TerraHawks (1984)

One of three things which could be called a title screen. None of them have anything to do with the show's logo.

Name:TerraHawks
Number:253
Year:1984
Publisher:CRL Group
Developer:Richard M. Taylor
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (113W/82L)

Gerry Anderson is a figure I'm sure is known to many British people of a certain age, and many more outside of that. Responsible for Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, series so popular once upon a time, that it was internationally popular. To the point that they likely ensured that puppetry survived as a medium much longer than it really should have. I don't think I've ever seen any of his puppetry stuff, I've seen a few episodes of UFO and Space: 1999. Very nice miniature work, but I wasn't really interested enough to continue watching.

TerraHawks is his last puppet show, albeit not the marionette-style he used before, instead a Muppet-style design. Never saw it, probably won't. It follows the usual format of his children's shows, a crack team of humanity's best face off against an extraterrestrial invasion force. In this case, the titular TerraHawks, led by Doctor Ninestein, so named because he's the ninth clone of a Doctor Stein. The invasion force are a group of robots who rebelled against their former creators and are now plotting to take over the Earth. Why is probably one of those things they couldn't mention in a children's show.

It's this sort of thing that despite not liking anything I've seen from Anderson, that I have to respect him on. He'll make a show out of some subject that rarely gets touched on outside of literature and commit to it. The robots think they're the good guys, not evil, even though they likely destroyed their old planet. C.S. Lewis once said that the worst tyrant was the one who mistook his own cruelty for the voice of Heaven. He was talking about a theocracy, but is a machine who mistakes his own conclusion for an objective good any better?

But it's 1984, and the work of licensed video games was usually given to developers with little interest in the subject matter and little ability to realize it well. None of the subtext matters. In fact, none of what I just wrote matters at all. There is nothing connecting this to the show beyond the name. This is, pure and simple, an attempt at exploiting British children for their hard-earned pounds.

I realize it's an old complaint about licensed titles. They tend to suck, but let's be honest, by having that license they have a higher standard than some random crap we haven't heard of. We have expectations. SkyRaven 2077 has no expectations. TerraHawks has some expectations. Namely, that at some point, we will be shooting at the bad guys of the show as one of the heroes from the show.

The manual, at least what World of Spectrum has as the manual, describes this as a pilot training program. This simulates a world within a revolving black hole. "The most demanding environment for a spaceship Commander known to the Universe." Fair enough, in theory. A lot of games have the veneer of being a training program, some of them are really fun and interesting. However, at no point does the manual mention anything that actually ties it into the TerraHawks universe behind just the name of the show.

The people behind this were a lot more proud than they should have been.

The game has a slick and well-designed menu system, which I normally wouldn't bring up, except that this is fairly well implemented for the era. You don't need the manual for the controls, you just need it to explain how to play the game. There's also a 2 player mode...testing the theory that all games are better with friends.

This is the game, baby.

Starting a new game, you are greeted by a space warp. This is just here for flavor, because after a half a minute, you're in the game. Flying across hordes of monoliths, as the manual describes them. What are you doing? Trying to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. What's stopping you? Monoliths and your fuel supply. It's less ragged fight against a superior alien force and more a really odd adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories about endless giant stone towers.

To start with, you can move up and down with 1 and Q, Q goes up, 1 goes down. Reversed Y-axis, no option to change it. 9 and 0 turn. Movement is strange, there's no speed control. You get a little icon telling you whether you're pointing up or down, in addition to to the height number going up or down. (And the monoliths slowly getting taller) But the game has a bigger variation on where you're going than it actually shows, as you can be going up or down even when you think you're level.

A set of monoliths in the distance.

Turning is also strange. Tap and you'll barely move, hold it down and you'll get a small delay, then a reasonable amount of movement, before it stops a moment. It'll continue, but it's something you have to work around when you're about to crash into a monolith. It's not the smoothest system, but I said strange, not unworkable. My problems do not lie with how you move, though this could be because you don't actually fight against anything.

You can shoot with enter. There's an ammo count in the lower right, near the time you've spent in the level and your score. All you do is shoot monoliths if they're in your way. Your beams are oddly stuck to where you are, shoot then turn and you shoot what you turned to. In a sense you can exploit it, but it's simpler to either shoot or turn, not turn then shoot. We're not exactly dealing with a complex game.

The objective is to find a series of arches to go to the next stratum. To do this, you rely on your rangefinder and when you're very close by, the radar. These tools are less helpful than they should be, because they work slightly less well than they should. The radar only works when you're within an extremely short range, and it isn't obvious right away that it doesn't turn like you do, it stays still.

But the rangefinder is weird, and didn't exactly work the way I expected. You're supposed to turn until you get a green light, then you start getting closer. Before I hit on the manual, I figured out that one way or another the rangefinder works for that, but went the wrong way. I thought that as the bar gets higher, you get closer, but it actually gets lower as you get closer. I suppose it makes sense, since it goes the same way as you lose fuel, but I expected it to be colored in.

It does look more like a tunnel, but this is your destination.

Once you get there, it's tricky to actually enter the arches. They're very low to the ground, something I underestimated. The first time I made it to one, I crashed into the ground. It's very easy to crash. The area around the arches isn't clear, either when you enter or you exit, so buildings could be around it.

And that's the game. There are nine stratums, at the ninth you can apparently fly into the black hole to go out into space. I made it as far as the fourth, there's no real change in these things as you go along. Once you've gone through one vortex, that's about it for the game's content. You just go on until you run out of fuel. I have no idea if fuel refills when you go through a vortex, I used a cheat someone made, wasn't risking that. The manual only mentions an additional shield every time you go through one, ammo is limited to the entire game.

There's no real world here, just endless monoliths. Sometimes a row of them appear, which is cool to see, but I'm pretty sure that this is all randomized. Even if it isn't, you're still looking at the same thing for hours, while a low droning sound plays in the background. What's worse is that I'm pretty sure that some monoliths are moving forward at a different rate than other monoliths. Which again brings to mind certain parts of Lovecraft's work, but I doubt this is intentional.

For some reason, there's an autopilot feature, as if what this game needed was taking more stuff away from the player. You go to the height and direction you want to be in, then press M. Whenever you have to turn around to avoid some monoliths, you press A to turn back to that direction and height. The thing is, where the light is green is not always consistent and you can always just...turn around to where it is. It's just there, it doesn't add anything, it's just another thing you can do.

Weapons:
Standard laser. 1

Enemies:
Behold, stone pillars! True terror! 0

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Endless monoliths most mundane. 1

Player Agency:
It works, but in such a way that it feels slightly off for the whole thing. 3

Interactivity:
I guess breaking stone pillars by shooting them counts. 1

Atmosphere:
There is something profoundly weird about this game that prevents me from entirely writing it off, I'll give it that. 1

Graphics:
It's kind of neat how many monoliths can be on-screen and in how many differing configurations, but sometimes you can get confused as to what is the monolith and what isn't. 1

Story:
This doesn't even have anything to do with what it's supposed to be licensed from! 0

Sound/Music:
Some occasional sound effects, then a low droning noise for background. 1

That's 9.

Normally, I wouldn't just play something like this, but it was the third game I tried to play this week and frankly, what it was doing felt offensive to me. There are a ton of licensed games which are bad, sure, but a lot are either generic action games which imitate something better or come out a bit janky in how they adapted the license. They might not be good, but they're trying on some level. This isn't trying, someone just took a completely different game and slapped another name on it. If I was a British schoolkid in the 1980s, I'd be angry.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad idea for a game. I enjoyed it, but then, I'm coming from the position of someone who isn't paying for the name. The concept of having to chose whether to fly higher or lower for different benefits is a solid mechanic. It's an idea that could be improved upon in a game that isn't adapting a television show where I'm expecting epic space shootouts. Lovecraftian flight simulation would be a cool idea for a game.

Last week, I promised a Mobile Suit Gundam game, namely, Mobile Suit Gundam - Jet Stream Attack, a game published by Bandai themselves on the PC-88 and the FM-7. After about fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how the game works, I eventually quit. It's one of those space games where you get a big sector map where you go to where conflicts are. The problem is, I couldn't figure out how to actually fight anything, and just kept dying when a red dot touched me on the radar. I pressed every button on the keyboard and all I ever got was a strange status screen. Only enter did something there, and that was just closing it.

There was also going to be a Apple II game called Space Ark, but I also couldn't find a manual and while I figured out the controls, I couldn't really figure out how to do anything. With these two cut out, and this game out of the way, this actually puts 1984 down to 9 games, which means soon I'll be done.

Next time, it's a return to Wolfenstein 3D...in some form or another.

Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984)

Name:Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Number:252
Year:1984
Publisher:Muse Software
Developer:Muse Software
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 20 minutes
Won:Yes (113W/81L)

It's finally happened, we're here to kill Hitler. Er...chronologically. Because Wolfenstein 3D technically hasn't happened yet. Unlike the games of tomorrow, we are not going into this as some elite badass, gunning down hordes of nazis. No, we're going into this as a guy who is very fragile and has to sneak his way into the bottom of Hitler's bunker and place a bomb there....and still technically an elite badass, because we're one guy with a pistol and a knife.

I've felt reluctant about this one. Castle Wolfenstein was a good game for 1981, but three years is a lot in the 1980s. Things change fast. The king of the hill in 1981 is not necessarily the king of the hill in 1984. There has been considerable improvement in the genre, so standing still even a little could be bad news.

This was released on four platforms, Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64 and DOS. At first I tried the DOS port, but it was rapidly clear that this wasn't going to work out. For various reasons, neither the Atari or C64 port worked vey well, so that left the Apple II version. That wasn't working out much better, so the DOS version it was instead.

Behold, outside.

The game puts you in an empty room to start with. This is because you're going to need it, moving around is a challenge. The QWEADZXC cluster moves around, WADX cardinal directions, QEZC diagonals. S stops. This is important, because you can walk into a wall and you will stop dead for a moment, and this is a problem. I don't think there's a way of getting around it. You move constantly at one speed.

Shooting is down with the IOPK:<>? cluster, or at least, that's how you aim. The actual shoot button is L. Your shots at hitscan and the only indication that you hit someone is if they die. This makes aiming diagonally a lot of trouble, but as anyone who plays soon finds out, this is worth figuring out. H holsters, which is also very important.

Meeting the first guard of the game, note the door on the right, that's a closet.

In every room past the first, there tends to be guards. There are the usual kind, who walk around, scream halt through the PC speaker, then ask you to approach. Once you do so, they ask for your pass, at which point you have to walk up to them and give it. There are five passes, activated by pressing 1-5. One pass works for the entire floor, but give the wrong one and he takes it. Give two wrong ones, and you get killed or captured. At this point, it's probably better to just shoot him if you've given one wrong pass. Unless there's more than one guard in a room, in which case the other will activate the alarm. You can search their corpses with space.

Walking towards a guard with all five passes.

There are also desk guards, who in theory work the same way, but have some changes. They don't walk around and instead sit at a desk. Unlike the others, you can't walk around with a gun and expect to shoot him successfully, you need to do a pass. He sees you with a gun, he raises an alarm, endless Nazis start popping out. But where he differs is in what happens when you bribe him.

"What closet is it for?" "Meh, they don't tell me that."

You can bribe anyone with the M key, assuming you have money. This is apparently 100% successful. You'd really think Hitler's bunker would have people immune to this sort of thing, but apparently not. When you bribe a desk guard, they sometimes tell you useful information. Like what the pass number is on this floor or a series of numbers for a cabinet somewhere. Regular guards just treat money like a pass.

A worthwhile interaction.

Now that the whole getting around the game thing is solved, how about actually taking out Hitler? The bomb is in a closet somewhere, and in order to do that, you need to search them. How? You point your gun at them and then press space. This gives you a wide variety of things, from money, a first aid kit and the occasional pass, to useless objects like tools and Hitler's diary. Naturally, you can't search while a guard has a visible sightline to you, but otherwise you can search to your heart's content.

However, some are locked. In order to open them, you have to press the number keys, three in a row, until you hear a click. As the manual explains, if you press a correct number then an incorrect number, you need to press the first one again to get to where you were. But eventually, in one of these on the first floor, is the bomb.

Note the dead Nazi in the corner, it's more noticeable when you're the one to make the corpse.

The bomb changes the game around considerably. Now you have a timer on all your actions. You can of course, reset the timer as long as you drop it, but if someone sees you, alert, gunshot, dead. Basically, duck out of sight, reset it, then continue on. There's a lot of leeway on this, since it's reasonable for you to get out of the bunker before it goes off.

Don't mind me, just dropping off a special delivery for one A. Hitler.

Eventually, the guards start getting thicker, but chances are if you've made it this far, you won't be worrying about this. At least not for the reason you might think. On any one screen, only one guard needs to be shown your pass, the first one who spots you. If there are a lot, you need to spot the one you need to show it to and get past the horde around him. They won't cause an alert if you bump into them, it's just annoying and adds a slight bit of pressure. It's the one point you can actually lose after figuring out about the passes.

This meeting seems so boring that I'm surprised nobody's killed themselves.

Hitler is on the third floor, surrounded by his elite staff, constantly heiling each other. This is foreshadowing. All you do here is drop the bomb off, reset it, then head back the way you came. That timer isn't how long you get before exiting the bunker...technically, just how long before it explodes. Which then causes all nazis to shoot you on sight. Do you remember the way back, what the passes were and where the elevators were?

"Don't worry, it's fine if you can't walk out before it explodes, it isn't going to shoot off beams of light or anything."

As a stealth game, this leaves a lot to be desired. That I won it this easily is a testament to that. Random bunker layouts along with randomized passes are basically this game attempting to give itself more than a thirty minute playtime. It's annoying, but it's the only reason why you'd spend that much time here. Otherwise the game consists of you finding out what the pass is, acquiring said pass if you didn't already have it, and then showing the pass to everyone you meet.

Taking out single guards isn't that difficult, because it's just a question of remembering which aim key will aim at him and then hovering your finger over it. The only real way to lose in this game is user error. Whoops, pressed the fire button then the left button, now I'm dead. Or gave out the wrong pass, and it was one you needed. Otherwise it's bang, bang, bang, then constant cries of pass, then heil. Bumping into guards is like bumping into a wall, except the nazi starts going away from you. By the end of it, I wished I had killed more, simply because it would have been a mercy to us both if the guard didn't have to keep doing so.

Other aspects include first aid kids, which heal you if you have one, with F. There are also tool kits and keys. The first are used via CTRL+T for some mysterious reason which the manual doesn't explain. The keys are supposed to unlock the doors with CTRL+K, but I didn't seem much reason to do so since the combination lock is more fun. There's also a dagger, which you can switch to, and is silent. Since bullets are plentiful and there's no reason to attack enemies in rooms with more than one guy, there's no point to it.

The game also allows you to move dead bodies by pointing the gun at them and pressing space. This has no point because of the aforementioned factors. I get a lot of what the game is trying to do, but man, a lot of this stuff would only be useful if the game actually needed it. With that, to the rating.

Weapons:
Knife aside, I did enjoy the feeling of having to be a quick draw on your gun to win a fight. 1

Enemies:
There's guy you give money to for the answers to the game, guy you give a pass to ten thousand times, and guy who shows up and kills you if you start an alarm. 2

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Despite the random nature of the rooms, it's clear that there are a limited amount of pre-made rooms which I don't think are enough to fill out an entire game. 1

Player Agency:
I kept accidentally pressing the wrong buttons for shooting. Most of the keys are self-explanatory, even if you need a look at the manual once or twice, but it kept happening. Perhaps it's me, perhaps it's the game. 4

Interactivity:
An odd amount of stuff to do despite the somewhat simple game. 2

Atmosphere:
Feels a lot less action thriller and a lot more German bureaucracy drama. If you use the wrong thing, it's another long wait for you. 2

Graphics:
Simple, kind of distracting. Enemies change their hat shape depending on which direction they're pointing. Otherwise you can make out everything you look at, at least. 1

Story:
Uh, you're in a bunker where Hitler is, take out Hitler. 1

Sound/Music:
Scratchy sounding gunshots and real speech from the nazis. Adds some flavor, but gets old quick. 1

That's 15. Four more than the last game and reasonable for 1984.

I have to admit, it's an odd choice to have a game depict stealth be as mundane and boring as this game does, even if it's not realistic for you to be gunning down potentially dozens of Nazis with no comment. I've spent hours on worse games and this was better than I was fearing, if only just.

Looking at other reviews, I don't see anything I didn't mention, but I will note that all the reviews I could find were from later on, none at the time. This is probably linked to the company soon going bust. There's nothing about it that strikes me as bad or uninteresting for the time, but it is sitting comfortably in the middle of the rating scale, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought of it as middle-of-the-road.

Next up, a Mobile Suit Gundam game on the PC-88, something which is sure to be interesting.

MechWarrior (1989)

Name:MechWarrior
Number:251
Year:1989
Publisher:Activision
Developer:Dynamix
Genre:Mech Simulation/FPS
Difficulty:4/5
Time:6 hours 15 minutes
Won:Yes (112W/81L)

The year is 3024, humanity has spread so far out into the stars that everyone has all but forgotten about Earth. War is conducted primarily by gigantic mechs which are capable of shredding most other targets. In this, you, Gideon Braver Vandenburg, are the son of a duke, a domain which consists of the planet/moon Anderson's Moon. While out on patrol, a mysterious "lance" of mechs attacks your ancestral castle and kills your family, the only clue to their identity a mystery crest of a winged skull.

The hated rivals of your family swoop in to try to take over the dukedom, smearing your family and stealing the sacred chalice of the domain. After a beating you up and all but insinuate that he ordered the attack, you meet up with a friendly noble, who hooks you up with some cash, a slightly used mech and now you have to save everything that once was your family.

More ominous than helpful.

Or you know, you fire up just the game and get a random text crawl about a symbol burning in your head.

So begins MechWarrior, the first game in the much beloved MechWarrior series of mech sims and second game adapted from the much loved BattleTech universe. Before this, there was a more traditional RPG that the CRPG Addict played and somehow mustered less energy for than I did. Which is surprising considering that I knew nothing about this and didn't care at all about it one way or another. I always try to go in with an open mind...if it's something I've never played before. 

MechWarrior the computer game is based on MechWarrior the tabletop RPG. Not BattleTech, the wargame, where two armies fight each other in a scale smaller than most wargames. Like an actual wargame, with counters and markers instead of neat little models. No, MechWarrior is a tabletop RPG much akin to Dungeons and Dragons or Vampire - The Masquerade where you have stats and experience and slowly get better.

This isn't actually entirely true, because compared to those, in MechWarrior, you're encouraged to have multiple characters. Not like in some harder RPGs where those are your back-ups, in this case, you're switching between your mech pilots and the tech crew. This strikes me as an attempt to not make the mech pilots some gods of battle who can do everything without anyone else's help. And also in case you have more than one lance in a company. Since it's going to come up, a lance is just a small group of mech pilots, like four, and a company is a group of lances.

Naturally, there was absolutely no chance of most of this making it into a computer game in 1989. but rather than just excising most of the non-mech stuff, this shifts the game entirely, into an action game where it's like you're really there, shooting those darned guys from the side of the galaxy that are evil. The RPG aspect has been cut down to two stats with a not entirely ignorable effect and the rest to something that...I'll get to the economy later. It's weird that this is the third game I've played on this blog that was based off a tabletop RPG and it more or less removes the RPG aspect.

The two stats, gunnery and piloting, automatically improve as you play the game. How? Dunno, but it does. Gunnery's effect is obvious, sometimes when you shoot, it doesn't go where you aimed, not sure how this affects the AI, since they seem to be aimbots. Piloting, on the other hand, if it has an effect, it's more ethereal. If it's a speed or turning improvement, it's so subtle I missed it.

A selection of random mechs and their ace pilots.

 MechWarrior the computer game consists of three components which are sort of awkwardly fitted together. There's the combat simulation, the sprawling galactic map which is a cut down form of more advanced space trading games, and the story, an intergalactic spy novella. Once again, it's weird that this is the third game I've played that was based off a tabletop RPG and it involves an intergalactic spy conspiracy.

You get the option to get repairs done ahead of a mission, if you're in that bad of a shape. Confiscated equipment applies to scavenged enemy mechs.

 The combat simulation is the primary draw of the game. It's here that the consequences of the other two aspects of the game play out. These are primarily done by going to the mission select on the main menu, but there's a special scenario relating to the story. Before each mission, you get told what you're doing, what the opposition is, and how much you're getting paid. On rare occasions, you can get a series of missions, where you get no chance to repair or reload your mechs between them, but they offer considerably higher rewards.

One versus two, good odds.

At the start of your mission, you get a layout of everything on-screen. The white dots are you and your lance, the red the enemy, and the blue is either your target or the enemy's target, depending on which dots it's next to. Those dotted lines? That's the boundary of the map, touch them, and you retreat. There is no leeway in this. There are also mountains, which you can't go through.

A hostile Locust, I'm doing badly, since two of my lasers are currently dead.

Behold, realistic mech action. On the top, we have the viewport, in which you see what it is you're shooting at. The heading at the top tells you in which direction you are...though I would have preferred a simple compass direction for ease of use. AWS is Automated Weapons Systems and Zoom X1 is telling me I'm not zoomed in right now. You can do that with the Z button, up to X3 magnification. You can't shoot at anything but X1, not that you ever need it.

The lower left are your weapons. The boxes at the absolute bottom are decoration. On this particular mech, I have a short-range missile launcher, and four medium range lasers. The number is ammo, the green box is what is have selected, and the red around them indicates that they're in the AWS at the moment. The letter on the right indicates range, L for long, M for medium, and S for short.

The middle is your map, which can be changed into a radar of objects in relation to you with T...if you needed that for some reason. The red bars are how much heat the mech currently has, it automatically goes down if you don't fire, and goes up if you do. Ammo weapons increase it less than energy weapons. If it goes up too high, you are stuck in place until it goes down. The letters in green boxes above it are the condition of your internals, if they start going yellow, you better be close to winning.

On the right, we have what you have targeted with the enter key, in this case, a lowly Locust mech, which the game assures me that it is a reliable and dangerous mech despite it always losing, even when I didn't know what I was doing. As you damage parts of it, they go yellow, red or black, for destroyed or rendered useless. The bar at the bottom is speed, red means backwards, green means forwards.

This is going to be basically the same no matter which mech you pick, even if there is some variation. I noticed when I was in a heavy mech, the weapons and the target switched sides. I spent time in three mechs, the default, starting Jenner, light mech supreme, a Rifleman I picked for no real reason, which is somewhere between a medium and a heavy mech, and a Battlemaster, the cream of the crop.

Soon we shall engage in an epic battle.

The differences are about as you'd expect, lighter mechs are faster, have less weapons and armor, and are generally cheaper. Heavier mechs get better weapons and take more hits. The game implies that even the worst mechs can take out the heavier ones, but outside of exploiting the AI and getting some lucky shots in, heavier is straight-up better. Speed doesn't matter when the enemy has longer-ranged guns than you.

For the most part, this controls fairly simply. You move with the numpad. Left and right turn, up and down handle your speed. Up increases it until you reach your best forward speed, back decreases it until you go backwards. < and > turn the head of your mech, not to the degree that you can strafe anything, but enough that you can make a more sideways approach if need be. A automatically returns your head to the forward position.

Some mechs are equipped with jumpjets, which are activated with J. This is basically a mech jetpack, you fly around and hope you can land before you run out of juice. I couldn't figure it out, and considering how I ended up handling the combat sections, it wasn't any loss. In theory, you can use this to jump over enemies to reach the enemy base. Mission permitting, you can win without firing a single shot.

Aiming is unorthodox, but I didn't have trouble with aiming in of itself. N and M aim up and down in noticeable jumps up and down. Which does mean that aiming from far away isn't going to be very precise, but by the time you can start shooting, this isn't as big a problem as it should be. No, the big problem is targeting enemies.

Hitboxes are not what you'd think they would be. You hit a leg and sometimes it goes through even if that doesn't make any sense. Sometimes when I do hit something what I hit doesn't seem to line up with what I damaged. And while a lot of mechs, when you've gotten them into the yellow damage range, don't take more damage right away, you can see when you hit. 

Note the heavy damage on the enemy here.

Now, despite what it might seem after a bit, shooting a leg is not always the best option. They move around, they have an awkward hitbox a lot of the time. You know what's actually easier? Hitting the head. I only discovered this towards the end and it made the final missions so much easier. In bad situations, hitting the leg can be a slugfest. I've never noticed that with the heads. Every mech head, or faceplate, on some, is fragile and an easy enough target to hit.

It also took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out the range system and how best to use it. Once I started to comprehend the game's systems, it seemed like my only option was a straight-forward charge and slugfest, and as I'll soon mention, the AI offers no other option. Clever use of the range on your weapons can change the tide.

A situation which is about to end badly for me.

The AI is not as smart as you in aiming, most of the time. They get better as they get close. Most, if not all mechs, have medium range weapons, meaning that long range weapons are at a premium. Short range weapons are so short ranged as to be useless entirely. So once I figured out that lying on the edge of weapons range was better than a straight fight, more so with long range weapons. Aim at the right spot, and be slowly walking backwards.

Which brings me to the AI. Enemy and friendly units are equal in all senses, and that means they're all as dumb as bricks. This doesn't matter in the heat of battle, they shoot at whatever annoys them at that moment, and that's all that matters. Everything else though? Yeah. If they're going after a specific target, they will ignore everything to go after that target. An easy exploit in defense missions is to just walk behind them and start blasting. A light mech can take out a medium mech this way easy. In a base attack mission, you can pick off enemies one by one, since they only go after you if they see you within a certain distance.

But in those missions where neither happens, there's nothing you can do but fight it out. If there's a strategy to it, I never figured it out. Armor is weaker at the back, but good luck exploiting this. Everyone turns around slowly, and you're really not anymore special than them. The only real strategy I had was hitting their lead mech and hoping for the best.

Tactical warfare.

With friendly AIs, you get the chance to ignore some of their programming. Some. Press the C button and you open the command screen. It's all in real-time, so you better be quick on the trigger. The game offers a bunch of options, but I found the only useful ones were defend, which sends the unit to somewhere and waits there until the enemies come, and attack, in which the unit attacks that. You can also check their status in here. Since the targeting system does not distinguish between friend or foe, you can check their status that was too. This is as confusing in battle as it sounds.

Another satisfied customer.

Despite what I felt sometimes, the combat here was interesting when I had things to figure out. Whenever there was a brick wall, it was either because I had an inferior mech or I was doing something wrong. The problem is, on the flip side, the second you figure it out, unless you mess up, you will be pulling it off every time and that is going to be boring. Once you've figured out combat, there is little to do but earn money.

Everything of value in the 31st century.

The second part of the game is the sprawling galactic map. Space, a thousand years in the future, is a very lived in place. There are five factions, who each have a good number of worlds, and their own relationship with you. Keep fighting the Kurita, and you won't get hired by them anymore. Keep failing missions for Liao, and they won't hire you anymore. Do well, and sometimes the shadier factions won't stiff you.

Each planet has its own faction, planet-style, tier, population and mission center. Faction is important, you can fly to places owned by people who hate you, but they're not going to give you a mission. Planet-style just determines what the background is, and population is just a number. Mission center is important, you don't know whether or not a planet will have one until you're there, hope you didn't spend your last C-bill getting here.

5 million for a mech that doesn't even work would be a terrible value if this wasn't the run I cheated for money.

Tier is where the game tries to be a space trading game. There are four tiers, which determine how much a mech costs, how many there usually are, and how likely you are to get parts. There's a trick to mechs, on some worlds they cost less and on others they cost more, even if selling them gives you less than buying on a comparable world, the difference between the cheapest mech on two worlds at the far end of this is enticing.

What mechs there are is important. You aren't going to win the game with your starting mech. The regular missions will generally match you within your mechs weight class, so long as you aren't outfitting a team of four Locusts, you should be good. The real problem comes with mech parts. See, the game tracks a lot about your mech, every bit of armor, every weapon, internals and individual heatsinks. Each can be damaged and repaired.

Where the game tries to get clever is that it isn't a guarantee that the parts can be repaired on that trip to the repair center. I'm not sure what the intention was, but in practice, going in and out of the repair center eventually got me the parts with nary an issue whatsoever. If it worked as it should, it would actually be a whole lot more annoying than it is, but we'll get to that.

Talking to a bartender about some likely important matter.

There are also other bits of information. There's a complicated intergalactic travel system which tracks how many are traveling, their mechs and how many jumps you need to reach your destination. All deployed on the player's screen in a nice, round, number. There are also mercs you can find in a bar to join you on the field of battle. The game gives them unique dialog and somewhat unique portraits, (two people share every portrait) but on the battlefield there is no practical change.

This brings us to the last part of the game, the storyline. This is attached but somewhat separate from the galactic simulation. Find the people who killed your parents and stole the sacred chalice of whatever it was. This is accomplished by reading the news, going in and out of places, occasionally traveling between planets, and choosing multiple choice questions.

One of the longer choices.

The writing is verbose and dramatic, but I don't think this works against it. For whatever reason, there are no pictures during the story sections that aren't otherwise normal parts of the game, so going for a thousand words instead is okay. The plot is interesting in the way it twists and turns, since the central conflict is cleverly foreshadowed. That said, there are cracks in this part.

One you play through the game once, likely to failure, it's clear that most bars and most news stories are flavor. This is cool, and gives the world the sense that there's more to it, but it's more illusionary than in most games. Even after the five year time limit, you can go around to your heart's content, and there's just nothing out there. The galaxy is dead and you're just wandering around a galaxy where nothing happens.

There are choices you can make during some of the story segments. These determine if you win or lose. The thing is, while reloading is always an option, sometimes it's the luck of the draw. Sometimes the right answer is the one that's the most likely to get you killed. Sometimes there are hints, but given the other aspects, why not just go for broke?

For reference, a picture of Natasha from the MechWarrior book that was contemporary to the game.

To go for one of the less obvious answers. After surviving an assassination attempt, you get a hint, from the same guy who led you to the assassin to insult a woman named Natasha Kerensky heading the Black Widows Company of Wolf's Dragoons. At best, you can hope this ends up on the field of battle. There are layers to how bad a decision this is.

In context of the game, you just get a description of an attractive red-head who is working for your side's mortal enemies. A named character, tough, but probably not impossibly so. When I looked it up a bit, and oh, it's a cool bit of world-building for people who have played the board games. When I went to look at the game lines to check what the actual gameplay of BattleTech was, I realized that the Black Widows are the first supplement of the entire world. You get the opportunity to get in a fight with the BattleTech waifu and her loyal men. The literal cream of the crop.

Bringing it back to the game. The best case scenario is that the player, in a dinky Jenner, will fight four Battlemasters. (And die) The most likely scenario is that he ends up with a slit throat and whatever passes for a burial in the 31st century. What actually happens manages to fight the uber mercenaries enough until a MI6 spy named Tasha saves his bacon.

Side note, reading about Natasha makes me feel that the game is building up our hero a bit too much. Going in solo against quite possibly the most dangerous people in the galaxy and not going home in a box, even due to a quirk of fate, is insane. There's no evidence to suggest Gideon is that special in hand-to-hand combat.

Tasha has three characteristics, being a badass spy, getting annoyed by Gideon being a dumbass, and apparently being the future mother of his children. Because this is the only way to get her to meet you and advance the plot. When the game is working, because some thing seem to be on a time limit, it can be incredibly non-logical. But in the moment, well, you can reload and why not get into a fight?

The entire story, outside of the final fight, will take you about a year and a half to complete. Which sounds like plenty of time, right? Except that each mission takes a third of a year. That's 15 missions in theory, but in practice, that's more like 10. If you sell your starting mech at the start to get cheaper travel fees, and go back to a pirate to get the bounty on his head, that nets you ten million. Which is about a fourth of what you need for the final mission for a realistic chance, since you're going up against two sets of heavy mechs. Is it any wonder that people exploit the trading system?

These three parts compliment each other to make something more. On it's own, the mech sim is extremely samey as the right way to do each fight makes itself clear. As the bits you do in-between story and travel, it's getting you closer to the truth. The galaxy is a solid glue holding it all together. The story...well, it could possibly stand on its own with more work, but with a twist like it has, it would lose something outside of this context.

With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
A complicated set of weapons, each of which have their own situation, no matter how incredibly specific it is. Do I fire this weapon now and just wait out its speed, or fire all these weapons in sequence? Can I afford this much heat on my mech? Should I just use missiles and bullets now or the lasers as well? While there are situations where this was thought out for me, I was thinking about my weapon usage far more than I have in a long time. 5

Enemies:
Dumb as rocks and straight-forward in all matters. Which of the eight mechs they're in determines how dangerous this is. 3

Non-Enemies:
Still as dumb as rocks, but at least rocks you can sort of direct if you know what you're doing. You also decide which mechs are your allies and there might just be some measure of progression. 3

Levels:
Endless team multi-player maps. Base attack, base defense, and sometimes just plain team deathmatch. No one map is that interesting, once you've seen one configuration of mountains, you've seen them all. 1

Player Agency:
More on the deliberate side, but it felt smooth. Aiming isn't that precise, because you get two random keyboard keys to do it. I do wish that the command screen paused the game automatically and that I could use the mouse properly on menus, it just scrolls through them. Otherwise, there are a lot of actions I didn't need, but I'd rather have them and not the reverse. 6

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
I dig it. Between the western take on mecha and the used future aesthetic, the game felt like something I had never actually seen before. It helps that I'm a sucker for a well-done space opera. 5

Graphics:
I like the 2D art. Not sure if it's VGA or EGA, but it's well-executed. Lots of little details going around, good use of color. The 3D, well, it's early 3D, what do you expect me to say? 3

Story:
What at first seems like a simple case of a man hiring a bunch of mercs to do something turns into a sprawling intergalactic conspiracy. This game is a trip, and I was surprised at how much I liked where it went. 4

Sound/Music:
Basic PC Speaker along with either Adlib or MT-32 musical stings at certain moments. It gets the job done. 2

That's an impressive 32.

Not the worst Dynamix game of 1989, but not the best. It's the third best so far. I don't know how Dynamix is not only dominating 1989 in releases, since I've played four games they released this year alone, but there are still more for me to cover. Four, at least. Some of them seem pretty interesting. I'm impressed considering how small the company is.

While there are many things to criticize, this is a team-based shooter with complex body part damage released in the 1980s. It works, it's playable, it's very existence feels like it contradicts common wisdom. Whatever can be said about it, that the AI is dumb, is surpassed by how they made a team-based shooter in the 1980s where you can shoot a part of someone's mech until it's rendered useless.

Reviews of the game generally praise the game and are impressed by it. Though some seem to not understand exactly what it is they're reviewing. Which isn't surprising, considering that by my current estimation this is the first serious mech simulation. A few places do seem to be docking points for the poor RPG aspect, which I feel like wouldn't be as much of a problem if they didn't stick it on the title screen.

Something I have to admit makes the game feel a bit pointless in retrospect is the afterstory for our characters. As I mentioned, Vandenburg wins, and somehow manages to get with Tasha. The next BattleTech game proper? Unceremoniously kills Vandenburg off in a wholly unsatisfactory way. As in, one year later, you find out everything you've fought for, and if you won you fought a lot, is gone and wasted. It doesn't make any sense to me considering what this game allowed him to get away with, and I can't see anyone at Westwood having a grudge against him.

There were a few ports of the game, mostly to Japanese computers.

Sharp 68000

Perhaps the most important change is that the intro to this game actually explains the plot of the game, rather than explaining it on a piece of paper. It's very helpful since it prevents you from not getting something important about the game. There's new graphics and sound, the music not just being limited to stings at a few places, mostly after battle.

The new graphics are slicker and anime-styled. Call me picky, but I feel like even if these are better, it does remove what on some level makes MechWarrior stand out from the crowd. A mech game with anime graphics is nothing unusual, western-style mechs are pretty rare that the few times they show up are usually cherished.

That said, while the underlying mechanics are the same, there's been some changes. The AI isn't quite as dumb as it once was, and possibly even gets an unfair advantage against the player. I couldn't pull off my usual leg or head attack, and it seemed like I was constantly getting shot at without any sign he was running low on attack juice. The controls are the same, but not quite as responsible. I may do a quick run-through on this one at some point.

PC-98

It's like the Sharp 68000 version in most respects, intro that tells you the game's story, new graphics and sound. It's probably the best version, except that when I played it, the usual emulator configuration that worked around this time ran a bit too fast. I still came out on top, but this one is very tricky to set up.

SNES

Some places list this as the same game, wrongly. This isn't a case of how some ports are mostly the same, but in practice very different. The underlying logic is different, there's a different engine in place and the graphics are different, but the gameplay itself is the same, just with different quirks. This is straight-up a different game from a different developer with different everything. This will be its own entry at some point.

This one was certainly a long review. Next time, we're going to go back to my attempt to finish up 1992 in FPS by...playing a 1984 top-down shooter.

MechWarrior: Won

As well as things went for most of this session.

Now that we've seen the limits of the gameplay, let's see how the story goes. Since I would prefer not constantly reloading my game in order to follow the plot correctly this time around, I'm going to use a hex editor to give myself a massive pile of money. With a billion dollars, there's not really much I can't do. Hopefully one of those things isn't solving the game.

Teenager trying too hard to look cool, random guy, woman who is about to seriously regret her career choices and the woman who was on last month's cover of Martian Vogue.

Fortunately, one of these things is giving me the opportunity to create a crack team...sorry, lance, of ace mech pilots. Pay no attention to their poor stats, this isn't the most important thing. What does is whether or not I can take out the enemy before they get destroyed.

Something I didn't realize the first time is that the game is outright shouting at you to go for Griez. The bartender who tells you who knows about the batskull unit icon? He tells you to go to Griez. I do the same journey I did before. One mission, go the Galedon V when it comes on the news, go to Land's End, meet with one of Griez men, go to Delacruz and meet with him, take his package to Dustball, then find out about the Stone Arrow ship, talk to the bartender, then head to Mosiro, get told that the captain, Kangaroo Jack, of the ship has a girl on Delacambre. This is where I got stuck.

Hey, I actually got the text this time.

This time, I strike a vein of pure gold. I don't meet with Jack's girl, but an agent of MIIO, Kearney who has also been monitoring the situation Vandenburg is trying to solve. Jack's ship was used to transport a renegade band of Wolf's Dragoons to Anderson's Moon. The symbol? A fake for the purposes of the story, in actuality, they wear a black spider. He's more than happy to bring me in to deal with Jack.

If this was a double cross, you'd think that he'd sic the cops on me.

Once I leave, I get the chance to follow a note the guy left, once I do so, I find Jack on the floor, dead, and a mystery person has a weapon on my back. This time, I'm given three choices. The correct is hide, because talking is suicidal and now is not yet the time to fight. For some reason. This of course, gives me another choice, as I discover that this guy is definitely the assassin, fight or run. I fight and graphically kill the guy. This actually pops up on the news later, but thankfully for me, they only suspect the owner of the business it took place at. Off-screen, Vandenburg asks Rowe about a "black widow" mercenary unit and I'm pointed at Proserpina.

These are actual characters in the tabletop game, whether that makes this choice easier or not is beyond me.

The Dragoons are in the bar, and after Vandenburg is done gawking at their pretty commander, engages in conversation with them with all the subtly of a brick to the face. She says they've never even heard of the place, and I'm given the option of accepting or challenging her story. I challenge, because there's a chance this might end up on the field of battle, but no, Vandenburg just gets his crap kicked in until another woman steps in and evens the odds. Tasha, as she introduces herself and after Vandenburg finishes gawking at her, explains that Kearney's isn't MIIO, he's ISF. Kurita and the Dragoons know nothing about Anderson's Moon. What I should be doing is heading after Matabushi, Incorporated. Why? Because she's MI6 and their her target now, too.

I mean, considering this game, I don't exactly have a choice but to head into the most obvious traps and I don't have any real reason to trust her either. Helping me out of a stupid situation is a pretty safe ploy to get me to do your dirty work. If I check the news, Rowe has sent me a message confirming that Kurita is backing Jarris and that I should recontact Kearney, who is at Albiero. Tasha, meanwhile sends me some messages that connect Matabushi to the assassination of Duke Vandenburg. Matabushi's HQ is at Albiero. This leaves me in a tricky situation, because Tasha is trying to get me to believe that everything I've been told up until now is an attempt to get me killed...but then again, Rowe doesn't seem to be doing a lot in terms of keeping things going back home. Even discounting that, it's really hard to ignore that Kearney sent me into an ambush.

The second I arrive on Albiero, it's readily apparent that something is about go down. Seven choppers arrive at a Kurita base of some kind...for some reason. This is so obviously a trap that even the narration exposes it. As a strange cargo is loaded into one of the choppers, another force guns down the troops at their base. I'm given the choice of doing nothing until I spot what seems to be Tasha again, ignoring the carnage to go after the craft with the cargo. I can follow her or stay down. Since I've already determined that Rowe is a double agent, I go after her.

This seems to be the correct choice. We get a description of the character catching it just as it flies off and find out that there are a lot more corpses inside. Kearney, it seems, is already inside, and he and Tasha are fighting. They spot Vandenburg, and I now have to chose which one I trust. This is actually a hard choice, if I didn't have the ability to reload. Going in, I was going to go for Tasha, even discounting Rowe, but gut reaction to the dialog? Kearny, the surprise strikes me as a hint he would be the right choice...except now that I think of it, why would he be surprised that she's accusing him of being an ISF agent if it was foundless?

Tasha turns out to be the choice I make and the correct choice. At this point, I check to see what the ISF and MI6 are in-universe. The ISF are the Kurita's intelligence service, and since Matabushi is a company in Kurita space, this plot would start getting very convoluted if the ISF were attacking them. MI6, or rather MIIO, is Davion's intelligence service. Funnily how an ounce of knowledge of the setting of the game makes this an entirely trivial choice.

She congratulates me for not being a complete and total dumbass. Since this is likely a secret mission, she tells me whatever it is I need to know. This was a lucky raid, since security was weak on this place, they managed to get away with what they stole. Gold bullion, cash that needs to be laundered, "lostech" and a large amount of computer files. In that computer file is the location of the group who destroyed Vandenburg's home, and where the chalice is. Not only is she giving me that, she's giving me 5 million. I just need to not say anything about what happened here at all or mention the existence of MI6. I don't know why that's so secret, but believe me, for something that would solve all my problems if I wasn't cheating for money.

Well, probably. At this point I discover absolutely everything has up until this point, been jerking Vandenburg around. Grig Griez is one of their agents, Jordon Rowe is, as if we couldn't figure that out by now. The chalice is being guarded by a special lance of mechs consisting of a "Warhammer" and four "Battlemasters" on Radstadt. Don't know what a Warhammer is, but I've bought a Battlemaster. I'm not looking forward to the fight.

At this point, let's talk about what it took to get here. It has been a little over a year and nearly 3 million in C-bills to do all this. That's 2 million you need to get in order to do this, and since there's at least one time limit going on here, you need to thread the needle very carefully. Remember, on a lot of these places, you get no ability to do missions, so ending up in an unwinnable situation is very likely. That said, some of the saves I got when I first found the game, the player didn't have any mechs. So, selling the main character's mech and then buying a new one once you get the 5 milllion is a possibility. Then you have about 9 missions to build up a force to take on the four Battlemasters. There's no getting a comparable force in time, Battlemasters are over 9 million and I've never seen a Warhammer. (My first screenshot was from a later time, this early it was more random mechs)

And while I have been purchasing more mechs and hiring people to pilot them, I've been remiss in getting them up to full strength. This is where that aspect where parts sometimes not being available gets annoying. Moreso because you can't just wait for a part to become available, you have to go to another place to hope you can get it. If you can't, well, you're going to have to go to the crew section and then disable that mech.

The two mechs on the ground to the right are mine.

My first fight with the big bad guys goes poorly. Very poorly. I'm really not sure what kind of strategy I should be doing here, so I end up doing an alpha strike on the Warhammer. Turns out it's one Warhammer and three Battlemasters. Dunno if that would be easier or harder if it was four Battlemasters, but either way, we get slaughtered. None of them are downed, and one of us is dead. What's worse is that I was going for the legs, Battlemasters are tricky to hit in the legs for some reason. This is what some might say is a bad sign.

There is in fact, an element of luck to this alpha strike. In that sometimes I can actually take out multiple guys and sometimes not. The facts remain, this strategy isn't working. What about if I try to ambush? There's an ambush option in the command screen. This goes worse, because one guys rushes off when they're in range and another just sort of runs. Kind of annoyed, but I can't blame him. This isn't going to work, I need better firepower.

And while the improvements characters get from fighting seems to be marginal at best, for my AI companions, marginal is better than nothing. So let's get into some regular missions. Honestly? The whole command system leaves a lot to be desired. I really think there should have been some ability to either select what your mechs do beforehand. If I have any chance of entering the fight as they do, I have to rush straight out and then open the command menu, or else pull them back so we don't all fall one by one.

At least, when there's an actual threat. Enemy AI, now that there are frequently four hostile mechs, isn't any smarter than friendly. We could be ganging up on one mech and they'd still sit if we were outside of their range. Of course, what works for you also works against you, like when you have to try to get three geniuses to try to do something that allows them to survive the mission.

We've built ourselves up into an average fighting force, the four of us. All of us are now in heavy mechs, two Warhammers, one Battlemaster and myself in a Rifleman. I've had it since I started building up a force, might actually be a medium. Might be crippling myself a little, but I've gotten used to the quirks of the thing, so we're all good. Probably. It's a comparable force nonetheless.

And I actually win. It's a hard faught battle, two friendlies get downed in the fighting, and another gets more damaged than it should in the home stretch because I can't really tell friend from foe in front of me. There really should be some sort of color to sort that. Still, I breath a sigh of relief when the last Battlemaster goes down and I have finally completed the game.

And there's another battle. See, sometimes the game puts you on missions with multiple parts. I've never won one, because I failed to see the point. The game is generous here. My friendly mechs are all in good enough shape to fight, there are three hostiles instead of four, and I can pick them off at my leisure. Yeah...

After I lose, I just hire another person, since someone died and just walk in and out of the mech repair place until my mechs are mostly functional. I don't need full force, right? Just enough to take out three mechs with a superior force. Yeah...except that now I have to completely redo the mission. The fight against four mechs. You might as well just reload, because in a practical game, you're getting one shot at this.

Note the yellow on the damage and weapons, that's how bad a shape they're in.

Since I didn't save quite before this, I end up doing a little more work, and end up with precisely a comparable force. One Warhammer, three Battlemasters. It's enough to take out the enemy force most of the time, but I still always fail at the second map no matter what strategy I take. Meaning I'm not doing enough in the first half of the mission to ensure I have enough for the second half. Probably.

The first strategy I do is use the ambush option near some rocks in the lower half of the map. Plenty of time to set it up, and then hopefully we'll be dealing with them more one at a time. I wasn't under the impression that this setting was going to do much more than give me the choice of battle, slightly further away from the usual setup and hopefully we could all attack at once. The only thing was, this causes my guys to circle around the place I selected. In the moment I realized they were doing that and not just trying to get to where I pointed, I understood why bad guys execute their underlings. When is there ever a situation where I'd need that? Not just in this game, just...period.

That said, when I do this properly, with a defend command rather than ambush, it works...about the same. That said, this does result in my successful final attempt. Less because I figure out a strategy for fighting with my lance and more because I'm fighting smarter. Everyone has been doing the same blunt strategy, including myself, even down to where we're aiming, the legs. If you look at the part of the GUI with the weapons, you'll see L, M and S, for the range. Since all mechs are roughly comparable, if I slowly back up while they're heading towards me, I can slowly snipe them. And rather than aiming for the legs, I aim for the head. This is considerably more effective.

The machineguns on this thing are very short-ranged, so short that there's no point in using them.

In the one time I make it through the second mission, this actually helps me a lot. My allies aren't here to help me fight, they're distractions while I blow up the enemy's cockpit. Even better, we're not actually fighting the whole force, just three of them, since there's a fourth hiding behind the base. We do the actual objective, walk up to the base. Victory.

I get a short exit text acknowledging my triumph and then the option to quit or to continue. Even in victory, you can still fight through the galaxy to your heart's content. Which would be a nice thought if I didn't just burn through my fighting force. You don't get money for winning here, and fixing four mechs which were likely practically scrapped is not going to be easy on your wallet.

I'm really not sure how you would be able to do this legitimately. As I said, this was a really close fight at the end, and that was with a comparable force. This is something you'd need about 40 million to get, and that's not taking into account repairing and then going off to the final battle. Sure, you can actually get Griez bounty if you go back to his planet, but that's still 2 million, which combined with what you get from a sold Jenner and the 5 million reward is still less than a quarter of that. I really don't know how that's even possible. Even giving myself a limitless amount of money somehow didn't guarantee my victory. That's impressive. This is definitely going to be interesting to rate.

This Session: 3 hours 15 minutes

Final Time: 6 hours 15 minutes