Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984)

There's a very nice animation proceeding the title.

Name:Raid on Bungeling Bay
Number:240
Year:1984
Publisher:Broderbund
Developer:Will Wright
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour
Won:Yes (105W/77L)

When we think of a predecessor to SimCity, one would naturally think of a strategy gather rather than...this. As we've often found, important game ideas come from the unlikeliest sources. One particular element of a game is more interesting than the rest, so let's turn it into something more. Welcome to Raid on Bungeling Bay, the game SimCity was originally a level editor for.

The concept is simple. The Bungeling Empire has built six factories, destroy them, and don't get shot down by the enemy. To aid in this task, you have five helicopters, and an aicraft carrier to act as a base.

Keyboard controls consist of the IJKL cluster, with I being forward. Space shoots and Z drops a bomb. Turning is generally smooth, but you can't turn and shoot at the same time. Instead, you lock into place. Forward movement is increased by gradually holding down I or decreased with K, but you only go backwards as long as you hold down K. Which occasionally creates some problems, like when you have to land on the carrier.

You don't die in one hit and you get nine bombs. Landing on the carrier restores your health and bombs, which you do by getting to a low enough speed above the carrier and shooting. Unlike the rest of the time you shoot, this stops it. Because of the nature of how it works, it's easy to accidentally press space before an action finishes and then have to take off again. What's weird is if you get shot while on the carrier, you get knocked off.

A bomber going after the carrier.

The carrier is not a static object, it constantly moves slowly upwards. To prevent you from forgetting where it is, the game includes an arrow which points back to it. At later stages, it gets annoying when you might have to worry about enemies attacking you over it, but it's manageable. It can also be attacked by black planes, which the carrier either regenerates from when not under attack or takes so long to destroy that you have plenty of time to deal with it.

And here's a fighter...doing something as I try to bomb a factory.

Your primary target is the six factories. You might think, having nine bombs on your helicopter, that this would be easy. You can hover over the factory and just unload. Thing is, factories have weak points where you can destroy them with less than nine bombs and points where you need more than nine. Which means a trip back to the ship and hoping you get back before the factory repairs itself. It can and does get very annoying at times.

There's a secondary target of a battleship the Bungelings are building. If it gets completed, it goes after your carrier. The thing is, it's broadcasted to you when it's nearing completion. So I never actually had to worry about it moving around, I could always send its progress back to zero.

It's fairly easy to figure out where everything is, simply because there are three factories on islands to the left of the carrier, and three to the right of the carrier. The battleship is on the left island off the start. Everything loops, but generally you don't need to loop around horizontally outside of extraordinary options.

There are three enemies who pose a threat to you. Turrets, which have difficulty actually hitting you, to the point that you could stand still and they'd miss you. Hits they get feel like bad luck rather than bad movement. The planes, meanwhile, are harder to deal with. The don't exactly have perfect aim, but sometimes they can get a shot on you despite it feeling like the result of random luck. It's hard to take them out sometimes owing to the whole turn and shoot things. The radar helps, but because everything hostile is yellow, isn't foolproof.

Then there are missiles. They appear and chase after you. Hitting them is hard, because they're usually so close to you that dodging them is the only thing you can do. You basically have to just outrun them until they mysteriously disappear. Which is a thing that happens with all enemies, sometimes they just mysteriously stop chasing you when you cross off/on an island or approach the carrier.

As you take out factories, or as time goes on, more enemies and defensive measures pop up. The manual says it's as time goes on, but it seemed more tied into how many factories have been destroyed. This is a hard thing to measure, as there's no reason to take out the defenses of a factory without taking out the factory and things which don't shoot back are unimportant.

The game starts off quite easy, but by the time you're taking out the last factory the sky tends to fill with planes and the ground with turrets. You actually do get to see these things being built and try to take off, with the option to destroy them before they become a problem. It's a nice touch.

Sadly, winning the game results in you just getting a text scroll along the bottom saying that the enemy has surrendered. Then again, this was relatively easy for the year, so I shouldn't be counting on too much.

Weapons:
Basic weaponry. 1/10

Enemies:
Fairly simple variety, some turrets, a few chasers, cannon fodder, static targets and something that goes after your base. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None as such.

Levels:
The area is described as over 100 screens long. Not sure how true that it, but it's certainly a big place. I don't feel it's that special though. 3/10

Player Agency:
Very smooth, if still janky in a few places. 5/10

Interactivity:
None, as such.

Atmosphere:
Feels like a lot of classic top-down shooters, but doesn't necessarily distinguish itself. 3/10

Graphics:
Nice, clean, simple. Pretty nice animation too, even if it's just machines going around. 3/10

Story:
Basically none.

Sound/Music:
Simple sound effects. 1/10

That's 18.

Raid on Bungeling Bay is a fine game, but it doesn't really feel all that exciting. It's competent, but it doesn't really have much going for it beyond that. I sort of struggled to find the time to play this one despite starting off really well and still struggle to find interesting things to say about it.

Next week, we'll see Catacomb Abyss again as we get through the very last of 1992.

Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992)

Name:Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure
Number:239
Year:1992
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Apogee
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:4 hours 30 minutes
Won:No (104W/77L)

For the most part, Apogee's titles have generally not felt like direct analogues to the console games that dominated side-scrollers from the late '80s to the early '90s. Keen or Duke might have bits that are similar, but there's nothing about them that felt like they were inferior copies of Megaman or Contra. In fact there's been a pretty clear progression from the old single-screen titles to finally throwing off the shackles of poor screen scrolling. Cosmo is different, because Cosmo has that whiff of copying about it.

The story is, Cosmo's birthday is coming up tomorrow and his parents are taking him to Disney World, but a comet crashes into their ship, forcing them to make an emergency landing on an uncharted planet, which the episode's title helpfully calls Forbidden Planet. Which, when I think about it, feels like shoehorning a reference to a famous sci-fi film than an actual name. After landing, Cosmo's father repairs the ship while Cosmo then decides to go wandering off, because Cosmo is a small, dumb child. Only, it turns out that when he returns, his parents are missing, and there's only strange footprints there. Cosmo worries that monsterous aliens are going to eat his parents and he needs to rescue them.

In contrast to most Apogee characters, Cosmo is unable to shoot things, because he is a small child with suction cup hands. However, he can jump on enemies and can climb walls. Jumping on anything, be it enemies or crates with goodies inside, cause Cosmo to jump up a little. The instructions also tell me that he can find and use bombs, because shooting people is bad, but using hi-powered explosives is good. They work like you'd think, slow timer until they explode, so you shouldn't be using them willy-nilly.

Bombs are comparatively high-powered. Anything that I had trouble killing with it was less because it couldn't damage it, but rather because it was hard to actually land one on it. It spawns a little in front of Cosmo, so you can't deploy it if that isn't possible , and you have to safely get close. One it explodes, seemingly any non-wall object touching it dies with it. Random eyes on the ground, and basically every scenery trap. Even spikes. To say it's useful is understating it, the bomb is a tool more clever than any gun could be.

Cosmo is actually a kind of crappy protagonist from a playability standpoint. He moves slowly, possibly because the screen scrolling isn't all that smooth. His jump has one of those thin arcs that feels annoying to jump around with because you don't get enough horizontal reach. I've had the problem more than once. The wall climbing is also quite weird, rather than walking up it, you stick to the wall until you decide to jump off. It's also a bit disconcerting to have to do it, but gradually it's validness as an option becomes second nature At least he can look up and down, a very handy skill with some of these areas, and a health bar. Which can be increased, but is quite rare to find and almost always is in a secret area.

The DNA of proceeding Apogee games is very obvious. While Cosmo isn't just Duke with a few changes going on, the menus and probably a significant chunk of the underlying game logic was taken from there. Judging by Cosmo's occasional appearance in Commander Keen source ports, I suspect the two were frankensteined together. Since it has more handcrafted backgrounds along with free floating objects, as opposed to being on a grid.

There are also crates and barrels with stuff in them. Usually the barrels are better, bombs and health pickups are inside.Crates usually just have fruit inside, which just give points, something there is no shortage of. Rounding out the pickups are stars.

The opening level does a good job of introducing the game's central design in a clear way. To start with, there's a hint orb, which really looks like a trap of some sort, and the first one activates when you automatically go into it. Future ones you have to press up on in order to use.

But there's that whiff of what I dislike in plain platformers. Just plain old going left to right, with the occasional branch upwards. It's Apogee, so there's a bit more to it, a hidden secret in a pit, a little bit of verticality required and some unusual monster designs. I must admit, I wasn't expecting what I thought of as a children's game to have enemies which stopped to roar once in a while. But that said, it's another game where you're supposed to get enjoyment from collecting hundreds of pieces of fruit.

Every two levels you get a bonus stage, which I must admit feels pointless at first. You get unlimited lives, and while it does drop health and bombs occasionally, I was in no danger of running low on the former, and the later was not very helpful in a bonus stage. You also see enemies which can suck out the fruit you collect. Of course, later on I appreciated them, since health and bombs were not rationed out quite so generously.

Here are the enemies, unlike Keen, there's no easy names for these guys, so I made up my own. Enemies take variable amounts of hits.

• Croc Heads, red walking enemies with giant teeth. Stops to roar occasionally, don't do anything else. Your basic enemy, even if the roars add a little character.
• Purple Worms, also walk around, but if you stomp on them, you create a little puddle of acid where they once were. Which is as unpleasant as it sounds. Touching them beforehand isn't actually lethal, only the acid is.
• Blue Balls, which come to think of it, might be an inappropriate reference. They roll back and forth, but if they fall off an edge, they parachute down.
• Cyan Balls, more like obstacles than enemies, because they don't move and stand in the air. I don't think they're killable, but I didn't try. Basically there to allow Cosmo to jump to places he wouldn't be able to otherwise.
• Butterfly Worm, segmented worms with wings. Like the Cyan balls, they're more obstacles than enemies. You use them to reach areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
• Flying Worms, which are the enemies in the bonus stages. They steal points, and don't cause much trouble otherwise.
• Climbing Vines, segmented green plants. They don't move around, but you can't kill them. Jumping just causes Cosmo to bounce off, and bombing just momentarily causes them to retreat into the ground.

• Gob Blasters, blue monsters with yellow spots and a tube. They shoot at you with pinpoint accuracy. Which sucks in one way, but makes them rigidly easy to avoid on the other.
• Jump Flowers, less an enemy and more an obstacle. It grabs whatever enters it and then spits it out like a spring pad.
• Blue birds, which fly around in a set pattern. Not a pattern at you, just a pattern near you.

• Muscle ghosts, cyan enemies that look like ghosts. They hang around, then fly a really short distance in the direction you're in. If you're not looking at them. Of course, if you're stomping on them, it doesn't matter, they won't do squat. Once you do it enough, they turn into smaller forms which are easy enough to avoid.
• Tube Sponge, yellow sponge-like enemies with two sets of legs, on the top and on the bottom. You have to use bombs on these guys, you can't jump on them.
• Bootleg Thwomp, basically just stone Thwomps. Considering the Muscle Ghosts are boos, I wonder how many enemies in this game are just reskinned Mario ones that I haven't played enough to understand? Oh, and they have no range limit, hope there isn't one on the ceiling five floors up.

• Face Plants, look like the Cyan Balls, except they're attached to a wall. You can't stomp on them, and they shoot at you. Basically wall guns.
• Spring Bot, robots with guns on the front and springs on top. Stomping on them causes you to jump up, like you jumped on a springpad. They'll only shoot at you if they're within light, as in a lit up lightbulb.
• Spike Bot, moving spikes. Jumping on them has fairly obvious results.
• Shadow Bot, a robot which, until you get close to it, is in shadow. Get close and it punches you away. Basically the only robot you can actually stomp on.
• Lightning bot, a set of wheels which shoots lightning up until it reaches the ceiling. Again, you can't stomp on them, so you need bombs.
• Cursed Cabbage, a green enemy which appears as a cabbage when not moving. Once you know what it is, it's not that difficult, it just has short, occasional jumps and dies in one hit.
• Flying Bullet, a bullet-like object that jumps between two points. So high that you can't jump on top of it in the middle of one.

• Spiked Demon, a big, jumping red foot with spikes all over. Has enough of an arc and a frequent enough jump that you can't easily just stomp it to death. Which is hard to even do because it takes so many hits.

The game quickly introduces most of the roster. It feels like they're just not pacing them out, instead just getting it over with as quickly as possible. Which is odd, because early on it seems to be imitating Sonic's level design choices. Two stages set in a certain environment. No bosses, just a bonus stage. The second odd bit, beyond the obvious Mario parallels, is how the theme seems to be creepy and bug-like. Wasn't this supposed to be a children's game?

Things start getting active at Episode 1 Level 4. Things were already ramping up, but I start dying a lot here. It's not necessarily the enemies, although being casual about enemies is likely going to get you slaughtered. The real threat is how many bottomless pits this level has. It's not so much that they're there, in that the game feels like it's a bit deceptive about them. Verticality comes into play more than your typical platformer, and unless you look down a lot, it's very easy to get blindsided with what seems to be just a drop slightly down but is actually a bottomless pit.

Level 5 starts off a bit off the rails before revealing it's straightforward, if annoying. It's an underground cave which is the worst kind of maze. You're not sure which direction you're supposed to go in and it's not quite clear if you're supposed to go back up. Once it's clear where you're supposed to be going, it just turns into a game of going down, each level in turn. It's actually getting awkward to have to stop to look down, the game is constantly hiding things just out of sight, so sometimes things within your sight are easy to ignore. Like say, spear traps in the wall or ceiling.

Level 6 is an ice level. Oddly, this avoids most of the usual annoyances in favor of making itself known in weird ways. Rather than sliding, slopes act as conveyor belts and hanging onto pockets of ice causes you to slip down. For the first time, you actually have to take advantage of this wall-crawling in a meaningful way to advance, by jumping between the sides of platforms. It makes sense, but at first it can feel like you're missing something else.

Level 8 throws in a completely new mechanic, a flying platform. As in, one the player controls. Naturally there are enough environmental hazards to make things tricky. It's actually quite hard to get around them, because pressing down goes down, it doesn't look down. The second is that there are a lot of electrical barriers blocking your path. Stopping this involves a switch, but unlike how this would normally work, you have to drop a bomb on it, then jump on it, because jumping on it causes Cosmo to get hit by spikes above. It doesn't help that the design goes against everything the levels have previously been, being extremely back and forth in how you're supposed to win.

Level 9 is weird. The game's been shifting between more themes in a single episode than most do across their entire running time and I'm left scratching my head at how we've got an oil field in bug-infested planet. The various oil spouts can be jumped on, but go through the stream and you get hurt. It's a very simple level, just one with some weird concepts.

Level 10 is another frustrating exercise. It's one thing to have a keyhunt. It's another thing to have a keyhunt when the keys are springs hidden in the walls. See, in this game there are colored springs and doors. Push the spring, the door opens. These are not the most obvious thing, since years of of side-scrollers have trained me to ignore random bits of wall standing out.

After a long and hard journey to get all the springs and not die by the unexpected, I meet the boss. Who looks like Robotik in his Egg Machine, just with a metal dome on top. You just stomp on top of it until it dies. It tries to stomp you from doing this by going back and forth and by having sliding tiles to prevent you from just hanging above it. It isn't very difficult, it just feels a bit tricky after such a long jaunt.

Episode 1 ends with Cosmo falling down a large shaft into the mouth of a monster. That is, your standard level, Cosmo falling down, then an image which flashes by and the usual, what will happen to our hero now cliffhanger that ends all shareware episodes. Episode 2 starts the same way, only revealing that Cosmo has entered inside the monster. I'm starting to doubt whether or not this is a children's game.

Level 2, the real first level is...charming. It really hammers home how you're inside some sort of creature. It's simple in theory, you're mostly just jumping across tiny pillars. The game enforces an inability to use the wall climbing ability by making most walls ones that Cosmo can't stick to. It's not necessarily difficult, just tedious doing dozens of these things.

Level 3 and 4, a mushroom forest. The thing about the Croc Heads, the not Goombas, is that getting hurt by them is usually a dumb move on the player's part. Unfortunately, the game conspires to make this not the case here. Instead, you're constantly going up and down slopes, and hitboxes are square, not cut to an enemy. So you constantly have to give enemies a wide berth just to avoid getting hit because you didn't jump at the right angle to kill them.

Some very tedious but otherwise unnotable levels pass by. Most of the tricks the game has seem to have been used by now. Look at all the tiny bits of platform we make you jump on. Or the ice level where you have to climb up a slippery wall above a pit. Then the game gets nasty in the forest section. Rather than the polite jumping on stationary enemies, we get the Muscle Ghosts, you have to jump across a pit on them. Which is possible, but man, I do not want to see what fan mods do with that.

Level 10 is an exercise in frustration. It's a long tedious level in which you basically have to just grind out the correct path. Even when I was getting it right, sometimes I would get it wrong, the game going off in such a way that my previously correct path messed up in some way. The balls going in a direction I didn't expect, or a shooting enemy going in a direction I would have rathered it didn't. That's not even getting into how health pickups are placed so that when they fall or fly out of a barrel, you have to chase them across the map. Then there are the enemies placed in such a way so Cosmo jumps off them, to another platform. To get to the end, you literally have to rush and hope that you don't get killed by either a Blue Ball or a Spiked Demon.

For this, Cosmo gets out of the cave he was in. (He was in a cave?) Then he assumes his family are in a distant city and we get the lead-in to Episode 3.

Episode 3 starts off with basically no indication of this, instead being set in another forest. And with no sign that it's the start of an Episode, because this first level is already pulling all the tricks and annoyances that the last level of Episode 2 did. Followed by another level set inside a creature. Most of this feels like repeats of earlier levels but with more of the annoying parts.

Level 6 shifts it up in an annoying way. You get a starting section where you have to navigate across a series of platforms which are step-through for a moment after you land on them. Only, this is the only area around and you need to avoid the Spiked Demons and get a spring activated. Then the level reveals just what the game can do with Spiked Demons, regular spikes and fire tubes. I'm not really caring for it.

I gave up on Level 8. It's another spring hunt in a game that's full of spring hunts. This might be the 15th or so. After a while they blur together. The problem is that the spring in question is very tedious to find. I didn't find it. There are just so many traps you can easily get hurt by forgetting to pay attention for one second and the level is just so long. There are so many places it could be hiding that I feel like I can never actually find it, and so I didn't.

Fortunately, if I were to make it to the end, I would discover that Cosmo's parents were safe all along, he was worried for nothing, and he gets to go to Disney World, which is on Earth. Apparently nobody notices that an alien with suction cup hands is around. With that, the rating.

Weapons:
The bombs were very cleverly utilized weapons, feeling like they had limitations and required thought in their use. Even in a game with a dozen more weapons, they'd be the star. 2/10

Enemies:
There's a good variety even if there are certain enemies the game gravitates towards. I do dislike how many enemies are naked copies of Mario enemies, but other times it does make up for it. 4/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Cosmo seems to rely on most of Apogee's worst traits, switching between confusing maze levels and the occasional, get past that you little crap. There was very little that made me go, aha, that was clever, just mostly grateful on the more forgettable ones. 3/10

Player Agency:
In of himself, Cosmo moves okay. Wall hugging takes some getting used to and there's always a bit of jank to it, but the camera is something you'll be fighting against all the time. Moreso than enemies, what's stopping you from winning is the camera. 4/10

Interactivity:
There is a lot you can blow up with a bomb. Maybe it isn't dramatic level changing stuff, but you can screw around quite a bit. 2/10

Atmosphere:
This is certainly a weird, alien planet, even when your lead is a naked alien with suction cup hands. If nothing else, this game manages to keep throwing weird stuff at you even when it's doing something as mundane as a robot city. 5/10

Graphics:
Probably Apogee's best in-house effort yet. Tons of effects, excellent backgrounds and animation. 7/10

Story:
I feel like the story is unnecessarily nasty towards Cosmo. Every episode start begins with Cosmo in some pickle he needs to get out of, and then it all turns out to have been pointless. Try selling that one on TV. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Bobby Prince made some nice tunes, but little sticks out and I had the music off most of the time. Sound effects are solid and are PC speaker. 3/10

That's 31. Which seems unreasonably high, so let's bring that down to 30. It's amazing what having some decent graphics can do for an otherwise mixed bag.

There are good ideas, but it's hurt by just how frustrating it is getting around the harder levels. Though I must admit, from a practical, we need to provide value for money factor, I nearly beat it in under 5 hours. That's not exactly a good chunk of time. Considering that the commercial part is even less, I can understand why they made the choices they did even if I don't like them.

Next time, we'll see something from 1984.

Ashes of Empire (1992)

Name:Ashes of Empire
Number:238
Year:1992
Publisher:GameTek
Developer:Midnight
Genre:FPS/Strategy
Difficulty:5/5
Time:8 hours 50 minutes
Won:No (104W/76L)

Ashes of Empire presents a more complex version of what Midwinter 2 was trying to do, gain control of a territory before an opposing force decides to attack you. In contrast to the slightly goofier post-apocalyptic setting of Midwinter, this time it's in a vast country called the Confederation of Syndicalist Republics, which is somewhere between the Soviet Union, in size and having a massive nuclear arsenal, and the Yugoslavia in having 5 distinct ethnicities that all hate each others guts and would like to see those guts spilled on the streets. (Well, that's what the CSR has, anyway)

I note that I'm reconstructing the information about the game as best I can from what resources I have. See, this game has a truly massive amount of background materials. It's a bit difficult to find the manual, but even so, this manual is incomplete, it doesn't have anything from chapters 4-7, which are possibly not essentially to winning the game, but do provide important background information. Knowing the Midwinter 2, "Regional Profiles" sounds absolutely vital to actually winning the game. And the rest of it sounds like useful background information. I do understand why nobody bothered to upload what is 100+ pages of something that's of little interest to even most DOS gamers, even if it hurts. On the plus side, there is a VHS tape that a few people were kind enough to upload to the internet.

It's not difficult to see why. What the manual has paints it as more valuable than the game itself in terms of actually playing it. I'll explain some of it later, but even in this cut down form it contains vital information for success. The player is the commander of the United Community (Obvious take off the UN) forces. What these are is vague, but you're leading a force to bring peace and harmony to the CSR by pacifying each sub-Republic. This is accomplished by performing four tasks. Building, Demolition, Pacification and Ethnic Harmony. As the UN's major failures in Yugoslavia were yet to happen, I believe this was not intended to be satirical, but rather completely serious.

Selecting where you start off.

Getting away from the Yugoslavia comparisons, we ARE talking about a power which has nukes, and has elements in what remains of the government who aren't afraid to use them. Time is a factor in the game, you need to go through things as quickly as you can. There are hard limits and soft limits. The game has a time limit of 150 days, owing to how the state of nuclear alert goes up every 50 days. You're likely to get less than that, since that's the high limit. Soft limits are things like time in a province or republic, dictated by how many "morale" buildings you get under your control or by capturing provinces.

Further soft limits include the people in power deciding to nuke the region you're in or partisans deciding to set fire to forests. You get fire-fighting teams for the latter, but there's nothing you can do about the nukes. From what I understand, having never had either happen, they destroy resources you get for freeing a province rather than killing you.

So...it's almost a famine?

Despite being a game with goofy gameplay, I don't believe I've ever played a game that's captured quite a feeling of despair in warfare before. You're not fighting against some evil empire, you're just fighting against desperate people doing desperate things. Yes, the top brass are willing to nuke themselves, but the country is literally collapsing around them. We're not dealing with people who are all there.

Civilian cars, because even in fictional communist republics, some people are more equal than others.

To win the game, one needs to get all the Republics pacified, which requires pacifying two provinces and the capital province, or a considerable number of other provinces. I never got far enough to deal with a capital province, so maybe it's considerably more difficult. The specifics of each pacification programme in each province is different, the buildings you need to build/capture, the buildings you destroy, the enemies you need to eliminate and the votes you get all depend on various factors.

Negotiating, and being told when some local Professionals will return.

The way you accomplish this doesn't change much though. You start off in a plane, flying from village to village, negotiating with the owners of various buildings. You're not getting buildings for the sake of getting buildings, because resources play a role in the game. You get a number of trade goods, combat items and then campaign goodies. You can trade these to get the buildings, along with other goods. You can also negotiate for the building, trying one of eight persuasion options in order to get it to change hands. This instead costs time. What can you afford to lose more of? Or you could just know that buildings of a certain type in a certain area all work via the same persuasion method.

The heads rotate around on the neck, because that isn't off-putting at all.

Then there are Professionals, individuals which travel across the map and offer various things in exchange for more. Sometimes it's just more simple goods, other times it's something like various teams, which function as people goods, get enough Professionals on your side and you can make new ones. For the most part, Professionals don't offer anything you can't get elsewhere, they just make it considerably easier. That said, they also offer votes, which you cannot get in any other method. There's seemingly more available votes than Professionals than you need, but I didn't get very far by necessity.

A map which has been filled out with a lot of towns, but not much in the ways of enemies.

Most of the gameplay for me consisted of traveling between villages, capturing Radar Stations, which allow you to see more of the map, capturing vital buildings, and capturing the building pairs which allow you infinite vital resources within a certain region. Ammo, fuel and food are the primary ones, which are incredibly useful to have. There are buildings which allow you unlimited vehicles of certain types, as well. Then recording the locations of various Professionals, and possibly giving them the goods they ask for if it's a good deal.

Engaging in a little air-to-air combat.

You'll note that most of this does not describe shooting things. For the most part, you can just fly past enemies. Combat is odd. There are two weapons, missiles and bullets, most vehicles have them. (There's also a stun weapon for when you're on foot, but I was never in that situation) I feel like by the end of the game, I didn't have any issue whatsoever with the mouse aiming, even if at the start I had to turn my mouse sensitivity down. Because enemies can be removed by Professionals, you only want to do this when necessary.

About to shoot at a tank in a fighter, something which just won't work in this game.

But what you can shoot and be shot at is decided with a somewhat complex system. Everyone is in a vehicle, except possibly you, and that vehicle can attack certain other types of vehicles, and a few are the only ones which can take out buildings. So if you're flying a fighter, you can only shoot other aircraft, and can only be hit by enemies which shoot at aircraft. In practice, because flying is faster than driving, and there's always a building which offers unlimited aircraft, it's picking out one kind of plane for that moment.

Driving in a tank. Note the HUD, which is nearly flawless outside of the compass being apart from the radar.

It's fine, nothing fancy, no flight sim developers are soiling themselves in terror. Guns are actually easier to aim than missiles, because they are given quite a generous hitbox. I'm talking as long as you hit the tile something is in, you've killed them. Missiles have this problem where the enemies shoot missiles at you and both explode. You can avoid this if you're really high above them, but this can be impractical. Side note, bombers shoot bullets, presumably this was to make things easier on the development side.

If you get shot down, you either use up medical treatments you've traded for or get to wait longer. Because everything is a question of time, not health. You get another vehicle by pressing a button and selecting a new vehicle. It costs you resources, fuel, the vehicle in question and an airlift, so not getting shot down is good. If you run out of ammo, you get more by pressing a button to restock your ammo, which costs you fuel, ammo and an airlift. If you're out of fuel or airlifts, good luck.

And that is the entire game, repeated probably 30 times. The idea is very clever, but at the same time, Singleton has this design philosophy which makes these things feel like an insurmountable problem that can't be managed without knowing everything ahead of time. If you don't know how to do everything perfectly, then you won't have much chance at winning at all. Which means that through every province you go through, you've have to do it at least twice. Once to figure out where most of the important stuff is, again in order to handle it quickly. You don't quite have to plan out your route that much, but there's just no playing around.

There's basically no reason not to want this particular deal.

Which is not helped by the game setting itself up so that any actual fighting seems like it's counterproductive to your objective. Yes, you are supposed to take out enemy troops, but there are professionals which allow you to turn a lot of them to your side. That combined with the whole peace vibe the game is going for, makes the act of fighting itself feel wrong. In odd irony, this is the most a game has ever actually done to make the war is hell theme work as opposed to window dressing or something hamfisted. Fighting is always possible, but these are not bad people, and just as easily they could be fighting alongside you. They're not even fighting against you for any reason other than survival.

The problem is no amount of clever ideas can make a game that just doesn't feel fun to play work. Yes, it feels counterproductive to shoot enemies, but it also just isn't that fun flying around in a small area slowly whittling down a group of 14 enemies, who spawn 1 at a time, among many other groups of enemies, none of which you can fight at the same time, in a wide open area which looks like nothing much at all. It succeeds at being anti-war by making fighting feel like a complete waste of time. This isn't to insult real world peace efforts, but it's just too much like the real thing to be fun at all.

There are probably hundreds of these across the country, and you might just have to enter every one.

And it also doesn't help that the game doesn't really feel like either genre it is, just a weird trading sim. Yes, it's a FPS. They might be vehicles but the difference feels like a moot point. Yes, it's a strategy game, but it doesn't feel like I'm really thinking long term that much outside of time. It plays like a really messed up game of Elite where the most valuable resource you have is time.

The game is also very slow. If you don't know what a particular building is, you have to climb down in your plane. Actually VTOL, because there are small mercies. Check your GUI to see if it's the one you want, exit with a button press, enter the building with another. Wait for the building to load, because every transition, be it a building or a menu, takes a few seconds, do what you need to do. Switch to the village, go through the rest, exit, return to the plane, then fly back up. Yes, the exiting of the plane is necessary, because if you don't, it disappears and that's a vital resource.

Then of course, to get to the next village, you open up the map, go in the general direction, and just stare at the screen, which has a short viewing distance, occasionally returning to your map to check you're headed in the right direction, or opening the expanded radar screen to see if the village you're looking for is within range. Assuming it's in the current cell, because if it isn't, it'll suddenly load in when you change cells.

Between these factors and the general seriousness of the game's subject matter, I keep wondering. Is this game intended to be fun or a learning experience?  The former shows up in a considerable amount of the game's gaminess. There are underwater cities in places with lakes, which took me out of the game for a moment. In the latter, well, while yes, this is a terrible situation, it is not down to one man to literally fix a country himself. No one does anything without your okay. This was fine in games like Lords of Midnight and Midwinter when you were an abstract entity controling various characters. In a game where nobody seems to do anything that isn't at the behest of a man going around bombing every building and killing every enemy himself, during a situation where delay means certain death, it's weird. Then again, we are talking about a game where you can bomb a bombproof factory.

Weapons:
Gun or missile. There's some strategy to them, and they actually felt kind of satisfying once I got used to them. 2/10

Enemies:
The vehicle system aside, enemy AI is very questionable, almost never providing a real threat, just the odd bit of good luck. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
You can actually order in friendly troops, and they'll take out enemies at a 1-to-1 ratio, but it's incredibly wasteful. 1/10

Levels:
Behold, endless tiles and endless villages full of endless people. 1/10

Player Agency:
It takes a lot of time to figure out the various keys you need to enter buildings and check your objectives, and even when you do each transition is slow, but it's very functional. 6/10

Interactivity:
You can destroy buildings, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. 1/10

Atmosphere:
I have never played a game that managed to so successfully impart the awfulness of war and famine. Alas, this is not conductive to it being fun. 5/10

Graphics:
The 3D is kind of hard to distinguish. The 2D is...fine. I don't object to it, but it does remain that it's not very interesting. 2/10

Story:
The game hammers home as much as possible the whole fall of an empire aspect as much as possible, but you're focused completely on the big picture rather than details, so there's not much of an actual story. 2/10

Sound/Music:
I don't know how much music there is, but it's incredibly repetitive for a game that's going to last hundreds of hours. The sound effects are nice, but it doesn't matter when you want to turn your speakers off just to get away from that constant pounding. 1/10

That's 22.

As a game, I can't recommend it. As an experience, it's certainly given me something to think about. I'm not really sure what Singleton was going for here, but I must admit, that could be said of Midwinter 2 as well. Was this fun with added realism? Or something intended as serious look at the collapse of a Soviet Union-like state? Complicating matters more is I can easily see this as a Midwinter 3 - How the Bombs Fell. Those underwater cities are more Midwinter than reality, after all.

Next time, a bit of an off-topic track in Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, which will hopefully provide a bit of contrast to a game which dances around the edge of ethnic genocide and nuclear war.

Ashes of Empire: Cutting One's Losses (Lost)

I finished the last entry, asking myself a question. Restart or continue onward in what might just be a doomed state? The answer came when I looked over the map again. Can I even *win* in this province? No. I can't, there simply aren't enough forts to do so. Since that was a bust, it made my decision easy. Restart in a new place. Also, turn off the sound via the install menu, because that was getting annoying. You really can't be bothered to have an in-game music toggle?

This time, I go for one in Ossia. Or rather the one the game seems to let me pick, Temir, where instead of a famine, the economy is the problem. Only smugglers and gangsters are moving stuff, there's nothing in the shops and rebels have taken the gold. In practical terms, I have to get Vaults, Mines, Well Heads and Refineries. I have to take out Forts, Barracks and Communication Centres. This is an interesting realization, I didn't know that what buildings you had to build/destroy were conditional. I also realize that this means I can't get unlimited ammo in this province. There are a lot more troops I'll have to deal with, but I'm confident that I'll be able to deal with that one way or another. The votes are considerably easier, just Ossian and Moldenes, with a tiny Ruzakh minority.

Fighters spawn close enough to my starting position that I end up fighting some the second I switch away from my map screen. Two towns also pop up right within walking distance. This is not what I'm concerned with right away. I'm concerned with filling out the map so I can know where I need to go, and that means going around without getting into combat, just exploring towns and recording Professionals' requirements. And also this time checking that I can actually, you know, win this province.

The province is very small, but full of a lot of enemies. Not in the sense of there being big concentrations, but of them being spread out all across the map. This makes things tricky to properly eliminate. Does this mean I need to get half a dozen pacifying professionals to get through this with a minimal amount of fuss? I decide that ultimately combat is something I should be avoiding.

My campaign here starts at Kilodar near the starting position. I trade goods for a Depot and Pump Head. Now I just need to find a Processing Plant and I have unlimited food. There's an Engineer Builder here, who just wants goods for goods and votes, not really something I need just yet. A Professor is expected, so I negotiate at a mine until he comes. This turns out to be the wise choice, as the Professor knows where everyone in the province is, and is willing to give me 30 airlifts, plus medication and votes besides. All he wants is 10 fuel, 10 goods and 10 gold.

I head east, going through, but ignoring Trotchenko, nothing I need. My real objective here is Brivrilsk. I negotiate for a Control Tower and a Fort. I might have to blow up the latter later, but until I need to do so, it's going to provide vital resources. Then there are two professionals, a Doctor and a Strike Marshal. The former just gives me medical treatment and some votes, not yet necessary. The Strike Marshal, meanwhile, is incredibly powerful, so I decide that it's actually a better option to allow him to reach a different town, he recruits all CSR forces with 50 km, which is a waste near the border.

That isn't actually where I wanted to go, but as I've mentioned, it's hard to have an exact idea of where you're going in this game. So, I head southwest to Vistev, which is a small town with a Vault and a Radar Station. Which opens up my knowledge of the area without having to rely on the guy who told me where everyone is.

I continue southeast to Drigoran, which has a Mosque, a Well Head and a Hospital. I grab the Mosque and Well Head, since I need the latter. There's a Surgeon and Superintendant Administrator here, both of which just want various goods rather than anything harder to replace. Against my better judgement, I give both the necessary resources, and get medical treatment, papers and enough Moldene votes to finish that. Which now leaves a good question of where to go next, as most of the towns that have anything I want seem to be pinned down by some battalion I'd need ground attack capability to deal with, and I'm trying to stick to a fighter unless absolutely necessary.

This turns out to have been an unwise decision, as I head southeast, to Jilgevo, which only has a Well Head and a Bombproof Warehouse. It's guarded by tanks and I just decide to ignore them. They shoot the Well Head. I'm glad that enemies can destroy buildings as well as friendlies. This game wasn't hard enough as-is. The manual also states that bombproof buildings are destructible too, but that doesn't matter.

Out of an interest in capturing a Refinery, I head southwest to Batchyl, which is practically a one-stop shop for most of the important bits. A Well Head and a Refinery. Unfortunately, there's a tank battalion there too, which means that this fighter is going to be more trouble than its worth for a moment. Still, just because they spawn there sometimes doesn't mean I should change just yet. Enemies have to be right on top of the town, not just wandering around it. There are two nurses here, who just offer a paltry amount of medical treatment and votes that I don't yet need. I negotiate for a Vault, and the two important buildings.

Southeast of that is Dedlagan, which has a Control Tower and a Farmhouse, not important right now. What is interesting is that another Strike Marshal is here. The end result is the same, he wants diamonds and 2 medical teams, demolishes the forts (Apparently there are more than the required number to destroy in this province, or he can destroy ones I have) and recruits nearby CSR forces. This doesn't seem that much better, but I know there's some more south that I haven't encountered yet.

My next target is west, Elgalsk. There's a Refinery and a Factory here, the later produces ground vehicles. The big news is that there's a Captain of Works here willing to build Mines and Well Heads for me. I think there are enough Well Heads, but I'm not sure on Mines. He pushes the number of Well Heads into the target reached, and now I only need to find a few Mines to succeed there. Votes are also becoming quite easy to finish.

I head east-southeast to Taskagan, which has a Vault, an already built Well Head and two Engineer Builders travelling to there. One's a Ruzakh and both have little to offer me, so I just give the Ruzakh what he wants so that part of the votes are over. I decide now to head to the little outcroping in the southern part of the region, going west to Cregomsk. Owing to a mountain southwest of Taskagan, I end up making an accidental detour back to Elgalsk, which I've already cleaned out. Going the right way around, turns out that mountain wasn't supposed to be blocking me, I actually reach my destination. The buildings there are unimportant, there are more Professionals here. A Lieutenant Administrator offers me just air lifts and votes. It's not really something I feel is too worth the cost, but at the same time, it wins me the voting programme, so I take it. The other is a Medical Coordinator who offers me nothing I need at this point.

I engage in a little combat at this point, no reason not to. More or less just shooting whatever little I can before moving onward, I'm not doing serious cleanup just yet. I then head west to Rupirsk, which has a Radar Station and a Mine, winning both via negotiation. No Professionals here, so I continue south to Zutol, where there is a Professional, a Nurse, who offers me nothing I actually need at this point. Otherwise, there's a Vault, Well Head and Radar Station, with exception to the Radar Station (I just give the required wine), I negotiate for.

Continuing further south, I go to those three towns in a sort of triangle shape. Grelyl has a Mine and a Radar Station. Second, Digrevsk, which is actually one I didn't know of before, has a Refinery, and Processing Plant, as well as two Professionals. The first is a Highway Master, who will build most of the rest of what I need, but needs a Medical team I don't have. The second is a Lieutenant Administrator who can offer me nothing I need. I lose my Groundhawk here, but that doesn't work entirely against me, as I needed a bomber for Frogorno, which has a Barracks I need to take out. There's a Well Head, Fuel Dump and Windmill here that I negotiate for while waiting for an Engineering Coordinator. For three gold, he'll give me all the ammo and fuel I'll need in this area. Then it's just east to Memeanka, which has a Factory, Warehouse and Refinery, but more importantly, a Professional. It's just the Highway Master again, and I need to get another medical team somehow before grabbing him.

Since there's a Communications Center in Saprorsk, I head there next. There's also no required buildings there, so, indiscriminate fire is not a problem here. Then it's back south for a series of towns with Well Heads, Vaults, Refineries and one Radar Station. I'm going around the edge, just grabbing what I can. Including medical Professionals so I can maybe build a team out of them.

Once I'm out of the hole, so to speak, I head west to the mountains. It's fairly clear skies, but of course the areas that do have enemies are the towns. Still, there are plenty of Well Heads (I no longer need them if I did before), the final Mine I need and a few Vaults, so I'm slowly but surely finishing things up. At least, until I find a Radar Station revealing most of the north, and quite a few enemies. At least once I've returned to the starting section my issues are now down to enemies, Vaults and one building I need to take out. The number of Vaults I manage to get gives me hope that I can do this. Because I now have only 2 left to get.

The last building I need to destroy is in the northeast, and now I have to hope that there are two Vaults on the easternmost part of the area. And then to my shock, the hope rang true. All that was left was the big fight against the hordes of the CSR. The big one. Sixty four units to take out. Because that's what you have to do....and then I reload an earlier save after a stupid combat incident, only to discover that every time I enter the game world the screen goes black.

This is about as far as I'm going to go for this game. I wanted to save a province at least, but it seems even that option has been taken from me. I'm not that sad about it. I don't feel like I'm really doing anything. As a combat game, I'm extremely discouraged from shooting most people by virtue of the game's attempts at promoting peace. As a strategy game, it's a very simple trading game where at any point you can sacrifice time to gain resources, be it just negotiating or traveling to another province. By the time one starts to feel consequences of anything, the causes are so far gone that they're forgotten.

This Session: 4 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 8 hours 50 minutes