Wolfenstein 3D - The Second Encounter (1994)

Name:Wolfenstein 3D - The Second Encounter
Number:266
Year:1994
Publisher:Macplay (Interplay's Macintosh arm at the time)
Developer:ID Software
Genre:FPS
Systems:3DO, Jaguar, Macintosh, SNES
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:4/5
Time:5 hours 10 minutes
Won:No (117W/91L)

As is usually the case with best-selling PC games, someone will try to port it to consoles. Technically, we've seen it before with Star Cruiser...even if I have yet to actually play the computer version, but this is the first one we're all familiar with. Normally, this wouldn't rate much of a glance, since most FPS are in some regard inferior on consoles and there's no real getting around that. Wolfenstein 3D though, isn't exactly better, but it is different.

The first console port was to the SNES, roughly comparable to some DOS machines at the original release. Which, in theory, should mean that the game plays similar to the original...mostly. The change is that the SNES is not quite as powerful enough to handle the proper experience, so corners were cut. Let's just get to that, shall we?

Oh, sweet lord, that's hideous. At the expense of having a decent sized viewing port, everything is a blur. This, in of itself, is not enough to warrant another playthrough. There are a dozen versions of Doom with similar issues. No, what warrants another playthrough is that there are thirty new levels, played concurrently, not in episodic chunks. New should be in quotes, since they're supposed to be simplified ports of various DOS levels. On the 3DO version and on Macintosh, these are alongside the original six episodes for...uh...some reason.

I eventually went for the Macintosh version. I tried the 3DO version, which is supposed to be the best, but it had no side-stepping and the emulator ran slowly on my system. Macintosh, despite some hiccups with a new version of Ubuntu, worked better. Even if there was still some slowdown with having a decently sized game window. Yeah, turns out running a Macintosh version in 320x200 you're running in a window on 1600x1080 is a recipe for not seeing anything. 

This controls a bit differently than you'd expect. Oh, there's the usual use, shoot and move, but the movement is awkward. This may tie into the whole slowdown bit, but aiming at someone was very awkward. I probably should have tried to find a port of this to ECWolf or something, but I was in too late before I realized it. There's a different sound effect when you use a wall, and nothing afterwards. I wasn't actually sure that this worked the same way as DOS.

 

Z and X sidestep. Aha, you may think, you can turn and sidestep, like a proper, modern FPS. Well, maybe, on my machine, side-stepping and turning results in nothing or turning in a very small circle. The Nazis haven't seen such incompetence in battle since they last fought with the Italians! Rounding this out is / for automap and esc for pause...which then allows you to open the menus, which are in the program menus like any well-designed game should have.

The GUI is changed. It looks like an AI upscale for some reason. Items are the treasure items you've found along the way, which now have a Quake sound effect when you pick them up. After about 40, you get another life. BJ looks weird, but is otherwise the same. Not shown, the ammo for your rocket launcher and flamethrower. Yes, there are new weapons here.

The returning ones are mostly the same. The pistol is no longer a Luger, but is instead some weird heavy metal monstrosity. The other two are almost the same. They shoot with 100% accuracy, which in this particular version can be annoying. Precise aiming is tricky, so you can go back and forth over an enemy while he gets free shots in. 

The rocket launcher is more like a railgun. Shoot it at someone and it goes through them. This was hilarious the first time I used it. I'm sure that's been done somewhere, but I've never seen a rocket which wasn't explode on impact before. It does explode, but only on walls or bosses. Not a lot of ammo, but oddly, more ammo than you'd expect.

Then there's the flamethrower. Rapid-fire, no decay in attack. Basically, a machine gun with solid projectiles and more damage. Anything it hits, well, it dies fast. Basically a plasma rifle without a cooldown period.

Every looks and seems just a little bit odd. It's not quite like that one image of a fan-made HD upscale of a game, but it is close. Guards, SS, officers and mutants all share the same lines, only the mutants don't have an alert sound. So there's no distinguishing them if you end up the wrong way down a fork in the road. Dog food also gives a dog barking sound effect, so this is distracting. Hunting for secrets is strange, because you can't hold down the use key here, instead you have to hammer it, while hearing BJ grunt continuously.

Levels seem to be simplified forms of more complex levels from the original. The first level, for instance, is a version of E1L1 with no side paths and a few side areas. Others, if they're based on a level, I couldn't really tell. Some levels are just more forgettable than others, so Second Encounter is working with that. Oddly, it kind of works. Wolfenstein was best when it was short levels you burned through quickly, and every level here is short and to the point.

To recap, the ideal for Wolfenstein, since each level has a limited amount of space, is that this forced limitation requires the level author to be clever in his use of enemies and space in order to make something short and fun. Which kind of worked during the original levels, but as the game went on you could see this idea start to disappear. By the end of Spear of Destiny, we had reached the limit and that game's expansions just spammed stuff at you because there was no other path forward. (This reasoning tends to be why I like Wolf-clones more than Wolf itself, because they tend to keep this feeling going for a bit longer or don't drag themselves out as long)

Second Encounter doesn't fool itself. No, by the third level, you'll have gotten your first non-secret gatling gun and found your first boss. But at the same time, the game loses the snappy gameplay, at least in how I experienced it. Enemies always seem to take a dozen bullets, aiming is awkward and enemies don't seem to do that much damage to me. Even Hans takes a few salvos to take me out. Doors also can only be closed again if it's midway through opening and only if you were the one to open them. I feel like the inevitable mod for Wolfenstein 3D that added in these levels probably fixes this, but in theory, I am testing something else.

By the time I have enough ammo for all weapons that I can go through a level more or less as I please, it feels even less like Wolfenstein 3D. Unless I miss or get ambushed from behind, I am under no real threat. Bosses die to several rockets, but those are easier to aim and they like to get close. In complete contrast from other expansions/sequels, I am now far too powerful for the game. I barely need to worry about secrets, to the point that I didn't even know there were secret levels until I stumbled into one.

Even when I do occasionally bite it, it's not that much trouble to get back to where I was. Even when it does get to the harder levels, I'm not constantly spinning around to take out guys hiding behind corners...because that's something this one can't effectively do. Oh, there are some, but the game doesn't overuse them this time around.

At least, until you get to 5-1. Now there are the usual amount of enemies. So you have to carefully clear out a level room by room, over the course of ten minutes, with controls that don't let you turn around quickly or aim accurately, when the game often expects you to do both. And we're back to what made Wolfenstein bad once again. But for a while it was the manageable kind of bad.

Then 5-5 happens. As I've banged on before, one of the expected principles of good level design, as in, so obvious we shouldn't have to explain it, is that levels should not start with the player about to get shot with no chance of escaping some damage. 5-5 not only ignores this, but practically throws the player into a nearly lethal situation. You don't start in elevators, so you're out in the open. Where a SS and a couple mutants are.

5-6 repeats this with a SS RIGHT IN FRONT of the player. This is a boss floor, incidentally, complete with fifty or so enemies, and a boss who, when you fire a shot in his room, becomes alert. Which is good, because there are about a dozen enemies in there. The first time I got there, I killed him and then got taken out by some guards who waited for me to enter. This level certainly encapsulates the Wolfenstein 3D experience.

I had already decided that I wasn't going to finish the last "episode" of Second Encounter beforehand, 5-6 solidified that, and when 6-1 opened up on another group of hostiles I just laughed as I quit the game. There's nothing quite as ironic as a game I thought was actually going one way start to end to the point that made the others bad.

As I was making it to those last few levels, I was starting to have a bit of trouble with ammo. Not 5-5/5-6, which had plenty of bullets, but I was actually getting into the double digits for that. I also noticed that as the levels wore on, I was finding less and less flamethrower and rocket launcher ammo. To the point that if I were pistol starting each level I would be having significantly more trouble than I already was.

Weapons:
The flamethrower, for the most part, feels like an unnecessary addition. Since the base weapons now all have perfect accuracy, a sprite projectile weapon isn't that useful. It's basically an additional 99 shots for risky situations or if you think you can anticipate where an enemy'll be. The rocket launcher, meanwhile, is quite possibly the most useful rocket launcher in any FPS, simply because the only situations it isn't useful is against a single guy. 4

Enemies:
Unchanged from the original. 4

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
As a greatest hits version of Wolfenstein, I have nothing to complain about. Most of what I enjoyed about the game is here and that which wasn't...well, we didn't lose anything. That said, since the game has lost the opening elevator, and several levels had enemies outside the elevator...and now they aren't balanced around that, this is actually worse. I will say that this version's way of using mutants and officers together more felt nice compared to the either or of the original. 3

Player Agency:
Sure, this version has smooth side-stepping and a map feature, but it also has strange turning, no holding down use, and it's hard to hit anything. Plus that side-stepping comes with a cost of working awkwardly with turning. 4

Interactivity:
Unchanged. 1

Atmosphere:
Somewhere between frantic action hero movie, the life or death action of the original, and sometimes the tedious slog that was the Spear expansions. So, very mixed. 3

Graphics:
There's something uncanny about it all. None of the enemies have side or even back sprites now, so everyone is just going straight for you. The walls seem unchanged, but I can't help think they have and I don't like that I couldn't figure out why. 4

Story:
The SNES version added in cutscenes between "episodes"...which was not present in the 3DO or Macintosh version for...some reason. Now there's nothing, not even the vestige of what the DOS version had. 0

Sound/Music:
Higher quality sound effects, some of which sound weird. This is discounting the use of a Quake sound effect for picking up treasure. The music is odd, it's all this really energetic pseudo-heavy metal stuff. Less Doom's...well, doomier influence and more the kind of stuff that would influence power metal. Very happy, very energetic, but there are like 5 tracks. 4

That's 27, along the same lines as Spear of Destiny.

Were it not for the sudden shift into gotcha moments, I think this version would have been the best. It almost did exactly what it needed to do...and then it screwed it up. I wouldn't even have complained if it kept in the hardness of the later levels were it not for enemies being right next to the start. All other issues pale in comparison to that. I know Wolfenstein is about being a quick shot, but you can't be testing me the second I start a level, I make my saves there.

This should be the last time I cover anything directly connected to Wolfenstein for a while. Any other expansions I could find are just compilations of random levels, which could be worth a look as a lark, but not anytime soon.

Next time, I continue having to manage real life issues, but I think I'll either try out the Acorn 32-bit version of Elite or pull out something completely random out of a hat.

Moto Roader (1989)

Name:Moto Roader
Number:265
Year:1989
Publisher:NEC
Developer:NCS
Genre:Racing
Systems:Turbografx-16, Windows, Wii, Wii U
Country of Origin:Japan
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours 20 minutes
Won:No (117/90L)

You know, when you're just randomly playing games looking for something easy, it's kind of strange how little you seem to find. At first, out of a hat, I picked this one, decided against it, then played some Doraemon game I added...which was not a shooter, but a game in which you defeat enemies by digging holes. Interesting, but not my thing. I came back to this, since I still had a copy and...well, decided that I should be covering this anyway.

Moto Roader is a very generic game at first glance. It looks like a forgettable, bland top-down racing game like so many others that we've forgotten over the years. A perspective chosen not because the developers were using the latest technology or deliberately choosing it for whatever reason. It had a sequel, sure, but at the time of its release, there was only one other racing game on the system, Victory Run, but 1989 was a packed year, so how did it get ahead of the pack and somehow get two sequels?

From a race results rather than the opening name selection.

There are five racers in every race, each of which can be either human or computer controlled. Which actually sounds impressive, but I'm guessing that was picked because that was how many the system could physically support rather than deliberate choice. Player 1 is always white, so that will be the one I'm racing every race. The game offers the chance to pick a name...with five letters. I'm usually not this lazy, but I went with AAAAA, because there are multiple sets of race series and even the first I would be entering the same name over and over again.

After this, and after a blonde podium girl with eyes uncomfortably close to the size of her boobs for one so gifted, we get a drone fly-by over the racetrack. It speeds up as you get further along in the series. Pretty sure this is nowhere near the first racing game to do/need something like this, but it's still rare enough that I find this helpful and new. You get to find out just enough ahead of time to find out where the real danger spots. This, as you go along, becomes increasingly more and more helpful.

This leads into the part selection menu, where you spend money on parts for your car and various special items, including weapons. This is where things get interesting, car customization. At the game start you get 5k and every race you get a certain amount depending on where you were in the race. As long as you finish, you get money. Which depends on which position you get, up to 10k for getting first. No matter what, with some trickery, it's possible to survive even if you're dead last...but it still needs trickery.

The car parts are as follows:

• Tires, these determine your acceleration, and I believe how well you turn. This makes them very important, because getting your speed back up faster is often just as important as having it in the first place.
• Body, changes the body type of your car. This improves your speed, but not to the degree that engine does. It's a bonus on top of your engine.
• Brake, determines cornering ability. You don't get a dedicated brake button, so it might help when you take off the accelerator, I wasn't paying attention enough to tell if that changed anything.
• Handle, how well you turn. I think, because the best option costs 200 I basically never went a game without having it. There are also two steering modes you can have, a more traditional left/right turn function, or...I'll explain later.
• Engine, speed, you need this, and you need a lot of it. You need to keep upgrading this to keep pace with the other racers, because otherwise you will be left in the dust. This is a dramatic change from first to even second, where having the second engine almost guarantees victory in your first race.
• Turbo, I think it improves speed. It didn't work too well for me the one time I got it, but something has to be giving the AI more speed than the body and engine.

The specials are as follows:

• Warper, the manual says this warps you ahead one place. I have never seen the AI use it and I never bought it. Because if I'm spending that much, I'm just getting Nitro for the final push.
• Gas Tank, refills your gas timer, multiple use. More on that later.
• Turner, I don't know. I've never bought it and never used it, and the AI doesn't use it.
• Nitro, rapid speed boost, one-time use. But in the end, there's only one time it's best to use.
• Grenade, shoots an explosive ahead of you. The other racers love this one.
• Bomber, drops an explosive behind you. The other racers love this one.
• Hopper, causes you to jump. There are a few situations this could be really helpful, but if you have the situational awareness to use this ahead of time, you usually can just go around the hazard.

Once you've purchased what you think is best, it's time to actually race. It's a scrolling top-down view. Use your item/weapon with button I, accelerate with button II.  Again, there are no brakes, but assuming you take your finger off the accelerator, you won't have any trouble slowing down. The real learning curve is in turning.

Now, Moto Roader can work like your average racing game. Can. Mode B handling options allow you to turn like you're playing any old racing game left and right. Mode A is different, and likely the one any modern player is going to have to figure out beforehand. Mode A is kind of like playing a game with tank controls updated to a modern audience. Tap the d-pad in the right direction and you move that way. On my machine this is a bit tricky, since holding down S, left and up causes that old keyboard locking up crap, but I can bypass this by tapping up or left as needed.

This works to the game's favor, oddly enough. Because your view is in absolute directions and this movement turns to absolute directions, in certain bad situations, you're home free. No awkwardly sliding to the left or right because you didn't turn all the way...now you can just fix that by tapping up. It allows you to match the AI in its perfectness...or at least their one bit of perfectness.

The track's made up of several distinct pieces. Narrow bits, short divides, cross junctions, hard turns, soft turns, oil slicks, jump spots and walls you have to move around. Firmly in the arcade style of the genre. If you hit a wall or a jump spot, you'll stop dead and have to go around it, but make a turn wrong, hit an oil slick or go off into the grass too fast and you'll spin around like a top. Naturally, the game sets up the tracks so you won't be able to avoid this.

The game has an absurd number of tracks, ranging from mundane, to real world race tracks, to complex obstacle courses. One group starts off with one intended to be a suburb, which would have been a nicer concept if the graphics were capable of showing it. As these go along they tend to get longer and longer, sometimes to the point that a single lap of a track feels like enough, yet often there will be two. It's impressive, but at times I wondered just how many times the player was supposed to go through a race series to even have a chance of winning.

This ties into that number you've been seeing in the corner. That's the gasoline you have left. It refills through one of three ways, gas tank power-up, through a gas zone in the middle of a lap, and when you reach the finish line. Run out, and it's a game over. It drains slowly as you go around, but it goes down faster if you're slow enough to end up on the back side of the screen.

See, If someone ends up so far behind that they'd be off the screen, they get teleported to the middle of the screen. Speed and direction are carried over. For the player, this drains their gas, but the AI has no such handicap. So if you run off the road on a sharp turn, you'll get placed back on it when the guy who made it speeds off into the distance. But you better hope you won't have to turn around too much. This is why you get the tires with the best acceleration.

But this actually creates a weird effect in several situations. In a section where the center of the road is actually bad, like an oil spill or a narrow bit off to the left or right, you can be teleported into more pain. It can actually screw you up, putting you through a nasty loop for a while. Even the AI can get tripped up by this. And on the home stretch, just because you should be second or third doesn't mean that a lucky teleport won't send you back a spot. By the same token, you can exploit this even if logically these guys should be lapping you.

Now, the other racers. They're great. They're slightly dumber humans. They act like a human logically would but they don't have the benefit of any foresight. They'll do something mostly well...if they can react in time, but the other guys aren't going to be making hairpin turns if they're at the front of the pack. Often all of the AI would go off somewhere and I alone would somehow manage to make it through. Especially often on wall pieces, where you zig-zag through walls.

They'll have one of three specials. The hoppers...which jump. I'm not sure why they get these, it never seemed to help them in any noticeable way. Then the grenades and droppers. Whether or not these were effective seemed random, sometimes they'd hit gold, other times not. This was the only experience I had with weapons. For me, it was simply more effective to use other things. There's probably some wisdom in saving a grenade for the finish, jump up a few places, but I'll explain why I didn't later.

These guys have to handle their money the same way you do. They can't get better upgrades than you theoretically could with the same money. Which is good in theory, except here's where the trouble starts. There are four other guys, and chances are the guy in second got enough cash for the biggest engine. If you purchased the second engine, there is no way for you to buy the best engine on the second race, and you need to buy something else to keep at least some parity with the racers. This starts the doom loop.

The second race is usually possible to survive. You won't get first, but maybe you can get second if you're lucky. After that, if you don't get the gas tank, you'll get teleported so many times it's game over. The other racers are going to have high powered engines and turbo chargers, you won't stand a chance. Looking back, I should have tried the same method the AI was using, perhaps this was a hint that burning your cash on the second engine wasn't the correct choice of action.

At this point, you probably expect to hear me complain about the difficulty, but I'm not going to do that. The strange serenity of the early races combined with the sheer chaos of the later ones makes it a fun experience. The few moments in a middle race I get to be in the lead, only to see every other racer slowly catch up to me. The final races I actually make it to, when I have some parity on the high end, only for every other corner to turn into a major crash for someone.

My issue is that the presentation feels goofy. The soundtrack is bland, generic happy race music. It feels somewhat out of place when the guy in the back shoots a grenade and everyone else spins around. Or just when someone is always going off the road. I wanted the option to turn it off and put something more appropriate. Having the music just be background noise contributed to the feeling on longer tracks that this race was taking too long.

I think some of the tracks should have been shorter length-wise but just throw in another lap. Some races had three, a few one, but most two. There are a lot of races, so they were doing this from a good point of view, giving the player content, but sometimes that wasn't quite as good as it could have been.

Weapons:
All of the weapon items are very effective at what they do, even if I never saw the wisdom in using them. 2

Enemies:
I've not seen better AI in a top-down racer. Of course, I don't usually play top-down racers. Feels human in that it has the same flaws humans have, and the developers did not make them perfect play AIs. 5

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There is no want for choice here, even if the levels are obviously made of certain repeating blocks. 4

Player Agency:
While there is an option for traditional left/right steering, the point and go system this game has feels very nice to use when you get used to it. 6

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Beneath a somewhat cutesy exterior lies chaos. 3

Graphics:
Nice, bright and happy. Doesn't quite depict what it wants to depict half the time. Seems like every race track in the world is on a bright green field. 3

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Sound effects are solid 16-bit representations of what they're trying to do. Music is bland and sometimes aggravating. 2

That's 25...again. Not bad for a game category which usually has quite a few zeroes in it here.

Reading the reviews for the game, not a lot of period ones, modest scores, but there were some for the Virtual Console rerelease on Wii. These find the game's very existence offensive. I gotta say, in retrospect it makes sense as to why Youtubers, despite their obvious and sometimes extreme biases, started eating the lunch of professional reviewers around this time. These do not read like the words of someone who got paid to review a game, they read like someone who feel like the good folks behind this game committed a war crime. I realize I do this sometimes, but it's usually when I actually spend the time to go through a game. If I'm not spending that much time on a game, it's usually because I don't find it that interesting.

For instance, the controls. They are unique, but I got used to them in about half a hour. It took me a moment to figure it out on the first race, but you know, that's because I'm just starting to figure things out. For 200 out of a starting 5000, you can switch to a normal left/right with the best possible handling for 200. (or as I said, the default with best possible handling) This is so cheap that I basically never went a race without it after I realized it. Or you can spend nothing to switch to it. The game is not going after you for not using it's own method of controlling the game. Yet everyone is acting like this is some impossible to get around problem which can only change if you spend an obscene amount of money. If you can survive a race, you can get the best handling even if you didn't buy it at the start. I swear any retro reviews from the late '00s should be taken with a salt shaker.

Next time, once again, trouble on the home front, but I'm going to aim for the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D, also released on Macintosh and 3DO as Second Encounter. Since it's somewhere between a remix and quasi-expansion of the original game.

Pickle Wars (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pickles

Flying Machines

Rovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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