in a game where one hit deals one HP, and enough ammo to take out the army myself. You've got to give me more than that!
That said, I was starting to feel a lot of the cracks in the game beyond the gameplay. Animation, most importantly the player, is wonky. Platforms have two different sprites they cycle through as they move, which is annoying, but while the hitbox of a platform is crummy, it's at least consistent. Sound effects are a weird mix of decent Soundblaster stuff and things that sound like they're PC Speaker. There's not enough music and it doesn't last that long. I think there's something like five tracks maximum and each is about half a minute.
The episode ends with all the ancient weapons obtained and with Linda finding a clue to the Doomsday Weapon. But the Pickles have been watching and kidnap her. Please buy our game. You can stop the Pickles from unleashing the Doomsday Weapon! Somehow, I doubt many people got far enough to hear that plea.
Episode 2 begins with a recap and then we see Linda on the Pickle ship. A child Pickle comes to see her, because he wants to know what a real human looks like. The Pickles think they have this in the bag so much that they've brought a child to a warzone, eh? He thinks it's a game, and after a bit of back and forth, because she's unhappy, he lets her go. Okay...this is getting weird.
For this episode, I switched up to hard for a bit just so I can have some semblance of anything other than apathy. It's not like I'm going to run out of lives or anything. This seems to just increase the Pickles speed and regeneration, but at the same time, unless you need to camp our their location, this doesn't change anything. The levels are more difficult, owing to increased fire/water/lava floors, but they're actually better. As in, hey, this is an actual level where I have to move around to avoid enemies and take them out rather than just mowing down the entire level. Like the more forgettable levels in a better game.
A caveat here is that even by the second level I have so much health and ammo that I'd have to try to run out. It also pulls out that mean trick where it hides secrets in passageways on the bottom of stairs. There's still the usual issues levels have been having, where you go past some dangerous jump only to find out that led to the exit, or having to grab items by jumping from a moving platform over lava. The more annoying stuff. Doesn't help that your hitbox, as I said before, isn't easy to understand.
The story continues with Linda eventually reaching a spaceport on the Pickle planet where she finds a phone she can use to call Dave. Unfortunately, she lacks the 350 credits she needs to make the call off-world. Considering inflation and the fact that this call would be more technologically complex than anything a human as done on Earth, I'm not sure if that's a good deal or not.
The levels between this and the next cutscene are mostly fine. Mostly. Again, they're mostly just a matter of avoiding falling into a pit, everything else is a breeze...except that Level 8 hides a SaladShooter® in a secret. Yes, I was able to figure it out, but it's still a nasty trick to do. Still, there are far worse tricks the game could be doing.
The story continues with Linda finally failing to reach Lord Geric, but instead paging Dave, which costs more. The Doomsday Weapon is on Puzzle, where it was last used. Now it's time to continue as Dave once again, whereupon we get another background. This one's very nice, the artists are really good at doing pixel renditions of forests. The level design continues as you'd expect, mostly normal levels with one nasty thing in them.
After a few levels of this, there's another cutscene where Dave presumably heads to Puzzle. Presumably, because that's where the Doomsday Weapon is. The game seemed to freeze and I skipped a cutscene. Now I'm inside some mines, which turns the game into one of those really annoying open-ended levels where you're never sure where to go, nowhere seems to make any sense, and it's only luck that I ever seem to reach the exit with all the SaladShooters®.
The second level ends with destroying some sort of strange wall block, which turns out to be the controller to the Doomsday Weapon. Naturally, this is bad news, because if the Pickles try to control the weapon without it, they could destroy the universe. Now I need to find the second controller on Trivia, but first Dave goes to rescue Linda, who is now back inside the Pickles' dungeons.
It's time for a sewer level! Now there are tiny little spots on the ground which instantly kill you! I have nearly fifty HP and I get killed in one shot. The levels themselves are as bad as you'd think. Funny how this episode went from almost being reasonable to being tedious as hell. Miss one single thing and it's a ten minute trek over the level again.
The second episode ends how you'd expect, Dave finds Linda, they escape and head for Trivia to stop the Doomsday Machine. They now have twenty four hours to find the controller, as at the end of that time, the Pickle Emperor will destroy Arcadia. This leads into the final episode, in which we see our heroes evade the Pickle fleet with some impressive moves we don't see, and now they need fuel.
How does the third episode start off? It's really not that special. It's doesn't look at that different and the level design doesn't improve like from the first to the second. There are three levels of this, more wandering around large confusing areas with little to distinguish one area from the next. I'm getting the feeling that this game shouldn't have tried having fifteen levels an episode.
This detour allows them to head for Trivia, where there's an underwater maze. Fortunately, they have suits and air tanks, neither of which will appear or have any affect during gameplay. Unfortunately Linda is afraid of drowning, since she almost did as a child. It's odd that this is a serious moment and that Dave is that okay with this. I'd be a bit nervous about this, but that's because I've seen how bad above water mazes can be. Underwater mazes sound like they should have been in Inferno somewhere, but I guess Dante thought a river of excrement was more interesting.
Fortunately, none of what was just mentioned mattered, because the game is going to proceed exactly the same way it has over the past levels. What, change the gameplay? Ha. Long and wide, confusing levels. Oh, and this time you have to explore the darn secrets to find the SaladShooters®. I suppose there has to be something new in the third episode. It just wasn't something good.
The next cutscene has Dave get trapped by a wall off-screen, and now Linda is going to have to overcome her fears to save him. This really feels like a strange thing to bring up and then have her overcome like that. Shouldn't this fear have been introduced earlier? She psyches herself up once she finds out that Dave is trapped, it doesn't feel satisfying story-wise. Shouldn't we get some kind of character arc here beyond the two of them denying their feelings for each other?
Once they get the controller, they head back for Arcadia. The Emperor is about to use the Doomsday Weapon and then Lord Geric will never get his pizza. The United Earth Force is going to head out to attack the Pickle fleet, but they won't be there in time to stop the Doomsday Weapon. They have to stop them. This just brings up more questions. What, is Arcadia supposed to be some sort of Communist Space Utopia?
These levels are more or less standard, solid levels, which would be the backbone of a better game, but are the highlight here. No hunting for secrets here...which you think would be the case. This is exposing a flaw in the game's design. There's nothing wrong with having the player hunt for something every level if it's done well. Monster Bash is a personal favorite of mine and Crystal Caves was a solid title for Apogee. The thing is, the latter was some enough to make crystal hunting very obvious and the former had a compass for finding animals. It also gave you a reason for it all the entire game. Dash was saving pets from a horror villain, while the miner in Crystal Caves was greedy enough to risk his life like that.
Here the narrative doesn't quite make sense. I know I'm supposed to find the SaladShooters®, but the game implies that until Dave and Linda found the Ancient Weapons they really were just jumping around. Even on hard, the enemy doesn't seem that difficult to deal with. I've owned more than my fair share of crappy Chinese electronics, and even they wouldn't break if I threw a sliced up cucumber at them. More to the point, while I don't object to collecting the weapons per say, it makes the later levels very easy and often it doesn't make narrative sense. At this point I should be collecting something else.
The final level throws all reason out and forces you over a long pit while jumping at SaladShooters®. The universe is about to end, but let's make sure we can take out the last bunch of flying machines! And naturally, when combined with the difficulty in landing on a moving platform, means a lot of dying. This one level has an ending cutscene when the universe explodes. Hope you like seeing that a bit.
If you go past that, you find the Doomsday Weapon, which you can now use on either Arcadia or the Pickle planet. I, being of no real thought, pressed the Pickle planet, and got a cutscene in which it explodes, and then we see our heroes talk about how they genocided billions of people on the Pickle planet. But that's okay, probably. Here I was about to make a joke about them stealing Pickle eggs for some reason and not realizing that was a war crime. This is an actual ending to the game, it sends you back to DOS when you finish it.
What you're actually supposed to do is go past those two switches and then shoot a glowing thing on the wall. This destroys the machine, and now...there are more levels. Again, I'm glad I'm picking up every SaladShooters® when I have 300 shots in reserve. In a sense, this is odd, despite not really padding itself out, by the time I reach the true ending, I hit the eight hour mark. Just natural...uh...whatever this is.
The true ending involves our heroes calling the Pickle Emperor on the phone and demanding his surrender. The Earth fleet is surrounding him and he has no Doomsday Weapon. The Emperor surrenders and finally, peace is achieved. Dave proposes to Linda, but before they can go off to their honeymoon, Lord Geric calls and tells us that someone else is in trouble, and they go off to help them. The end.
Weapons:
Your only real weapon is a straight-shooting blaster which fires as fast as you want, can only be aimed left and right, and moves so long as it's on-screen. It's technically more competent than most weapons of this simplicity, but not by much. 1
Enemies:
There are five enemies, none of which come off as a real threat and only two require any real skill to get past. If you removed your ability to attack, you could reasonably get around most levels with enough practice. With weapons, there are very few times you're actually in danger. 2
Non-Enemies:
The mail machines are more like things you avoid hitting than anything else. 0
Levels:
These range from being solid but unmemorable to tedious and annoying to go through. More of the latter than the former. So many good design principles are blatantly ignored at least once, not because it made a really cool level, but because they could. 3
Player Agency:
Count me in the group of people who find using the up key as jump as being annoying. This is a computer game, it isn't like we're running out of keys. It isn't like this is for the joystick controls, you get jump and shoot, you still need to use the keyboard to use warps and switches. Otherwise, it's mostly fine, but your hitbox is tricky to understand, even at the end I still didn't understand it. 4
Interactivity:
For a game with a use key, there's not a lot to use outside of doorways and switches, which you nearly always should use. Shootable blocks make out the rest, which are solely used to block your progress. 1
Atmosphere:
Pickle Wars is a weird game. There are a lot of disparate elements which make it feel cobbled together at times. Often, weird for weird's sake, but you also can't be sure that this wasn't just accidental. There's also no real new content in the commercial episodes, just a few new visual and music bits, nothing actually changing how the game is played. 3
Graphics:
My biggest issue is that the animation is jerky. Not in an intentional way where this is an important part of the visual profile. An unintentional thing that makes your character's place in the game world feel off. Since it primarily concerns the player, even if nearly everything has this issue. Everything else is fine despite the mismatched styles going on. It's not always the best, but it does come together for the intentional weirdness. 4
Story:
The story is primarily concerned about being funny to the point of excluding most other points beyond "the heroes beat the evil invaders." It also concerns a whole lot of things which seem to happen off-screen. The game describes Linda as having a fear of drowning, yet this doesn't actually matter in the slightest. The game's comedy is fine, but the best of it is in the various mail messages. Which you have to wait around for, and that just isn't happening. Most of them seem to repeat in the later episodes too. 4
Sound/Music:
There aren't a lot of music tracks and they're all short. Some I'm not even sure are more than a few bars. There's one track that reminds me of something, but what it is escapes me. Some are annoying, but mostly it's just disappointing. That one's probably a coincidence. The sound meanwhile, is an odd mix of PC speaker-like sounds and digitized voices, with a few real sounds thrown in. 4
That's 25, which is lower than any post-Arctic Adventure game from Apogee, but not appreciably. It definitely comes off as worse than Apogee's efforts regardless of this, though.
I don't know what I'll be doing next week, but it'll probably be some less demanding game, if I manage to have an entry out at all. Real life issues pushed my finishing up of this past my usual self-imposed deadline and they show no sign of disappearing anytime soon.
