Spacewrecked - 14 Million Miles from Earth (1990)

The European releases, which use Federation Quest, have a much weaker title screen featuring that red planet below.

Name:Spacewrecked - 14 Million Miles from Earth AKA Federation Quest 1: B.S.S. Jane Seymour
Number:232
Year:1990
Publisher:Gremlin Graphics
Developer:Celestial Software
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:5/5
Time:13 hours
Won:Yes (102W/73L)

I have mixed feelings on Spacewrecked. I first loathed it for unusual mechanics and awkward controls, before considering it for the worst FPS before 1993...which was a fun mental thought considering the usual caliber of worst games I've played...but once I got past the first level the game sort of settled into a scheme so many games from this time fell into; Nice idea, mixed execution.

 The backstory, as given in the manual, tells us that we were sent to explore a distant planet. It turns out to be pointless, the planet had nothing of value. As you lift off, the scattered debris of an exploded moon damages your ship to the point that you can't return to Earth. So you enter cryogenic suspension and wait for your death or rescue. You are awakened some time later to find a fleet of twenty Scientific Survey Craft. Oh, but they're damaged too, they warped into an exploding nova. This caused most systems on-board the ships to become crippled, freed the aliens they captured, and set forth a process which caused mental degradation to the crew. So, you have to find the Energy Flux Decoupler for the power room, the old one is fried, find the inhibit lock and take it to the bridge so you can fly off, then fix the systems of the ship. While dodging everything on the ship that wants you dead. 

"Congratulations, you now only have to do this 19 more times!"

You need to do this twenty times, once for each ship, because of some Interlock Navigation System, which needs every ship to be in operating order or they go nowhere. Basically an excuse for the twenty levels the game consists of. Let me tell you, once you've seen one ship, you've seen more or less them all. They all consist of the same basic layout, the only difference is what rooms are there and what's in those rooms. Even the doors are the same, albeit, some may be locked and some may not. I guess it's imitating the design of a space ship of a certain class, but I can imagine having this as your only game for a month and being somewhat disappointed.

Most of the lower deck, as per the final ship.

You need to do this twenty times, once for each ship, because of some Interlock Navigation System, which needs every ship to be in operating order or they go nowhere. Basically an excuse for the twenty levels the game consists of. Let me tell you, once you've seen one ship, you've seen more or less them all. They all consist of the same basic layout, the only difference is what rooms are there and what's in those rooms. Even the doors are the same, albeit, some may be locked and some may not. I guess it's imitating the design of a space ship of a certain class, but I can imagine having this as your only game for a month and being somewhat disappointed.

A screenshot from the DOS version of the game. It's got some issues.

That said, while this ultimately proved to be more bad than good, I note that the concept isn't that bad. It's quite similar to what would become the roguelite genre, taking the concepts of RPGs and applying them in an action game context. You get twenty randomly laid out ships, more than enough for anyone. This would be fine, if this were the extent of the RPG elements. It isn't, and this is where the game starts to fall apart.

RPG and action are difficult genres to balance together. RPGs rely on character knowledge and skill, action games are the opposite. This is why despite how beloved Morrowind and Deus Ex are, they still have their detractors. When you are playing a game in first-person and the action goes in real-time, when you swing at something, they should be hit if it seems like you hit them. They are loved for the same reason they are hated, they abstract something that is usually just depicted at that level of action. They try to balance the two systems and whether or not this works has been a debate that has simmered over the past two decades. And neither combat system is all that complex either, so this adds to the problem.

Spacewrecked could be said to be in a similar debate. In theory, it applies RPG systems to action gameplay. Similar to, but distinct from, Dungeon Master. We even get a new and exciting version of the combat waltz. Sadly, this is done terribly and drove me up a wall. This is not a RPG in the sense of being derived from actual role-playing games. There are no real RPG components. It's a RPG in the sense of using the level design of Dungeon Master, and the RPG mechanics if you miss or otherwise screw up, because the dungeon master hates your guts. Your attack accuracy is tied into some sort of anxiety your character has. That is, your cursor jumps around so long as you have a weapon equipped and have your cursor over the viewing area.

Make no mistake, the artists on this game loved big heads.

While this goes on, you have to hit whatever it is in front of you. Maybe it's a bear, maybe a T-Rex, maybe a crew member. It jumps around so much it might as well be random. The game then decides if you hit. If you miss, sometimes you get critical failures, like in many tabletop RPGs which for some reason never jumped to computer RPGs. Whoops, hit yourself in the face. Sometimes you break the weapon even when you hit. Then the enemy hits you, and your character's voice lets out a mocking cry of pain. It's not unusual for the deck to be stacked against the player, but this game really feels like you can't fight against your bad luck.

Yeah, that's a sentient rock monster.

Combat waltzing here is replaced with just going back and forward. You can't do anything else against a currently awake enemy except go back and up and down stairs for some reason. Turning doesn't work either, which I think is probably a cheap fix against exploiting it to get around enemies. Enemies occupy the same tile as you when you fight. Back and forward is fine, except that movement is mouse-only, and the buttons have a weird hitbox. Often, I would click on what I thought was one direction, only to turn around or go in another. Even if I didn't move my mouse after a successful action.

I accept that many developers at the time thought that using the mouse only was a good design choice. That some developers decided that making the keyboard, if they considered it at all, just be a lame mouse. I get it, even if it's weird to me, someone who prefers the keyboard to move outside of strategy games. What I do not accept is that I am hitting the wrong buttons. This game was clearly not tested extensively, even by the dev team, which likely explains most issues. There were no testers outside the dev team, because even one would have asked why they thought this was a good idea.

Your character's face gradually turns into a skeleton as you take damage.

That said, while I managed the combat, I did so through save states. You can save and load in the middle of a level, but it takes a while owing to it saving to a floppy. Even with this in place, some enemies were a lot of trouble. There's a crab enemy with a small hitbox which deals a lot of damage. I don't know what the deal is, but it's hard to hit them with a weapon as opposed to a stun weapon. Then there's the partially invisible gnome, he only appears when he attacks. The usual combat strategy goes out the window with him, but at least he stops his attack if you hit him first.

We're just straight up kidnapping humans born on other planets.

Enemies are mostly typical otherwise. Which is odd, because the game has some 20 aliens and a bunch of humans. This is despite the game going out of its way to make enemies seem unique and interesting. The difference is exclusively down to hitbox, their damage and health. I thought one human character tried to run away from me, but perhaps that was just some odd luck, it never happened again. Some enemies have guns, yet they were limited to melee when I wasn't. Even enemies that seem like they should be cowardly just stand their ground and fight me to the death.

Some people on this ship seem to have been missing a few screws before their brains got fried.

It's at odds with what the game is trying to convey. Here are all these complex and thought out characters and it doesn't matter that one is an intelligent, psychic alien, he's going to blindly attack you physically just the same as a bug-eyed metal eating alien. A human wearing a karate gi reacts just the same as a human imitating Shelley Duvall. Why bother with the effort when they all act the same? Why tell me what something's intelligence and hostility is when a fight is always inevitable?

At least with inventory items, it's less built up, and less surprising that it isn't very deep. There are four types of weapons. Melee, a knife and a crowbar. Ranged that have one magazine and they're done, pistols, autopistols and a flamethrower. Rechargeable weapons, blaster, laser sword, and a proton cannon. (I think, I never used it, you'll get why in a moment) Then the rechargeable stun weapon, the electrostunner. Outside of the regular ranged weapons, I thought it was well balanced. A knife for desperate situations, weapons you can recharge and a stun weapon for when you can't be bothered to kill something. There's no point to having traditional gun weapons if there's no way you can reload them, they're just a liability in combat.

All weapons have a reload wait time, even the knife. Less because they have ammo and more so you don't spam it. They each have differing crosshair sizes, and I think this is connected to how easy it is to hit an enemy. I think. If it isn't very clear by now, this game indulges in a lot of obtuse things that would take me more time than I care to spend deciphering. For instance, medical syringes which heal you come in multiple colors. What's the difference, and why was my guy's heart yellow for a while?

For most of the rest of the inventory, this isn't much of a problem. It's a grid-based inventory system, most objects are one tile big, a few are two. If you don't have a robot following along, unless it's a spacesuit or air tank, useful when the oxygen cuts out, the two tile ones need to be in your hand. You get two places to put items effectively, backpack and belt. They each have a different weight limit, 40 and 15. Unless you're grabbing everything you can, this won't be a problem. The problem is that it's slow to open up your inventory screen, pick up something, replace a weapon or even just using an item. Wait for it to open, wait for it to close.

Outside of items relating to functions of the ship, there's not a lot left that's useful. There's armor, but that might not appear on every level. Flashlights function when the lights fail, and in the rooms with damaged lights. Flares and probably candles also fill the same function, but can't be recharged. Repair kits are a vital part of fixing the ship, and for the frequent problems that befall your equipment. A coolant applicator is important for not getting radiation poisoning when you fix the ship. Then there are the function chips for the robots. There's a lot more that's basically just fluff. Ropes and goggles which don't seem to do anything.

A T-Rex, biting my face off, along with an orange door on the left and a yellow or white door on the right. You won't find out until you try to open it.

Keycards are surprisingly important. The game reinvents how doors work. Normally in a game, you would either get a key for a door of a certain color and all doors of that color would be openable now. Or you would be able to unlock just one door and that key would disappear. The important bit is that doors stay open. Here though, they don't. There are a bunch of doors of most colors of the rainbow, with white being the highest security level. Cards go up to white and get drained by the level of the door. Once the card is drain you're allowed to enter the door once. Enemies don't care about locked doors and just go through. Thus, you have to carry around a whole bunch of keycards, periodically going back to recharge them along with your weapons and flashlight.

Time for some nice, refreshing Tang.

Then there are the bottles, which come in measurements between 1 and 5 liters. This is how you transport coolant to the various rooms in need of repair. This is what you need to do in order to ensure that the ship runs smooth enough so you can actually fight off the horde of aliens and brain fried humans. You find them, or a manufacturing room to create them, then go to a lab to pour coolant into them. This is where the game decides to get cute. Randomly, as in, it is entirely a matter of luck, the game decides that they have a flaw in them, and removes the bottle entirely. You also get to watch each bottle get slowly filled up, in real time. Hope a T-Rex didn't come in.

The ship thirsts for Tang.

So after having managed to get some coolant into bottles, you go to one of the four systems. If you do not have a repair kit, you cannot do anything. You also should have a coolant applicator and a robot with a repair chip in it. The latter is just nice, but the former prevents coolant from spilling...unless you overfill it. You slowly pour it in, then slowly watch as it drains for you repairing it. It's not a guaranteed thing for it to work, even with the robot, but at least it's very likely with the robot.

The bars fluctuate, so you're never entirely sure how good a shape they're in.

From here, you basically continue to fix up every system, making sure the path to everything you need is clear, and just generally doing busywork. At some point, you replace the flux decoupler in the power room and bring the inhibition lock to the bridge, but you'll probably do that before you get every system above 80%, the threshold for victory. My advice is to get 5 liter bottles. The manual says that drains the ship's power more, but unless you're crazy enough to let the game randomly decide to trash your bottles, I doubt that'll factor in much.

Simpler than regular coding, but quite complex for a random game.

And finally, we have the robots. There are six, some mundane, some more useful off the bat, like a computer robot, a medical robot and a repair robot. The game's big selling point seems to be the robot programming aspect. You can basically order a robot to do anything except attack a specific enemy. If it ever attacks anything, I didn't figure out how. For all the effort the developers put into it, it feels quite pointless and possibly even counter-productive.

Taking out the whole attack aspect, you need the number of an item and the number of a room to go there, so you can't have it go anywhere you haven't already gone at some point. So, no using it to help you explore the ship. There is an implication that it can help with bringing coolant to places, but given the trouble I had with doing it on my own, having to manage a robot to do these things seemed like more trouble than just doing it myself. Especially if it had the same failure rate with bottles.

There are four systems you need to repair, not counting the item you bring to the power room. Bio Control handles the stasis of the aliens and the humans. As it fails, it brings creatures out. Despite how important this sounds, I found this a less important target to fix. It's not like the monsters will go back in. The various sources might spawn an infinite amount of enemies, but any attempt to find this out would take so long as to be far longer than you would need to fix it.

Then there's Life Support. This is the most important from many points. It controls the galley, where you can get food, an occasional healing item, lighting, doors, the rad filter and the oxygen in the ship. I'm really not sure what the rad filters do, they failed a few times, but I wasn't suddenly in bad shape. Maybe it causes problems if you also have trouble with overflowing coolant. The doors are the big problem. First, your keycards are drained of one level more than they should, no entering white doors with that issue. Then doors start getting locked randomly. At that point, well, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose.

The Computer, or the bridge, is the most important from the rest of the points. It controls the terminals and recharge stations. From the various terminals on the ship, you can see the ship's status and check the map. It's less effective than a map you would make yourself, but it's the only way you'll find room numbers. The recharge stations are absolutely vital. They recharge the cards, the robot and your weapons. It really doesn't matter if you have life support if you can't reach the bridge.

And then there's communications. It allows you to use the communicators you can find to give orders to robots and find out if you gave the robots a bad code. Oh, and it causes "Communications have failed" to appear when it fails, which often happens at amusing times. Basically, you will only actually care about this if you figured out the robots, and even then, it's going to be the last one.

Visually the game is a mixed bag. A lot of the scenery is good, but then you'll have the odd background object which looks like it was crudely attached to a wall then someone competent tried to do a good job coloring it. The enemies look nice, but they only face you and have limited animation. A few of the enemies feel flat too, like they have no depth to them. Of course, some credit must be given, some failings can be accepted when you're drawing this many enemies and animations. Possibly even for two different platforms. (The DOS version looked far worse than the Amiga version I played for the most part)

The sound design is good, but limited. There's one track that plays at the beginning, then another that plays once you finish a level. I wish there was a bit more. The slow beep of my character's heart monitor in the background isn't annoying, but isn't what I prefer to be hearing all game. And with that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
Nice variety, but very quickly falls into a few ones you can easily get. They're also frustrating to use, not a good feeling. 3/10

Enemies:
A lot less interesting than they should be for a game that has more than 20 different kinds of them roaming around. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
I acknowledge that if you're willing to put in the time to learn how the programming aspect of them works, the robots you find are useful. But since in order to actually use them, you need to have the numbers of rooms and items marked down, and their combat mode seems unimplemented, their usefulness is limited to the rest of us. 2/10

Levels:
Twenty ships, with the same layout but different contents. There's not really enough to the game to warrant such length, but if you wanted to play it for that long, you can. 3/10

Player Agency:
Mouse only, and your movement cluster has a poor hitbox. Everything works, but it's generally frustrating to use. 3/10

Interactivity:
Everything is annoyingly automatic, unless it's tied to item use. You go to a galley and eat something automatically or not. There is a lot of stuff here, but it just feels like it's part of the basic game function, not something you play around with. 2/10

Atmosphere:
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be serious or silly, but I enjoy the idea of going through a ship that's been heavily damaged and the crew have gone insane. 3/10

Graphics:
Overall appealing, with limited variation on enemies and robots, with some flat objects and characters. 4/10

Story:
The in-game version of the text crawl seemed not entirely satisfactory, as I didn't figure out why I was being attacked by the human enemies until I read the manual. I still don't know why there was a British bobby. 1/10

Sound/Music:
I think it's decent, but it really could have used some more variety and something beyond a heart rate monitor for background noise. 4/10

That's a score of 28...somehow. I don't quite think that's right, so I'm going to remove a few points for a 26 total.

I think it's far too broken to play unless you really like the genre, but there is some interesting stuff here. Add in some keyboard controls, tweak the aiming a bit, fix the robots and maybe add in some true randomization, and most of the egregious issues are fixed. Obviously there's a lot of tweaking here and there that needs to be done, but the game is uncomfortable enough that things still need to improve before you can start focusing on balancing the enemies.

Reviews of the time solidly stick around the 80% mark. Graphics, sound, controls and the map are soundly praised while the only people to mention the shooting or repairing refer to them as middle-of-the-road. It's somewhat strange. There's also a few people calling this a sequel to Federation of Free Traders, which was published and developed by Gremlin, whereas this game is them publishing something by a different company. From what I understand of the two games, it's unlikely the two share anything beyond a space opera setting.

Next time, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. I'm thinking Ixion (Which I have previously misspelled as Ixiom), but there's a bunch of stuff I want to do and work on and maybe the complex Acorn FPS that might just be an open-world adventure game is not what I want to be covering right now.

Spacewrecked: Won

The enemy that was my bane for most of this session. Even above the gnomes!

Exploration started off this session quite poor. The lower map is well-bottled necked. You have to get past a bear or a Wesbet. Why isn't it just called a Wesbet bear? Who knows. I hardly react to encountering new enemies in the flesh. It's just stunning and running past. Ignoring computer chips. It's possible that ignoring the robots is screwing me over, but outside of medical care, it seems like too much micro-managing for me. What I really need, they can't give anyway, bottles.

Lower deck's map. The Inhibitation Lock is west of the bride, labs are on either side of the elevator, and there's a manufacturing room in the south door at the east end of the east hallway.

The west side of the lower deck proves to have mostly stuff I don't yet need and more labs. Helpful yes, useful now, no. I just need two things and the game keeps disappointing me. Weapons are not that useful yet, but they're rare enough that unless I make an out of game map, which would be tedious because of the doors that lock on one side thing, I won't find them again. I try out the rope once, it doesn't do anything. Something had to be unimplemented.

The main deck, this one's so filled out you could use it as a base for any level of the game. Terminal rooms of importance are east of the west elevator, and at the southeast corner of the map. Charge rooms are in the middle of the circular hallway and at the northern end of the connected hallway. The west corridor is most just bonus stuff here.

Rather than brute-forcing my way through the lower deck, I decide to use my previous level maps to find the elevator to the other dorsal deck. That works, although it seems slightly different. Was I wrong? I'll check, don't worry. It leads to a terminal room with a crab monster. And one room north of that is my destination, the manufacturing room. How cruel, but I expect no less from a final level. I make myself six 5 liter bottles and plan my attack on the rest of the ship.

On the west side, there are manufacturing rooms on both doors on the side from the elevator, a galley at the far end. On the east side, charge rooms flank the room that's left then right from the elevator. There's a coolant applicator in the south one.

Fortunately, on the other elevator, there's a lab on the lower deck right outside. Do that, then rush up to communications and I should have enough time to fix it before running out of electrostunner charge and keycard power. I do...but I don't have the repair kit from the save I started this particular run from. It takes a long time to find one. I said last time there was one near the ladder down to the lower deck...and that's not as true as I remember it. I did find one in Bio Control, which is quite unfortunate because I need to stun two enemies, the disappearing gnome and the rock monster, before getting there. And I discover that without the applicator, coolant spills, which is charming.

This guy just gives a little kick. Which makes him look very goofy.

It isn't really helping me that I constantly have to reload because weapons get fumbled or you get hurt. The repair kit can fix it, but it also has charges and of course, doing that in combat is real smart. It's completely random, and therefore, somewhat annoying. I really wonder how this game was intended to be played? You can reload in-game like this, but that's a lot of loading and saving to disk.

From here, that is pretty much that. It's just a matter of fixing up the systems enough so I have time to breath while taking out the roaming monsters. But the recharge system stops working, so I figure I need to wait for it to get back up to strength once its fixed. And then I realize that I need to fix the computer room...I.E., the bridge. Probably. Well, at least that gives me some idea of what I need to do.

A lot of the humans seem like they're refugees from other genres, she tries to stab you with a knife like a horror antagonist or something.

Eventually, I find my way to the bridge. It's on the lower level, east of the elevator. Which because of the way the map works, means you go through the first door level from the lift. Once you go through the corridor on the left there, it's the last door on the left. Which took a while to actually reach. It is mercifully quick back, and having five five liter bottles is enough to fully repair it. Yeah...the number of five liter bottles I had was five. It would have been six if one didn't have to be thrown out just after making it...because the game doesn't damage objects, it just randomly decides they should die.

I clear out the area around my "base" of operations on the main deck, basically life support, after making sure that system won't fail on me. And just slowly clear it out, occasionally picking up items like weapons or key cards. New enemies do slowly spawn in, but I clear them out fairly quickly. I wonder if the rooms they come out of generate them out of a finite number or infinitely? It's probably best not to test that.

Then it's mostly just going between floors, doing the busywork, as I gradually clear up more and more of the main and lower decks. I think there's about 20-25 minutes before a system starts failing, and it feels like it takes half of that preparing for the next fix. Not helping this is a lack of recharge stations throughout the central and eastern half of the lower deck. At least I find the inhibition lock, just a bit left of the bridge, and the replacement flux decoupler, just before the locked door leading south at the end of that corridor. The locked door leads to a manufacturing room, which if you were capable of reaching this far without energy weapons, would set you up for a bit. There's even a repair kit next to the flux decoupler.

My cleanup of the main and lower decks more or less uncovers everything, meaning that the power room is on one of the dorsal decks. My guess is that it's on the west side, east side I know enough that it seems unlikely. And let me tell you, the west side of the dorsal deck is just as brutal as the side with all the dinosaurs. Turns out that the crab enemies are difficult to hit. It's not so bad with the stunner, but killing them is far more tedious than any other enemy. That combined with one of the purple heads as well as an invisible gnome and it's just so incredibly frustrating. This of course, means that the power room is here.

One run through with the electrostunner later, and now all I have to do is fix the rest of the ship. I kill a crab, then wander back and forth a lot. A whole lot. At least 10 trips in total. Waiting for the coolant to pour in, pour out and then fix the things with all the fun stuff in-between. It takes so many trips I start to think that maybe I've done something wrong and the final mission can't be won in the state I've gotten it to. Navigation just won't get up to a good status despite Communications being fixed.

But eventually, I win. And the game just ends with the same sequencee it always ends on. The music track just plays on and on, and the game itself does nothing to get out of this screen. This is all I'm going to go through I'm afraid, I checked level 2 again and it was just the same map design again, just the rooms all replaced. There's not really any more for me to say.

At one point, I got a working robot with repair, and most importantly, combat ability. In theory, combat mode just turns on and off, and it never shot anything. Maybe it works with the programming mode, but that's a lot of work for not much reward and kind of nullifies why I would want a robot to fight my battles for me. Communicators are just for communicating with robots, if they should need to get programmed orders from wherever you send them. The crowbar is a melee weapon. That's pretty much it for the mysteries of the game, next time, the rating.

This Session: 5 hours 20 minutes

Final Time: 13 hours 00 minutes

Spacewrecked: Star Cannibal

The shiny new game.

Since I needed to start over anyway, I decided to explore some of the Amiga rips I could find online. One had to work sooner or later. I managed to do it with a European copy, albeit two different rips. One from a set which only had the first disk and the second from a set with a first disk that only hanged.

Some of the changes are things like a static heartbeat in the background, proving that the Japanese aren't the only crazy ones, sound effects when you bump into things, and a player portrait that doesn't look like it's of a serial killer. There's no music, and you have to wait for rooms to load...while the timer is running. Or when disks are being changed for some reason. I'm going to hope that the game is balanced around this. It does add an element of trouble to combat encounters, since the game pauses to load your inventory. The content of the game itself is the same. At least as far as I know.

My final map of the opening level, there's more, but there wasn't much point in exploring it further.

Gameplay is really not that good so far. I'm just trying to make it across the ship. The ships is divided into three floors of 7x20. The dorsal deck seems to be half, until you notice that the level is divided in two. There's one elevator, from the main floor, which goes to the other half, I didn't notice if any of the ladders go there. This is about all the game is trying to do, don't mistake this for clever DM-style, massive three floor puzzle, this is just a FPS map with three floors and you can probably run away from most enemies.

Gotta do this somewhere from 3 to 15 times, depending on how big your bottles are.

The objective is to get the four main controls of the ship at 80% or more by pouring coolant into them and then hoping you fix them. Basically, busy work if you've killed the enemies between these places, dangerous busy work if you haven't. You also have to take a flux decoupler to the power room and an inhibit lock to the bridge once you're done. You need to find bottles or make them at a manufacturing room, go to a lab to fill them, then go to the place that needs to be repaired at this moment.

Karate guy again, since he pops up on all the ships, his name is pointless.

Crew members don't appear as cyrogenics fail, rather, they're just always around. Between them and the monsters it seems like we have roughly 30 enemy types. I suppose type is a bit strong considering that enemies only have three consistent behaviors so far, charge, random and stay a respectful distance away. I saw this in a Ugruskor, which actually has only moderate hostility. So the enemy descriptions are more like wishlists than actual traits.

That's not a key, that's a rope, not that it's helpful.

Combat has revealed itself to be quite terrible. Against most enemies, you're flailing around trying to kill it before it can hurt you. Combining the worst aspects of real-time and turn-based combat, but at least there's some control over my actions and the time for a "reload" isn't too long. You can't really escape from combat and there's little point. Against the tougher enemies, I found myself fighting a mini T-Rex called Lyacodrak, which requires a little more strategy. Which is just backing up whenever he's close to attacking.

From what I've read, real T-Rexes were about the size of an elephant, so this guy is quite small compared to what he should be.

It doesn't help that I don't know how useful items are or what I actually need right now. You have a weight limit, not just a space limit. It's one of those little numbers on the lower right. The big problem is that the robots that come along with you, which have the only big item storage, have small numbers for their size. Twenty when two big items are easily half that. And they need power.

The game even makes fun of you for expecting otherwise.

Other items uses are quite mysterious. I got a rope and crowbar, but I didn't actually need them. There are various injectors which heal the player, and a door opener which I guess does what it says, but never had the need to try it. I had more than enough charges for my keycards, especially once I figured out the charging stations. Flares function as light, ironically, better than flashlights which never seemed to work in dark rooms. At least on this one.

Food stations give you health, though the effect isn't too obvious on this level, when I got armor pretty early on and it was quite difficult to lose health after that.

Level 1 is doing an okay job of being a training level, but man, it's not much more than that. It feels like rooms are randomly placed, outside of key places being somewhat close together. It's all just sort of there. From a design perspective, it relies on luck with you finding what you need to find to win, even if I got most of it early on. Well, outside of weapons, anyway, that the game ensures is plentiful enough that there will be no problem.

I didn't realize that this game could have some real "soyjak vs. chad" energy, until I noticed the never changing protagonist's face compared to the often expanding heads of the enemies.

I beat level 1, and play a little of level 2, but then decide to go to level 20. Because from the first one, there's a whole lot of, do I really need to play TWENTY levels of this? I prepare for a massive jump in difficulty and get it. You're just given a cross and a knife. You're basically forced to use a knife against either the T-Rex enemy or a Telerak, which I could actually win against simply using the typical method of going in, attacking, then backtracking when attacked. This is one time when the room loading sequence works in your favor, they can't change rooms while you change rooms, so unless you get really unlucky with the timing, it's easier than usual. This really helped me when a Balrik found me in a charging room just after finishing off the Telerak, and thus in a weakened state. I'm just not that good, possibly just yet.

By now I was nearly dead, so I was basically spamming reload whenever I spotted another enemy. Checking the ship's systems showed that the cyrogenics and stasis units were failing, meaning that enemies were guaranteed to be wandering around. I guess this is what the game is doing to make this level difficult. There's about three more enemies roaming around, another karate dude, a caveman and some plant thing. I have access to two weapons, a knife and an electrostunner.

I previously dismissed the electrostunner as useless, because I have twenty guns, I don't need to stun anything, but it's pretty effective at stunning enemies so you can move around. If you hit an enemy, they'll be stunned for a while. They're only stunned so long as you don't hurt them. Attack, and they come to. Not enough charge to make that worthwhile, I need armor and weapons.

My examination of the main deck keeps getting stopped by ending up in rooms with the lights out. Doors can be locked on one side and rather than try to fumble with the key in the dark, I just reload. I really hope there wasn't some trick I needed to do with the flare to get a flashlight in one room, because if so, I'm probably going to have to take the long way around. Since I have a stunner now, I will explore the dorsal deck.

It isn't one T-Rex, it's at least three T-Rexes. I wasn't always ending up in the same places and enemies don't stay still, and in one case, I was taking the elevator there. And the electrostunner doesn't work as long on them. One shot lasts maybe a few seconds. If I rush past the dinos, I can find communications and a fix it robot...which doesn't help me right now. One injector with some sort of healing drug in it, as well as a laboratory behind a locked door near the ladder. That is useful to know, all I need to find is the manufacturing room and I can at least fix life support...communications would have to wait.

Level 20's main deck. Notice anything familiar?

So the main deck, which I haven't yet explained in detail, is shaping up quite nicely. There's a central area next to the ladder which has a recharge station, life support is in the same general area, albeit in the dark. There's a corridor away with a whole bunch of rooms, but two of the enemies wander around there and the third isn't far away. It's worth it, because then I get a laser sword, a flashlight and an injector, didn't get the one above. I'm now in pretty good shape to take out these guys, but I want to see how long it's going to take to find the manufacturing room. The flash light works, too, no more wondering about a room's light factor.

My flesh might have been torn from my bones, but so long as I have an eye, I'm okay!

This turns out to be a wise move, because I had the repair kit for so long I forgot that was an integral part of the process. Fortunately, there's a ladder to the lower deck which has it there. Which of course, comes with the caveat that there are a lot more enemies there. Joy. Including a leprechaun that's only visible when attacking called a Gendren-Taz. There's even a charger next to the ladder back on the main deck if I need to explore further.

While that is going to be necessary at some point, it may be necessary sooner rather than later, as I'm running out of map space on the main deck for there to be much of anything there. What's worse is that the recharge room connects into communications, something I wrongly assumed would be the least important system but is turning out to be the second-most important system after life support, and right now it IS the most important system. Reloading usually delays the change, all bad things seem to happen randomly, you can reload a save state and a gun which breaks won't. That's a risky thing to rely on, and I don't want to for long. I may try to speed through this without ending up killing the purple guy at first, even if he stuns poorly like the T-Rex.

I end about here, in a bad place, but seeming hopeful and with the knowledge that if I need to, I can restart and do it right. I know where three of the systems are and have the most important item in their repair. Bio Control was the third, it's not important right now since it's already failed. The bridge, I think, should be on the main or dorsal deck. I need to find a flux capacitor for the power room and that should be it outside of my enemy troubles.

Like I said, twenty levels is a lot and I don't think they had enough to fill it up. In fact, they don't, while looking at my screenshots for this entry, I noticed that the design of the ship is the same, what changes is what's in each room and often what each room is. Which is a shame, because I thought this level showed promise in the design, but alas, it seems that there isn't going to be much to it. Some of it felt fun, but the tedium and especially the controls are getting on my nerves. Seriously, you have no idea how annoying it is to click on one of the arrows, only for it to either not register or register as the wrong direction. At least combat is intentionally screwing with the player! Combat is at least kind of working, so there is a skill factor to it, even if it's one that's so subtle I can't even think of it beyond, you just sort of get used to the twitching of the cursor.

This Session: 5 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 7 hours 40 minutes

Beyond the Scion (2010)

Name:Beyond the Scion
Number:5
Year:2010
Mod for:Tomb Raider - The Last Revelation
Modder:EssGee
Genre:TPS/Platformer
Difficulty:5/5
Time:10 hours 30 minutes

It's time for more Tomb Raider, and don't let what this is a mod for fool you, this is connected to the original game's plot. As a crude Star Wars-style text crawl tells us, the plot of this mod is a what if scenario. What if the other two rulers of Atlantis were immortal, had mortal identities today, and what if Lara had the complete Scion after leaving Atlantis? Seems like we're exposing the plot twists before they start, but okay.

You don't really want to know how many tries this took.

To start with, this game differs from TLR in controls, there are more. A lot more. These controls add in things like jumping off ledges to pole jumping. They're more finicky than the usual Tomb Raider controls, but once you figure out their quirks they tend to work. But hoo, boy, you get a rough introduction to them.

One of the ground Atlanteans, this guy is a reskin of something for TLR, but I never got far enough to figure that out.

The first section is a remake of Tomb Raider: Anniversary's Atlantis section. So small amount of fighting the Atlanteans, mostly just going up a big shaft. Enemies seem to be a mix of remodeled TLR enemies with some new, weird additions. There are two versions of the flying Atlanteans for some reason. One of them you basically just have to kill before it can get anywhere near you, because it sticks to you like glue when it's attacking.

This took me hundreds of deaths and reloads simply because of how tricky it is to get used to pole jumping. It works weird for this game. You don't grab on with action/ctrl, you grab on with action and the forward button, then let go of the forward button when you want to jump. Most of the other moves don't have quite as many quirks in how they work, and some I'm surprised weren't just in TLR to begin with. Minus the unusual methods of getting them to work.

Audio for this cutscene is reused from the original I think, but a lot of further stuff was made for this mod.

The only reason why this mod starts off in Atlantis is so you can get a different cutscene where Lara misses the Scion instead of shooting it. Otherwise it proceeds exactly like it did in the original games. Exactly, even with the place seemingly blowing up. I wonder why we couldn't have just gotten a cutscene showing this done as the mod starts, because there's a reason why Atlantis was at the end of the game. You don't get the kind of weapons you should have by now. The game gives you a revolver and a scope, but you need that for targets. I shouldn't be conserving ammo here, I should be pondering which of my arsenal I should be using.

The boss fights here are very easy. We first have the "Torso Guy", which is at complete odds with how difficult this mod is otherwise. He charges towards you and then tries to swipe you, but if you stand against the wall, then jump over him, the model collision will glitch out and you'll go over him. Rinse, repeat, however long you need. Even for this big Atlantean, this instance is easy. At least previous ones felt like they could hurt you or you could jump off. Natla is barely even a fight, you just ignore her to pull switches in each corner of the arena to win. She disappears into the sky and the level ends.

Lara is reaching a letter in her library, right in front of her nice and shiny Scion. It's from T. O. Khan, get it? It urges Lara to hide the pieces of the Scion in three specially prepared vaults that were prepared for this exact purpose eons ago. To find them, Lara needs to find an Australian Aboriginal whose ancestor wrote down the locations of them in a cave. Khan suspects that Natla might intercept this letter. So many suspicious things are happening here, like if Natla is going to go after Lara, why wouldn't she also go after the vaults? Then again, if we get into that, we have to ask why Natla never went after them in the original either. I also have to ask why Lara should trust this letter and assume that Khan doesn't want them for herself.

Lara going after one of nature's most vicious killers.

Australia starts off weird. We get a cutscene where Lara finds out where she's supposed to go, then gets deposited into a wombat cave for no explained reason. Once she gets out, killing a wombat and dodging a suspiciously dropped boulder, we meet her companion who despite many suspicious circumstances, is entirely legitimate.

It's a nice enough level, despite having a whole bunch of just plain odd encounters. I feel like the author didn't really care for Tomb Raider's combat, and just threw in a bunch of random animals to fill time. I guess that's not really out of character for Tomb Raider, but it just feels like wildlife here is randomly deciding to pick a fight with Lara rather than Lara clearing out her path. I say this not as someone complaining that Lara is killing the local fauna or anything, just that I dislike it feeling like the local fauna is out to get Lara and will die to accomplish this goal.

That said, I dislike how so many jumps require you to lose health. It feels less like something clever and more like the game is just doing it to annoy you. There's health before and after each of these, and it isn't like health items are in short supply anyway, so it's basically just a thing that you have to go through.

I got as far as South America. At first, it was better than previous levels despite some issues. To start with those, each level starts Lara off in a small area where the only way out is to find a hidden switch. This is kind of annoying the first time it happens, because Lara has to back up, then look at a shaft she climbed down before she entered the level. It feels like an annoying gotcha that only works because there's a disconnect between Lara and the player.

Lara was in the water before the spikes somehow shot her up in the air, all without touching her.

Then there are the spike traps. They're not like normal TR spike traps, they pop out of walls and floors, which would be fine, except their collision is bigger than their models would suggest. Maybe it's just your typical collision in this game, but it feels larger and it never seems to stop to consider that Lara is standing still or slowly going down to them. I admit this could be me maliciously attributing behavior that's in the main game to stuff added in the mod. I do remember such traps in the base game, but not the behavior.

Water puzzles are the central theme in this level. You have to use a kayak to get past half the level, then the other half is centered around a big stone pillar. Every puzzle is above it or below it. I think my favorite was one where you have to jump across a series of platforms hung by weights to get to a switch. It's a clever enough set up that I didn't realize what I was going for until I had to get back on the platform.

Spot the switch, enemy and interactable object in this screenshot. Of course, the enemy won't wait and the object can be approached, but that switch is darn near impossible to spot.

But as I got through the second half, I felt like a lot of stuff was centered around tripping you up. It felt like there was pixel hunting going on, hiding items on top of similarly colored floors or switches in places that you would probably never think of looking for.

I gave up on the last section here, after a series of events that made me question why I should continue to the end. To start, you have to make a jump to a ladder over lava, then on the other side there's a push block. Push it to the end, and there's a pressure plate. The pressure plate opens a door you can easily spot as you go in. You have to push the push block back to the ladder, then use the pressure plate, which is timed, to reach the door. Except that it's very precisely timed, I couldn't do it and it isn't even the way forward, it's a secret. Based on events that would soon follow, I was not wrong to believe this.

The levelset is ultimately just fine. Most of it is enjoyable, but there are a few moments that are just so frustrating that I'm impressed nobody complained before. It's especially odd because most of these are at the start. In most other regards, the mod doesn't really excite. Yes, there are fancy new moves and some nice-looking areas. But the new moves are janky and a lot of the areas are kind of bland. Anything that could excel is tempered by some issue or another. So, 5/10 for level design and everything else I'm not so sure if I'm rating something new or not. From what I've seen, this isn't the only TR mod with these actions, so there must be some script modders can add to their mod.

I don't really get why this is so beloved, outside of it possibly being the first to do a lot of these things. It's very heavily balanced towards the platforming side of the game, to the point that it makes the token nature of TR's combat feel even more token. This also could have stood to be a lot more grand in the level design department. At times it didn't feel like a TR levelset, but a different game entirely. Perhaps there was more of this in the sections I couldn't get to, but it's a big ask to force players through something bad to get to something good.

Next time, more Spacewrecked, of course.

Spacewrecked - 14 Billion Miles from Home: Intro

The text goes slowly enough that it doesn't feel like an emergency.

Rather than a Tomb Raider mod this week, we'll instead be seeing the start of another game that's slipped through the cracks over the years. Finishing up, as far as I know, our little jaunt in the land of RPGs that are really FPS games, we have the vibrantly named Spacewrecked - 14 Billion Light Years from Earth or BSS Jane Seymour: Federation Quest 1/Federation Quest 1: BSS Jane Seymour. However, the title in-game is just Spacewrecked, but the other was the European title, and I've seen it both ways.

The story is...I'm not actually sure what the story is. The intro says that you're someone whose ship was destroyed after an asteroid storm, then finding the BSS Washington in a strange state. We received a message that quickly ended. Basically just like Xenomorph, except it probably isn't going to be the bootleg xenomorphs but rather some other kind of alien. I can tell because I can see the enemy descriptions and they're a motley assortment of designs.

The character picture I didn't go with. The stuff above the text box is fluff.

Spacewrecked was released on the usual three platforms, Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. I tried the Amiga version, but as per usual it crashed on me. Fortunately, DOS has actual music and sound effects, including Roland MT-32 support. Oddly, the music has a very Amiga feel to it. I wonder why? You're given two choices of character, both of whom look like they're badly grayscaled images of mugshots, but I'll take the blonde lady for looking less like she's murdered thousands of people.

Thanks, I'll need it.

The game seems to be controlled entirely through either your mouse, joystick or keyboard aiming. Yeugh. Movement is like your typical DM-clone, directions with turning. Though that turn function is a bit annoying, since it isn't obvious until I accidentally hit it. Everything else is an icon. Menu is the floppy, and the inventory is that printout. Everything else seems to be contextual.

This is a lot of space, and it is nice that they tell you what everything is.

The inventory is annoying. You can only move items on the inventory screen, outside of switching items on your hands. It gets better. To use an item or examine it, it has to be in your hand and you have to be on the main screen. This doesn't seem like it's going to be a problem for weapons, but for other things, that could get annoying. That said, floppy disks seem to be the keycards, colored of course, and work automatically.

There are about five items in the opening rooms. A "Manual Gun", a book called "How to Beat the Game" in an alien language, very funny and respectful of the player, an empty 3 liter glass flask, a gray floppy and a magnesium flare. I go from a shuttle bay, can't reenter the shuttle, to a hydroponics lab with just a random flare to a computer room. The manual quite helpfully tells me that the door disk/access cards are ranked from red to white, and gradually lose color as they are used, but may be recharged in a recharging station. Oh, joy.

Well, it seems like there isn't much worth worrying about right now.

You can see a lot here, from information on the crew to information on aliens. Out of context, it tells me absolutely nothing. Well, the ship status tells me I need to fix the navigation system. Probably. Then there's a map which just shows where I've been. Which is actually kind of helpful, though I note that as far as I've gotten, I'm not having trouble navigating. We'll see how far that goes though.

If I'm reading the manual right, this is a Grampsoc, which has low hostility and shouldn't be chasing after me.

Outside is a long corridor. Seems like you can see, and thus the affect the world, in a 2 tile radius, that is, two tiles in any direct direction, one tile diagonally. This helped me a lot when I spotted this guy. So, combat. You need your gun to be in your right hand or you can't use it. Because whenever your gun is readied your cursor goes into a combat stance when it's on the visual part of the screen. You can tell it's in a combat stance because it keeps moving around randomly across the screen. Instead of the game acting like a random number generator for hitting a target, you're the random number generator for hitting the target. At least the cooldown seems normal. Oh, and my character gradually has her face turn into more and more of a skeleton until she dies. Shades of Nitemare 3D.

The manual quite helpfully tells me that some weapons can be recharged and others are dead when used up. I'm guessing that means no reloads. Further adding to item fun is that you seem to need a repair kit for some items. There is a knife, but the only advantage it offers is that doesn't cost ammo. Yeah, it still does the weird thing.

Well, let's see where else I can go first. Upon restarting I notice that the door disk I have is actually yellow, not gray. Odd and slightly worrying. I can't help but think that yellow is a hard color to properly get across in a computer game using pixel art. Especially when you have a limited color palette. Anyway, I find a shower room which has a blue door disk and a flashlight. Guess they were dirty.

The cabinets sure are...boring.

The next room I find has a stasis chamber, one pod on the wall, uninteractable. That's just what this game is going for, well-thought out but static world. But there is a cabin connected to it for some reason. Inside is a medical chip and a capacitor that I can only carry in my hands. Well, let's go back to a room I noticed but didn't enter when I first tested this game.

Past another stasis chamber is the robot room. It's actually the power room, but it has a robot in it, which is more important. The manual makes a big deal about them, see robot section later and then gives six pages on them. They're basically AI companions that you can command and program, you can have six with you at once...which sounds frustrating. For now, all I can do is put my medical chip and a force shield chip I found on the floor in the robot. Oh, there's a red herring on the floor, because the authors are having a laugh at you.

Hmm...what can I do here?

Programming is very free, but seems useless unless you know exactly what it is you want to do, which makes it seem pointless right now. You can have the robot go anywhere, pick up and drop anything, but it needs to have the number to the item and room. No idea yet about using said items, seems like you need a chip for that.

Now I need more than good luck.

At this point, I quit and save and then come back later. As I reload my save...the game breaks. In a weird way. A new, empty three-floor ship is generated and I can explore as I see fit. The only thing here are two knifes. A similar glitch happens if I change to the other character, who logically, shouldn't exist. It seems as though the version I got didn't rightly work. Why am I not surprised? At least this happened early on.

Anyway, there's also a life-signal detector, a coolant sprayer and a flexsteel sprayer. I'll know when I should use the later two, but the detector is useless. Even if combat is annoying as it is, there's no point in it. I gradually go through the rooms. I find a store room with a white door disk and a flamethrower. This guy is something I appreciate, nice, big target.

I appreciate the honesty.

So I take it to the creature. Three shots and he's dead. Overkill? Probably, but my only advantage right now is health regeneration I have no shot at killing something otherwise. I'm probably not going to be able to recharge it either. Since it takes up two slots when it's empty, I'm going to have to dump it.

Two guns! Muahahaha.

One of the rooms the creature was guarding was a recharge room. For a robot, a flashlight and access cards. I find a blaster on the floor, some decent environmental story-telling for once. My flashlight has enough charge, but I bring the robot back over here since there's no point it in being away from the power right now. I explore a little more, finding a knife in a terminal room with broken lights, flashlight works, and a communicator in a room next to the recharge station. Further in is a 1 liter glass flask, a repair chip and another white door disk. Why do I need so many disks and why do I need all these flasks? Don't tell me that this is going to be one of those stupid water jug puzzles.

I'm not quite sure if the time is accurate to how long I've been playing or not, but there it is.

Usage of door disks is tedious. It doesn't automatically activate, you have to use it. Which means opening the inventory, replacing one of your two hand items, closing the inventory, using it, opening the inventory, putting your other item back, and then closing it again. An unnecessarily complicated act. Inside is a 2x2 foyer with a door disk and another communicator. I'm guessing items are trying to fit into a naturalistic sort of thing rather than what the player will actually use. I hope, actually, that means I might have a chance to kill something eventually.

I leave the room and notice the door is still locked. It relocked itself after I exited but didn't give back my charge. Why? Because power is failing in the ship and doors are now down to okay. I checked the systems after checking the map. It won't actually show you all of a corridor even if you can see all of a corridor, you have to have been there. That means there's a soft time limit, which for me right now, is a hard one. Which doesn't work with how I write about games, if I'm honest, as there isn't a pause function.

There are three more locked doors here, one leads to a cabin with nothing in it, and the other two lead to two connected foyers which lead to the rest of the ship, including the lift. I get another blaster, but more importantly, I find a chip which I think means coolant management. Clearly, I need to have the robot do something with that, so I go back and grab it. Perfect excuse to recharge the disks anyway.

The game is overplaying it, you just hit him.

I go out the other end of the foyers and find myself fighting another enemy. They have names, but it's a pain to go back to a terminal and the manual is low-resolution enough that I can't quite tell unless it's a unique-looking enemy. I'm not really sure if the gun does any more damage than the knife, but it's basically just a case of slugging it out.

Cursed orange juice.

Nearby is a laboratory with a repair kit and a coolant dispenser. That's what the glass containers were for. There must be five different kinds of bottles you can fill up and then use somewhere with the coolant applicant. Oh, and sometimes the dispenser decides your glass bottle won't work and destroys it. Yippee.

I'm not sure why I really need coolant to fix this, but okay...

The next room over is life support, which needs the repair kit, the coolant applicator and coolant to repair. So you pour coolant in, not too much or it overflows, which is toxic. Sometimes I do randomly lose health with no apparent reason, but this doesn't seem to do anything. Once done, you get a chance to repair it, more coolant means a better chance. And sitting here, you have no context for how much you need to repair. Or why I'm repairing it.

Everything on this ship wants to kill me.

At this point I fight a Chee, a flying jellyfish which vomits acid. Presumably in a different way than humans vomit acid, more like an offensive method. It just constantly gobs it at you while I try to shoot it. For a game with twenty varieties of aliens, they sure are all doing the same thing.

Wow, everything on this ship really does want to kill me!

After this, I lose track of what I'm doing. I run around, get some armor, and more worryingly, a spacesuit. More blasters, but it seems that most recharge stations don't work for them. At some point, I find one of the crew. Huzzah, I think to myself. No. It isn't huzzah at all. He has, to misquote someone from Dawn of the Dead, gone gorillacrap. He does actually run away from me for some reason. I try the communicator, better than nothing, but just shoot him.

At this point the ship becomes more or less too damaged for me to do anything reasonably, and I decide to end the session before the inevitable happens. So far, my observations are not good. I feel inclined to simply state that this is not a good game and quit. Comparisons to Xenomorph are very forthcoming. I don't remember if I said anything about how annoying it could have been if the game's systems all worked properly, but this seems to be what you get if they did. It's going to be an uphill battle to get anything done. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be doing, just fixing the ship. Checking a manual, I see that the crewman must have popped out of a cryo station as a failure of a ship component. I also noticed that terminals were not working half the time.

My continued playthrough of this game solely depends on whether or not I can actually solve this ship. I can cheat to the final ships no problem, but if I can't figure out how to actually get to them, then there's not much point in cheating to get there, is there?

This Session: 2 hours 40 minutes