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.