Quest of the Space Beagle (1984)

Name:Quest of the Space Beagle
Number:263
Year:1984
Publisher:Avalon Hill
Developer:Scott Lamb
Genre:Space Simulation
Systems:Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 50 minutes
Won:No (116W/89L)

The Continuing Adventures of Jupiter Mission 1999, Part II is a subtitle that really should have been looked at by an editor. The title is a pain to screenshot, it's flashing. Good thing I don't have epilepsy. In case you don't feel like going back, Jupiter Mission 1999 was about the player being randomly selected to go on a mission to Jupiter, where there was a mysterious signal. All the competent people die in an asteroid shower, and the player is forced to do the work because the sentient AI in control of the ship got damaged. I left as the game crashed after trying to figure out how to move my ship.

Explaining what happened is now a text crawl with moody music in the background. Also flashing, lovely. So the part I didn't get to was stopping an alien invasion, which I did by activating a self-destruct switch on the alien's teleport station. It exploded and teleported us to a far galaxy. Where all the aliens were that wanted to conquer the Earth...only for one that approached me to be friendly. Uh, I think we might have made a boo-boo. These are the Faunians, descendants of a great civilization from eons past. They were heading for our system not because they were conquering the universe, but because hostiles, The Gentuza, were heading after their homeworld. Now I have to help. Because the Faunians, being gentle herbivores, are unable to fight. They're not descended from hippos, I guess.

The first section is a epic space battle between these forces, with you on the Faunians and the Gentuza being your target. This is their homeworld, incidentally, so we're starting out small. You have to take out their fleet and then capture the planet. Like an on the ground view of your typical Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations game. All you have to do is individually take out every ship yourself. Have fun! Given how the last game went, I'm sure you're about to ask how bad this gets. 

Pretty bad. Simply put, enemy ships can move faster than you, and you can do nothing about that. Their shots only hit you when they're on-screen, and sometimes you can get them off-screen, other times they stick like they're already attached to you. Even in my first attempt it wasn't completely unreasonable to take one out, but it was very frustrating to do so. Still, sometimes I get lucky. Even worse, any time you get hit, you can't fire for a few seconds.

So, one time after I died, I counted how many ships were left. 32, out of what I believe is 39. (It's actually 40) Considering these guys are only inferior to the player in that they die after one shot, this is quite unbalanced against the player. Fighting against a superior number of enemies equal to your strength is not something I've encountered in any space sim I've played before. Yes, there could be a number of hostiles superior to you, but not to this degree. More grinding. There are probably a whole bunch of complicated rules to this I could possibly learn the entirety of, but I understand enough to get away from all the shots except the ones the game decides I can't.

After savescumming my way through that mess...nothing happens. Right, well, there is a strange thing on my M-scan. Which if it isn't showing up on my screenshots, is an orb on the lower right, compared to the V-scan on the lower left which shows the enemy. Clearly, I need to head to it, despite no visual on-screen. So I finally check the manual. It does explain the combat system slightly better than I previously understood, but doesn't actually explain how I'm supposed to go forward beyond heading for 000,000. Which I have no way of figuring out because the part of the GUI which has that pops up when I'm damaged, not when I'm perfectly okay. Oh, and I love this line from the manual:

IMPORTANT: Save your game frequently to prevent an undue amount of repetitive play.

The game is actually telling me to savescum. That's hilarious. Eventually, I figure out how to summon the GUI, F5, and head for the planet. It's when the blue dot is in the center of the scanner. Now I have to...wait, I guess. First time I've played a game that requires the manual to understand but it also forgets to mention half the important information. After I go off for a bit and then return...it still hasn't advanced, but after jiggling the nose a bit it works. 

I'm not writing all that down, but hopefully you get the message. Since I crushed their space navy, they consider me the strongest, but before they'll do something for me, they want me to prove myself in their labyrinth. After some trouble getting it to load, I reach the next part.

Hope you weren't reading something to pass the time, because you're on a timer. Oxygen's running out, you're going to die! Gotta say, I can't imagine having spent money and all that time on this only to end up in a slow section where you slowly walk around. Hope you read the part where the fire button moves your camera around, otherwise you'll be slowly crawling into whatever hazards are about to kill you.
 

Oh, I'm sorry, that isn't working in this port, guess I'll just watch as this thing slowly creeps up on me and drains my energy. Or it might be, it just takes me a long time to figure out how the heck it works. It only works if you hold it down as you move, which I guess makes sense. It sounds like I'm angry, but this is just annoying and tedious. You move slowly left and right, but go up or down, or dare I say it, diagonally, and you take one step at a time. The complete animation for one step. Nothing screams fun afternoon like having to navigate some annoying hellmaze. None of this layout is fun or intuitive to navigate.

There are oxygen and food pick-ups, but the actual objectives are the computers. That big thing in the first screenshot. There are three of them. One was easy to find, but the way to it involved going over a pit. As I don't have a jetpack and there's no other way, I pressed on. After a considerable amount of searching, I found the second, which just resulted in me messing with some levers. Cool, cool. Going further in the section this was found just resulted in dead ends. So...did that spawn a bridge earlier? No. Well, I tried, but between the slow movement speed and how it feels like everything I'm doing is pointless, this is where I'm stopping in this game. After this, there's supposed to be a section where you find a path to Earth via star charts. Yeah, that's going to be fun.

Weapons:
A basic laser, even if there were quirks to how it worked. 1

Enemies:
The two different mini-games I played each had their own opponents, but both were quite basic, even if their AI was fine-tuned to annoy the player. 1

Non-Enemies:
None, really.

Levels:
Take down 40 enemy fighters and endless confusing labyrinth are not my ideas of a good time. 1

Player Agency:
Everything is oddly slow, though with exception to the whole "hold down the fire button to move the camera" thing, it works as intended. 3

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
This is such a strange and alien feeling game, probably why I stuck with it despite essentially being a modern action-adventure game which forced all the different sections into one big chunk of each rather than naturally flowing over the course of a longer game. 3

Graphics:
Simple, with decent enough animation whenever a human character is on-screen. 2

Story:
The evil aliens are going to fold because you shot down their defense fleet, but first you need to traverse their labyrinth is not interesting, but at least the writing quality is tolerable. 2

Sound/Music:
Simple intro theme, then...uh...I was actually listening to other music for a lot of the gameplay, but I believe it was mostly blips and bloops. 1

That's 14, exactly the same score as Jupiter Mission 1999. Makes as much sense as anything.

In a sense, this reminds me of later action/adventure hybrids like Inca. There's a world here that because of the nature of how it's made, we're not going to see much of it, so we're just left gazing at what is mostly a mediocre action game in an attempt to see the real meat. Everything else that's going on. As I said, in a sense, Inca's a lot better even if that's a game you don't care for and this is far more grounded in reality.

Next time, you know how a lot of people were doing touching and tasteful tributes to Bobby Prince last week? Talking about his contributions to amazing games like Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and I personally hope, Bio Menace. Well, I'm going to talk about Pickle Wars, a game I remember being a male cowpie. Hopefully his contribution to that game is much better than I remember the game being.