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