Dark Side

Name:Dark Side
Number:121
Year:1988
Publisher:Incentive Software
Developer:Major Developments
Genre:FPS/Puzzle
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes

You know, its funny, time is a funny thing in regards to games I blog about. By default, having a lawnmower approach like I do adds wide gaps between someone's games. In the early days I didn't really have things too well organized, and just played whatever was from the '80s, a more likely possibility if it was a FPS. This game's prelude, Driller, the first Freescape engine title, came out 1 year before this, but I'm blogging about it a little more than 2 years after playing it. A short time span, in comparison to what I will eventually reach. Its the sort of thing that's really cool, but is very clearly something that doesn't mesh well with the thing I'm trying to do. This format doesn't really work well for a game that's long, difficult but mostly going over the same things over and over again.

Can you spot the danger here?

The story's connection to Space Station Oblivion is fairly loose. Last time the criminal exiles called Ketars tried to blow up the first moon, Mithral of a colonized human planet, called Evath. Now they're planning on destroying Evath from its second moon, Tricuspid. Where things get weird is that I remember aliens were somehow connected to the first game and the Ketars, who are human, lived on Mithral. The player's objective is to destroy all Energy Collection Devices (ECDs) before that happens. You know, the usual plot. I'll be playing the Amiga version, owing to my own biases of this time period. This time I play as a dude in power armor and a jetpack rather than the first game's weird tank thing.

One of many, many appearances of this freaking screen

Obviously, it looks better, but that's just because I'm playing on the Amiga. Controls just about as well as the last game, not amazing, but fair considering what they were trying to do. Really, this is just Space Station Oblivion with a fresh coat of paint and perhaps a tinge more mercy. The big advantage here is that we have mouse aiming. A welcome boost compared to last game's not mouse aiming. Also because I'm on the Amiga, I have keyboard joystick moving, which works for this game. Turns the whole thing into something weirdly standard-ish. I imagine this would be a monstrocity to play on original hardware though. What doesn't work, oddly enough, is the jetpack. Fly too high and you get teleported to the darkside and die.

An interior, much like you'd expect it to look like

Early on I take some getting reused to the game. Early enemies don't die, which doesn't go well. Each screen is a unique room with its own puzzle to solve in order to destroy the ECDs. You interact with things by shooting them or walking into them. Its Quake-style interaction before Quake baby. I say that, and its very clever in execution. Puzzle is in fact, the key word here, moreso than the last game. The central concept of the game may be to destroy ECDs rather than place giant drills, but the same concept applies. ECDs have a specific order to them before you can take them out. Some are more widely connected than others. If you take one out before you're able to, it regenerates.

This room doesn't seem like its important, but it is of the utmost importance

Compared to the original, there are big problems. Its not that early enemies don't die, enemies are basically just unkillable. Technically, I guess you can kill the camera/alarm things that send you to a cell. No, the biggest problem is that the game is on an extremely strict time limit. The game has a little power bar charging on the left side of the screen. The game or manual doesn't do anything whatsoever to draw attention to it, but this is the amount of power the weapon you're trying to stop has. Once it fills up...boom. As such the game requires significantly more speed than the original and is a bit more difficult to get used to. I didn't even realize something was going wrong until I was consistently dying.
This works out well, the game feels smaller and tighter in scope, perhaps as a result of knowing more about the game. Once you've gotten down the pathways of the ECDs and taken out a bunch the timer becomes much less of a problem. In fact, once you take out some of them, the rest start quickly falling into place, and it wasn't too long before I was down to 4% to take out, which is just the final ECD...which is on the dark side, where the giant weapon is.

Can you spot the hostiles in this picture?

Now, here is where the problem is. There is a tunnel under the dark side, which one can enter, but that automatically sends me back before I can shoot the final ECD. So I check a walkthrough. In order to reach the Dark Side you need to open a door, which needs the four letters DARK on four buildings behind force fields. To get there, you need to find four teleport crystals to use in a fancy teleporter. One in a cell, one behind one force field, another in heightened room, and the last is hiding on the ceiling in the tunnels. The problem is that that crystal doesn't seem to want to show up. The mechanics of this are a mystery in the Amiga and DOS version, but in the ZX Spectrum version its supposed to activate when you shoot an axe on a wall. It doesn't.
You know, failing to be able to win the game because of this crap is becoming a Freescape staple.

Foreshadowing

Weapons:
A generic laser pistol you have no reason not to shoot at anything you think is shootable. This doesn't really play like a shooter. 0/10

Enemies:
They're generic, but they are set up in such a way, especially the cameras, that requires a bit of thought in getting past. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Some clever ideas, but feels incredibly simple in most respects. The weird endgame section doesn't help things any. 2/10

Player Agency:
It works, but its clunky and confusing. I can aim the gun now, but moving around feels slow. 3/10

Interactivity:
This feels really simple. I'm basically just shooting a select number of objects. There's no destruction of anything that the game doesn't 100% want you to destroy. 1/10

Atmosphere:
None.

Graphics:
Very simple shapes, but everything important has a consistent and highly distinguishable shape. 2/10

Story:
None in-game.

Sound/Music:
This is actually really amusing, because there is music, and its pretty good. However, you have a choice between music and sound, and sound won out for most of the game. I like being able to hear if I've been shot. 2/10

That's 12. How does it compare to the first game? Space Station Oblivion got...15. Ouch.

Period reviews were mostly positive, but the negative ones mostly seem to be complaining about the game's length; That its too short. Of course, for me this seems like a hollow complaint, since I know there are at least 4 more titles using the engine I have yet to play.

The next Incentive Software title will not take nearly as long for me to reach, being 1988's Total Eclipse. Actually, its next up on my list of 1988 games. Everything else I've played, was in the wrong year or wasn't really a FPS, so I ignored it. Well, outside of Star Cruiser, which has been kicked down to 1990 for the console release, which was translated into English. I don't know enough Japanese to feel comfortable playing a story-heavy title quite just yet.