ZZT's Revenge: Ezayna

This isn't just the opening screen, it's also the title screen.

With the success of ZZT, it was only natural that there would be follow-ups, three of them. Best of ZZT, Super ZZT and ZZT's Revenge. We'll be talking about ZZT's Revenge first because that's what comes with all releases of ZZT after a certain point Both Best and Revenge have the honor of being made from fan submissions, far from the first such game, and their commercial status is odd, so even if I didn't know of earlier titles like Championship Lode Runner it would be hard to call them the first fan made commercial expansions.

I'm going through these in the strange order Wikipedia has them listed under, so we'll start with Ezanya. The story, is the player is a lowly country serf who lives on the outskirts of the capital. Several weeks ago, the King disappeared and nobody could figure out why. But that didn't concern the player's world, until yesterday, they received news from a messenger, first, the King returned, just as mysterious as he disappeared, and secondly, the player's Aunt died and left the player a cottage in town. Thus the game begins, walk into that unusual object, and we have 5 ammo, 2 torches and gems in addition to the standard 100 health.

Sometimes showing only the important bits can leave you questioning how this is a capital.

Go through the door, and you're taken directly to the town. Which looks quite small. We have house, pub and palace...in addition to the part of town where the monsters live. The house has some stuff in it, in addition there are two scenery objects. Above my guy is a bed and below is a plant. Walking into them has some text about them. The door is a white door, can't do anything there yet. At first I think I'm going to go to the pub first, but then I spot a scroll in the middle of town, telling me that the King needs someone to rid the land of some scourge.

It turns out some evil dwarves are raiding the kingdom, bringing with them dragons and demons. Spies infiltrated the palace and took his magical emblems of power; Royal Crown, Jewels, Spectre and Signet Ring. Should I succeed, he'll give me all the fame and wealth I'll ever need. He then gives me a yellow key, guess that's what those doors in the upper right are. The pub functions as a general store where I can get more ammo/torches if need be.

So it's just some simple funneling going on here. I'm a little rusty, but it's not too bad. The only problem I have is that sometimes enemies just don't want to enter the tunnel they're being funneled towards. They just hide and I have to go in and hope I get lucky.

Despite how it looks, turning a dark screen into something visible, it wasn't until I tried to get past the slider puzzle that I started.

I go for the left yellow door, it leads to a dark cave. In the darkness, I hear the sign of one of those monster spawners. It's slow, but not a good thing to hear. I've taken advantage of ZZT's cheat codes to give you an accurate view of the level at the start. It's a tiger spawner. I take it out by the usual method, using my body to kill the thing it spawns. Northwest we have a spinning gun guarding three gems, hardly a fair exchange, but north of it are some easy to reach torches and gems.

As I go through this place, there's a lot of scenery objects, mostly pickaxes which were dropped by the dwarves. And a lot of crates too, north there's a path blocked off by one, and south some worms run around a bunch. Here there's a path through an underground forest, which has spores that hurt you if you interact with them, then a vortex at the end. The vortex warns us that there's some sort of menace above, threatening the dwarves and destroying the earth. He tells me to go after the force that sent us and to not harm those that did not seek to destroy us. He then gives me the "earthpower", which just heals me a bit.

At this point, things get a little tricky. I didn't realize there was a yellow key in a hidden wall on the left, not that it helps, the other door at the hub is guarded by a dragon and it's actually a red door. There's a door in the south of the map, but I need something to open it. It turns out that I forgot about slime and how it works, because there's a block east of the spawner that gets overwhelmed by it if you don't go there quickly. Quickly enough that you can stop the spawner first, luckily. So I go back to the pub, buy some health, ammo and torches, and go forth.

After a puzzle where you move some blocks to create safe passage across a wall of guns, and a few items south, there's this puzzle. Oh, this puzzle. This is why I figured out the cheat codes. See, I tried everything and nothing would let me past, so I looked up a walkthrough...only there isn't one. There's a guide which sort of gives you hints here. Sort of. It tells me to have two blocks vertical...somewhere. I'm really not sure where they're supposed to be, and a reviewer was talking about how they used the zap cheat code to get past this. (which removes objects in the four tiles surrounding the player) Someone who presumably knows more about this game needed a cheat to get past this. Who am I to be better than an expert at this game?

Past the slider puzzle are two dwarves, represented by "coin" icons (for lack of a better term) one wandering around and another standing still. Can't interact with the wanderer, but the standing one I can talk to. He's very helpful. If I explain my quest to him, I'm told I'm a friend of the earth, that much be the vortex. Can't imagine he'd be thrilled to hear I'm here to kill him. Others of his kind would kill me where I stand, but he'll help me as much as he can, which is to just give me another key.

The key opens up a nearby treasure room, hidden behind a secret wall. Which has the Signet Ring. Unfortunately, the way back is not quite that obvious, there's a secret wall in front of what seemed like a teleporter. Turns out that's what the pusher pointing towards the entrance in the block puzzle does. Back to the king, he gives me a key to the Dwarven Citadel, but tells me to rest first. I first check the plant in my house again, and get a leaf for some reason.
 

The reference to Snow White and her dwarves seems to just be to make the rhyme stick.

Since I now have enough gems to hear a rumor from the barkeeper, I decide to hear what he has to say. The King allegedly tortured a dwarf posting messages on the signpost to get the location of the Dwarven Crown. Wait, the Dwarven Crown? Well, we know that the guy who smiled malevolently isn't a good guy, so it's not surprising he's stealing stuff. I'm given two choices of dialog, and I go "hmm...", he then gives me a piece of paper with an anti-poison potion or somesuch. Checking the signpost, I find a message that's obviously related to some sort of door code. Clack green twice, Snow White, blue light, and ruby red kiss.

I suppose something that feels busy in a ZZT game wouldn't be too busy in another game, man that doesn't help at first glance.

So to start with, you have the option of using a key to get an invulnerability potion to get across the rows of spinning guns. You have to do this of course. There are invisible walls in the room in the middle. Because this level wasn't hard enough without it. Next, you have to go to both doors that are just lines. Why? Because they're poisoned, and you need to use that potion you just got. Well, make it anyway, that's what the alchemy room is for. Things are less on a clock at this point, but things are still tricky.

See those dwarves in the lower left? You need to kill them, but using ammo on the red one is going to make you run out. Instead you just have to drag it against something and hope for the best. It'll drop two keys, a green and a cyan one, cyan's for the east door. Green opens the doors in the prison, of which the only not containing an enemy is the eastern one. There a dwarf is about to die. Apparently he was the one who accidentally gave the King the keys to the Dwarven Kingdom, by beating it out of him.

North is far more mundane. Outside of the obvious lasers and enemies, you get bombs. That's all it really takes to take out the spawner. The west side is just a big fancy enemy you can shoot, that's what the bombs are for. Between these three things, you get enough cyan keys to go through the doors. The thing in the center there are the jewels I've been tasked to get. Despite the warnings, I have to. He gives me the white key and tells me to rest again.

Reminder, this would be dark and I wouldn't see anything beyond my home.

The barkeeper has no new information, and I decide the door in my room is the best choice. This room is dark, I took a screenshot with it off for information purposes. It doesn't occur to me for a few moments what's going on. This is the world overrun by demons. This must be the right choice, I can't imagine anything else being better. The objective here is to just take the potion in the upper right and take out the dragon in the throne room, which then opens the door on the right.

Monsters are in the four corners of the left room, walls of guns in the upper right, and then the king on the lower right.

That leads here. This is what the message was for. Unfortunately, you need to take out the monsters that are exposed by this. You really need to have loaded up on ammunition for this. At this point I've just been cheating myself the stuff. This was probably not a good way to start off this expansion after the cobwebs of having not played it in a long time. Then there's a bit where you have to thread the needle of those spinners...while under threat of spinning guns.

At the end is the King again. This is...trouble. He seems to have some sort of bizarre pattern, shoot him when he's one symbol in order to hurt him, otherwise your shot bounces off. Except that isn't true. Instead...you need something I don't have to hurt him. I guess I need to reload.
 

If you use the bombs on that area in the far left, you'll cut off one way of getting out of there.

The other white door is quite curious. You can't shoot here, so you're basically just dragging bombs so you can reach the staff in the upper left. The vampire bat is an annoying thing you have to run away from. I'm not really sure how someone is expected to play, short of heavily conserving their resources and demonstrating levels of skill far in excess of what ZZT usually asks. Also, once you grab the staff, you have but a moment before the red asterisk causes some slime to spawn, potentially trapping you before the spinning guns can get you out.

The events repeat back with the King again. Now I have to get him the Royal Crown. It turns out that if you screwed up working with the sliding block puzzle earlier, you're screwed out of reaching the blue door now. This is getting to be quite difficult for us mere mortals. This is different from my usual playthroughs, I'm sure the developer actually could beat it reasonably, but man, I have no shot of it without cheats.

The classic ZZT vehicle/elevator.

Another very dense level. The elevator moves quickly and automatically, so I don't go in an order I would like. I start central right. Crates to block the shots of some dwarves, who act like spinning guns. A tiger spawner, which I don't actually take care of with the bombs. That dwarf there is friendly, give him ten gems and you get a key. Which I use to open a room on the upper left, moving that slider away from the key and over the guns. Sadly, that doesn't help me get past the horde of monsters there.

Central west seems empty at first, until you open it and realize that the odd objects can be searched, there's a key in one. Now I can go through either room on the bottom. I decide that the lower right one is the wisest, take out that spawner. Curious, there's a yellow door down there, but no key as far as I can see...and then I realize I can't go bakc out. Darn it. So I reload and go to the lower right. This is the Dwarven King, and he won't let me go past him to take the crown. Like the human King, whose name I have omitted out of its length, I can't hurt him. But unlike the human King, I can just walk past him, rob his crown and everything else, then continue onward.

I go back to where the blue door is, and the purple dwarf is the one who helped me earlier. He's dying, much like the others, but he gives me the EarthSword. Aha, this must be what I was missing. Funny how being smart led to me being in an unwinnable situation earlier. Then again, for all the cleverness this game has going on, it's surprisingly loose with keys, since I can easily leave some place with spares I shouldn't have, as often they only guard some treasure. The king disappears when I give him the final piece, and oddly, sleeping in the bed is the answer to getting the final white key.

With that, it just becomes a matter of running into the King until he dies. You get a text crawl and then a nice shiny picture. Feels disappointing, but that's too be expected, the only person I cheated was myself. But not even an explanation of why the King turned into a demon and why the Dwarven treasures were so powerful? That said, I'm not really sure how many people could, since this felt very tight as far as resources go. This isn't even survival horror in how much you're expected to conserve, this is like a Kaizo hack in its precision. Kind of strange from a levelset promoted to official status. Next up, we'll see the specifically named Fantasy.

Side note, I know I said I was going to play something from 1984 this week...but I was just sick enough to make that too difficult to stick to but not sick enough to stop entirely. That said, I have determined that Falcon Patrol 2 isn't something I'm going to be spending much time on. It's basically Defender, but without the hostages and against one enemy type. Not bad exactly, just not much to talk about.

This Session: 3 hours 50 minutes

Ixion (1992)

The cover is just this image in black and white. Like something out of the early '80s rather than the early '90s.

Name:Ixion
Number:233
Year:1992
Publisher:Software 42
Developer:Tom Cooper and Barry Clarkson
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (103W/72L)

If you've been reading my previous entires on original FPS for the Acorn Archimedes range, you probably have a mental image of what this one will be already. Mouse-only, crude 3D graphics, straight-forward shooting action, frustrating difficulty and the usual British humor. Ixion is different, it tries to be a complex action-adventure game and as far as I can tell it isn't humorous.

Finding out about the game world on one of the computers.

Ixion has a strange backstory. Taking place in the future, the human race has colonized many other planets, but Earth itself has become an environmental hazard. All but a few places have turned completely uninhabitable. After Earth was evacuated, the population of the galaxy became poor and turned to crime. To combat this, Earth has been turned into a prison planet, what's still vaguely inhabitable of it, anyway. The game begins with the player arriving here, charged with narcotic possession. The objective is simply to escape the planet.

Spiritually, this reminds me a lot of Galactic Empire. Like it, this game comes out as a FPS with adventure game sensibilities. Whereas Empire had a clever dialog system and story to balance out a less than ideal combat system and sometimes frustrating puzzles; Ixion has none of that. Ixion is straightforward, has a bizarre world, and offers nothing but busywork. There isn't even a save system, so if you die or are forced to quit, you have to restart.

A relatively common starting view.

You are placed in the game world with no guidance outside of escape. So it's time to get used to the game world. You move around with the arrows on the GUI. There are no keyboard substitutes. The only keyboard commands are help, pause, minimize the game, (you quit by middle clicking the game's icon, remember Archimedes game) and controlling the size of your radar. To interact with objects in the game world, you left click on objects to use them, assuming you can or you have the item necessary, and right click to shoot.

Oh, except the two things near you when you start; The only non-hostile non-talking human, and a car. The first human you see cannot be interacted with. The first time around, I thought that meant I was pressing the wrong mouse button, and shot at a distance some ways away from him. This didn't turn him hostile, but other, wandering security machines did become hostile.

The car is weird, because you use it by walking into it from a certain angle, like one of the many buildings. It's a godsend of an object, because it allows you to speed around the map. Let me tell you, it isn't fun just walking around it. It's not that big, I think about five minutes from one corner to another, but speed is very helpful. I didn't check the manual enough to figure out that you just walk into the side of it in order to enter it. Considering that it's not obvious where the manual is, and that it violates the rest of the rules of interaction, it's a bit frustrating.

The game has a good amount of places to go to, but there is a proper sequence to it all. This is where the adventure aspect of the game comes in. Sort of. This is like an adventure game in that there is a sequence of puzzles you need to solve in order to advance through the game. It's less like one because you can boil down all puzzles to fetch quests and key to doors. Like a game that decided that the best part of Doom was hunting down all the keys.

I'll take you on a guided tour of the game, rather than the aimless wandering I had to do. To start with, the first location you should head to is west of the starting area. West, not south or north. South is a bar, that'll be important in a moment, and north...first is a locked door, then a place with two guys who kill you if you approach. At least when you first meet them you won't likely make that mistake again.

For a criminal, he's sure a nice fellow.

West is an office building...at least that's the only explanation I have for it. There are many rooms, which have some items. Food, a small amount of cash, some anti-radiation pills and a pair of sunglasses. The middle two are puzzle items, the first a healing item and the shades make the screen slightly darker. The food isn't just a healing item, it's the only healing item. There's also a computer with a floppy drive and no OS.

Then there are two people you can talk to. The first asks if you want some work, take out some guy who wronged him by stealing some of his equipment. The other is a creepy-looking alien who you can't speak to yet. He's very important. Were this a game with more serious world-building as opposed to things that happen, I would wonder what kind of prison colony this is if it has a guy who I later discover is an arms dealer and an alien who, while not as shady as the arms dealer, is still pretty shady.

The guards, from a very safe distance away.

The proper sequence of events now is to head south of your starting position, to a bar. Inside is a charming barman and a lady who wants something. You give money to the barman, and give the drink you get to the lady. She then tells you where the guy is, north of you in an L-shaped building, and gives you a pass so you can get past his guards.

So, combat. As you can imagine from the controls, combat is not fun. Right click releases a steady stream of bullets. From the start, your options are to either launch a preemptive attack and hope you can kill them first, or shift between dodging and shooting. You get a crosshair when you shoot, but it's slightly off-center from where you're aiming. You can dodge behind cover, but enemies that can move will find you, and most of the time you get cover it isn't a fight you should be having anyway. You can shoot enemy bullets, but good luck with that.

And if you get hit, you are in bad luck. The food barely heals you, and health regeneration is extremely slow. I know it happened, but waiting around never seems to make it work. Perhaps it's related to the radiation icon on my HUD being active half the time. The rad pills nullify it just enough so that my health regeneration can deal with it, but not anything else.

Going back to the arms dealer, I get a missile launcher for my trouble. This is another weapon, though it isn't obvious at first. Sometimes it works on an enemy, sometimes it doesn't. Instead of a stream of bullets, it's a higher damaging but slower to fire homing missile. The first time it happened I was confused, because it's much slower. It does make dodging easier when you aren't trying to fire constantly. Not really sure how much better it made combat, for reasons that will be made clear in a moment.

I'm surprised they even bothered to put labels on these things since I just walked in.

The next step is to go to the nuclear power plant to the southwest of the starting area. At this point, sometimes the robot security wandering around the map started to attack me. Why? Dunno, there's no consistent explanation. It's not killing the guy or going near the plant, sometimes it just happens, sometimes it doesn't.

For the power plant, you need the rad pills, otherwise you'll die. There are some slightly more clever puzzles in here. Like shoot some crates to open a door, or use a button to find a slightly hidden elevator. There's a lot of items here, a couple of key cards with letters on them, a floppy disk hidden away, and some Infrared Glasses, which turn the screen red and allow you to see hidden messages. I never found it, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Also in here is a computer. From it, you can log onto different system OSes, but the one here allows you to mess around with the reactor. You can turn it off, and this allows you to get past a force field in another building. I wouldn't ponder the ramifications of this, if any thought was put in, it's clearly that the people behind the design of this place are incompetent. The game suggests that if you wait around for a long enough time, the plant will explode, but I didn't check. If it does, that's a better ending than what you get.

More importantly, the other OSes do things like explain the game world, the backstory, and if you have the right code, invincibility. Yeah, you can cheat in this game by...well, you can just check through the game files. I took advantage of this because I wasn't going to finish the game otherwise. You'll see why.
 

Feels very ZZT-like, which is guess tracks.

At this point the game gets really into the whole keycard and door thing, because now that's basically going to be all you're doing. Your two keycards open a door south and one northeast, which have more keycards in them. These open up the central building, but it's not where you go yet. Instead, there's another puzzle in the building that's dead south, move a big cannon so it'll shoot some crates, this reveals a room with a translator.

That's certainly a charming design.

But before you go talk to the alien, you need to put the floppy in the computer. Why? Because the computer allows access to a room with a battery that's very important. You just need a password which I guess requires the IR Glasses to find, but I never found it. The intended sequence here is to go up to the alien, sell him the battery, bribe two guards in another building so you can get another keycard and enough money to buy back the battery. Or you could just run past the guards.

The central building requires you to first use the battery on one door, then the keycard you got from the place with the two guards you bribe. This gets you a keycard for another door in the room, which has the teleporter. Hope you read the game's backstory and kept a note of the location of the nearby spaceport, because that's where you need to set it too.

 

This is what you get if you don't fall down, because there's no looking up or down.

The spaceport is just pure combat. Go to one of the two buildings, and hope you don't accidentally fall down, then shoot the big crystal to deactivate a force field on the other building. Inside there, shoot a weird flying robot, get a boarding pass, then leave the planet. You slowly fly off into space.

In addition to the puzzles that come off as busywork, there are many robots wandering around the two sectors. Obviously in the second they're always hostile to you, but in the first they start off friendly, but for no reason, turn hostile. I have no idea what triggers the change here, time is the only consistent cause. Shooting someone inside a building, entering the power plant, none of these actions caused me trouble all the time. Which I guess gets down to the game's problem if you somehow fixed the controls.

Turning an adventure game into a real-time 3D action game is just a bad idea. Unwinnable by design puzzles are something most are firmly against, to the point that this hurts the genre a lot in the constant attempts to revive it. But this ignores how bad unwinnable by poor luck is and why games like these haven't been revived in the years since. If it's intended, it can be worked around, if it's bad luck, you don't ever know if what you did was something wrong or just bad luck.

It doesn't help that this game also lacks saving and has numerous gotcha moments. Perilously walking over catwalks, one of which is near the end of the game, and oh, if you keep walking after entering a building you fall down and are completely out of luck. Unless you dig deep, the adventure games you're likely to play aren't that cruel. Even Elvira, which delights in mocking the player, has saving despite more gotcha moments than a game of tag.

That said, there's some stuff that deserves some credit. The computers are fairly interesting, if slightly too full of having to guess at things. Then, the skyboxes, or rather the sky. It probably doesn't come off too well in static images, but there's some clever stuff going on there. Slowly moving around, clouds which are independent objects. Shame it's tied up in a game that really had no need for it. With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
I don't think there's much depth when I was unsure if the missile launcher was an upgrade. 1/10

Enemies:
Nearly all variations on your plain shooter enemy or a turret. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Non-combat NPCs with limited dialog. 0/10

Levels:
There is some semblance of a more natural world, which I kind of liked, but it was counter balanced by the large focus on walking back and forth. A lot of walking back and forth. 2/10

Player Agency:
Mouse-only shooters will be my bane until someone figures out that the keyboard is a helpful tool. 2/10

Interactivity:
For a game that seems to be trying to be an adventure game, far too crude. You use most items automatically, and others you have to enter your inventory to use. It's basically click and the occasional shot towards a crate. 2/10

Atmosphere:
I'll give the game one thing, I certainly feel like I'm walking around an irradiated hellscape of a prison planet. 4/10

Graphics:
Hey, animated people walking around a true 3D world. Take that, Alone in the Dark! Besides that, I noticed that some stationary objects can become invisible depending on where you're standing. I also liked the particle effects. 2/10

Story:
The game world makes no sense. Why does this prison sector have an alien? Why is there some semblance of civilization? Why can I just walk into the power plant? Why do people have food? I don't understand what the game is going for at all! 0/10

Sound/Music:
A title theme, some effects when you walk around, and some interesting sound effects. This one has some early footstep sound effects, which is pretty nice. 4/10

That comes up to 19. Taking out 2 points for no save system, we get 17 in total. Not the worst game or even FPS I've ever played. I appreciate what it tried to do, even if it failed.

Acorn User had a review of the game which feels less like a review and more the act of someone who doesn't want to admit that it isn't as good as he wants to think. He praises basically everything except the lack of saves. You'll get used to the mouse-only controls and it gets rid of the stuffiness of adventure games. He didn't finish the game. Normally, I'd move on, but I'm not feeling charitable about this today. This is the thought process of someone who has developed a cult-like mindset with his system of choice. They don't want to admit that maybe they backed the wrong horse, and instead try to shill whatever seems to them to be the best thing the system has to offer. In comparison to a lot of people I've seen who have this mindset, I think that this isn't so bad. It's outclassed by games I've talked about in the past, but I don't think that the writer knew about those. Taken in the usual isolation these games I've been covering have, this does seem to be a cool prototype. But the gameplay is nothing special, and it doesn't matter how cool a prototype you have if it's just cool without even passable gameplay to go with it.

With that, we've pretty much ended our time with this branch of FPS design. 3D focused open worlds which tend to view pretty much any aspect except the world itself as secondary at best. It's not really a mystery as to why these games failed. Most of them seemed to try to combine action and adventure elements, but the action was never really fun enough to want to run through it and the adventure half was amateurishly done.

It's strange that most of all, what killed most of these games was an insistence on either a bizarre control scheme or simply just using the mouse. I wouldn't recommend most of them if they had traditional control schemes, but I would be more favorable towards them. Some of them might have even been worth checking out for historical purposes.

Next time, I'm afraid I've got a busy week coming up and I've suddenly fallen ill, so I'm probably going to pull out something from 1984. Somehow I still have a good chunk of games from there, but hopefully this will cut it down a little.

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/72L)

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