Galactic Dan (1992)

Name:Galactic Dan
Number:227
Year:1992
Publisher:The Fourth Dimension
Developer:Ian Holmes
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:5/5
Time:9 hours 15 minutes
Won:Yes (97W/71L)

This is my third game in the Acorn 32-bit machine range, the others being Apocalypse and Starfighter 3000. (The latter I haven't covered because I unwisely wanted it in a single entry) Both were fantastically advanced, and incredibly unique. Quality between the two was wild, so Galactic Dan had me intrigued. Would it be a frantic unplayable mess like Apocalypse or would it be an epic romp far more entertaining than it has a right to be in Starfighter 3000?

An early scene, note that I already got all the hostages I need, so this guy can live or die and I have no concerns about it.

Kind of the first? What I wasn't expecting out of this game was for it to be the missing link between Hovertank 3D and Doom. I know the absurdity of that statement, because iD did games between those of course, but this is just odd. It feels like something that should contribute to the development of Doom, but it also seems impossible given the platform and the vast geographic and platform difference between the two games.

One of the more informative briefings, telling me everything I need to know about this very dangerous location.

The story is you are special agent Dan Quicksmart, sent to free the people of the moon Lygon from the evil Vorians. Because they invaded...and also because they're going to nuke the place once you're done. (The Hovertank comparisons continue) Each mission gets introduced by one of two commanding officers who rattle off a vague hint or inane gibbering depending on the developer's mercy that day. Then you get the time and number of hostages you have to get. Bigger numbers are bad, but smaller numbers are usually worse.

The actual genius of the game doesn't appear right away, instead, you get something that doesn't look too different from what we've already seen. The world is true 3D and everything else is 2D, usually a 2D rendering of a 3D model, but we don't see that straight off. So you're left to navigate basically another Hovertank 3D level but with mouse-only controls. It isn't too bad straight off. Right click moves, left click shoots, middle button jumps. Moving the mouse up and down basically controls your speed, or goes in reverse if you can. It's not going to be too bad, right?

That blue shape above the ground is a hostage, the spiky ball is an enemy, no doubt it shot me after taking this screenshot.

The real suck factor comes in when you realize that the game genuinely expects something more than I suspect most hardened platformer players would be capable of. A lot of the time, it was a gamble as to whether or not I was going to make a jump rather than land it. This might be because my middle mouse button is in my mouse wheel, but there is no rebinding anything. Sometimes it just didn't work, and that was knowing there's a delay between pressing it and jumping. Assuming that there is something wrong with my mouse, we're still left with the idea of moving with one mouse button and jumping with another. People generally don't intentionally press multiple mouse buttons at the same time.

Walls this close together would not be risky in most games, but an ill-timed move to either direction could result in unnecessary delays.

Fix this and you still have genuine problems. Hostages are difficult to grab sometimes, yet often I found myself stuck on walls. That's freedom for enemies to blast away at you while you try to figure out what angle you can take to get unstuck. I never tried to break the game, it just happened. Situations that in basically any other game I've played would be simple to get out of turn into a source of frustration here. It's worse when you have to factor in the 3D element, often to a target you can barely see. Hope you're real good at visualizing 3D spaces.

A level consisting entirely of just jumping across platforms. In theory, simple, in practice, annoying.

The biggest problem is that the game requires a level of precision that I didn't find possible, if it ever was. Some jumps require you to jump while moving forward slower than the default speed you get by pressing move. What I guess is supposed to happen is that you pull the mouse back, press move, then jump, all in quick succession, but if that's possible, I can't do it. The game just expects you to do miracles with its controls. There's also falling damage (and running too fast into a wall damage) but that's just a minor problem compared to everything else.

I can see some people finding Wolfenstein 3D very unimpressive after this.

Now...the thing is, while this is bad in execution, I don't think the concepts in a lot of these levels are bad. If I were playing Doom (with jumping enabled) I could probably hit a lot of these and it'd be fun. It's a combination of these factors and combat, which I'll get into, making the whole package just incredibly frustrating. If you fix one aspect of these then the whole package becomes a lot more tolerable. The game's aspects just don't work together. Each aspect of the game works against the other aspects of the game to render it all completely moot.

It's hard to get the franticness of combat in one screenshot.

This gets us to the other big part of the game, combat. To start with, there are three weapons, a regular blaster, a higher damage attack, and a third which kills most things in one hit and most important, goes through the air fast. Everything in the game depends on two factors, how fast your shots reach an enemy and that shots destroy other shots. As every weapon is only as fast as you can click, this means you have to either spam more bullets than the other guy, or try to get an angle where he isn't shooting at you. I didn't find a good strategy in the end.

While there are distinct types of enemies, they broadly fall into two categories, stationary and mobile. The stationary ones you can plan around, the mobile ones are trouble. Mobile ones generally move around quite quickly, but it isn't that difficult...at first. Enemies get stronger with every level, until towards the end you start fighting guys who seem to take dozens of regular blaster shots. Towards the end, enemies were basically rolling around spamming shots at me while I either spammed back or just ran away. You can't actually fight them toe-to-toe, because you can't sidestep.

I question how well the developer tested this, even in a, "well I can beat it" method. I'm not really sure if there's a way you can do combat well. At the end most enemies took a lot of shots to kill and that strikes me as at the most generous, intentionally unfightable category of enemy. But it's just questionable enough for me to be wondering about it. Where I can attribute laziness there could be something there. After all, on the levels with harder platforming, there is a more generous time limit to match. And there could be tricks I couldn't just figure out.

The biggest challenges to this generosity are the hostages and the more precise jumping sequences. I didn't mention it, but hostages have multiple behaviors, but standing still, to coming after you to running away. Running away is often incredibly annoying and often drags out an already annoying level into something dreadful. The precision is an interesting question. Assuming I accept the possibility that there's something that my mouse can't do compared to original hardware, that's still riding the edge of this stuff. You're asking a lot in a short space of time. If I can't do it, that's not a lot of people who can.

In the audio-visual department, there's that amateurish sense of exploiting a cool toy as much as they can. Not like someone aiming for a specific thing, but someone with more time and money than sense trying to make something cool. Since, you know, stuff like this is something everyone can do now, there's not much cool factor left. When the technical accomplishments are no longer impressive, one is left with what it actually looks like...which is more than some contemporaries, but severely lacking in other departments. To the rating.

Weapons:
Three weapons, one basic and one is basically a door key. It's too rare to use otherwise. 2/10

Enemies:
A decent variety of enemies with wildly differing behaviors which don't matter because most of those behaviors can kill the player in 5 minutes if he isn't lucky. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
The hostages in this game should get negative points for that little running away trick. 0/10

Levels:
Despite the frustration involved, I though that there was a lot of good ideas in this game, ones that perhaps a better game could make actually enjoyable. 4/10

Player Agency:
Incredibly frustrating and simple. Thank god today we know not to bind jump and move to the mouse at the same time. 1/10

Interactivity:
Not much, just some stuff you shoot. 1/10

Atmosphere:
I certainly felt like I was on an alien world. Perhaps in a sense, the now awkward 3D works in its favor. 2/10

Graphics:
Ugly, unpleasant to look at, all those things. That said, I will note that despite itself, I never felt confused by the level design, no idea if that's the weird color grading or good level design. 1/10

Story:
Aliens from somewhere you don't know are invading somewhere you also don't know, vague briefings to follow. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Non-offensive, but unmemorable and not distinguished. 2/10

That's 17.

All right, that is a low score, but I do feel like this represents what we'll see over the coming years pretty well, better than a lot of games we've seen so far. It did a lot of things so right that I feel disappointed that it did some of the most important ones wrong. All arguably without even being connected to anything at all in the genre.

This motivated me to check some Acorn Archimedes games lists to make sure I didn't miss anything on the platform. It's not very well documented...and it turns out there's another FPS from 1992. Look forward to that. Next up I'll try to continue in Mazer II and probably fail.

I also took some time to clean up some 1984 games that either don't fit my requirements or aren't really worth talking about:

• Mazinger Z (PC-88), not a shooter at all, apparently I added this not knowing what it actually was. It's some kind of top-down thing which seems to be more along a RPG than a shooter.
• The Sentinel (C64), sequel to Dimension X, plays like Star Trek but as a first person action game. Kind of annoying to play.
• Wing Commander (C64), no not a fan port of the game you're thinking of. This is a weird game where you fly across an island stopping enemy bombers from destroying various targets. Unnecessarily complex controls and incredibly boring gameplay.