Mazer II - The Ghost of Mordaine (1992)

The subtitle is only in some places, perhaps because you don't know who Mordaine is until you've won.

Name:Mazer II - The Ghost of Mordaine
Number:226
Year:1992
Publisher:Big Red Computer Club
Developer:Farfetch Software
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:5/5
Time:15 hours 10 minutes
Won:Yes (98W/73L)

Mazer II is business as usual when it comes to these early days of FPS. It's odd, but not really that unusual to its contemporaries. It's an exclusive to one system, in this case the Apple IIGS, (basically a color Macintosh before they were called that) unique control scheme, an elaborate story that seems unfitting for this era, and pieces of absolute frustration.

The first bit of important information is the title. No, you did not miss my coverage of the first game. I don't know what the first game is. Maybe there isn't one. But the experience is not ruined by the lack of the first game, it's ruined by other things. In fact, I daresay missing the opening of the game may have made the experience better. Mystery is key to a good story, and this game serves mystery up.

One of the curious Mazeworlders, telling me what his problem is.

The story is, you, presumably the player himself, has arrived in Mazeworld, which is a world made of mazes. Mazeworld is in pretty bad shape right now, beings from the Dark Realm are invading, slowly draining the life of the place. These creatures breached in part, thanks to a being called The Adversary, who brought in the Dark Worlders in order to enact some mysterious plan himself. Now you have to stop these people while figuring out what happened to the creators of Mazeworld and a past adversial figure called Mordaine.

It's a basic story, but told in an interesting way. It isn't obvious what the plot development is going to be until you see it, which is important, though I think if you stick to a thought you have when you get most of it, you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right. Being dripfed the story through encounters with people desperate for you to help them or villains about to order your death does wonders. But I think I liked it most of all because, despite being a sequel, feels quite like a story about a children's fantasy world being invaded by some evil. You truly are the only hope.

The game is controlled almost exclusively by the mouse, with the exception of the escape key for the menu. Only, it's a Macintosh mouse, basically. So you get one button doing too many things and then movement which you hope won't go out of the emulator's window because there is no true fullscreen command and even the mouselock function doesn't lock it in the window all the time.

Affirmative energy floating in the game world.

You get four weapons, as such. Only one is truly a weapon, destructive. The other three are for interactions with stuff. Creative, which could be thought of as a use key, except from a distance. Affirmative and negative, which are a yes and no answer to questions. You change, not via any reasonable method, but by holding the mouse button down and dragging it into a certain direction. There's technically a fifth, which is nothing, used for advancing dialog.

Every weapon drains energy, and you of course have health on the left. It regenerates, there are no pickups. Ammo also regenerates. Unfortunately, it regenerates slowly, and enemies are far stronger than you are in numbers, but usually not in actual strength. Combat is weird, because of the controls it was never going to be great, but the game kind of tries. To start with, direct confrontation is suicide. Enemies are better at shooting than you are...not because they actually aim any better, but because they don't have to worry about accidentally shooting creative energy. They actually have the same handicaps you do, in addition to dying in one hit.

Combat with some of the creatures on one floor, this is as close as it gets to a normal FPS.

Enemies respawn, at set points after their death. In theory, you should be able to survive better than your enemies, but in practice, as with Doom's Nightmare! difficulty, this isn't happening. This is basically just a repeat of Galactic Dan, all the good strategies I've picked up over the years don't work when my control scheme is a mouse alone. At least I don't have to jump with the mouse and moving is...normal for a mouse. I get the feeling that the author was really into this whole virtual world thing and using as limited a control scheme as he could manage to get that across. Nice idea, terrible execution.

These guys are blocking a portal, and if I get close they kill me, which would be 100% in place at your usual adventure game.

This ties into what I feel is the real meat of the game, the puzzles. This feels adventure-esque for the simple reason that the actual gameplay is just a disguise for navigating between puzzles. Fighting enemies is incidental. They either respawn infinitely or are invulernable. Not exactly a point in favor of combat. It's very odd, because if it were a few years later, one might say that the choice of an adventure disguising itself as something else was an attempt to make itself more palatable, but in 1992, when FPS wasn't a genre yet? I don't understand it.

The puzzles were pretty good when they were centered around using the four energies cleverly. Paying attention to the world and how someone else is interacting with it. There was one puzzle I couldn't find my way around without cheating, but I can be pretty certain it isn't just a clever application of some energy, since I tried a lot of things and never found a real answer to it. The puzzle after it is also kind of crap, both as a puzzle and what sense it makes with its solution in-universe. Every other puzzle is fittingly logical.

I like this game far better in theory than in practice. It's the world of a children's story if the villain won, where you slowly try to make things right. Dodging enemies stronger and tougher than you as you try to get help from the few remaining helpful entities. This is what it is in my head. In practice, there are two separate genres here, one of which has much more focus on it, while the other is stapled on awkwardly. Which seems to be a common problem with adventure/FPS hybrids, this, Galactic Empire, Inca and Isle of the Dead, to just list the ones I've already covered. I know in all those cases, the developers would have been better off trying to make the adventure half of the equation the whole game. With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
It's hard to describe what you're given as a weapon, more like a single gun with four different ammo types, all infinite. 1/10

Enemies:
Sort of tied into interactivity intimately. Every enemy is tied into a puzzle on the level they're on. While you can delay them all, you can't stop them without solving that puzzle. Some are easier than others to delay though. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
Every time a character acts as a friendly it's basically just a scripted sequence, but it does feel more interesting than most FPS by this point. They're actually helping me for once! 1/10

Levels:
Fairly simple for the most part. As could be expected, a few levels are mazes. The first I didn't find too annoying, you can easily do the wallhugging trick to get where you need to go. (Well, in theory, that was where the puzzle I couldn't solve was) The second, meanwhile, does not allow this trick. It also has hordes of enemies who can easily kill you. The rest are all simple enough to figure out and center around the puzzle more. 3/10

Player Agency:
Annoying, tedious, and I'm tired of this sort of thing. The issues here are half what the game is doing, all mouse, and half what the emulator is doing, you can't really capture the mouse in KEGS. You're also slow and can't sidestep. It takes a moment to shift energies, unless you get unlucky in combat and accidentally switch from destructive to negative energy, which isn't the same thing. It's also annoying to have the use key tied to ammo. 1/10

Interactivity:
For such a limited amount of actions, the game gets some decent mileage out of them. 4/10

Atmosphere:
Mazer really sells itself on the once bright world enshrouded in darkness, with each corner hiding something unpleasant, often for ill. 4/10

Graphics:
Amateurish, but charming and effective. Very little animation though. 3/10

Story:
Were it not for the story, I don't think I would have powered through this one. It's not mind-blowing, but it was enjoyable enough that I felt the effort was worth it. 4/10

Sound/Music:
None.

That's 24. Which is a bit generous for another game with a repulsive control scheme, but does reflect that I found it enjoyable despite its handicaps.

With that, 1992 should be mostly smooth sailing. I have an arcade game and an Archimedes game left, but both of those should be simple enough to cover. There are going to be some replays, of course, but those should be simple. Outside of a Mike Singleton game called Ashes of Empire, everything in the near future looks to be simple enough. Which probably means some of it isn't, but enough of it is that I'm not too worried.