Battlehawks 1942 (1988)

Name:Battlehawks 1942
Number:250
Year:1988
Publisher:Lucasfilm Games (Lucasarts)
Developer:Totally Games
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:8 hours 20 minutes
Won:No (111W/81L)

The first of Lucasarts four flight simulations, Battlehawks 1942 takes place during the Pacific Campaign of WWII, and lets you play as both the American and Japanese side in the follow-up battles after Pearl Harbor. In many respects, it's what you expect out of a Lucasarts game, but I found the experience to be one of the few disappointing titles to come from the company.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's the worst game to come out of the company. Even before rating this, I'm sure this will do better than the two previous titles I've rated on this blog. But I didn't really think those were going to go much beyond interesting ideas that failed thanks to the time period they were released in. This is a game in a genre I know will produce something very interesting in a year, not something I'm going in with little expectations. I expected more from a Lucasarts flight sim.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is that while the DOS/Amiga/Atari ST thing this has sounds all nice and futuristic in 1988, we're still talking about an era where sound cards were rare enough that this doesn't even have anything beyond PC Speaker. Just beyond the point where the C64 and Apple II were realistic competitors to the platform but before it could challenge the ST/Amiga meaningfully. Whenever the game shows above a certain number of planes, the game starts slowing down.

This could cut things down to how this is one of, if not the first flight sim to have a game world, as limited in detail as it is, with probably a dozen large objects being tracked and all their little bullets. The faults are comparable to the problems in a more modern game rather than the issues of having to figure things out. At the time, it would have blown everything else away, now we see the issues more clearly.

In-game information on the planes.

Reading the manual shows that they really were trying to make something grand about the game. It's nearly 150 pages long, and even if you cut it down to just gameplay aspects, it would still be forty pages at least. The designers really wanted you to go in knowing how these planes worked and the historical background of these battles. Even having a bibliography. The authors also bring up why they designed the game why they did, for the most part, and bring up a common criticism of modern air combat. See blip on radar, shoot missile, blip disappears.

The regular mission selection, left and right switch between the missions of a particular battle.

The game has sixteen tutorial missions and two campaigns, one for the Americans and one for the Japanese. Each campaign has sixteen missions. The campaigns have a weird design. Every mission is available at the start, assuming you've picked a pilot of the requisite nationality. You can play any mission in any order for as many times as you'd like, but once you reach sixteen missions on a particular pilot/career, that pilot is finished.

I see the admiral is looking very...young today.

This actually made a weird effect in how I played the game. Sure, I do get medals and promotions for completing a mission, but since I'm going to be replaying most missions over and over again, I just made a pilot for each mission. Functioned as a sort of weird indicator of how many tries it took before I either got a mission or gave up. The only time it didn't work was when I was unlucky enough to die, a situation that only happened a handful of times. This causes the pilot's campaign to end.

The hybrid approach to not quite having a campaign but not quite just being random scenarios is odd. What actions get you promotions and medals are sometimes at odds with what you have to do with the regular objectives. If you play through each mission once, you basically zip across places which you logically should not be able to do. Plus, there's nothing stopping you from going back in time like you've decided to turn this into a sci-fi game about setting the timeline right.

That said, this does work well at teaching you the game for the most part. The tutorials are entirely straight-forward and help get you used to the controls as much as possible. They're actually pretty good at least at first glance. Keyboard aiming is arrows, mouse aiming works fine, didn't test joystick aiming. I used mouse aiming primarily, which works like you'd think, except there are two problems.

Stalling is a constant problem. This could very well be realistic, but this ties into the trouble with both mouse and keyboard aiming. Keyboard aiming works where if you hold down the button, you get a delay between the initial pressing and the point where it starts moving constantly. When you stop, it holds over a bit. Like typing a letter on a keyboard in a program that's stopped responding properly. Borderline unplayable.

Mouse aiming is better, in that stalling below five thousand feet is not a death sentence. Instead, it's quite the workout for your wrist. Maybe a trackball is better for this sort of thing, or maybe I just should have pulled out my joystick. Everything is smooth and what I expect, it's just that you don't get a good range of motion with a mouse here.

"I know the ship got sunk, but you personally didn't hit it, so it doesn't matter."

The other problem is bombing sucks. This might be realistic. I'm not really an expert in WWII, something which I should probably change considering that this sort of thing is going to come up often as the years go by. (Like there's a downside to knowing about WWII in this sort of blog) However, unless you are trying to be REALLY realistic, not having a sight for bombing something is bad. And this does not hit that niche of being that realistic. There are just too many factors which are obviously not realistic that this feels annoying.

This was the most consistent problem the game had. Oh, sure, I would get gunned down on occasion and multiple missions felt impossible to win otherwise, but anytime a mission had me bomb something? My victories were entirely down to luck. Dive bombing was beyond me even by the end. Strategies I thought would work just didn't when I started up the next session. Torpedo bombing, which was just a simple case of following height and speed requirements, turned against me by the end.

Actual aerial combat was smooth and I never felt much issue with it. There were a few factors I didn't figure out until later. Like how Japanese weapons are supposed to be used, but this is a issue with the historical design of the planes and less something that can be worked around. That said, enemy AI is often simple and goes directly for whatever target will make you lose. Usually, this is you. The only time they don't do this is when this would be inconvenient for them or they need to distract you from another plane bombing your ship.

What about your friendlies? Well, friendly fighters might survive, if you babysit them, but for the most part, will get shot down and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Friendly bombers? You're the escort, even if you're also a bomber. Technically, they have an easier time of it, since most bombers have rear guns. Just hope that the enemy is sitting within range and within a certain area behind them.

A Zeke after having taken out a few Americans, note that the first bullets start from 600, and are lower comparatively to the cannon's starting of 60. I'm still probably too trigger happy.

There is considerable variation in planes and what they do, even within a class. The Japanese, for instance, use lower caliber machine guns, which in fighters they compensate for with higher caliber "cannons", which actually deal damage. Bombers just get stuffed. One American plane, which you are saddled with for a few missions, only has one front and rear machine gun, which also affects how much damage you do.

The average experience tailgunning.

Rear guns are interesting. The AI gets to use both front and rear guns at the same time, but you have to switch seats. This was rough to get used to at first, but once I got used to changing viewpoints, it was tolerable. Yes, there's a problem where you can suddenly stall or skate too close to the ground, but most of the time you're level enough that you don't need to worry about that. It has better aiming, about 45 degrees freedom left, right and up. This is true of the enemy too, meaning that attacking from below is actually not that stupid an idea.

At the risk of sounding like one of those people, this game is very Star Wars. I don't mean in terms of ethics, morality or anything like that. The planes feel like predecessors to the fighters in the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games on a broad level, despite imitating real world planes. Obviously some aspects of this go back to the original film, since the tie fighters just look like they're mass produced and easily destroyed. This would eventually bleed over into the video games, with a bit of hero bias, owing to how X-Wing pilots are not the faceless goons the Empire are.

In general, I actually have to wonder if this is something that was intentionally being invoked during the original movie. Lucas has stated, at least in Return of the Jedi, that the Empire was American and the Rebels were the North Vietnamese. But Lucas also invoked many WWII war films, including Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film, in the sequence in which the heroes get medals. In conclusion, it's probably a coincidence and everyone is basically doing whatever seems to be the coolest at the moment, but there's just that bit of doubt in my head that makes it seem like there's something to it.

Side note, I took the Triumph of the Will thing as gospel without checking it, but seeing that video now, it seems a lot less clear cut than I was led to believe. Sure, it shares elements, but that's just the basic setup of both.

That said, I am going to stay on this hill about how this a predecessor for the X-Wing games, and not just because it uses the same engine. The Americans focus on making sure their pilots stay alive with superior armor and offense, often to the detriment of their ability to climb. To the point that some planes have basically non-existent climbing ability. Take away the climbing aspect, sounds like the Rebel Alliance. We just don't get any A-Wings.

The Japanese focus on speed and agility, at an almost suicidal loss of armor and attack power. Who cares when you have twenty more people ready to die at the drop of a hat? Or in my case, being able to gain altitude within the century. Whoever they can't shoot down will shoot them down. Practically the doctrine of the Galactic Empire in every game I've ever played. There's just none of the fighters they give the people who prove themselves more deadly than the average fighter pilot.

Is it flak or is my plane about to crash, either way, I'm not going to be hitting that carrier.

Each mission takes place during some part of the four historical battles, except by game limitations, you either defend or attack a carrier for 90% of the game. In each mission, there are up to eight hostile planes and up to four on your side, including you. The game gets a lot out of this despite itself. That said, there are issues which become apparent as you play through the game.

The campaign feels frontloaded against the player in many respects. The Battle of the Coral Sea starts the campaign off and all the defense missions here are harder than they will be later. The Japanese campaign starts you off in a mission defending a carrier that sunk historically, which is always harder than defending one that didn't sink at that battle. I don't remember if the Japanese have more of them than the Americans, but the crucial point is that the Japanese are often put in worse situations.

Stop this plane in the middle of a dive was the other thing I seemed to never be able to do, yet I was consistently asked to do it.

This is something I became aware of as I continued through the game. Even on the in-game difficulty ratings, the Japanese get shafted. They have more impossible missions compared to the Americans, and a few of the hard missions felt that difficult. The manual talks a lot about different perspectives on the war, well, it seems that the Japanese perspective is getting killed. Was this really the best they could do? I realize I'm talking about the air force that thought that kamikaze attacks were solid military doctrine, but were there really no fights you could have put in where the Japanese have a shot at winning?

Speaking of the manual, it talks about the artistic choice to use bitmap sprites as depictions of everything from planes to ships to the bullets you fire. Like FPS games would do a few years from now. In theory, this was supposed to be part of the appeal, look at the oddball title from Lucasarts! In practice, things didn't really look any better than your average chunky model game.

Photographic proof that I have in fact, once bombed an enemy carrier. A regular Christmas miracle.

It's probably an excuse, but I found from an audio-visual perspective, the game wasn't that good. There's a reason why I prefer Amiga versions of games around this time, and the PC Speaker sounds prove why. For the most part, self-explanatory, not great but understandable. There are sound effects for planes getting destroyed, someone bailing out of a plane, and chunks of metal hitting the water. By the time I realized those later two were things I was already quite a ways through the game.

But the visuals, man, I don't get it, but I kept missing in ways I expect I wouldn't do in a game with models instead of sprites. Your shots have a distance limit, but I kept shooting too early, a problem the AI doesn't have. It also seemed like my shots went through enemy planes as opposed to hitting them, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell if this is a problem with the method or the game itself. After all, most FPS games which use sprites don't need you to lead your shots in the slightest.

I understand a lot of what the game is trying to do, and what it's going for, but that's not necessarily fun. Now, it is reasonable in many games like this to sacrifice fun for realism, but that's not the case. Far too many aspects are sacrificing the realism for something that's neither fun nor realistic, and it just gets on my nerves.

With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
It's really nice that despite there being basically two types of machine guns that there's a decent enough variation on how they're used. 3

Enemies:
Despite single-mindedness in programming, there's enough variation between the planes and ships to be a bit interesting in how you deal with them. 3

Non-Enemies:
They're like Lemmings with wings, but sometimes they do something helpful. 2

Levels:
Despite being the same sky above and featureless ground below, there's some decent variety in the number of missions. Even if by the end it's starting to become clear what the game's limitations are. 4

Player Agency:
Mostly functional, works like you'd expect, but has some issues which I feel are a bit too janky to just attribute to realism. There's also an issue where the right mouse button functions as your secondary fire...some of the time. 5

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
If the objective of the game was to make the player feel like the one sane man in a world of crazies, good job, but I think it wasn't. Could have used some islands in the distance. 2

Graphics:
I expected the spritework to be nice, but they don't seem that much better looking than the chunky models you'd see elsewhere. 2

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Mostly understandable, but the big standouts require a bit of time to even understand what they're supposed to be. 1

That's 22.

I don't hate Battlehawks in the end, I'm just annoyed by it. So many flaws seem less tied to something unavoidable and more just a stroke of bad luck. Just a bit more playtesting, a few more people to see how awkward it is to bomb a ship or hit enemy planes in edge cases. It would have made all the difference.

Period reviews are mostly positive, as you might expect. This noticeably feels like a step ahead of previous flight sims, even if it's a step behind Dynamix's titles. The closer to negative ones point out that it has a limited shelf life, seems like even at the time it might wear a bit thin. Oddly, I found no complaints about the pervasiveness of the game's manual copy protection, you have to look up an image every freaking time you want to play a mission.

Early on in my playthrough, I found out that the engine here was apparently reverse-engineered for use in Wing Commander. It's been a while since playing that, but I don't really remember fighting against the controls in that game as much as the controls in this game. Now of course, space and the air are two different subjects, and just because you reverse-engineered something doesn't mean you have to slavishly adhere to it. My memory of the X-Wing games also tell me that I didn't have nearly that much trouble. 

Next time, we're keeping in the '80s with the sort of FPS I skipped over, the original Mech Warrior game by Dynamix. Which I'm sure I won't be trouble at all.

The Colony

Name:The Colony
Number:125
Year:1988
Publisher:Mindscape
Developer:David Alan Smith
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 15 minutes

Today's title is a bit unusual. I say unusual, as if any title that qualifies as a FPS from the '80s has been normal, even the closest we've gotten was Midi Maze and even that was a bit out there. No, today we have The Colony, a FPS that plays more like an adventure game, and yet the adventure game aspect seems totally tacked on. Originally released for B&W Macintoshes, before getting ports to Amiga and DOS, the former being the one I'll be playing for reasons I'll explain shortly. The Colony is very technically impressive, something I'm sure could be ported to everything under the sun. This is also the first game I've seen where someone involved with the original game, in this case a producer, claims the title to be THE first FPS. As you can already guess if you've read my blog for a while, this takes the Freescape engine approach to things.

The story is, the player is sent to find out what caused a colony to lose contact with the rest of the galaxy. In approaching, he smashes into a black hole, escapes and crash lands on the planet containing "the colony". The latter half is in the intro. I had a curious experience with this game. First I played the Macintosh version, the original because B&W Macintosh titles are cool-looking, then the Amiga because the original was seemingly unplayable, and then the B&W Mac version again because I figured out what I did wrong.

The bridge, after turning on the light

After the nice animated intro, the game starts...and its awful. I hesitate to start a review like this, but, holy crap, this is bad. The intention of the game is that the player goes to the nearby control console and turns on the lights. Which works somewhat in the Amiga version, not in the Macintosh version, which is pure B&W. So all the walls are just black and the doors are just there. The problem connecting this is that the nearby console, an obvious destination, has two buttons. One turns on the lights and the other causes the ship to explode. When you start up the game you might press them both, think that you shouldn't do that, and then screw around in vain for the next twenty minutes.

The control panel, having the two big buttons be light and cannons seems a bit overdramatic to me, but what do I know?

But enough about that, let's talk about the controls, and boy, howdy, this makes the Freescape games look like a modern console shooter. In theory you have the standard FPS controls, WASD + mouse, which this is actually the first game to do to my knowledge. Except these work quite poorly. Very, very poorly. The mouse is your standard awkward mouselook and moving that was standard before people figured out the standard usage. Its awkward, but it works. The keyboard controls are stiff, and make me yearn for another Freescape game. Something I shouldn't have to do, owing to the massive number of those.
Right, four paragraphs and I haven't actually played the game yet.

A typical scene

Once in motion, the game is weird. I don't think its weird in a bad way. You know all the amateurish backgrounds you see in amateur adventure games. Well, its like that, except in 3D. This actually looks pretty cool in-motion. Interacting with items in the environment is done by moving into them. This looks akin to a more standard first-person adventure game with some simple animation. I should note that walking into things seems to slightly damage the player otherwise, which is just a bad design choice. Once interacting with the environment, which include computers that look suspiciously like classic Macs, things turn into a standard adventure game screen. Except that random things can and will kill you, not only the aforementioned self-destruct button, but a cigarette.

Choosing ones weapons and armor, the heavier they are, the more energy they drain, and you can run out just walking around

Now, I should point out that you don't even get to shoot anything until you can figure out how to put on the suit of power armor. By the time I actually got to something I could shoot it felt like an accomplishment. Sort of, because when I got out of the ship finally...it was like Battlezone. Except on a Mac, controlled by the mouse and slow. The actual objective at this point is to find the entrance to the colony, but all these...uh...aliens, even though they look like robots, are in the way. Kill them or not, its all pointless, because this screen is just here to drain your life.

In case you didn't believe me

Once I make it into the colony, I'm greeted by...an enemy. At first I think combat is like Freaks, but I'm just playing poorly. It is the first use of "kill enemies and walk over their corpses to heal" that Freaks did. What is actually happening, as I discover in a slide in a meeting room* is that the aliens are energy beings, whenever they got shot enough, they suffer an energy overload and turn into eggs, which are pure energy and thus heal/restore ammo. Incidentally, this was caused by a teleporter disaster. I didn't realize that wasn't something Doom originated. There's even someone who calls them demons! And it appears the aliens don't use eyes to see things, because they saved the children by cryogenically freezing them.
*Yes, apparently while the the base is slowly getting ripped apart by aliens, staff found the time to prepare and have a meeting. Can you guess what nationality the creator of this game is?

Am I fighting aliens, robots or the Illuminati?

Thus this is the game loop for the rest of the game. Try to kill the weird-looking aliens in a panic, hope not to use too much firepower, and learn more about what's going on. Basically the first FPS to try the whole "reconstruct the events that caused so-and-so great calamity". Its just a shame that this game plays so badly. Like, holy crap, this controls like ass. The combination of slow speed and awkward controls makes the whole experience very unfun to control. Every shot causes a brief stop, and its intended for it to run slowly.

The purpose of the mini-map in the lower right is basically just to tell where you are in relation to nearby environmental objects

 Once some time is spent reconstructing those events, the objectives become clear. The colony needs to be destroyed, lest the aliens escape and wreck havoc on other worlds. The messages from the dead imply that I should cause the reactor to self-destruct. The game implies otherwise, as saving the children implies I can also save myself. From messing around on my ship, I know I can take the reactor core out of mine, and since its destroyed because of the crash, I can replace it with the one from here. Clearly the "self-destruct" button is just broken on the planet, and is no doubt some weapon. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow you to carry multiple things at once, and I doubt my abilities are enough for as many trips as the game wants me to take. Plus, I don't know how to take the cyro-pods, so I guess they're screwed anyway.

More fighting, this doesn't look any more exciting in motion

On each level is a queen, and killing that queen causes most enemies on a level to die. And when I killed the queen on the second level and all that was left was an abandoned colony...I felt little desire to continue playing. Maybe its because I know I can't really win the game at this point, maybe its how slow it is, or maybe its the sensitivity of environmental objects, but I just felt like I had seen all that there was to see.

Eggs, any one of which could turn into an alien at any moment

Weapons:
Generic laser weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
The game tries to have the different aliens do different things, but in practical terms you've got three or 4 different kinds of enemies. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Effectively items. 0/10

Levels:
The Colony is clearly going for a more realistic style in an era where that's just not possible with 3D technology. The series of corridors connecting various logical rooms just felt like work navigating through, to say nothing of the outside area. 0/10

Player Agency:
Technically it works, but I've never seen a more awkward implimentation of a control scheme. The game requires considerable precision in aiming and moving, especially over the alien eggs. However, the keyboard controls feel straight out of a Dungeon Master-clone, while the mouse controls, while better, are still awkward. 0/10

Interactivity:
You don't get any environmental interaction unless you walk into something, and this is overly sensitive. Sometimes you get adventure-style scenes, but these all fall into a simple pattern quickly enough. 3/10

Atmosphere:
The game does a good job of feeling like a lone space marshall uncovering a mystery on a faraway world. However, it doesn't do a good job of keeping it. 1/10

Graphics:
Well...it looks okay. Its not bad, its not impressive, everything is just sort of there. 1/10

Story:
Its cliche, but its well-executed. The real highlight of the game for me was the information the game was slowly telling me about this alien menace. Its just not enough to actually save the game. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Actual sound effects, and a brief intro tune. Unfortunately, it seems like any time the sound effects go on the game stops and they're very low-quality sound effects. What was once decent sounding quickly turned into noise. 1/10

That's 12. Good concept, bad execution.

Curiously, reading period reviews, it seems this opinion isn't unique. Almost as many say positive things as they do negative things. Quite a few implications that this game only got as popular as it was because it was the only option for the game poor Macintosh. This would explain the constant, false claims that this is the first in most categories that its said to be. Neither the producer nor the author actually played any games. This also goes well with the author's future work just creating 3D worlds, which was used in The Abyss, possibly others.

Unlike in a lot of cases, we have the author's own words on the matter. Its a very interesting look back, going on to explain why Macintosh games were not great, the issues he had with publishing it, and the technical choices he made during development, and brings up when we'll see this guy again, with the last of the Tom Clancy submarine games.

That, in theory, should be the last proper FPS of 1988. Next up 1989, a year I'm looking forward to.

Total Eclipse

Name:Total Eclipse
Number:123
Year:1988
Publisher:Incentive Software
Developer:Major Developments
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes

Now we're back into games I've played before. A long time ago, like back in the '00s, I played this game. I don't even remember why I wanted to play this game, because its not exactly an appealing looking title and I definitely fell victim to graphics snobbery back then. Was I drawn to it by its early nature or by the Egyptian theme? I don't know.
This title has a bit of a backstory. Hundreds of years ago in Ancient Egypt one of the High Priests was upset people were not sacrificing people to "Re", the God of the Sun. So he cursed his people so that should the sun ever be blocked during the day, the offending object would be destroyed. Or had the pharaoh build a pyramid that would do this. Pretty soon, 2 hours in-game, the moon will totally eclipse the sun...and the moon will be destroyed. Pretty sure that the moon would be destroyed several times over since even 30 BC, calling that the latest of Ancient Egypt, but I assume this is just a sign that the story doesn't matter at all.
Past the unimportant backstory, we've got a few gameplay changes. Heart rate, which seems to be akin to previous game's health, and the addition of water and light. My thoughts turn to that of your classic text adventures, the ones with light, mazes and sometimes food supplies. I wonder if this is an intentional similarity or if I'm just filling in some blanks? Once again its sound effects OR music though, lovely.

Such a nice-looking effect

Once the game begins, I am greeted by the sound of a heart beat. I've heard this kind of thing before and this one isn't too annoying, especially since its a vital element to the game. It gets faster if you've been hurt, lowers if you rest or find treasure. Time is more akin to Pathways into Darkness than Dark Side, which is good. I never died owing to time, or even water.

A puzzle of sorts, walking into that pillar removes it, causing the treasure above it to fall down, on you if you aren't fast enough

The light mechanic is somewhat annoying. You can click on the flashlight on the menu or press T. Using the mouse to turn it on and off is troublesome, because the game expects you to click a specific area on the flash light to change its status. One can always use the keyboard command for it, but one is more likely to follow the siren call of the mouse than anything else at first.

One of the many symbols around

What about the central three pillars of the game? Avoiding enemies, level design and puzzles? A few enemies are killable, including I do believe the first enemy who has a weak spot in a FPS. However, these situations with an enemy are almost always something to be avoided. The levels are an indistinguishable mess of stairs and doors. The idea is to map it, and I didn't feel like doing that. The week I played this I was dealing with the aftermath of upgrading my OS, and while I tried doing it legitimately, it was too much like work. The map I found was in Polish, so all I lost would be the time spent making a map.

Yes, even I have to admit there's something nice about this game at times

That leaves the puzzles. While the engine's puzzles were never really that impressive, I can't help but feel here like we're getting incredibly simple now. For instance there are a lot of puzzles that simply amount to finding the symbol that matches the one on a door. Otherwise just shoot anything that looks suspect, especially walls, and then walk into it if it isn't. Once you take mapping out of the equation, which also removes a maze puzzle near the middle of the game, the only clever puzzle in the game is one where you have to gather five ankhs or keys before opening the final door. In true text adventure fashion, its more than possible to screw yourself by opening too many doors, since these ankhs are universal.

The black parts here are holes

Still, unlike previous Freescape games, this title has a pretty good flow to it. It goes from mapping the game area, to solving the puzzles, then mapping some more, before going through the upper floors of the pyramid rather quickly. The problem is once you've figured everything out you now have to deal quite obnoxiously with rationing out the ankhs. There are 7 ankhs and you get absolutely no leeway in how you use them whatsoever. This, combined with the low amount of enemies in the game, makes me think of this even more like an adventure game than a proper FPS. Were the platforming any more complex than walking over precarious walkways, I would be tempted to call it a proto-Tomb Raider, but without that key element this is just strange.

This one way to win, also requires one to pass over the entire map multiple times in the most inconvenient way. Every single walkway that looks like a nightmare to navigate, you will navigate. The biggest problem with it is that you don't have a good feeling for where you are in relation to everything. This makes walking over the various walkways a very nervous process.
And yet somehow, this is the most popular game by far, and I have to admit there's something compelling about this game. I can't put my finger on what. Is it that we always have a reason for driving forward? Is it that I can actually finish it for once? The Egyptian theme? The last one seems most curious, there's no shortage of Egyptian-themed games around, and yet there's something about the engine and the theme that feels like it goes together. Unlike science fiction, Egypt works rather well with the large polygons of this game. They were a consistent fan of these big geometrical shapes as we all know. Egypt was big into making massive monuments.

The final boss, not the most fearsome opponent in gaming history

The game ends with a rather unceremonious final boss in the form of a giant pharaoh head/sarcophagus. Just walk behind it and then start blasting the back of it. The game's over after a few shots.

Success!

We get fireworks, not the best, but nice, and then the game starts again. Guess the fireworks are the closest thing we get to an ending.

Weapons:
The same weapon/interaction beam we've had since Space Station Oblivion, except now its a pistol. Its a nice effect, but its still the same thing. 1/10

Enemies:
You've got actual enemies and some turrets, but outside of the boss they're closer to traps to avoid than serious fights. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
By this point, things have been cut down into effectively one giant maze. I guess there is a certain cleverness in the layout of some sections, and the secrets, though required, do reward exploration. 2/10

Player Agency:
Without any form of jumping, the control scheme feels limiting somehow. The true 3D combined with the very limiting controls feels plain weird. 2/10

Interactivity:
Things are back to Space Station Oblivion levels of scenery destruction. Mind you, most of it is destroying parts of the game you need to progress, but the thought is nice. 3/10

Atmosphere:
Yes, its feels like Egypt. Its the cheapest form of atmosphere possible, but its there. 1/10

Graphics:
Yeah, its a Freescape game all right. 1/10

Story:
Nonsense, even for a story that only matters in the manual. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Your typical sound effects at this point. The music's nice, but it doesn't really fit the theme and it has some weird sounds in it for some reason. 2/10

That's 13. I wonder if any Freescape game is going to surpass the original. Its not like that's a hard thing to do or anything...

What about reviews? Well, most of the statements are about speed or the impressiveness of the 3D. Neither of which are concerns today. (although I will note I had slowdown when looking at some things) I do find it amusing that someone said this was too big, a different person, I presume, to the person who said Dark Side was too small. I was actually going to complain myself that this is somewhat small, and acknowledge my hypocrisy in the process.

I know I said in Dark Side's review that this was it for 1988, but unfortunately that was based on a misconception I had regarding 1988's The Colony. When I checked it after Dark Side, as one does when one is going through these titles, it didn't sound like there was any actual gunplay going on, even something as pathetic as this game's, I assumed it was a game about solving some puzzle in a 3D world because there's another game like that from around this time. Only, it actually is a FPS. Oh, well. The next Freescape title is not going to be very long to reach either, being 1989's Total Eclipse 2: Sphinx Jinx, released exclusively in a compilation with the original on 8-bit platforms, not even a DOS release.

Dark Side

Name:Dark Side
Number:121
Year:1988
Publisher:Incentive Software
Developer:Major Developments
Genre:FPS/Puzzle
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes

You know, its funny, time is a funny thing in regards to games I blog about. By default, having a lawnmower approach like I do adds wide gaps between someone's games. In the early days I didn't really have things too well organized, and just played whatever was from the '80s, a more likely possibility if it was a FPS. This game's prelude, Driller, the first Freescape engine title, came out 1 year before this, but I'm blogging about it a little more than 2 years after playing it. A short time span, in comparison to what I will eventually reach. Its the sort of thing that's really cool, but is very clearly something that doesn't mesh well with the thing I'm trying to do. This format doesn't really work well for a game that's long, difficult but mostly going over the same things over and over again.

Can you spot the danger here?

The story's connection to Space Station Oblivion is fairly loose. Last time the criminal exiles called Ketars tried to blow up the first moon, Mithral of a colonized human planet, called Evath. Now they're planning on destroying Evath from its second moon, Tricuspid. Where things get weird is that I remember aliens were somehow connected to the first game and the Ketars, who are human, lived on Mithral. The player's objective is to destroy all Energy Collection Devices (ECDs) before that happens. You know, the usual plot. I'll be playing the Amiga version, owing to my own biases of this time period. This time I play as a dude in power armor and a jetpack rather than the first game's weird tank thing.

One of many, many appearances of this freaking screen

Obviously, it looks better, but that's just because I'm playing on the Amiga. Controls just about as well as the last game, not amazing, but fair considering what they were trying to do. Really, this is just Space Station Oblivion with a fresh coat of paint and perhaps a tinge more mercy. The big advantage here is that we have mouse aiming. A welcome boost compared to last game's not mouse aiming. Also because I'm on the Amiga, I have keyboard joystick moving, which works for this game. Turns the whole thing into something weirdly standard-ish. I imagine this would be a monstrocity to play on original hardware though. What doesn't work, oddly enough, is the jetpack. Fly too high and you get teleported to the darkside and die.

An interior, much like you'd expect it to look like

Early on I take some getting reused to the game. Early enemies don't die, which doesn't go well. Each screen is a unique room with its own puzzle to solve in order to destroy the ECDs. You interact with things by shooting them or walking into them. Its Quake-style interaction before Quake baby. I say that, and its very clever in execution. Puzzle is in fact, the key word here, moreso than the last game. The central concept of the game may be to destroy ECDs rather than place giant drills, but the same concept applies. ECDs have a specific order to them before you can take them out. Some are more widely connected than others. If you take one out before you're able to, it regenerates.

This room doesn't seem like its important, but it is of the utmost importance

Compared to the original, there are big problems. Its not that early enemies don't die, enemies are basically just unkillable. Technically, I guess you can kill the camera/alarm things that send you to a cell. No, the biggest problem is that the game is on an extremely strict time limit. The game has a little power bar charging on the left side of the screen. The game or manual doesn't do anything whatsoever to draw attention to it, but this is the amount of power the weapon you're trying to stop has. Once it fills up...boom. As such the game requires significantly more speed than the original and is a bit more difficult to get used to. I didn't even realize something was going wrong until I was consistently dying.
This works out well, the game feels smaller and tighter in scope, perhaps as a result of knowing more about the game. Once you've gotten down the pathways of the ECDs and taken out a bunch the timer becomes much less of a problem. In fact, once you take out some of them, the rest start quickly falling into place, and it wasn't too long before I was down to 4% to take out, which is just the final ECD...which is on the dark side, where the giant weapon is.

Can you spot the hostiles in this picture?

Now, here is where the problem is. There is a tunnel under the dark side, which one can enter, but that automatically sends me back before I can shoot the final ECD. So I check a walkthrough. In order to reach the Dark Side you need to open a door, which needs the four letters DARK on four buildings behind force fields. To get there, you need to find four teleport crystals to use in a fancy teleporter. One in a cell, one behind one force field, another in heightened room, and the last is hiding on the ceiling in the tunnels. The problem is that that crystal doesn't seem to want to show up. The mechanics of this are a mystery in the Amiga and DOS version, but in the ZX Spectrum version its supposed to activate when you shoot an axe on a wall. It doesn't.
You know, failing to be able to win the game because of this crap is becoming a Freescape staple.

Foreshadowing

Weapons:
A generic laser pistol you have no reason not to shoot at anything you think is shootable. This doesn't really play like a shooter. 0/10

Enemies:
They're generic, but they are set up in such a way, especially the cameras, that requires a bit of thought in getting past. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Some clever ideas, but feels incredibly simple in most respects. The weird endgame section doesn't help things any. 2/10

Player Agency:
It works, but its clunky and confusing. I can aim the gun now, but moving around feels slow. 3/10

Interactivity:
This feels really simple. I'm basically just shooting a select number of objects. There's no destruction of anything that the game doesn't 100% want you to destroy. 1/10

Atmosphere:
None.

Graphics:
Very simple shapes, but everything important has a consistent and highly distinguishable shape. 2/10

Story:
None in-game.

Sound/Music:
This is actually really amusing, because there is music, and its pretty good. However, you have a choice between music and sound, and sound won out for most of the game. I like being able to hear if I've been shot. 2/10

That's 12. How does it compare to the first game? Space Station Oblivion got...15. Ouch.

Period reviews were mostly positive, but the negative ones mostly seem to be complaining about the game's length; That its too short. Of course, for me this seems like a hollow complaint, since I know there are at least 4 more titles using the engine I have yet to play.

The next Incentive Software title will not take nearly as long for me to reach, being 1988's Total Eclipse. Actually, its next up on my list of 1988 games. Everything else I've played, was in the wrong year or wasn't really a FPS, so I ignored it. Well, outside of Star Cruiser, which has been kicked down to 1990 for the console release, which was translated into English. I don't know enough Japanese to feel comfortable playing a story-heavy title quite just yet.

Slaygon

Name:Slaygon
Number:119
Year:1988
Publisher:MicroDeal
Developer:John Conley & James Oxley
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:2/5
Time:1 hour 20 minutes

From the team that would bring you Day of the Viper and the publisher of Fright Night comes another weird early FPS title. This one has a very legitimate claim to the adventure label, unlike Delta Man. So much so that if this weren't connected to Day of the Viper I probably wouldn't play it. I would be willing to bet that neither TAG nor Renga in Blue will be covering this one ever.

The way outside

The player is the operator of the super robot Slaygon, an invulnerable robot. The mission? To stop the evil corporation Cybordynamics from unleashing a virus to destroy the human race. Cybordynamics is a controversial business that replaces humans with robots and other automations. To do this one has to overload their reactor in their automated lab. I wonder if this is satire, because this feels like it could be intended to be satire. It sounds like it could go either way. British games so far have a noticeable tendency to be satirical.

A door, what does it contain? Something good, hopefully

Starting it up and we're in a lobby. Not sure why since this is supposed to be automated, but I suppose this doesn't really need logic in it. The game is entirely controlled through the mouse, including movement, which is annoying and slow. We've got six functions down below, two of which are for combat; Scanner reveals a set area around you; Plotter maps as you go along, plus it shows your location; Sensors show what state the enemy is in, and I didn't really use the cloak function. Though the game tells me it makes Slaygon invisible to all enemies except the base commander, but uses a ton of energy.
Rounding out the interface, we have 8 boxes for items, the buttons above the plotter button control inventory, with the question marks telling you what an item in front of you is. Above the save/load buttons we have an energy bar, which drains on the use of all functions and acts as health. In combat, it drains considerably more if you don't have shields up. Arrows move, and basically everything else is self-explanatory. It works, I don't have any complaints about that, but its slow and feels awkward to use.

Combat, these things only show up if you open the door, you can tell if one's inside by the color of the square above the arrow button

Combat is a boring affair. There are doors in this game, and some contain these Cylon-looking fellows. As soon as you see one turn on your shield and then start firing your laser. There are seemingly no tactics, just exchange fire with the enemy until someone is dead. How much the enemy will take before it dies varies, but you can tell based on what they look like, and you can't just ignore the harder ones since they may have a valuable item behind them. Given the manual's hyping of the robot's abilities, I'm quite disappointed in how weak the player really is.

Some static object one has to use an item on to advance

The adventure aspect is very simple. Scan an item before taking it to discover what it does, and then the item will usually be used as you walk along. There are upgrades to the weapon and the shields, but you just use these, you don't need them in your inventory. Keys and various trap nullification items work automatically, while things like interfacing objects and health (energy in this game) items require use. The problem is that by the end of the game you're juggling quite a lot of items, and you can't really afford to drop most of them. The keys can be dropped after you've unlocked all the doors they correspond to though.

Only five more numbers to go!

Its not explicitly told to you (unless you look at the part of the manual they tell you contains spoilers), but the objective of the game is to find 5 numbers for a code to blow up the reactor. To figure this out you need one device that gets the numbers from one type of machine, and another device that allows you to type in the code into the reactor. The thing is, while I got 4 out of the 5 numbers needed, I was still missing one by the time I got to the reactor. I had to find two more key cards before I could get out, and I had already got around the map. So basically, in the last stages it turns into more of a maze game than anything else. And once that's done its a fairly easy trip back outside.

The end

I should note I played on the easier skill setting. The manual says that the harder one randomizes the location of some key items, but I suspect it increases the map size too. I barely had any map on my screen when I finished, seems like there was room for a lot more. Which I have to say would work quite poorly in this game's favor, because already by the time I finished it I was finding the whole experience boring.

Weapons:
I feel like just exchanging fire like a generic strategy game is one of the saddest combats I've ever seen. 0/10

Enemies:
Its kind of cool slowly figuring out the graphical differences between stronger enemies and weaker ones. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
It was shocking to discover that the game isn't randomized entirely, and that the level is pre-set to some extent. 0/10

Player Agency:
It works, but so much feels awkward and slow. 2/10

Interactivity:
I can't really think of what else to describe this game as besides an adventure game, but the amount of interaction you get here is pathetic. 1/10

Atmosphere:
None.

Graphics:
Very simple stuff. Everything looks as it should but nothing is terribly impressive. 1/10

Story:
The manual's story doesn't really have much effect on the gameplay, and doesn't entirely fit with what happens in-gameplay. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Really basic sound effects, which was quite annoying to see in an Amiga game. 1/10

That's 6.

Feels like a harsher statement against the game than it should be. Its not as horrible as that implies, it just doesn't feel like anything more than a demo. The sort of thing that shouldn't have escaped into the wild. Which is a funny thing to say about a game that was published and presumably put on store shelves, but I remain hopeful for Day of the Viper.

Fright Night

"Welcome to Fright Night", says a surprisingly clear voice

Name:Fright Night
Number:88
Year:1988
Publisher:Microdeal
Developer:Microdeal
Genre:Side-scrolling Action Game
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour

Fright Night is an interesting beast. Its the sort of bad game that could only come out on the Amiga. Adapted from a movie, but it looks amazing, it sounds amazing. You play it and its like...WHAT? Even as a cashgrab this seems...awful.

Jerry, fresh-faced and ready for the night

You play as the head vampire from the film, Jerry. I haven't seen it, and it doesn't seem like that's going to have much concern here. Jerry needs to kill all the people in his house before nightfall and then return to his coffin. The first night this is simple enough. Enemies throw things at you, they hurt, but you can walk past them. The real concern is figuring out the game at this point. You have a constant timelimit, nightfall, and a short timelimit, your rapidly diminishing health. Neither of these are much of a threat at this point.

Jerry walks up some stairs

Then you reach the second night, and the game becomes hard. Hands are coming out of the ground, and ghosts are floating around. Its at this point it becomes clear Jerry is weak for a vampire. In addition to needing about a half dozen victims just to make it through the night, if these hands or ghosts touch him, he has about three seconds before he dies. At full health. Further, Jerry is slow, and can't dodge for anything. He's effectively defenseless.

The only time most will see this screen

Which brings up the controls, they're not good. Jerry moves slowly, which isn't bad of itself, except that means EVERYONE gets a free hit against him. Sometimes there are stairs, which Jerry needs to go up and down, which require precision. While getting attacked by things that have a good shot of finishing you off for good. Jerry can jump straight up or crouch by pressing the joystick button and then up or down. There is a delay. It seems there is the option to jump forward, but it didn't work while I was playing. This is the only real method you have of avoiding attacks. Jerry himself automatically attacks humans whenever he moves in close enough. There is only one life.

Jerry, dead again

The game just continues on like this until you win or become bored. Outside of the way the game looks its extremely boring to play. You're not really doing much, beyond dodging ghosts and grabbing people. Most of the effort, it seems, was put towards making the game look good and sound good. Its really impressive in that. Sound changes when you change rooms, cleverly reused graphics, but for a game where a scary vampire bounces around like comedy show? Its just a whole lot of nothing. Its not even the first game to use this formula, Dracula on the Intellivision has the same formula, but Intellivision games have excuses for playing like crap, they're on really old systems. And even then the Intellivision was capable of more, as was this. So were the people who worked on this. Except, it turns out, the programmer, a noted advocate of the Atari ST. Well, that answers some questions.

Jerry, after a meal, note the hand coming out of the ground

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
There are ghosts, hands that come out of the ground, and a selection of human enemies. Mostly, they're all just sort of there. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
There aren't any.

Levels:
The house gradually grows larger over the course of each night. Its simple, and in a better game it would have been effective. 1/10

Player Agency:
It works, but that's about it. Doing anything that isn't going left or right requires a bit of precision. Precision you don't get. There are also minor issues playing this with keyboard controls, unintentional ones, given that joysticks were more common back then and I'm using my keypad as an imitation. 1/10

One of the many ghosts that wander the house, perhaps his victims

Interactivity:
There isn't any.

Atmosphere:
Starts off nice, even mildly spooky, rather than the usual cheap haunted house stuff. Once enemies start showing up, that kind of loses its charm. Hard to enjoy it when you're desperately trying not to die. 4/10

Graphics:
Every background in this is a joy to behold, real skill went into this. There's some reuse, but everything looks great. The character sprites look good too, they're well-animated...mostly. 8/10

Story:
You're a vampire, kill some people in your house. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Generic Amiga sounds, but a primo soundtrack from legendary musician David Whittaker. If you can track it down, I suggest giving the soundtrack a listen, it is the best element of the game. A real treat to hear. 9/10

The skull indicates Jerry's health, he's not about to have an easy time here

That's 24, but since the game just wasn't fun, I'm going to remove 2 points. Giving a final score of 22. This is not a fun game by any means, but it does have high marks. If you're interested in old game music, or seeing examples of old pixel art, this game is top notch in that regard. For everyone else, stay away.

Briefly checking old reviews, and it seems like this opinion hit the head right on the money. One reviewer even mentions getting stuck on the same place I did. A curious thing.

According to Mobygames an adventure game was advertised, but never released. My personal Bias aside, that would have been a much better use of everyone's time and money. An adventure game where you play the villain? At the very least a modest curiosity.