The Colony

Name:The Colony
Number:125
Year:1988
Publisher:Mindscape
Developer:David Alan Smith
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 15 minutes

Today's title is a bit unusual. I say unusual, as if any title that qualifies as a FPS from the '80s has been normal, even the closest we've gotten was Midi Maze and even that was a bit out there. No, today we have The Colony, a FPS that plays more like an adventure game, and yet the adventure game aspect seems totally tacked on. Originally released for B&W Macintoshes, before getting ports to Amiga and DOS, the former being the one I'll be playing for reasons I'll explain shortly. The Colony is very technically impressive, something I'm sure could be ported to everything under the sun. This is also the first game I've seen where someone involved with the original game, in this case a producer, claims the title to be THE first FPS. As you can already guess if you've read my blog for a while, this takes the Freescape engine approach to things.

The story is, the player is sent to find out what caused a colony to lose contact with the rest of the galaxy. In approaching, he smashes into a black hole, escapes and crash lands on the planet containing "the colony". The latter half is in the intro. I had a curious experience with this game. First I played the Macintosh version, the original because B&W Macintosh titles are cool-looking, then the Amiga because the original was seemingly unplayable, and then the B&W Mac version again because I figured out what I did wrong.

The bridge, after turning on the light

After the nice animated intro, the game starts...and its awful. I hesitate to start a review like this, but, holy crap, this is bad. The intention of the game is that the player goes to the nearby control console and turns on the lights. Which works somewhat in the Amiga version, not in the Macintosh version, which is pure B&W. So all the walls are just black and the doors are just there. The problem connecting this is that the nearby console, an obvious destination, has two buttons. One turns on the lights and the other causes the ship to explode. When you start up the game you might press them both, think that you shouldn't do that, and then screw around in vain for the next twenty minutes.

The control panel, having the two big buttons be light and cannons seems a bit overdramatic to me, but what do I know?

But enough about that, let's talk about the controls, and boy, howdy, this makes the Freescape games look like a modern console shooter. In theory you have the standard FPS controls, WASD + mouse, which this is actually the first game to do to my knowledge. Except these work quite poorly. Very, very poorly. The mouse is your standard awkward mouselook and moving that was standard before people figured out the standard usage. Its awkward, but it works. The keyboard controls are stiff, and make me yearn for another Freescape game. Something I shouldn't have to do, owing to the massive number of those.
Right, four paragraphs and I haven't actually played the game yet.

A typical scene

Once in motion, the game is weird. I don't think its weird in a bad way. You know all the amateurish backgrounds you see in amateur adventure games. Well, its like that, except in 3D. This actually looks pretty cool in-motion. Interacting with items in the environment is done by moving into them. This looks akin to a more standard first-person adventure game with some simple animation. I should note that walking into things seems to slightly damage the player otherwise, which is just a bad design choice. Once interacting with the environment, which include computers that look suspiciously like classic Macs, things turn into a standard adventure game screen. Except that random things can and will kill you, not only the aforementioned self-destruct button, but a cigarette.

Choosing ones weapons and armor, the heavier they are, the more energy they drain, and you can run out just walking around

Now, I should point out that you don't even get to shoot anything until you can figure out how to put on the suit of power armor. By the time I actually got to something I could shoot it felt like an accomplishment. Sort of, because when I got out of the ship finally...it was like Battlezone. Except on a Mac, controlled by the mouse and slow. The actual objective at this point is to find the entrance to the colony, but all these...uh...aliens, even though they look like robots, are in the way. Kill them or not, its all pointless, because this screen is just here to drain your life.

In case you didn't believe me

Once I make it into the colony, I'm greeted by...an enemy. At first I think combat is like Freaks, but I'm just playing poorly. It is the first use of "kill enemies and walk over their corpses to heal" that Freaks did. What is actually happening, as I discover in a slide in a meeting room* is that the aliens are energy beings, whenever they got shot enough, they suffer an energy overload and turn into eggs, which are pure energy and thus heal/restore ammo. Incidentally, this was caused by a teleporter disaster. I didn't realize that wasn't something Doom originated. There's even someone who calls them demons! And it appears the aliens don't use eyes to see things, because they saved the children by cryogenically freezing them.
*Yes, apparently while the the base is slowly getting ripped apart by aliens, staff found the time to prepare and have a meeting. Can you guess what nationality the creator of this game is?

Am I fighting aliens, robots or the Illuminati?

Thus this is the game loop for the rest of the game. Try to kill the weird-looking aliens in a panic, hope not to use too much firepower, and learn more about what's going on. Basically the first FPS to try the whole "reconstruct the events that caused so-and-so great calamity". Its just a shame that this game plays so badly. Like, holy crap, this controls like ass. The combination of slow speed and awkward controls makes the whole experience very unfun to control. Every shot causes a brief stop, and its intended for it to run slowly.

The purpose of the mini-map in the lower right is basically just to tell where you are in relation to nearby environmental objects

 Once some time is spent reconstructing those events, the objectives become clear. The colony needs to be destroyed, lest the aliens escape and wreck havoc on other worlds. The messages from the dead imply that I should cause the reactor to self-destruct. The game implies otherwise, as saving the children implies I can also save myself. From messing around on my ship, I know I can take the reactor core out of mine, and since its destroyed because of the crash, I can replace it with the one from here. Clearly the "self-destruct" button is just broken on the planet, and is no doubt some weapon. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow you to carry multiple things at once, and I doubt my abilities are enough for as many trips as the game wants me to take. Plus, I don't know how to take the cyro-pods, so I guess they're screwed anyway.

More fighting, this doesn't look any more exciting in motion

On each level is a queen, and killing that queen causes most enemies on a level to die. And when I killed the queen on the second level and all that was left was an abandoned colony...I felt little desire to continue playing. Maybe its because I know I can't really win the game at this point, maybe its how slow it is, or maybe its the sensitivity of environmental objects, but I just felt like I had seen all that there was to see.

Eggs, any one of which could turn into an alien at any moment

Weapons:
Generic laser weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
The game tries to have the different aliens do different things, but in practical terms you've got three or 4 different kinds of enemies. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Effectively items. 0/10

Levels:
The Colony is clearly going for a more realistic style in an era where that's just not possible with 3D technology. The series of corridors connecting various logical rooms just felt like work navigating through, to say nothing of the outside area. 0/10

Player Agency:
Technically it works, but I've never seen a more awkward implimentation of a control scheme. The game requires considerable precision in aiming and moving, especially over the alien eggs. However, the keyboard controls feel straight out of a Dungeon Master-clone, while the mouse controls, while better, are still awkward. 0/10

Interactivity:
You don't get any environmental interaction unless you walk into something, and this is overly sensitive. Sometimes you get adventure-style scenes, but these all fall into a simple pattern quickly enough. 3/10

Atmosphere:
The game does a good job of feeling like a lone space marshall uncovering a mystery on a faraway world. However, it doesn't do a good job of keeping it. 1/10

Graphics:
Well...it looks okay. Its not bad, its not impressive, everything is just sort of there. 1/10

Story:
Its cliche, but its well-executed. The real highlight of the game for me was the information the game was slowly telling me about this alien menace. Its just not enough to actually save the game. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Actual sound effects, and a brief intro tune. Unfortunately, it seems like any time the sound effects go on the game stops and they're very low-quality sound effects. What was once decent sounding quickly turned into noise. 1/10

That's 12. Good concept, bad execution.

Curiously, reading period reviews, it seems this opinion isn't unique. Almost as many say positive things as they do negative things. Quite a few implications that this game only got as popular as it was because it was the only option for the game poor Macintosh. This would explain the constant, false claims that this is the first in most categories that its said to be. Neither the producer nor the author actually played any games. This also goes well with the author's future work just creating 3D worlds, which was used in The Abyss, possibly others.

Unlike in a lot of cases, we have the author's own words on the matter. Its a very interesting look back, going on to explain why Macintosh games were not great, the issues he had with publishing it, and the technical choices he made during development, and brings up when we'll see this guy again, with the last of the Tom Clancy submarine games.

That, in theory, should be the last proper FPS of 1988. Next up 1989, a year I'm looking forward to.