MechWarrior (1989)

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

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

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

More ominous than helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A selection of random mechs and their ace pilots.

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

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

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

One versus two, good odds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon we shall engage in an epic battle.

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

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

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

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

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

Note the heavy damage on the enemy here.

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

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

A situation which is about to end badly for me.

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

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

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

Tactical warfare.

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

Another satisfied customer.

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

Everything of value in the 31st century.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking to a bartender about some likely important matter.

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

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

One of the longer choices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With that, let's get to the rating.

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

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

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

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

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

Interactivity:
None.

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

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

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

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

That's an impressive 32.

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

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

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

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

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

Sharp 68000

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

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

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

PC-98

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

SNES

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

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

MechWarrior: Won

As well as things went for most of this session.

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

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

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

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

Hey, I actually got the text this time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Session: 3 hours 15 minutes

Final Time: 6 hours 15 minutes

MechWarrior: Lost?

Reminder, I'm using one button to take screenshots, meaning that the second you press a button it's gone so fast even a machine can't capture it.

Continuing my quest to find Griez, I head to Land's End. Here, there are no chances to take missions, but if I go to the bar and order a drink, I can meet with someone who knows where he is. Exit and reenter, and I threaten him unless he tells me where Griez is. The guy tells me to head to Delacruz. It's here that I find him, living like an Arabian sheik.

He isn't the guy I want though, oddly enough, and judging by how elaborate the game describes his underground base, fighting him is suicide without some guys on my side. However, he does offer to tell me what I want to know if I deliver some merchandise to Dustball. There, I'll be told what I need to know. However, Dustball is a planet in the northwest and I'd prefer to get another mission through before spending another 150k on travel.

Since there's no missions on this world, I head across the border back to Davion and do a security duty mission. This one goes well for me, because he decides to ignore me and head for what I'm defending, which exposes his backside to me. He never even gets off a shot, and I cripple his legs. That leaves me 250k richer.
 

I sure love being given choices with no way of knowing what the right one is.

Now that I've got a little cash, I head to Dustball, which turns out to have been ironically named. Home of the pleasure domes. I meet with the agent and after removing the goods, tries to kill me, at which point I get the chance to either run or fight. I fight, at which point I get a flowery description of Gideon kicking him and the lazer shot bouncing off some walls and hitting the goods I gave him. I get another chance to fight or run. If I fight again, the goods explode and kill me, so running is the safe option. As I hide, the guy says out loud that Griez wants me dead because I might know about a ship used for smuggling. He then tells me to look for it, the name of the ship being the Stone Arrow.

The barkeeper has plenty of information about it. It turns out it arrives here on Dustball from time to time, the captain calls himself Kangaroo Jack. Which at the time was probably just a weird name, but now outs the owner as a man who enjoys classic cinema of the 21st century. Unless there are millions and millions of kangaroos out in the stars, but since his actual name is Willard Puritan, that seems unlikely. His brother, Wendall, drives a Scorpion for Smithson's Chinese Bandits, who are currently pulling garrison on Mosiro. I'm either going to interrogate him or capture him, so off I go.

You can stick this much text on-screen, but you can't tell me what I'm looking for in the intro?

Heading to the mech bay, I find him working on what is apparently an old mech. After some conversation, he tells me that he and his brother don't get along, and that whatever I want to see him for is bad. He tells me to head to Delacambre, where he has a woman. As I leave, a dark figure attacks me and I get another choice of fighting and running. Fighting gets me killed, but if I run I can survive to live another day. Despite having a destination, the amount of travel is getting to me, so I head to the first planet I can which offers missions, in which case, is Betelgeuse in Liao.

Checking the news again, there's a criminal named Wayland Smith who is worth 50k, which is not a good deal considering how much effort that would likely be. McBrin has stolen the Vandenburg family vineyard by using the finance group he cooked up. And the Federated Suns have concluded some wargames in order to show they're not pushovers. My mission ends up being another garrison mission, in which I take out one scout who never even attacks me. Easy money. 

Delacambre is on the far east side of Davion space, costing me nearly 200k in travel fees. There is nothing here I can do. No girlfriend, no missions, no nothing. I reload my save after the last mission and do another one. Defense of field com unit. This one is a surprise in a sense, it's another mission where the enemy ignores. This time, rather than a light mech, it's a medium one, I believe. Never attacks me. Nearly takes out the unit, but I do it before he can take my mission fee. How much does this earn me in salvage, considering that I'm getting a single digit percentage? 79k of C-bills. I see how this should have gone. If I was smart and actually went after medium and heavy mechs instead of just fighting evenly, I could have enough money by now for another mech and be an actual team of mercenaries.

At first, I think I've put myself into a technically unwinnable situation, but fortunately, there is still hope. On Tiantan, a group of mercenaries known as the Gray Death Legion massacred helpless civilians. This is the juiciest target yet, I just need to head out to where they were and find out where they went. Which actually means heading to the only named place there I can reach, Tikonov. This too, is a dead end. Well, mercenary work should be fun.

I'm feeling overconfident, so it's time to try to take out a medium mech in a normal fight. It turns out, when your enemy actually fights back, you really can't just take out a medium mech in a light mech. It might be that the previous mechs I found were actually just light mechs, but the amount of missiles this particular model can pump out is too much for me to handle outside of luck. That said, I do manage to do a defense mission despite the enemy seemingly being in another medium mech.

I try another mission against a medium mech. Several times. The idea is to fight smarter, not harder. If I sneak up behind them, I can attack their less defended side. Sneaking doesn't really work since the enemy automatically starts moving whenever I get within a certain distance, and by the time I get close, they've turned around and are shooting at me. Right back where I started. That leaves the other option, shoot him in the legs. If you lose a leg, you fall over and lose, because you can't hit anything. I can't damage him enough in the legs before he takes me out in some way, so this just isn't happening.

So, it's off to deal with garrison duties where the enemy won't attack me head-on. These aren't going to be interesting anymore, simply because all one-on-one missions will end the same. I get token damage, he gets knocked down, I start raking in the C-bills. That leaves me to just monitor the news, since I have no leads on the chalice anymore.

In Galedon, Wolf's Dragoons contribute heavily to local mayhem, in-between slaughtering Kurita troops in battle, they kill civilians in a bar brawl. Sadly, by the time I've heard of them, they're already off somewhere, likely to work for Davion. Interestingly, Kurita and the Dragoons were supposed to be working together. I doubt they're the people I'm looking for, just a sepcial combat target.

I head back to Kurita space. No real reason or destination, just feel like improving relations with them. Interestingly, I try a defense mission, since it had a medium mech as the opponent...and no fight occurs. This, apparently, is enough to constitute breech of payment. Yeah, I think I'm going to stick to Liao space.

This, as it turns out, also puts me in a situation where I can defend against a medium mech. If I go behind him as he heads towards his objective, he does nothing to stop me as I follow behind him and pelt him with lasers. As long as you aren't in an enemy's line of sight, it seems like there's nothing he'll do to you.

My next mission tests this to the limit. I do another defense mission against a medium mech. Or rather, two of them. Their AI is the same as in previous defense missions, ignore me, go after their target. This turns the mission into a simple case of me gunning down two medium mechs. I don't succeed in time before one reaches the factory I'm defending...but it seems like I took him out before he does any serious damage to the factory. This nets me a cool 500k. A few more missions like this and I might just get myself an ally.

I do another mission. Turns out that just about everyone says you failed a defense mission if nobody ever shows up to fight you. Apparently some people haven't heard the phrase, no news is good news. Speaking of news, two important royals of Davion and Steiner wed, and "The Fox" has declared war on House Liao. Who I guess is a member of House Davion. This is unfortunate for me, seeing as those are the two groups I'm on good terms with, and Davion is currently kicking Liao's butt. The question is, do I stick with the war or flee for safer passages?

So I do another defense mission for Liao, and surprisingly, nothing happened and they still paid me. Guess war does that to someone. Off-screen, the planet I'm on, Tikonov, is supposed to be in Davion hands, even though nothing changes on the map screen and in the missions I get. This is more or less how it goes as the war continues. I get missions from Liao, plenty of cash for doing so, and Davion is constantly kicking their butt off-screen.

The five year mark passes and McBrin finds the chalice on an undisclosed bandit world. He gets the Dukeship (Dukedom?) and I have lost. The game continues, however, and I guess I can continue as long as I want to? It seems after a while, there's just no story and there's seemingly no way for me to actually lose short of going back to Ander's Moon.

Now that I have enough to buy another decent mech, I can hire myself another guy to pilot my old Jenner. Because I got myself a Shadow Hawk and I'm going to use the increased firepower to change approximately nothing about my usual strategy. I do hire a fairly good quality guy for the princely sum of 1000 a month. That's 12k a year. For reference, every mission I've done has paid out at least 140k. Even considering I'm repairing and rearming the mechs myself, that's cheap. It would have been even cheaper if I got a rank amateur for 400. 

Friendlies operate on a simple command screen. Each mech gets a command at the start of the mission, corresponding to whatever the objective is. If it's to defend something, they defend it, if it's to attack, they attack it. Meaning that in an attack mission, you can start thinking about strategy, but in a defense mission, it's safe to leave them to their own devices. Especially since the game doesn't pause for any of this. Hope the hostile wasn't right on top of you!

Any real command I can give here is effectively pointless. By the time I give it out, the enemy is already within range, and he goes blindly after him. This is an interesting aspect, but does bias the use of these missions to solo acts. Because having an ally turns a defense mission from a safe and easy way to get capital into an incredibly risky venture. See, now the enemy knows that he's outnumbered, he'll continue his blind attack at the object I'm defending. If he thinks he's about to die, he activates his jump jets, flies over us and then lands inside the building. This means if I try to hit him, I accidentally attack the building and he does nothing, content to let me do his job for him.

Jump jets, are installed on most mechs and are a complex bit of gameplay which changes movement considerable. I can't figure it out and just end up smashing my mech's legs. This was even with the Jenner, a light mech. Not even going to try it on the Shadow Hawk. I feel like in a game like this its tactical utility is limited to points where I was probably going to lose even if I knew what I was doing.

At this point, that's about it. I can do missions across the galaxy to my heart's content. You know, except if I try to get missions from someone I've ticked off too much. They'll let me stay there, but giving me a mission is too much, apparently. At this point I feel quite strongly that there isn't much point to hanging around. It's nice that it's an option, since otherwise this would be a giant galaxy of stuff to do while you're slavishly limited to the plot, but I need to solve the actual plot.

This Session: 2 hours

Total Time: 3 hours

MechWarrior: Introduction

I do not know anything about BattleTech. This is not something, I should say, is directed in a general way towards certain types of tabletop games. Despite my experience with Warhammer 40k being two abandonware games 15 years ago, I vaguely understand most concepts and ideas contained within the franchise. No, BattleTech is something that I've somehow completely avoided over the years.

As far as I'm willing to credit it, I think that most of the games being complex mech sims when I already struggled with something on the more arcade side in Armored Core (So I assume) had something to do with it. Let's just say that I've been content to watch other people do things in mechs rather than do it myself for a while. This of course, bodes extremely well for me being able to get anywhere with the game.

I'm going to try to piece together what I can from the in-game writing and the manual. Looking at the BattleTech wiki reveals that there is a considerable amount of stuff to go around in the universe, over sixty thousand articles, most of which are irrelevant to the game, but still presents me with a somewhat overwhelming introduction. The manual starts off pretending it's some sort of in-universe document, some mercenary The Anarchist's Cookbook, but beyond the intro, there's not much to show this. It's a bit less than fifty pages, bigger than some, but on the smaller side for a simulation.

The backstory the manual gives out is a brief history of a thousand years in which this universe differs from our own. The Western Alliance forced world peace back in 2014, gradually becoming the Terran Alliance by the 22nd century, at which point faster-than-light travel is developed enough to launch interstellar colonization. For the next hundred years humans expanded to over six hundred worlds.

War broke out as the colonies began to rebel against the Alliance. Six years later, the Alliance was broken and a mass exodus of Earth took place, and by 2314, the Terran Alliance had collapsed. This mattered little, as soon the Terran Hegemony replaced it and small-scale wars continued to rage until 2550. This is where BattleMechs come in, the now standard weapon of war in the "ritualized" warfare of the time. This would continue until the Star League took control and instituted a period of peace for a hundred and fifty years.

At which point, until the present, 3024, such brutal warfare occurred that manufacturing for modern equipment was so poor that cannibalism of existing equipment was the rule, rather than the exception. Now there is peace, but knowing the past thousand years, even if there's no open warfare, there's going to be plenty of opportunity for a mercenary. 

I wonder how much of this is actually going to be important to me.

There's this map of the Successor States, presumably the disintegrated Star League's follow-ups. Five alliances control the area, each made up of smaller powers. How much each section controls is not show in the manual, however...

Neither the bandits nor the Outworlds are available to reach.

In-game, we get this, revealing that of the five powers, there is also an Outworlds Alliance that I didn't realize was a separate thing until now. The Bandit Kingdoms, are obviously separate, but probably not important. The most important thing to know however, is that as a mercenary, trust no one. Even your employer is going to try to fleece you out of money. It's been a thousand years and nothing has changed.

This would be a great introduction if there was also information about what I needed to do beyond "find the skull."

The actual game places the player in the role of Gideon Braver Vandenburg, the eighteen year old leader of the newly formed Blazing Aces. Whenever you start a new game, you start on a random planet with a text box that is quite interesting, but tells us nothing of what it actually means. Find someone who has a crest of a death skull with wings behind it within five years. Well game, if a random eighteen year old can be the leader of a group of mercenaries, that's going to be a tall order. Unless in a thousand years people have suddenly decided that having cool skulls as your logo is not cool.

From top left, crew, mechs, missions, travel, bar and options.

There are six options on the menu. The first is that of your crew and news. The game never actually tells you the main character's full name all at once, but trust me. That's going to be important. The crew screen allows me to change mechs and see the skills of my soldiers. If I had any. Mr. Vandenburg is a solo act right now. Why you might ask? Let's check the news.

"Let's just casually have the plot go by and the player will definitely notice!" -The Writer, (Mark Brenneman, probably)

At which point, I really wish the manual decided to explain this. A thousand years of bloody warfare can be summarized in a paragraph before explaining the actual plot of the game! You don't even need to alter the number of pages we have! I'm supposed to be playing as Vandenburg, I should already know this rather than just assume it from context! This is important! It changes the context from "poetic reasoning to find someone within five years" to "bring back your father's killer so you can reclaim your birthright". Being cute is stupid here, I'm not sure I would have figured it out if I didn't look up this game on the BattleTech wiki to find out what Gideon's first name is. At no point so far has his full name been mentioned.

Now, the reason for this, unexplained in the manual, is that with the game, there's an affidavit explaining what happened. As in, there's a single page, an in-universe document, explaining what the heck is going on. See, Clan Vandenburg and Clan McBrin are rivals, and because of the valor of the two clans in the Succession Wars, Ander's Moon is a dukedom on the border of Kurita and Davion space. Whenever the old duke dies, a new duke is elected, anointed in oil from the sacred Chalice of Herne, an artifact from old Terra.

Jarris McBrin engineered a bandit attack on the player's father, and ensured it's success by sabotaging the castle's sensors. He just so happened to be on maneuvers with a news crew in tow. The skull in front of bat wings? Symbol of the bandits. Now that Jarris is the hero, he denounces the former duke as someone consorting with the bandits, and has evidence, which is presumably faked in some way. He then tries to get elected as duke, only to fail because the Council wants to hold off until Gideon reaches legal adulthood on his 23rd birthday. Jarris then beats Gideon up and tells him to leave the moon, but telling him that the bandits have the Chalice. In very shonen-esque dialog, I might add.

Gideon meets with a friendly councilman named Jordan Rowe. Rowe believes that Jarris is a pawn for someone else, and brings up deposits of radioactive materials, which the Kurita, a foreign power, would find very useful. He'll try to find proof of this, while Gideon will turn himself into a skilled mercenary to find the Chalice. To this end, Rowe gives him the mech and the C-bills he has at the start.

This explains everything and I'm glad it exists, but man, this kind of annoys me. This is fifty percent on the developers and fifty percent on people ripping this game for the internet. For the later, while I realize I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, come on, you can't scan a single page that explains the game's story? The easiest thing in the world to scan? The developers on the other hand, come on, this could have been at the start of the manual. It's not like you actually commit to the bit of the manual being an in-universe document. 

I can't help but think that having missiles above the cockpit like this is bad mech design...which might be true in-universe as well.

Back to the menus. The second option is to review your mechs or get new ones. For some mysterious reason, my mech has some light damage and needs a bit of reloading. I guess it was mothballed. Fortunately, I have a million space bucks, or whatever the BattleTech currency is. I'm starting to get the feeling that this game wasn't intended for people who didn't play the tabletop games. There's also the fun factor of sometimes parts not being in stock, but I'm not too worried about that.

Buttons or bullet holes? You decide!

The third option is for missions, the fourth is the map and travel options, the fifth is the bar and the sixth is the options. At the bar, I can get a drink or hire some people to be part of my crew. The drink functions as a rumor mill, in this case, Gideon asks the barkeep about a skull with bat wings. He says to ask some other guy, who would know. The game's just going to be this way, telling you things you have to just look around to find out about. I prefer to have some active income before I start hiring people, so let's do some mercenary work!

In theory, if your mech was damaged and you needed money to fix it, you could take advantage of the payable immediately bit, but that seems like a very specific scenario.

Mission briefings are basically just simple objective lists along with probable enemy forces. I'm not sure if there's any real practical difference between planets and objectives. Planets are planets, I would think, and objectives are all going to boil down to shooting the enemy mechs until they are either destroyed or gone. Assuming fleeing is programmed in.

Surprising amount of variety in mountains, not that it's going to matter too much.

There's a map, which going in I don't understand at all. I'm on the left, the enemies are on the right, and what I presume to be the property is in the corner. Note the two red dots, the briefing was wrong. I am mildly upset, I can understand making a mistake between 2 and 3, but 1 and 2?

Beautiful.

The game world is that style of blocky 3D we've come to expect from the early days, vague lumps shaped like mechs, then a featureless plain for everything else except important terrain. In this case, mountains. Although the enemy here is foolish enough to not realize I'm coming closer until I open fire.

Controlling the mech is deceptively easy. Numpad moves, up increases acceleration, down decreases it, left and right turns. There is a targeting sensor you can up and down to hit weak points, N and M, which despite how it seems is of vital importance, since you aren't automatically aiming at anything. Enter targets, and space shoots, going through all your weapons in order based on what is currently activated in your Automatic Weapons System. It's on and includes every weapon by default and I see no reason to mess with this at the start.

Wow, nighttime!

This ends badly...not because of any obvious reason, but because of two things. I didn't understand the AWS at the start and turned off the missiles, because why would I want those? The second is that his shots are constantly causing me to overheat. So I can't move or shoot, which as you can imagine, causes a death spiral and I die so badly the game crashes DOSbox.

Fortunately, I have saved at the very start of the game. Interestingly, the game has thirteen save slots, but you manually make all saves, which means you can have more than thirteen saves, but you can't use more than thirteen at a time. Also, the number of enemies on a mission is random, so there's only one the second time around.

This time, I do everything I can right. I don't screw with my AWS, I target him ahead of time, and when I think it's reasonable to do so, I open fire with a missile. They're dumbfire on this thing, which I discover when I miss once. That's okay, my initial missile hits and my follow-up blasts strike true. I'm blasting this guy apart like he did me. I'm going to win...and the game crashes when he dies. Must be a bad rip.

I spend a bit of time and determine that despite allegedly being playable in the version of DOSbox I'm using, it isn't. Fortunately, I don't yet need to switch to one of the Japanese versions lying around, and can instead play it in DOSbox Staging...which I probably should have used to begin with, considering that it's got MT-32 music. Barely, and at the cost of apparently putting the combat in CGA for some reason. It's not really justified.

That's some choice armor.

But this does work, finally, I get to finish a mission for the swell reward of...150,000 C-Bills. My repair costs are about half. The mission also sets me from April 3025 to July, or depending on what counts, three or four months. Which given the five year time span, means that a campaign consists of either 15 or 20 missions. Pretty la-di-da approach to mercenary work considering you have a time limit.

So...we got him drunk with cheap Baijiu.

When I go to repair my mech, I get this. This must be the guy I was looking for. Considering we're talking about someone who went after a duke, they have to be pretty gutsy, so if there was a regular unit with it, we'd know. Though pirates ballsy enough to do that also seem like they'd be obvious. What I'm saying is, there are only so many groups in the universe, so either there are a lot of big tough groups around, or this is a small-time group of dudes.

I check out how much a new mech would cost, and the only option is another Jenner, the one I currently have, in pretty used condition. It costs nearly four million C-bills, which means that at the rate I'm currently getting paid, I will never get another one. Even if I do perfectly, that's twenty missions. I'm getting a sinking feeling here.

Since I figure that my target is probably somewhere nearer to Kurita, so I travel near to the border. Costs me 45k C-Bills, but it's a reasonable expense for the moment. On my next mission, I shop around for various options. Since I don't like my chances with anything tougher than a light mech, my options are limited, and it seems like 150k is going to be what I'm getting on the regular unless I find something that gives me more money or stuff, somehow.

My second mission is a capture of ammo and weapons, fairly straight-forward. One enemy target on the briefing, none on the map. This, as it turns out, is inaccurate, it's behind a mountain. Apparently line of sight applies to my briefings too. I'm sure that won't be a problem later. This guy I gun down quickly with a bit of luck on my side.

Let's go back to the news. See, every time you complete a mission, you get four or so months worth of information regarding bandit/pirate attacks. This is as considerable as you'd expect, though less so than if we were getting information about bandit attacks in a known universe with over two thousand inhabited worlds. Older messages are automatically removed, but there does remain consistent messages between missions. 

Wanted, dead or alive, same price, is a pretty interesting way to do business.

Of interest to me now, there's Grig Griez, whose wicked acts are endless, but still only carries a 200k reward. That's enough to pay for ammo and repairs at least. There's also Helmar Valesek, the self-proclaimed bandit king of Santander V, who I know has a group of mechs with him and allegedly superior tactics. I think that despite the risk, I'll head for Santander V.

The way you find out where a planet is, is to activate the planets sub-menu on the travel screen. And I can't find Santander V, but I can find Galedon V, where I can find the last known whereabouts of Grig Griez from the local authorities. Also, nice Star Wars reference, I wonder if you can sue someone for using a random planet from your work in theirs?

Taking a screenshot automatically removed the text, considering it's the home key, that's a bit over-sensitive.

Griez, the arch villain, I love the writing in this, is on an uncharted planet beyond Land's End. Since I spent 45k to get here, I decide to pick up a mission first. Something tells me not following the proper chain of events is going to result in something not triggering. And actually...this kind of is Land's End. Well, no matter, I should probably get the Kurita's on friendly terms. This is a garrison mission, which means they come to me. 

This is the easiest mission yet. Don't go after them means I can focus on aiming, because as much as I hate to admit it, aiming a target indicator up and down and adjusting my speed at the same time is tricky. A few lucky missions beforehand and I barely get hit. That said, it is disappointing that my missile launcher takes so much heat to use, come on, ammo weapons aren't supposed to do that! (as a general matter of course, not necessarily something about BattleTech, something, something, game balance)

Boy, Jarris isn't wasting any time waiting on grinding the peasantry under his sole.

With that, the year is over and Gideon is a year older. Rowe is desperately trying to keep Gideon's supporters together as the economy on Ander's Moon begins to tank thanks to the Vandenburg's assets being seized. No joke, McBrin is opening a financial service...thing, which I'm sure is going to end up with some It's a Wonderful Life level screwery as the place is in such bad shape that food shortages are expected.

If I'm not mistaken, the left arm is completely destroyed, very modest repair cost.

There are new mechs here in Kurita space. Three Locusts are for sale, which are reasonable priced, under two million, I could reasonably get these within the decade. Of course, they also look like fodder to be shot down. There's also a Phoenix Hawk, which is only slightly more expensive than my current Jenner and much more reasonable for my playstyle of waiting for the enemies to come to me. I feel like before I get a new mech, I need a bit of buffer capital, since I know I'll get screwed on the trade-in.

Before I end this, I'd like to bring up reputation, which I briefly mentioned. There's a general reputation, of which I'm still risky, and faction relations. Curiously, despite everything I've done being allegedly bandit fighting missions, I had Kurita another group as slightly negative before doing one for Kurita.

Considering how this game is going and how simple and playable it is, I may just try my hand at a second campaign since it's almost inevitable that I'll lose.

This Session: 1 hour