Elvira - Mistress of the Dark (1990)

Name:Elvira - Mistress of the Dark
Number:248
Year:1990
Publisher:Accolade
Developer:Horrorsoft
Genre:Adventure/RPG/Survival Horror
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (111W/79L)

It feels good to have finally beaten this game. A grand weight off my shoulders. It was exactly what I expected it to be...because I knew there wasn't going to be something incredibly impressive at the end, just that there would be a sense of yes, I have won one of the hardest adventure games ever made. Even if I did take advantage of maps and had to look a few things up.

If you don't read the playthrough parts, Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a licensed adventure/RPG hybrid that just so happens to perfectly encompass most elements that make up a survival horror game. Who is Elvira? Elvira is a horror hostess, which if you haven't had one or haven't watched one, is someone who appears before horror films on local TV. I'm not sure how legitimate ones work, because the one I grew up with was Svengoolie, who was one of the later ones and who himself played things quite jokingly. Basically, they hype up the film before hand, appear before and after the commercial break to make jokes or state trivia.

Elvira, based on what I know, is one of the more comedic ones. Sort of what if a California bimbo hung around all the horrible monsters. The kind of bimbo who looks at a big nasty monster and goes "look at this jackass". This of course, was a winning combination, which is why eventually Elvira went from mocking movies to starring in one of her own. From this, came these games.

Try being the operative word.

This is a sequel to the first film, which is one of those things I've heard but have never quite been certain if it was true or not. The important thing is, Elvira is a witch, she's inherited a castle in some obscure English hamlet, and as she's renovating it, it turns out to be haunted. By the spirit of her dead ancestor and her army of evil guards. She puts an ad out in the paper, and in comes the player to try to help.

In this game, a guard sauntering out to challenge you is always a bad sign.

And likely dies at the hands of a guard in a gory manner I will neglect to show. There are pictures of it out there on other sites, if you want to see a pixel art depiction of a severed head. They don't skimp out, Lucio Fulci would be proud. It's one of those things that either really motivates you to not die or to die, depending on your fondness for gore. This is actually at complete odds with Elvira herself, who despite showing horror films, disliked the more violent end of the scale. I don't know what she considered the edge, but I'm sure seeing the part where a head was cut off is over it.

Few games give you quite as much a sense of "prepare to die", as this one does.

This act of violence sets the game's tone. This is no kiddy horror experience, you will die, you will die a lot, and the game wants you to die. It's mercies are mostly contained to not throwing you directly into a fight at the start of the game and the adventure side of things. In contrast to most adventure games from this era, there are very few situations where you lose because you used an item elsewhere or missed it earlier in the game. At least in the sense traditional adventure games are known for, you can still lose an item by forgetting where you dropped it or never picked it up. You can just always go back for it. This isn't to say they don't exist, it's just that most require very elaborate acts on the player's part.

Instead, you get screwed on combat. Combat is unrelenting and brutal. There are two attacks, corresponding to roughly half the screen. Click on one side to attack on that side. Which attack works seems to be random. When you defend you also get two defenses, also corresponding to half the screen. Successfully defend, you get an attack, the same is true for your enemy. Usually. You get a second after every failed attack to defend against the next, and most enemies don't have a good wind-up. You can figure out how to defend when a blade is halfway to your neck. Good for ambience, bad for survival.

This isn't to say that the system is bad, it just needs more windup. You need to be able to figure out how an enemy is going to attack before his knife is at your jugular. It's less difficult with earlier enemies, but later enemies can get quite fast, and the proper way to guard from attacks coming on the right has less method of leeway than you'd think. It's less halved and more 3/4ths for the left and 1/4th for the right, probably even less. You can always use the buttons on the side, but these feel like they're making the combat less interesting.

A few enemies switch the combat from the back and forth to having to time your attacks. These basically all happen in the crypt area, the head honcho there and the flying skulls all have to have timed attacks. If you don't know how it works...well, the flying skulls you might be able to figure it out, but the boss enemy doesn't even seem like someone you can take in a fight.

The graphic artist for this game clearly had a lot of fun.

You also get a variety of spells to deal with enemies as well as a crossbow. You use these before an encounter starts by clicking on the item and then using it. At least in theory. In practice, the number of attack spells you can get is heavily limited and you need them for certain enemies. The crossbow is also limited to those enemies and three special cases. For all the game hypes up its spells, it's very difficult to get the spells you need, since a lot of the ingredients are hard to find. Not helped by them being a part of the copy protection system and thus no walkthroughs I could find mentioned where they were.

Combat also has other little side bits. As you get wounded, you gradually lose strength and dexterity, which means you hurt them less and they get shots after you hit them instead of waiting until they can defend. Even if you heal yourself, if you've taken enough damage, you can be in a pain state which needs a particular spell with difficult to find ingredients to fix it. There's a reason that savescumming is suggested around this game.

Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty.

The RPG part of this feels like a token aspect put in because it needed to be put in. Strength is your damage, while dexterity, at low levels, prevents you from following up a successful attack. Res is resilience, your defense, get the right spell and you can raise it. There's also a suit of armor, but that means you can barely hold anything else. You have a weight limit and the game doesn't tell you how much you can lift. Life is your health and experience is just the score, apparently. Skill is more esoteric, it depends on the weapon and raises as you attack with it, but I'm not quite sure how it changes combat.

Oddly enough, the adventure half is generally reasonable given the company. Horror Soft tends to have a bad reputation for this sort of thing, but in this game, anything not involving combat is reasonable. Even that tends to be easy to predict after a while. Just move items around and keep an eye on anything you think might be important. The game is not unwinnable in its adventure half, we just tend to forget this because the RPG half wants you dead.

The objective of the game is to collect six keys, so you're going to have to take out that bird, one way or another.

The interface is mostly good. Mostly. Click on an object and what actions you can do light up. The problem comes with your inventory. You don't get a pick-up and drop action, and you need to do both. Instead, you drag objects to the other inventory. Be it yours from the room or the room's to yours. You need to check the room's inventory if you ever left anything there that wasn't originally there. Like, say, putting down spell ingredients in the kitchen.

That said, I did fall prey to the trap that tends to happen in adventure games. How easy it would be to just look up the answer to a nagging question. The only case I felt the game was being truly annoying to pull off was with lighting a cannon. You have magical fire attacks, but as is often the case, you can't light something with magic fire. So you have to find a fire source. Not the hundreds of torches, no, you need to get a piece of coal. Only, the coal is an item you can't just pick up.

Time to reinvent fire.

One of the things I've learned about adventure games is that often developers will go the extra mile in executing their vision instead of doing good enough, even if that isn't something that's going to be readily apparent to a player. On the other hand, you can sometimes notice something might be useful if it seems useless. The player is given a satchel at the start which seemingly has no use. There's an oven in the kitchen that has a piece of coal in it, but if you take it, you get burned.

The answer is to put the satchel in the room, then drag the coal into the satchel. This still isn't enough to light the cannon, because you apparently can't drop the coal onto the cannon that way. Instead, you have to get a pair of tongs from the dungeon. Only, you have to put that into the satchel, then bury the bones of the torturer. If you don't, his ghost comes back to life and kills you. Because apparently he's so much tougher than the other ghosts. At this point, you take both out of your satchel and now you can light the cannon. Of all the times to not be a smoker.

I do feel like the puzzles are less clever than the ones in Personal Nightmare. A lot tend to recall obvious bits of horror trivia or just plain searching places until you find what you want. The ones that don't, well, none of them are on the level of the cannon, but they never really felt clever. Just sort of meh. In a weird sense, this is just about finding out how you can do these things without getting slaughtered by the hordes of roaming guards. And that, in essence, is why this game, despite the difficulty and failings, is fun to play.

Weapons:
For most of the time, you're juggling melee weapons whose only difference is their base damage. Spells and bolts are limited enough that you don't ever seem to use them outside of special situations, making their contribution feel underwhelming. There is a decent selection, at least. 3

Enemies:
For a good chunk of the game, you fight hordes of guards which come in all colors of the rainbow. They vary in strength, but the game uses the same basic guard for most encounters. The only real differing enemies that you can actually find only dwell in one location, one in which you don't want to spend much time in. 3

Non-Enemies:
I don't mind getting insulted for things under my control, but being the constant target of insults when I'm the only one clearing out the castle feels wrong. Though I guess getting yelled at by the hot goth chick is someone's fetish. 1

Levels:
Every area is effectively a circle. Technically it's a square, but you're moving around in a circle, going through rooms one by one. It sounds simple, but in a sense, it works with how confusing the game can get if you don't pay attention. That said, the garden maze is something I would never try to attempt without a map, it's simply insanity. 5

Player Agency:
Attacking isn't as smooth as it could be, but for the most part, everything is easy to get used to and easy to use. 7

Interactivity:
The interaction list could stand a simple pick-up and drop command, but for the most part, I don't have any general complaints about how the adventure half is set up. Specific puzzles vary, of course. 5

Atmosphere:
Elvira is one of the first games to really do horror right. The brightly colored screens serve to hide a horrific and oppressive gameworld. 8

Graphics:
Despite the horror atmosphere, the castles and forests in the game are wonderfully done. Every background is a joy to look at. Human characters, meanwhile, are done well, but in some cases have too little animation. 8

Story:
A token effort, despite the potential for there to be something given the game. We get a background in the manual that could have been anything, and the assumption that we've read it in the game. 1

Sound/Music:
Sound effects are sparse, but effective. Enemies could make a better sound than a high-pitched shriek. The music is properly moody, each area having its own fitting theme. 7

That's 48.

Elvira gets a bad rap for understandable reasons, but this tends to result in people overlooking the game's positives. In a sense, these work too well. A horror game so horrific people fear it. But behind that difficulty is a fun game whenever you defeat those seemingly insurmountable problems. Sometimes a game's true destination is what you get out of it.

I played through the Amiga version, but in the interest of not playing through the game again, I've briefly gone through the rest of the ports.

DOS

From a technical standpoint, this should be better. I'm not entirely sure of the technical details, but VGA is better than the Amiga graphics chip, especially for things based on actual images. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of actual sound, and the soundtrack is less a spooky adventure and more Skyroads. I should really play Skyroads again sometime soon. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it feels less fitting. There's also the option of MT-32 music, which I imagine improves the soundtrack immensely.

Atari ST

It's basically the Amiga version without music and an ad for the movie at the start.

PC-98

Somehow, not just an inferior DOS copy. The combat is a lot slower. Which changes the oppressive atmosphere of the game slightly and makes it a bit easier. The soundtrack is the same as DOS though.

Commodore 64

Basically, a novelty. I tried playing it, but either there's an emulation issue or the game forces you to use a joystick as a mouse cursor. Which is always fun, but here it presents new and exciting challenges! The sad thing is, I couldn't even get combat to work at all. It's cool that they managed to convert nice, shiny Amiga graphics to the C64 though.

Next time, Onesimus, a Christian game using the Jill of the Jungle engine.

Welcome House 2 (1996)

Name:Welcome House 2 - Keaton and His Uncle
Number:247
Year:1996
Publisher:Gust
Developer:Gust
Genre:"Survival Horror"/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (110W/79L)

There's a certain measure of apprehension when you see a video game sequel released the same year as the original game. By default, it means that unless you carved up a bigger game into smaller chunks, you've spent less than a year on this game. This isn't really a problem during the '80s, because you generally just focused on a gameplay loop, or even during the early '90s. Id did their best work in around four years. But by the time 3D models started getting good enough to resemble something?

Welcome House, in case you forgot/missed it, is a Japanese-exclusive PSX game centered around a man called Keaton visiting his uncle's mansion. These days, it reads as a strange parody of survival horror games. There's no real enemies or threat of violence, but it plays like the genre, looks like the genre, and feels like the genre.

There's going to be a lot of this, often just as "telegraphed".

This time around, Keaton's been living with his Uncle Parkinson for a while, but uh-oh, it's the Fourth of July and his prankster Uncle has set a whole bunch of explosives off in his room. Turns out, he's set the entire house up with similar exploding presents. So much so, that he's rigged phones to explode. You better get used to this, because everything in this game explodes.
 

There's going to be a lot of this.

Which sounds like an exaggeration, but the game is practically non-stop explosions. The game really ramps up the physical comedy, to the point that it centers around it. Were it not a comedy game, the mansion would be a deathtrap. Bombs, phones turned into bombs, pits, mechanical traps and even bear traps. Parkinson probably got himself on a few lists with the purchases he made for the events of this game.

Control-wise, the game is unaltered from the first game. Tank controls, circle opens your item menu, square functions as your general action button. Once to use something in front of you, hold down and move forward to run. Start pauses, opening a map, press it again and you get the save menu. In general start functions as an accept button and cross as a cancel button. Which caused me a bit of confusion at first. 

Unlike in more serious games, a sign labeled danger is an indication that you should use it.

Much like the original game, this is advertised a polygon cartoon. In this case, it feels more like a description of gameplay than the general style of the game. You only interact with the game just to engage the game's jokes in the sequence the developer wanted. Everything else is an illusion, you get things like descriptions of objects and rooms, but they don't ever tell you something beyond what you can see in front of you. It's one long joyride.

But the game does have a problem. While it does flow well for the most part, once you stop for whatever reason, it becomes apparent that the game is basically just a series of events that happen, and your contribution is just advancing the plot. Actions that advance the gameplay are either a matter of gameplay, using an exploding phone, obvious, key and door, or random luck, walk through a doorway in a certain way.

One of the descriptions you get when first entering a room.

A good example of this is a room on the second floor with four big cabinets. You can enter here beforehand, only to find nothing inside. What you actually do is wait until later, when Napoleon the Dog flees in here after you get stabbed by him in military regalia. This makes no sense in context either, you just randomly turn away while chasing him around the room. Once you get him inside, whenever you open a cabinet, he appears in the opposite row. How do you solve this? You go to another room, sit on a random chair, which puts a "kick me" sign on Keaton's butt.

Which is not helped by the game following this up by making you give this axe to a lady of the pool, as in, a water elemental that appears in Parkinson's pool, who then gives you the choice of three axes, only one of which advances. I'm also reasonably sure that in order to get this axe exchange, you need to actually go down, talk to the guy repairing the diving board, go up to the second floor where a set of stairs upwards are, which somehow causes the board to be repaired, then return. Not exactly a series of puzzles which tends towards anything but random actions, but at least I understand the logic to axe lady of the lake and axe against chain of same color.  

Keaton gets his revenge against a statue.

Unlike the last game, there is no long awkward backtracking sequence once you seem to reach the end of the game. Instead, it's put all across the game. In a certain sense, the game suffers for this. It's obvious what the really big things you need to go back for are, but all across the game you get little ones which make you go back and forth across most of the mansion. For a game that isn't that long, it's odd that there's such blatant padding in it.

There's voice acting this time around, which is nothing special. They're doing the job you expect them to do and doing it well, but the job isn't special. Nobody rises above the level of the archetype they're expected to do. Because of what the game is, this wasn't ever not going to be the case.

Admittedly, out of context it just looks like a guy laughing at a dead dog, which is a different kind of weird.

The ending of the game is quite spectacular. In order to stop Napoleon from pranking you, you need to bait him with a bottle of booze. Which is in the spirit of what this game is imitating, but damn, it's pretty ballsy to do something like that. That seems like a risky move, even in the '90s. Then, after finding all the objects you need to open Parkinson's secret bedroom/viewing room, you get treated to one, spectacular final explosion. No wonder there wasn't a Welcome House 3, there was no house anymore. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
None.

Non-Enemies:
With the exception of Allegro, most of the characters are one-note and only state and offer simple things, only ever being more than scenery when the rare puzzle comes up involving them. 1

Levels:
Not having a last-minute point in the game where you have to go all across the mansion again and seeing the bizarre changes the game has made over the course of the game does wonders to improve the quality of the place. 4

Player Agency:
Same as last time. I feel like the game could have used a sidestep function, it really, really could have used that. 3

Interactivity:
In addition to the usual look/use actions, you get a lot of choices. Sure, these choices are often for things you have to do, but you get the option. 3

Atmosphere:
While I didn't much care for playing the game, I must admit, the cartoon violence and what awful prank Keaton would fall victim to more than made up for it. 6

Graphics:
It's cartoony, but charming. Keaton gets a wide variation of animations for the various calamities that befall him, albeit he's pretty much the only character with more animations than the usual you'd give a character who walks and talks. That said, it is very obvious that whenever something calls for an object to lose part of itself, the model completely changes. 5

Story:
It's the Fourth of July and let's just have the most explosive one ever, and boy howdy, does it ever deliver. 4

Sound/Music:
Low quality but fitting sound effects and a smooth jazz soundtrack. Unlike last time, when the tracks played in different rooms somewhat randomly, you get some degree of control, since there are radios in numerous rooms you can change the song on. Which doesn't apply to the licensed songs you can find around. These still only work on the jukebox, all one of them that I found. 5

That's 31.

I feel like I was very harsh on a few aspects last time. Despite taking longer than I should have on it, it was enjoyable as an experience, at least. One of those odd games where it could be said that a let's play is the better experience than actually playing it. Since you won't get the joys of wandering around a big mansion wondering what you have to interact with in order to advance.

Next time, another spooky game, albeit, one that's also not quite the usual fare. It's Elvira - The Adventure Game, an adventure/RPG hybrid which is one of the first games to lean into horror more seriously. 

Ixion (1992)

The cover is just this image in black and white. Like something out of the early '80s rather than the early '90s.

Name:Ixion
Number:233
Year:1992
Publisher:Software 42
Developer:Tom Cooper and Barry Clarkson
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (103W/72L)

If you've been reading my previous entires on original FPS for the Acorn Archimedes range, you probably have a mental image of what this one will be already. Mouse-only, crude 3D graphics, straight-forward shooting action, frustrating difficulty and the usual British humor. Ixion is different, it tries to be a complex action-adventure game and as far as I can tell it isn't humorous.

Finding out about the game world on one of the computers.

Ixion has a strange backstory. Taking place in the future, the human race has colonized many other planets, but Earth itself has become an environmental hazard. All but a few places have turned completely uninhabitable. After Earth was evacuated, the population of the galaxy became poor and turned to crime. To combat this, Earth has been turned into a prison planet, what's still vaguely inhabitable of it, anyway. The game begins with the player arriving here, charged with narcotic possession. The objective is simply to escape the planet.

Spiritually, this reminds me a lot of Galactic Empire. Like it, this game comes out as a FPS with adventure game sensibilities. Whereas Empire had a clever dialog system and story to balance out a less than ideal combat system and sometimes frustrating puzzles; Ixion has none of that. Ixion is straightforward, has a bizarre world, and offers nothing but busywork. There isn't even a save system, so if you die or are forced to quit, you have to restart.

A relatively common starting view.

You are placed in the game world with no guidance outside of escape. So it's time to get used to the game world. You move around with the arrows on the GUI. There are no keyboard substitutes. The only keyboard commands are help, pause, minimize the game, (you quit by middle clicking the game's icon, remember Archimedes game) and controlling the size of your radar. To interact with objects in the game world, you left click on objects to use them, assuming you can or you have the item necessary, and right click to shoot.

Oh, except the two things near you when you start; The only non-hostile non-talking human, and a car. The first human you see cannot be interacted with. The first time around, I thought that meant I was pressing the wrong mouse button, and shot at a distance some ways away from him. This didn't turn him hostile, but other, wandering security machines did become hostile.

The car is weird, because you use it by walking into it from a certain angle, like one of the many buildings. It's a godsend of an object, because it allows you to speed around the map. Let me tell you, it isn't fun just walking around it. It's not that big, I think about five minutes from one corner to another, but speed is very helpful. I didn't check the manual enough to figure out that you just walk into the side of it in order to enter it. Considering that it's not obvious where the manual is, and that it violates the rest of the rules of interaction, it's a bit frustrating.

The game has a good amount of places to go to, but there is a proper sequence to it all. This is where the adventure aspect of the game comes in. Sort of. This is like an adventure game in that there is a sequence of puzzles you need to solve in order to advance through the game. It's less like one because you can boil down all puzzles to fetch quests and key to doors. Like a game that decided that the best part of Doom was hunting down all the keys.

I'll take you on a guided tour of the game, rather than the aimless wandering I had to do. To start with, the first location you should head to is west of the starting area. West, not south or north. South is a bar, that'll be important in a moment, and north...first is a locked door, then a place with two guys who kill you if you approach. At least when you first meet them you won't likely make that mistake again.

For a criminal, he's sure a nice fellow.

West is an office building...at least that's the only explanation I have for it. There are many rooms, which have some items. Food, a small amount of cash, some anti-radiation pills and a pair of sunglasses. The middle two are puzzle items, the first a healing item and the shades make the screen slightly darker. The food isn't just a healing item, it's the only healing item. There's also a computer with a floppy drive and no OS.

Then there are two people you can talk to. The first asks if you want some work, take out some guy who wronged him by stealing some of his equipment. The other is a creepy-looking alien who you can't speak to yet. He's very important. Were this a game with more serious world-building as opposed to things that happen, I would wonder what kind of prison colony this is if it has a guy who I later discover is an arms dealer and an alien who, while not as shady as the arms dealer, is still pretty shady.

The guards, from a very safe distance away.

The proper sequence of events now is to head south of your starting position, to a bar. Inside is a charming barman and a lady who wants something. You give money to the barman, and give the drink you get to the lady. She then tells you where the guy is, north of you in an L-shaped building, and gives you a pass so you can get past his guards.

So, combat. As you can imagine from the controls, combat is not fun. Right click releases a steady stream of bullets. From the start, your options are to either launch a preemptive attack and hope you can kill them first, or shift between dodging and shooting. You get a crosshair when you shoot, but it's slightly off-center from where you're aiming. You can dodge behind cover, but enemies that can move will find you, and most of the time you get cover it isn't a fight you should be having anyway. You can shoot enemy bullets, but good luck with that.

And if you get hit, you are in bad luck. The food barely heals you, and health regeneration is extremely slow. I know it happened, but waiting around never seems to make it work. Perhaps it's related to the radiation icon on my HUD being active half the time. The rad pills nullify it just enough so that my health regeneration can deal with it, but not anything else.

Going back to the arms dealer, I get a missile launcher for my trouble. This is another weapon, though it isn't obvious at first. Sometimes it works on an enemy, sometimes it doesn't. Instead of a stream of bullets, it's a higher damaging but slower to fire homing missile. The first time it happened I was confused, because it's much slower. It does make dodging easier when you aren't trying to fire constantly. Not really sure how much better it made combat, for reasons that will be made clear in a moment.

I'm surprised they even bothered to put labels on these things since I just walked in.

The next step is to go to the nuclear power plant to the southwest of the starting area. At this point, sometimes the robot security wandering around the map started to attack me. Why? Dunno, there's no consistent explanation. It's not killing the guy or going near the plant, sometimes it just happens, sometimes it doesn't.

For the power plant, you need the rad pills, otherwise you'll die. There are some slightly more clever puzzles in here. Like shoot some crates to open a door, or use a button to find a slightly hidden elevator. There's a lot of items here, a couple of key cards with letters on them, a floppy disk hidden away, and some Infrared Glasses, which turn the screen red and allow you to see hidden messages. I never found it, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Also in here is a computer. From it, you can log onto different system OSes, but the one here allows you to mess around with the reactor. You can turn it off, and this allows you to get past a force field in another building. I wouldn't ponder the ramifications of this, if any thought was put in, it's clearly that the people behind the design of this place are incompetent. The game suggests that if you wait around for a long enough time, the plant will explode, but I didn't check. If it does, that's a better ending than what you get.

More importantly, the other OSes do things like explain the game world, the backstory, and if you have the right code, invincibility. Yeah, you can cheat in this game by...well, you can just check through the game files. I took advantage of this because I wasn't going to finish the game otherwise. You'll see why.
 

Feels very ZZT-like, which is guess tracks.

At this point the game gets really into the whole keycard and door thing, because now that's basically going to be all you're doing. Your two keycards open a door south and one northeast, which have more keycards in them. These open up the central building, but it's not where you go yet. Instead, there's another puzzle in the building that's dead south, move a big cannon so it'll shoot some crates, this reveals a room with a translator.

That's certainly a charming design.

But before you go talk to the alien, you need to put the floppy in the computer. Why? Because the computer allows access to a room with a battery that's very important. You just need a password which I guess requires the IR Glasses to find, but I never found it. The intended sequence here is to go up to the alien, sell him the battery, bribe two guards in another building so you can get another keycard and enough money to buy back the battery. Or you could just run past the guards.

The central building requires you to first use the battery on one door, then the keycard you got from the place with the two guards you bribe. This gets you a keycard for another door in the room, which has the teleporter. Hope you read the game's backstory and kept a note of the location of the nearby spaceport, because that's where you need to set it too.

 

This is what you get if you don't fall down, because there's no looking up or down.

The spaceport is just pure combat. Go to one of the two buildings, and hope you don't accidentally fall down, then shoot the big crystal to deactivate a force field on the other building. Inside there, shoot a weird flying robot, get a boarding pass, then leave the planet. You slowly fly off into space.

In addition to the puzzles that come off as busywork, there are many robots wandering around the two sectors. Obviously in the second they're always hostile to you, but in the first they start off friendly, but for no reason, turn hostile. I have no idea what triggers the change here, time is the only consistent cause. Shooting someone inside a building, entering the power plant, none of these actions caused me trouble all the time. Which I guess gets down to the game's problem if you somehow fixed the controls.

Turning an adventure game into a real-time 3D action game is just a bad idea. Unwinnable by design puzzles are something most are firmly against, to the point that this hurts the genre a lot in the constant attempts to revive it. But this ignores how bad unwinnable by poor luck is and why games like these haven't been revived in the years since. If it's intended, it can be worked around, if it's bad luck, you don't ever know if what you did was something wrong or just bad luck.

It doesn't help that this game also lacks saving and has numerous gotcha moments. Perilously walking over catwalks, one of which is near the end of the game, and oh, if you keep walking after entering a building you fall down and are completely out of luck. Unless you dig deep, the adventure games you're likely to play aren't that cruel. Even Elvira, which delights in mocking the player, has saving despite more gotcha moments than a game of tag.

That said, there's some stuff that deserves some credit. The computers are fairly interesting, if slightly too full of having to guess at things. Then, the skyboxes, or rather the sky. It probably doesn't come off too well in static images, but there's some clever stuff going on there. Slowly moving around, clouds which are independent objects. Shame it's tied up in a game that really had no need for it. With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
I don't think there's much depth when I was unsure if the missile launcher was an upgrade. 1/10

Enemies:
Nearly all variations on your plain shooter enemy or a turret. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Non-combat NPCs with limited dialog. 0/10

Levels:
There is some semblance of a more natural world, which I kind of liked, but it was counter balanced by the large focus on walking back and forth. A lot of walking back and forth. 2/10

Player Agency:
Mouse-only shooters will be my bane until someone figures out that the keyboard is a helpful tool. 2/10

Interactivity:
For a game that seems to be trying to be an adventure game, far too crude. You use most items automatically, and others you have to enter your inventory to use. It's basically click and the occasional shot towards a crate. 2/10

Atmosphere:
I'll give the game one thing, I certainly feel like I'm walking around an irradiated hellscape of a prison planet. 4/10

Graphics:
Hey, animated people walking around a true 3D world. Take that, Alone in the Dark! Besides that, I noticed that some stationary objects can become invisible depending on where you're standing. I also liked the particle effects. 2/10

Story:
The game world makes no sense. Why does this prison sector have an alien? Why is there some semblance of civilization? Why can I just walk into the power plant? Why do people have food? I don't understand what the game is going for at all! 0/10

Sound/Music:
A title theme, some effects when you walk around, and some interesting sound effects. This one has some early footstep sound effects, which is pretty nice. 4/10

That comes up to 19. Taking out 2 points for no save system, we get 17 in total. Not the worst game or even FPS I've ever played. I appreciate what it tried to do, even if it failed.

Acorn User had a review of the game which feels less like a review and more the act of someone who doesn't want to admit that it isn't as good as he wants to think. He praises basically everything except the lack of saves. You'll get used to the mouse-only controls and it gets rid of the stuffiness of adventure games. He didn't finish the game. Normally, I'd move on, but I'm not feeling charitable about this today. This is the thought process of someone who has developed a cult-like mindset with his system of choice. They don't want to admit that maybe they backed the wrong horse, and instead try to shill whatever seems to them to be the best thing the system has to offer. In comparison to a lot of people I've seen who have this mindset, I think that this isn't so bad. It's outclassed by games I've talked about in the past, but I don't think that the writer knew about those. Taken in the usual isolation these games I've been covering have, this does seem to be a cool prototype. But the gameplay is nothing special, and it doesn't matter how cool a prototype you have if it's just cool without even passable gameplay to go with it.

With that, we've pretty much ended our time with this branch of FPS design. 3D focused open worlds which tend to view pretty much any aspect except the world itself as secondary at best. It's not really a mystery as to why these games failed. Most of them seemed to try to combine action and adventure elements, but the action was never really fun enough to want to run through it and the adventure half was amateurishly done.

It's strange that most of all, what killed most of these games was an insistence on either a bizarre control scheme or simply just using the mouse. I wouldn't recommend most of them if they had traditional control schemes, but I would be more favorable towards them. Some of them might have even been worth checking out for historical purposes.

Next time, I'm afraid I've got a busy week coming up and I've suddenly fallen ill, so I'm probably going to pull out something from 1984. Somehow I still have a good chunk of games from there, but hopefully this will cut it down a little.

Mazer II - The Ghost of Mordaine (1992)

The subtitle is only in some places, perhaps because you don't know who Mordaine is until you've won.

Name:Mazer II - The Ghost of Mordaine
Number:226
Year:1992
Publisher:Big Red Computer Club
Developer:Farfetch Software
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:5/5
Time:15 hours 10 minutes
Won:Yes (98W/72L)

Mazer II is business as usual when it comes to these early days of FPS. It's odd, but not really that unusual to its contemporaries. It's an exclusive to one system, in this case the Apple IIGS, (basically a color Macintosh before they were called that) unique control scheme, an elaborate story that seems unfitting for this era, and pieces of absolute frustration.

The first bit of important information is the title. No, you did not miss my coverage of the first game. I don't know what the first game is. Maybe there isn't one. But the experience is not ruined by the lack of the first game, it's ruined by other things. In fact, I daresay missing the opening of the game may have made the experience better. Mystery is key to a good story, and this game serves mystery up.

One of the curious Mazeworlders, telling me what his problem is.

The story is, you, presumably the player himself, has arrived in Mazeworld, which is a world made of mazes. Mazeworld is in pretty bad shape right now, beings from the Dark Realm are invading, slowly draining the life of the place. These creatures breached in part, thanks to a being called The Adversary, who brought in the Dark Worlders in order to enact some mysterious plan himself. Now you have to stop these people while figuring out what happened to the creators of Mazeworld and a past adversial figure called Mordaine.

It's a basic story, but told in an interesting way. It isn't obvious what the plot development is going to be until you see it, which is important, though I think if you stick to a thought you have when you get most of it, you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right. Being dripfed the story through encounters with people desperate for you to help them or villains about to order your death does wonders. But I think I liked it most of all because, despite being a sequel, feels quite like a story about a children's fantasy world being invaded by some evil. You truly are the only hope.

The game is controlled almost exclusively by the mouse, with the exception of the escape key for the menu. Only, it's a Macintosh mouse, basically. So you get one button doing too many things and then movement which you hope won't go out of the emulator's window because there is no true fullscreen command and even the mouselock function doesn't lock it in the window all the time.

Affirmative energy floating in the game world.

You get four weapons, as such. Only one is truly a weapon, destructive. The other three are for interactions with stuff. Creative, which could be thought of as a use key, except from a distance. Affirmative and negative, which are a yes and no answer to questions. You change, not via any reasonable method, but by holding the mouse button down and dragging it into a certain direction. There's technically a fifth, which is nothing, used for advancing dialog.

Every weapon drains energy, and you of course have health on the left. It regenerates, there are no pickups. Ammo also regenerates. Unfortunately, it regenerates slowly, and enemies are far stronger than you are in numbers, but usually not in actual strength. Combat is weird, because of the controls it was never going to be great, but the game kind of tries. To start with, direct confrontation is suicide. Enemies are better at shooting than you are...not because they actually aim any better, but because they don't have to worry about accidentally shooting creative energy. They actually have the same handicaps you do, in addition to dying in one hit.

Combat with some of the creatures on one floor, this is as close as it gets to a normal FPS.

Enemies respawn, at set points after their death. In theory, you should be able to survive better than your enemies, but in practice, as with Doom's Nightmare! difficulty, this isn't happening. This is basically just a repeat of Galactic Dan, all the good strategies I've picked up over the years don't work when my control scheme is a mouse alone. At least I don't have to jump with the mouse and moving is...normal for a mouse. I get the feeling that the author was really into this whole virtual world thing and using as limited a control scheme as he could manage to get that across. Nice idea, terrible execution.

These guys are blocking a portal, and if I get close they kill me, which would be 100% in place at your usual adventure game.

This ties into what I feel is the real meat of the game, the puzzles. This feels adventure-esque for the simple reason that the actual gameplay is just a disguise for navigating between puzzles. Fighting enemies is incidental. They either respawn infinitely or are invulernable. Not exactly a point in favor of combat. It's very odd, because if it were a few years later, one might say that the choice of an adventure disguising itself as something else was an attempt to make itself more palatable, but in 1992, when FPS wasn't a genre yet? I don't understand it.

The puzzles were pretty good when they were centered around using the four energies cleverly. Paying attention to the world and how someone else is interacting with it. There was one puzzle I couldn't find my way around without cheating, but I can be pretty certain it isn't just a clever application of some energy, since I tried a lot of things and never found a real answer to it. The puzzle after it is also kind of crap, both as a puzzle and what sense it makes with its solution in-universe. Every other puzzle is fittingly logical.

I like this game far better in theory than in practice. It's the world of a children's story if the villain won, where you slowly try to make things right. Dodging enemies stronger and tougher than you as you try to get help from the few remaining helpful entities. This is what it is in my head. In practice, there are two separate genres here, one of which has much more focus on it, while the other is stapled on awkwardly. Which seems to be a common problem with adventure/FPS hybrids, this, Galactic Empire, Inca and Isle of the Dead, to just list the ones I've already covered. I know in all those cases, the developers would have been better off trying to make the adventure half of the equation the whole game. With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
It's hard to describe what you're given as a weapon, more like a single gun with four different ammo types, all infinite. 1/10

Enemies:
Sort of tied into interactivity intimately. Every enemy is tied into a puzzle on the level they're on. While you can delay them all, you can't stop them without solving that puzzle. Some are easier than others to delay though. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
Every time a character acts as a friendly it's basically just a scripted sequence, but it does feel more interesting than most FPS by this point. They're actually helping me for once! 1/10

Levels:
Fairly simple for the most part. As could be expected, a few levels are mazes. The first I didn't find too annoying, you can easily do the wallhugging trick to get where you need to go. (Well, in theory, that was where the puzzle I couldn't solve was) The second, meanwhile, does not allow this trick. It also has hordes of enemies who can easily kill you. The rest are all simple enough to figure out and center around the puzzle more. 3/10

Player Agency:
Annoying, tedious, and I'm tired of this sort of thing. The issues here are half what the game is doing, all mouse, and half what the emulator is doing, you can't really capture the mouse in KEGS. You're also slow and can't sidestep. It takes a moment to shift energies, unless you get unlucky in combat and accidentally switch from destructive to negative energy, which isn't the same thing. It's also annoying to have the use key tied to ammo. 1/10

Interactivity:
For such a limited amount of actions, the game gets some decent mileage out of them. 4/10

Atmosphere:
Mazer really sells itself on the once bright world enshrouded in darkness, with each corner hiding something unpleasant, often for ill. 4/10

Graphics:
Amateurish, but charming and effective. Very little animation though. 3/10

Story:
Were it not for the story, I don't think I would have powered through this one. It's not mind-blowing, but it was enjoyable enough that I felt the effort was worth it. 4/10

Sound/Music:
None.

That's 24. Which is a bit generous for another game with a repulsive control scheme, but does reflect that I found it enjoyable despite its handicaps.

With that, 1992 should be mostly smooth sailing. I have an arcade game and an Archimedes game left, but both of those should be simple enough to cover. There are going to be some replays, of course, but those should be simple. Outside of a Mike Singleton game called Ashes of Empire, everything in the near future looks to be simple enough. Which probably means some of it isn't, but enough of it is that I'm not too worried.

Inca II (1993)

Name:Inca II
Number:220
Year:1993
Publisher:Sierra
Developer:Coktel Vision
Genre:Space Simulation/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:5 hours 20 minutes
Won:Yes (91W/70L)

I don't understand this game. Why it exists, what they tried to do with it, and what they expected people to get out of it. We're four games deep into Coktel Vision's space action games, and while we're slightly better in combat than we were in 1990, we're just getting to, well, it's acceptable, while the rest of the game has been suffering more and more. Galactic Empire had an excuse, it was 1990 and nobody knew what the hell a first-person shooter was, Inca II does not.

My best guess for all this, is that the people assigned to do a game with space combat were not fans of space combat games. They had a list, and had to stick with it. Of course, they didn't put any effort into the adventure game portion either, but we expect adventure games from Coktel, not space sims. The attempts at making the plot more shifting feels like it was taken from space games, since Wing Commander is the only game of this era that actually managed to do something like that.

Which goes all out the window when I look at the credits and see names that were the previous games, some even worked on E.S.S., so they believed in this idea. How are they six games deep into this vague concept and nowhere near being better than when they started? I realize that outside of E.S.S., it's all been downhill score-wise, but that hides that Galactic Empire and Inca were both more about the experiences than the actual gameplay.

He's spying on you!

Inca II is not really about the experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the game has the balls to treat its characters like people and to kill off a main character, but it doesn't keep itself going after that. When I started, I kept thinking about Krull, a visually interesting movie with an unimportant story. Inca treated its world of a resurrected Incan figure in space as completely sane despite being, well, crazy, and I thought Inca II was trying to make the story grounded, the forces of good are just Incan-inspired, the bad guys are just Spanish-inspired.

These space combats are the only place where the story choices matter, you get more if you chose certain actions, which may make the last one easier.

The plot goes off the rails when the main character, Atahualpa, dies and we're forced to play as the main character from the first game, Eldorado. Despite the promises of a branching story, there seems to be no way to avoid this. It's at this point that ideas seem to be pulled from places that have no place belonging in the story as previously established. Every planet seems to have a random person on it who seemingly could not have gotten there and there are frequently no signs of anyone else. It's not surreal, it's ill-fitting.

Eldorado is weird this time around. In combat, he's very obviously mortal, but the existence of his powers implies something a lot more is going on. Most of the game is dedicated to laying down his powers to destroy a great asteroid threatening the Earth, but not that it's going to crash into the planet. At other times, he seems subservient to people he shouldn't be subservient to, like his wife or someone who is effectively a random guy on the council he set up.

WHAT!?

To top it all off, we don't even get a resolution to the game, at the end it turns out that a here-to-unmentioned god (Unless you count the European title) got awakened, presumably by Eldorado, and then does some stuff. It's not even a sudden downer, he just comes back and shoves off. Nor is it a Cthulhu Ex Machina. What was the point of anything then!?

Getting to the gameplay, we now just have space shooting sections and adventure sections, no more ground combat. I can't help but feel that this change is for the worse, it's not that they were good in of themselves, but they made adventure sections you moved around in; Here every adventure section is very self-contained. Maybe this would be better if they were better, but I just feel limited in what I can do in every place.

Most of all, this feels like an interactive movie, better than that implies from the time, but worse than that should be. It's feels like you're just acting out your part in a script you haven't read, and everyone else just awkwardly stands there waiting for you to do your part. Things that would make sense for a character in a movie to do fill the game. The game frequently does these in a way that only works because you have such limited options that you would naturally do these things just by clicking around.

Look ma, a 3D cutscene!

Don't get me wrong, there are actual aspects of this that are an interactive movie, like little cutscenes that play to show some action has taken place or the overwhelming importance of the story. Which is odd because it doesn't feel like the story should be the primary part. It's just that usually when a game is like an interactive movie, it's either a crappy game full of FMV, or a game with a nice story that puts you in control of the nice action scenes. I'm guessing this is just a failed attempt at the later, but my last guess was very wrong.

Such lovely art, wasted here.

The adventure game sections are pointless, they're just there for pretty backgrounds. But the space sections, well, they're just there because the last game had them. I could go into detail, but you basically move with the mouse and you have an infinite laser weapon, along with specialized missiles for special targets. I want to point out that I was playing along with the TAG review, and Ilmari, who lost every space battle last time, won the final space battle. If someone who admits they aren't good at the genre won, do I need to go into detail? Though I must admit, I'm not sure there's much detail to go into.

It's not technically just moving the face up and down, but it sure looks like it in motion.

Visually, it's very nice, the 3D is of the period to a certain extent, but the 2D art is very nice. Two complaints I have are that some of the 3D animations loop far too obviously, and the real actors are animated by moving parts of their face down. That's very awkward, and I can't help but feel like it was intended as a counter to Lost in Time's lack of showing the mouth. Like these guys felt that no mouth was a lame move. I think it's the opposite, no mouth gave a mysteriousness to that game, whereas this felt cheaply animated.

If anything, the game looks too good for what it is. It's like a book where the cover is really cool, but the actual writer is boring at best. Often, a really beautiful screen will flash by for a single moment, never seen before or after. A graphic artist's hours are not the same as a programmer's hours, but still, they were used for something that wasn't that important.

The CD version I played added in some stuff which honestly made the experience worse. There's a maze and then a final puzzle which add absolutely nothing to the game, much like the rest of the endgame. Then we have the voice acting. Everyone is terrible. Sometimes this works in the game's favor, like Atahualpa sounding like a whiny teen or the Han Solo knock-off sounding like he's collecting a paycheck. Other times it doesn't, like Eldorado being wooden in a way that never works. When Eldorado's son dies, his cry of "no" doesn't sound like he's dead, just that he ordered an expensive souffle for dessert and he wants to see a football game at home.

To close this off, I just thing that in most little ways this game was worse. Like I said, Inca was an experience, this was not. There are no little touches that make the game come off as Incan-themed, even the music is just sort of there. It's not really Incan themed, it's just sort of there, filling the void. I recognize it listening to it after the fact, but it just isn't interesting or memorable.

Weapons:
A laser weapon with a weird firing arc, and basically weapons that take out one kind of target. There's no crosshair, and there's no way to figure out where you're actually shooting. 1/10

Enemies:
The game talks up a lot about enemy ships, how many varieties there are, how they're all piloted by different kinds of pilots. The difference is that some don't move, some do, and sometimes there are way too many. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Despite a great deal of implication, there are no in-game friendlies. 0/10

Levels:
Something I never thought I'd say, but the game flows too well. It ensures that the game doesn't get stale, but at the same time it plays out like a series of events with no buffer between them. 3/10

Player Agency:
You control 99% of the game with the mouse, shoot, turn, all the adventure stuff. Other actions require the keyboard. Plus and minus control speed, although it's sometimes automatic. The function keys select your weapons. Some other keys, along with spacebar, control your targeting. You can tell it's a European game of this era when the developers don't understand how a keyboard is supposed to be used. 5/10

Interactivity:
Click on things and things happen, sometimes the puzzle makes sense, often it doesn't even if it should. 2/10

Atmosphere:
In theory, a wide variety of differing places and moods should work for a space opera game...but that is done far better in other works. 3/10

Graphics:
For the most part, beautiful and well-animated. 8/10

Story:
I don't understand any of this, at all. 1/10

Sound/Music:
It's fine, everything works, nothing feels out of place, but nothing is memorable. 7/10

That's 32, but I feel it's inappropriate for it to be higher than Inca given what I've said, so let's subtract 3 more for 29.

Is this one of the worst games of all time? Personally, I'm going to say no, but I can see where someone could argue for it. Would I say it's one of the worst adventure and/or space simulation games ever? Adventure, no, any game that I can finish within 6 hours is not near that list. Space simulation, maybe. I haven't played enough yet to know if something like this would qualify. The thing is, to be one of the worst games you really have to have hated it.

I don't hate Inca II, I am confused by it. It doesn't know if it wants to be as crazy as the original or just a space opera game with an Incan theme, starting off somewhat mundanely before going into utter insanity. The space combat sucks, but somehow two people who sucked at it managed to bumble their way into winning it. Even the more chaotic battles. The adventure game sections, even when they come off as reasonable, manage to make themselves seem convoluted.

It's not something I'll ever have a bugbear about, but it just leaves me scratching my head. Why did they do this, and why did they do this that way? A lot of good time was spent on this game, and nothing ever really tied it together. More than any other Coktel Vision game, I want to know what was going on behind the scenes. I understand where other games are starting and going, at least vaguely, this feels like three different plots tied together. Why the ending? Why the ending?

The next, and final Coktel Vision space game is 1995's The Last Dynasty, which by my current reckoning, will be played along whenever TAG covers it in 1995, assuming it's another adventure/action hybrid like the past four. Other Coktel Vision games will probably be played when I get to the years they're released in and whether or not they're actually worth playing here, I think only a couple are fully within my interest. For now though, it's time to return to Rejection, and not a moment too soon.