Pickle Wars (1994)

Name:Pickle Wars
Number:264
Year:1994
Publisher:MVP Software
Developer:Redwood Games
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Systems:DOS
Country of Origin:USA
Difficulty:3/5
Time:8 hours
Won:Yes (117W/89L)

Of all the shareware companies those who browsed the lot of the era know about, MVP Software is the least likely candidate for most valuable player. Sure, Apogee didn't always do action and sometimes Epic MegaGames was neither epic nor mega, but you were usually in for a tolerable time. MVP Software did less interesting games than those who decided to go it alone. Say what you will about the Hugo series, but even those were more interesting than Robomaze.

I will however, add an asterisk to this. Rings of the Magi is a pretty cool puzzle game, and I can't speak to the quality of their card games, but in the action sphere? Before starting on this entry I thought they were responsible for one particularly crap top-down game that I remember crashing a ton on period hardware. In this regard, I must apologize, they aren't as bad as I thought. Heck, they published something from Redwood Games, the people responsible for Math Rescue and Word Rescue. It's not going to be that bad...I say before having to install a DOS game using a Windows installer that doesn't even work.

As I alluded to last time, this has music from Bobby Prince, and comes in boring Soundblaster, ultra rich Gravis UltraSound, and last decade rich person's Roland MT-32. Since the UltraSound one crashed my emulator, MT-32 it is. This game was also written by Ellen Guon, who wrote some novels with Mercedes Lackey and contributed to the expansions to the first two Wing Commander games, as well as the second game. Whether or not that's impressive, I don't know. Lackey co-writes a lot of novels, so for all I know she's the feminist fantasy version of James Patterson, which...might be a compliment to Guon, except that she stopped writing novels after these co-writing ventures.

The story is, on the peaceful planet of Arcadia, an evil race of aliens, who have been dubbed "the dread Pickles", have invaded and Arcadia's...Coast Guard, is powerless to defend against them. But our hero, Dave, a history student at "University", finds Lord Geric's Depository of Ancient Weapons, which contain the legendary SaladShooters®, which causes the Pickles to faint and along with the Coast Guard officer Linda, shall drive back the evil invaders once and for all.

As you might guess, this game is slightly humorous. Our heroes are using an actual, real world, licensed product...which is basically just a vegetable slicer. The evil antagonist turned his brother into a pickle. I guess his name is Rick, am I right!? (I don't care about that show and won't pretend to) It's moderately funny. I'm not going to print out one of the jokes and put it on my fridge, but I chuckled.

Once you're past the intro, the game asks you what difficulty you want. Every time you start the game, incidentally. There's the usual main menu. The instructions explains the game, options are your usual options plus saving/loading, minus the sound card select. Demo is a demo, story reopens the intro. High Scores is what you expect, and about is actually the credits. Read mail I'll explain once I start.

The game starts you off in a random-looking room. Boy, my guy looks a bit out of place, but I have to say despite the oddness of the different elements, it might just make a better whole. He doesn't quite match how he looks in cutscenes, oddly. The music's strange, it's ragtime-esque with a squarewave occasionally popping in. It's like if there was a ragtime Sonic the Hedgehog track. I...actually like this better than I was remembering. Though the protagonist has one heck of a jerky animation.

Control-wise, the game is simple, but has a few oddities. Space or alt to shoot. You shoot straight and that's it, hold it down to fire at a steady rate. Not truly automatic, but hopefully enough Ctrl is jump, and jump is tied into how long you press the button. There are blocks that you can jump through and some you can't. Yet we also get look up and down, tied to page up and down. Why not just make it up and down? Enter is the use key. It's all very easy to control and straight-forward, though I suspect this game is going to throw enemies I can't easily hit soon enough. There are also ladders, which you can climb up and down with those keys.

You can really tell that the last game from these guys was a children's game, because there's an emphasis on non-violence that feels odd. You aren't killing enemies, you're just stunning them with chopped up vegetables. You're not getting hurt, they're stealing your carrots. It's so strange and feels out of place. Why are we just stunning each other? Are they here to steal the humans' fluids?

Here are mail machines, they drop floating mail. You read it. At first it gives useful information, then it gives the game's story. Like here, where an important government official is threatening to arrest the aliens that he has no army to fight against. Clearly going for a satirical look at the government, I dig it. Shooting either the mail or the machines is penalized, with a slight score drain. As the game goes on though, it just becomes another thing you have to wait around for, but at least what you get is usually funny.

Pickles

Flying Machines

Rovers

In this first episode there are three enemies. The titular Pickles, which are slow, dumb and easy to hit. I am on medium, so maybe that's affecting something. There are also slow, dumb and barely moving flying machines which are like the mail machines...in that they fly. Then a sort of rover thing which I jumped over. None of these are creatures you need to actually shoot, which is odd, but you can. Sometimes it's wise, but I think most are ones you could get away with not shooting. They remain stunned for a long enough time that you won't have much trouble with them. I think the flying machines and the rovers die and aren't just stunned, but I never saw one moving again afterwards.

That said, there are then these. They hide in a hole, and if you get close they jump out. Except it's less like they actually do so and more like they get an animation jumping out while you got hurt the second you reached within a certain radius. I nearly died because of them, but since there don't seem to be any lives I'm not sure how much that matters. At least they seem to die when they're shot, but it's tricky to shoot them because of the jumping out thing. Tricky but possible.

This means that the only real threat are those things in the wall, because everything else you can nearly always avoid or shoot before it becomes a problem. Really sets the stakes of the game low, that and how you basically can't lose anyway. It doesn't matter how tricky everything else is if your victory is assured if you put the time in.

The objective on each level is to find all the SaladShooters®, which means explore, explore, explore. Some are behind color coded doors. Gotta say, this level is set up somewhat crappily. Most enemies don't move if they're off-screen, so there's rarely any threat from that...except if one reaches your down path on an elevator. Which contributed to my near death. The bigger part is that it's very easy to put yourself into an unwinnable situation or get in one you confuse for being unwinnable. Like falling in a pit leading to the exit. An elevator goes down just enough for you to reach...but you won't know that because it takes forever to reach there.

The level design here in general is not great. Because each level is almost entirely "find items, then the exit", this seems to have resulted in some lazy level design. Over the course of the episode, the best levels are just the ones that don't get in the way. In comparison to how Apogee titles tended to have the more item hunt levels occasionally be fun. By having each small section be its own thing or by making it tricky enough that you get frustrated by it and forget you're doing some of it over and over again. In contrast, this is all about just making sure you didn't miss a secret wall along an elevator ride the height of the level. Otherwise you just comb the whole level until its over.

Switches, warps, doors and keys are an important part of the game. Switches activate the elevators. They don't seem to do anything else and there's no point in not using them. Warps are teleports, sometimes two-way, sometimes one-way. Sometimes over a pit. Doors and keys work like you'd expect, except its one key a door, but you can carry multiple keys. The game doesn't explain this as far as I could tell, but if you've gotten far enough for that to be a concern, you're going to be used to occasionally restarting a level.

After every two levels, there are cutscenes. Shows how far I got originally when I didn't know these were a thing. They're along a funny nature, the first one's about the aliens betting how long it'll take before the Earth goes. Then it's mostly about Dave finding his way to the Repository of Ancient Weapons, which is guarded by an senile old man named Lord Geric. Which does feel odd. The story as told in the mail messages makes sense, because we get the SaladShooters® in the first level and start fighting back...but then the in-between implies that we don't and we're really looking for something else as if this isn't helping. There are canisters labelled AW which I need to collect, but it's still strange.

After several levels, we end up meeting with Ensign Linda, who is in a strange bodysuit and...wait, Dave was in armor? Why does he look like a normal dude wearing a shirt and pants. in the game? When I get to play as Linda, she too, just looks like a normal woman in a shirt and pants. Would it really have been that difficult doing the sprites in what they actually wear? The two argue a bit in cutscenes, but mostly come to terms. They have to find the Doomsday Weapon, which naturally, the aliens somehow know about and somehow want.

As the episode goes through to its conclusion, the design of these levels remain as strange as ever. There's very little challenge, except sometimes from the hazards on the ground. By now, being able to anticipate firing on the hole monsters is good enough to deal with them. All the game really does to make it harder is to make you go up and down a level dozens of times, which does not try anyone's skills, but it does try their patience. I have thirty HP in a game where one hit deals one HP, and enough ammo to take out the army myself. You've got to give me more than that!

That said, I was starting to feel a lot of the cracks in the game beyond the gameplay. Animation, most importantly the player, is wonky. Platforms have two different sprites they cycle through as they move, which is annoying, but while the hitbox of a platform is crummy, it's at least consistent. Sound effects are a weird mix of decent Soundblaster stuff and things that sound like they're PC Speaker. There's not enough music and it doesn't last that long. I think there's something like five tracks maximum and each is about half a minute.

The episode ends with all the ancient weapons obtained and with Linda finding a clue to the Doomsday Weapon. But the Pickles have been watching and kidnap her. Please buy our game. You can stop the Pickles from unleashing the Doomsday Weapon! Somehow, I doubt many people got far enough to hear that plea.

Episode 2 begins with a recap and then we see Linda on the Pickle ship. A child Pickle comes to see her, because he wants to know what a real human looks like. The Pickles think they have this in the bag so much that they've brought a child to a warzone, eh? He thinks it's a game, and after a bit of back and forth, because she's unhappy, he lets her go. Okay...this is getting weird.

For this episode, I switched up to hard for a bit just so I can have some semblance of anything other than apathy. It's not like I'm going to run out of lives or anything. This seems to just increase the Pickles speed and regeneration, but at the same time, unless you need to camp our their location, this doesn't change anything. The levels are more difficult, owing to increased fire/water/lava floors, but they're actually better. As in, hey, this is an actual level where I have to move around to avoid enemies and take them out rather than just mowing down the entire level. Like the more forgettable levels in a better game.

A caveat here is that even by the second level I have so much health and ammo that I'd have to try to run out. It also pulls out that mean trick where it hides secrets in passageways on the bottom of stairs. There's still the usual issues levels have been having, where you go past some dangerous jump only to find out that led to the exit, or having to grab items by jumping from a moving platform over lava. The more annoying stuff. Doesn't help that your hitbox, as I said before, isn't easy to understand.

The story continues with Linda eventually reaching a spaceport on the Pickle planet where she finds a phone she can use to call Dave. Unfortunately, she lacks the 350 credits she needs to make the call off-world. Considering inflation and the fact that this call would be more technologically complex than anything a human as done on Earth, I'm not sure if that's a good deal or not.

The levels between this and the next cutscene are mostly fine. Mostly. Again, they're mostly just a matter of avoiding falling into a pit, everything else is a breeze...except that Level 8 hides a SaladShooter® in a secret. Yes, I was able to figure it out, but it's still a nasty trick to do. Still, there are far worse tricks the game could be doing.

The story continues with Linda finally failing to reach Lord Geric, but instead paging Dave, which costs more. The Doomsday Weapon is on Puzzle, where it was last used. Now it's time to continue as Dave once again, whereupon we get another background. This one's very nice, the artists are really good at doing pixel renditions of forests. The level design continues as you'd expect, mostly normal levels with one nasty thing in them.

After a few levels of this, there's another cutscene where Dave presumably heads to Puzzle. Presumably, because that's where the Doomsday Weapon is. The game seemed to freeze and I skipped a cutscene. Now I'm inside some mines, which turns the game into one of those really annoying open-ended levels where you're never sure where to go, nowhere seems to make any sense, and it's only luck that I ever seem to reach the exit with all the SaladShooters®.

The second level ends with destroying some sort of strange wall block, which turns out to be the controller to the Doomsday Weapon. Naturally, this is bad news, because if the Pickles try to control the weapon without it, they could destroy the universe. Now I need to find the second controller on Trivia, but first Dave goes to rescue Linda, who is now back inside the Pickles' dungeons.

It's time for a sewer level! Now there are tiny little spots on the ground which instantly kill you! I have nearly fifty HP and I get killed in one shot. The levels themselves are as bad as you'd think. Funny how this episode went from almost being reasonable to being tedious as hell. Miss one single thing and it's a ten minute trek over the level again.

The second episode ends how you'd expect, Dave finds Linda, they escape and head for Trivia to stop the Doomsday Machine. They now have twenty four hours to find the controller, as at the end of that time, the Pickle Emperor will destroy Arcadia. This leads into the final episode, in which we see our heroes evade the Pickle fleet with some impressive moves we don't see, and now they need fuel.

How does the third episode start off? It's really not that special. It's doesn't look at that different and the level design doesn't improve like from the first to the second. There are three levels of this, more wandering around large confusing areas with little to distinguish one area from the next. I'm getting the feeling that this game shouldn't have tried having fifteen levels an episode.

This detour allows them to head for Trivia, where there's an underwater maze. Fortunately, they have suits and air tanks, neither of which will appear or have any affect during gameplay. Unfortunately Linda is afraid of drowning, since she almost did as a child. It's odd that this is a serious moment and that Dave is that okay with this. I'd be a bit nervous about this, but that's because I've seen how bad above water mazes can be. Underwater mazes sound like they should have been in Inferno somewhere, but I guess Dante thought a river of excrement was more interesting.

Fortunately, none of what was just mentioned mattered, because the game is going to proceed exactly the same way it has over the past levels. What, change the gameplay? Ha. Long and wide, confusing levels. Oh, and this time you have to explore the darn secrets to find the SaladShooters®. I suppose there has to be something new in the third episode. It just wasn't something good.

The next cutscene has Dave get trapped by a wall off-screen, and now Linda is going to have to overcome her fears to save him. This really feels like a strange thing to bring up and then have her overcome like that. Shouldn't this fear have been introduced earlier? She psyches herself up once she finds out that Dave is trapped, it doesn't feel satisfying story-wise. Shouldn't we get some kind of character arc here beyond the two of them denying their feelings for each other?

Once they get the controller, they head back for Arcadia. The Emperor is about to use the Doomsday Weapon and then Lord Geric will never get his pizza. The United Earth Force is going to head out to attack the Pickle fleet, but they won't be there in time to stop the Doomsday Weapon. They have to stop them. This just brings up more questions. What, is Arcadia supposed to be some sort of Communist Space Utopia?

These levels are more or less standard, solid levels, which would be the backbone of a better game, but are the highlight here. No hunting for secrets here...which you think would be the case. This is exposing a flaw in the game's design. There's nothing wrong with having the player hunt for something every level if it's done well. Monster Bash is a personal favorite of mine and Crystal Caves was a solid title for Apogee. The thing is, the latter was some enough to make crystal hunting very obvious and the former had a compass for finding animals. It also gave you a reason for it all the entire game. Dash was saving pets from a horror villain, while the miner in Crystal Caves was greedy enough to risk his life like that.

Here the narrative doesn't quite make sense. I know I'm supposed to find the SaladShooters®, but the game implies that until Dave and Linda found the Ancient Weapons they really were just jumping around. Even on hard, the enemy doesn't seem that difficult to deal with. I've owned more than my fair share of crappy Chinese electronics, and even they wouldn't break if I threw a sliced up cucumber at them. More to the point, while I don't object to collecting the weapons per say, it makes the later levels very easy and often it doesn't make narrative sense. At this point I should be collecting something else.

The final level throws all reason out and forces you over a long pit while jumping at SaladShooters®. The universe is about to end, but let's make sure we can take out the last bunch of flying machines! And naturally, when combined with the difficulty in landing on a moving platform, means a lot of dying. This one level has an ending cutscene when the universe explodes. Hope you like seeing that a bit.

If you go past that, you find the Doomsday Weapon, which you can now use on either Arcadia or the Pickle planet. I, being of no real thought, pressed the Pickle planet, and got a cutscene in which it explodes, and then we see our heroes talk about how they genocided billions of people on the Pickle planet. But that's okay, probably. Here I was about to make a joke about them stealing Pickle eggs for some reason and not realizing that was a war crime. This is an actual ending to the game, it sends you back to DOS when you finish it.

What you're actually supposed to do is go past those two switches and then shoot a glowing thing on the wall. This destroys the machine, and now...there are more levels. Again, I'm glad I'm picking up every SaladShooters® when I have 300 shots in reserve. In a sense, this is odd, despite not really padding itself out, by the time I reach the true ending, I hit the eight hour mark. Just natural...uh...whatever this is.

The true ending involves our heroes calling the Pickle Emperor on the phone and demanding his surrender. The Earth fleet is surrounding him and he has no Doomsday Weapon. The Emperor surrenders and finally, peace is achieved. Dave proposes to Linda, but before they can go off to their honeymoon, Lord Geric calls and tells us that someone else is in trouble, and they go off to help them. The end.

Weapons:
Your only real weapon is a straight-shooting blaster which fires as fast as you want, can only be aimed left and right, and moves so long as it's on-screen. It's technically more competent than most weapons of this simplicity, but not by much. 1

Enemies:
There are five enemies, none of which come off as a real threat and only two require any real skill to get past. If you removed your ability to attack, you could reasonably get around most levels with enough practice. With weapons, there are very few times you're actually in danger. 2

Non-Enemies:
The mail machines are more like things you avoid hitting than anything else. 0

Levels:
These range from being solid but unmemorable to tedious and annoying to go through. More of the latter than the former. So many good design principles are blatantly ignored at least once, not because it made a really cool level, but because they could. 3

Player Agency:
Count me in the group of people who find using the up key as jump as being annoying. This is a computer game, it isn't like we're running out of keys. It isn't like this is for the joystick controls, you get jump and shoot, you still need to use the keyboard to use warps and switches. Otherwise, it's mostly fine, but your hitbox is tricky to understand, even at the end I still didn't understand it. 4

Interactivity:
For a game with a use key, there's not a lot to use outside of doorways and switches, which you nearly always should use. Shootable blocks make out the rest, which are solely used to block your progress. 1

Atmosphere:
Pickle Wars is a weird game. There are a lot of disparate elements which make it feel cobbled together at times. Often, weird for weird's sake, but you also can't be sure that this wasn't just accidental. There's also no real new content in the commercial episodes, just a few new visual and music bits, nothing actually changing how the game is played. 3

Graphics:
My biggest issue is that the animation is jerky. Not in an intentional way where this is an important part of the visual profile. An unintentional thing that makes your character's place in the game world feel off. Since it primarily concerns the player, even if nearly everything has this issue. Everything else is fine despite the mismatched styles going on. It's not always the best, but it does come together for the intentional weirdness. 4

Story:
The story is primarily concerned about being funny to the point of excluding most other points beyond "the heroes beat the evil invaders." It also concerns a whole lot of things which seem to happen off-screen. The game describes Linda as having a fear of drowning, yet this doesn't actually matter in the slightest. The game's comedy is fine, but the best of it is in the various mail messages. Which you have to wait around for, and that just isn't happening. Most of them seem to repeat in the later episodes too. 4

Sound/Music:
There aren't a lot of music tracks and they're all short. Some I'm not even sure are more than a few bars. There's one track that reminds me of something, but what it is escapes me. Some are annoying, but mostly it's just disappointing. That one's probably a coincidence. The sound meanwhile, is an odd mix of PC speaker-like sounds and digitized voices, with a few real sounds thrown in. 4

That's 25, which is lower than any post-Arctic Adventure game from Apogee, but not appreciably. It definitely comes off as worse than Apogee's efforts regardless of this, though.

I don't know what I'll be doing next week, but it'll probably be some less demanding game, if I manage to have an entry out at all. Real life issues pushed my finishing up of this past my usual self-imposed deadline and they show no sign of disappearing anytime soon.

Electro Man (1992)

Name:Electro Man AKA Electro Body
Number:256
Year:1992
Publisher:Epic MegaGames
Developer:xLand
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:5 hours 40 minutes
Won:Yes (115W/83L)

Electro Man is another of those strange shareware games that I remember playing as a kid before not really getting far and deciding something else was worth my time. At the time, it felt like one of Epic's worse entries. Of course, this was in the days when I didn't quite understand that these companies weren't just doing it all in-house outside of ID. No, Epic was publishing games they got from people all across the world. In this case, a Polish game.

Polish video games are weird to me. Not necessarily because of anything to do with them but how I see them. I didn't think of CD Projekt Red and I didn't even realize Blooper Team was Polish. Instead I just thought of very late Atari 8-bit computer games and assumed there was some game from the '00s I had forgotten which was vaguely of an eastern European flavor. I mean, there probably is, but that's not important.

It makes sense to me that a shareware game could hide it's origins like this. It also doesn't surprise me that it was beloved in its native country. This doesn't change how I'm a bit reluctant to play this game. In ye olden times, I didn't make it very far and thought it wasn't very good. It didn't help that because it had two names it tended to show up twice on some shareware disks. 

After we get a rocking tune on the title, the game begins. An echoy Christopher Lee-type says "We have to be careful, this is an emergency area". Not sure why, but that's probably something I should be doing anywhere. Not sure why the PC is such a blatant rip-off of Robocop, but that's a bit of a theme. Controls are simple, left and right arrows move, up jumps and down uses teleporters. The numpad is appreciated, because home and page up jump to left and right. You don't need these, but they are helpful. There is no air control.

The gun is weird. You shoot it with space, there's no aiming beyond left/right. It needs battery power, but it's closer to a weapon which overheats. As you get more batteries, it does more damage, before eventually starting to cut through everything on-screen. Oddly, some settings are less useful than others. The one that cuts through everything is the second highest power. The highest is just a wave that stops when it hits something. 

Screens are all flip-screen, much like an 8-bit computer game. There are three important things on-screen, assuming the flashing object didn't screw me. The battery is for your gun, activated with space, more batteries means more power to your gun. There's no ammo, fire too much and it overheats. The thing with the arrow over it is a teleporter. The phonebox is...something you have to shoot, as far as I can tell.

You can shoot some scenery objects. Some, like what appear to be videophones, which attract the eye. Others seem to be bits of the background. No matter what they are, there seems to be little point to doing so, outside of wasting ammo. Some of them will tell you in which direction you need to go...or they may tell you where another battery is.

What makes Electro Man hard is that your guy dies in one hit. Just if he touches most enemies or gets shot. He can fall for a thousand feet and be fine, touch a little guy who looks like the mech from Robocop, and dead. You respawn at the nearest respawn point and all your progress since last touching it is gone. Really, the only thing that truly carries over is general location and what key cards you've picked up. If you save your game, F2, and then reload after quitting, F3 at the start screen, only this is saved. 

There might be another name for them, but these are keycards. You need to get three of them to win the level. Otherwise, when you reach the end of the level, you're going to be stuck. There's no real going back once you've reached a certain point, so don't go downwards without making sure you've got nothing of value left on that floor. Because of the save system, you can very easily screw yourself, so this should not be considered an idle point.

The first level, once you read the manual, does a good job of introducing all the factors in the game. Once you've read the manual, without understanding the save system, it's pointless. Mechanics are done simply, here's how to get used to the teleporters, how to jump around, and here's something safe to shoot. 

The first level has two types of enemies to start with. Two-legged mechs which walk across the screen with variable speeds and occasionally shoot a shot. Not at you, just a shot randomly. They die in one hit or you could just jump over them if the fancy takes you. The others are turrets, they too, randomly shoot, which is unfortunate, because these tend to be ones that you can't always shoot back. That said, you do get some leeway once they've made a shot.

There's a third enemy near the end. Moving turrets. They go across rails...and actually they're not much worse than the regular turrets despite the change. I went across a screen full of them and wasn't in danger.

Despite being 1992, on DOS, this feels very much like an '80s microcomputer game. It's not really a game of skill as much as memorization. Remember where this is, jump over this, do these things in this order. Skill is involved to a certain degree, but mostly, you just do things as you remember them.

You're not doing every level from scratch, these are checkpoints. The problem then lies in how these checkpoints eat up all your batteries. That means that every time you pass a checkpoint, every battery you have just disappears. The game thus encourages you to take out enemies, even if they seem irrelevant. Because you might just have to go back across an area you've already been through, now without any weapons.

It should also be pointed out that these are big levels. You don't really move around swiftly, so it's probably "only" something like 50 screens a level. Individual screens might not be that tough, but combined they can get quite tense.
 

Level 2, when I finally got there, starts getting annoying. Starting off is a significant chunk of level where you just avoid things like mines and slowly appearing and disappearing barriers. The latter are very annoying because you have just enough time to get through. There's a lot of just hoping you get enough right to make it on through here, very tense, but also very annoying.

Let me tell you, the game gets absolutely every single variation they can out of these two components, combined with the mechs from the last level and sometimes a new, horizontal turret. Though the latter two are nothing compared to the variations the first two can get up to. Having to time a jump up is easy compared to timing your jump past a barrier and a landmine next to each other. In both configurations.

Then, the game sees fit to put a teleporter maze in front of you. You've never been able to tell where a teleporter goes before, but this section makes sure to make you suffer for not knowing it. The last bit is especially annoying, because after making a leap of faith jump into what might be nothing, you are forced between two choices. One leads back to the start, the other leads forward...to another teleporter maze. I have not seen a single card yet and I'm starting to get worried I've screwed myself along the line.

The final section at least, does have all three keycards, but there's a worrying trend here. The screen right of the checkpoint needs to be jumped into, or you step on a landmine, and there's already weird multiple screen jumps going on. This is the second level, if it's this bad now, what's next?

Level 3 is an office. Gotta say, very nice visual design here. Doesn't distract me from how odd the level design is. If you go down, there's nowhere you can go. It's even worse because if you do go down there, it teases you with a battery that you can't get. Once you're in there you need to kill yourself by jumping on a barrel with a glowing top. I didn't realize any of this at first, I went the other way and found out after doing some risky stuff that the barrels were deadly. Some of these plants look dangerous, and I can walk past them.

And this is not necessarily a problem limited to optional ways to get screwed. Certain sections of the game have areas which are blocked off by glowing barrels at the top and at the bottom. Some of these are your only way out and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to get past them. One of the keycards is before this area, and naturally there's checkpoint afterwards. Unfortunately, wherever I go, I'm going to have to come back. This is where the exit is. 

There is a map, at least, in the game world. If it's correct, I've gotten the one in section A and the other two are in section C and D. I just need to go over a lot of glowing barrels. And ceiling tiles that fall down. At least I'm getting an idea of how possible it should be to get past barrels on both the ground and the ceiling. Not at all, even with my character's generously small hitbox. I think it's as wide as his legs are, which considering how tedious this game is otherwise, is a nice touch.

Seriously, you don't want to know how many times it took me to make it through the one corridor from section A to section B. At least the teleporter maze that is the next section didn't kill me. The difficulty is less actually difficult bits and more tedium. Find out the right way through and hope you don't do what you've already figured out wrong. Now onto section C and the second keycard and...

Oh...no. I've been dreading this. Your character's jump arc is a U-shape, so in theory it should be possible to get past this. I try a few times, but keep hitting the ceiling barrel. But the last section had a ton of batteries, enough for the wide shot. That got me to thinking, is that the intended method of progression to get through here? I spent more time than I'd have liked getting all six, to find out that this is in fact the answer. You can shoot land mines with the wide shot. Designing your game around an inability to include a crouch button.

After a considerable amount of tries, I finally make it to level 4. This does not feel like level 4. You have not known suffering until you have reached this level. This introduces a few new components, barriers which kill you if they aren't green or yellow shifting to red, and crushers. The problem isn't these new components, it's that they're used in a section which has zero batteries, quite a few mechs, and if you mess up once, it's back to the start.

At this point, leaps of faith to someplace off-screen isn't even a dirty trick, it's just another way of getting through the level. You've just gotta do it. Better hope that it leads to somewhere else, as opposed to killing you. The number of times you can actually foresee this and avoid it is very small.

This is a very confusing level. To the point that even after a long and tedious series of jumps and crushers, I still didn't know if I was heading the right way or going for a red herring. Is this respawn point a genuine help or is it just going to put me in a situation where I'll have to deal with worse going back than I did going in?

One of the keycards on this level is behind a mess of green floating windows. And mess is the right word, you've got to shoot through dozens of them. It's odd, because while it isn't exactly fun, it does feel like a welcome reprieve after the mess I went through to get there. It might just be because after so much that tested my limits, something this easy feels a lot better than it would in a normal game.

Somehow, I'm only halfway through the game, and Level 5 continues the game. Somehow there is more to it, and it doesn't just feel tacked on. It's just an easier level, like someone throwing softballs at you after shooting a 50 cal machine gun at you for twelve minutes. There are just electrified floors and some barriers. The first keycard is just a few screens to the right. Which would be pretty bad if you didn't go that way first.

To a certain extent, this is a bit of playing dead. This level is a full-blown teleporter maze. There are about four different variations of the same screens, and each teleporter takes you to a different variation. The thing is, these variations keep the keycards in the same place. I think, there are more than three keycards around, because I had three when there were still some around. One is obviously in an unreachable location if you take the minimal amount of teleporters to go through the level.

The game also throws in enemies which are either invulnerable to your shots or just invulnerable to weaker shots. As per usual, it's easier to just walk around them rather than figure them out. I imagine later these will be trouble. For now, they're just a moving obstacle.

Level 6 is interesting. It follows on the same principles as Level 4, but on a more manageable level. I'm not dealing with quite as much difficulty, though the game does throw out blocks which appear and disappear. You'd think these were those disappearing and reappearing platforms, but they kill you instead. As per usual, I wander around, trying to figure out what's going on, until...

I fell to a place full of those barrels. This is a trap. A trap I fell for completely. The glowing red things are landmines. If I jump left I land on one, if I jump right I land on one, if I fall to the right I land on one. So...I can use cheats or restart the level. Which I didn't actually realize I could do until after figuring out the cheat codes. It does take considerable wind out of my sails though.

Remember how I said it was more manageable? I didn't yet look at a map. There hasn't really been one of these since level 3 or so, and yet here it is. In all its horrific glory. This just tells you where they are, even if there are usually teleports to the floors above a pathway up. It's how you get here to begin with.

The keycard on the lower left is the easiest. Getting it at least. You just need to make a careful jump from above it onto a platform one screen below the keycard. Oh, there's a respawn point left of here, I'll use it...and I've just screwed myself. Remember saving and respawn points are different. Now I have to go through a gauntlet of invulnerable enemies and barriers.

Only...the way out is through the lower left side of the screen. This is the only way up, the far right is a trap and there's no up from the keycard. If you accidentally save down here, it's going to be a while before you get back out.

The second keycard is easier, because it's "just" a matter of going past the very swiftly firing laser beam barriers to reach it. There's a bit of trickery once you reach the teleporters up, they take you farther than most others do, now that leaves the final one in the upper left.

The third one, thankfully, wasn't that difficult. Naturally, you have to go from farther to the right, then stay on top until you reach the upper left. The game fakes out a path on the left, but of course, it's a fake. Oddly, I had to use the level skip code, going through the exit just caused the level to repeat.

Level 7 turns into a far more normal level. That is, we're just getting more normal hazards, landmines, turrets you can destroy and regular mechs. No mazes, if you go the wrong way, you'll end up at somewhere with no exit and the option to jump on a landmine. It's still not easy, but at least it's difficult in reasonable ways rather than a confusing mess of stuff you're lucky to ever get out of.

That said, it exploits the hell out of parts of the screen you might assume are just part of the scenery, but actually lead to massive chunks of the level. Or in one extreme case, to the end of the level. At least by that time, I already had three of the four keycards.

Level 8 just outright flips off the player. A long line of jumps with these strange turrets, which shoot slow missiles. Though, by this time, you're probably used to this enough that you just sigh and go through it anyway. There's no finding keycards, they're just in your path. This is all the mercy you're getting. Because every new screen comes with it new and horrible challenges that it's entirely possible that you've already made too difficult by just standing around.

There are lots of little bits of crap throughout the level. My personal favorites were the times you had to jump up from the edge of a platform to reach the next platform because if you jump like you think you should, you fall down onto the bottom of the screen and die. Oh, and the game really isn't built for this kind of jump, so enjoy dying a lot. Too many screens involved this at some point. The absolute worst though, is this one. You're right on a respawn point, every should be fine, right? No, you have to time your jump so you land while the pillars just land, then jump again before they pop out to reach the exit. I died a lot despite using the invulnerability cheat half the time to prevent myself from tearing my hair out.

The final part of this level, the stretch to the level exit, is probably something I should have done without cheats, but at this point, I just wanted it to be over. It's a whole lot of just going through bits in the shots of turrets you can't destroy with the occasion hunt for a battery because now that's a precious resource. 

The game ends with the player being declared an invulnerable space hero. I know ending screens like this get some decent jokes about them, but I think it's fitting. Even if the game managed to fit all of Citizen Kane on a small floppy, it wouldn't be a worthwhile ending. No ending cinematic is worth that effort. Ending a game with a screen effectively saying that everyone who would try to fight you is now going to run away, screaming in terror? That's fitting, because only a madman would do so.

Weapons:
I enjoy the way the game makes it so that once you get two batteries, each improvement has its own advantage that you could use in some situations. Even if it would be better to just let them be their own options. 2

Enemies:
Basically props that you have to avoid and move around. 2

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Some levels are reasonable. Some are obtuse mazes no sane person would want to deal with. And the last one is...not fun. 3

Player Agency:
A lack of an use key hurts this game. You're basically a stiff block who jumps around in a strange arc. What's worse is that while this wouldn't be bad if the game were built around it, it isn't. It's built around you being able to stand precisely on some point at the edge of a block and jump over an otherwise impassable area. 4

Interactivity:
You can shoot a lot of random parts of the background. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. 1

Atmosphere:
This game seems to set itself up as a quite mundane experience, before sort of abandoning any pretense of being anything more than a collection of strange places and experience. 2

Graphics:
Nice-looking and nicely animated. Our protagonist almost has as many frames as a cinematic platformer hero, and enemies have a similar level of animation. That said, there's not as much variety in a single level's tileset, so a new level usually feels a lot better than it should on first glance. 4

Story:
What's going on in this strange game world? Why am I going through emergency areas with some Robocop-looking dude? Why are these levels done in the order they're done? Why is the last level on a random planet? 0

Sound/Music:
Everything, including your footsteps, is peppered with effective sounds. From your gun, to an enemy about to fire, everything has its own unique sound. While I wish there was in-level music, it does mean that you can more easily hear the sound of an enemy firing. 5

That's 23, which is quite fitting considering my initial reaction to the game so long ago. It's the kind of score I'd expect a shareware title that both Epic and Apogee rejected for being ass.

Curiously, reviews are pretty bad. And these are mostly Polish, with some German. Guess us Americans aren't made of stern enough stuff to play through this one. Considering that even the Poles aren't giving this above 7s, I suspect some of this good reputation came in retrospect rather than in truth.

I also note that so far, Epic is developing a bit of a theme as a publisher. That theme being DOS games which feel an awful lot like Amiga games. This one in particular feels like it could easily be one of the weirder Amiga games with the strange use of sound and the interesting music...when it shows up.

xLand, the team behind this, did two other games which Epic published, Heartlight and Robbo, which are Boulder Dash-clones. I think I've played Heartlight, but I may be confusing it with Hero's Hearts, which is also a sort of Boulder Dash-clone, but only in the puzzle game sense. The same general team would also form Chaos Works, who may show up here.

That said, while looking up the people behind this, I found something amusing. My point of reference for Polish games are those odd late-Atari 8-bit games and CD Projekt Red titles. So, the two primary developers, Janusz Pelc and Maciej Miąsik, worked on titles in those respective places. I feel like this is like me playing Skyroads, bringing up Disco Elysium because both games are Estonian, and then finding out that one of the people behind Skyroads worked on Disco Elysium. Sometimes, the world is a smaller place than you think it is.

Next time, the Gameboy Color version of Resident Evil.