Welcome House (1996)

"Keaton and his Uncle" isn't part of the title, but it's inclusion is weird because it's the subtitle of the sequel.

Name:Welcome House (ウエルカムハウス)
Number:196
Year:1996
Publisher:Gust
Developer:Gust
Genre:"Survival horror"/adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:4 hours 00 minutes
Won:Yes (79W/63L)

Described as a polygon cartoon on the obi strip, Welcome House is exactly the kind of game I wanted to learn Japanese for. Take a couple of established concepts like the look and feel of period survival horror games along with the comedy of silent films, mix them together and suddenly you have an unique idea. Now I should note, that when I say survival horror, its about as much as Doctor Hauzer was, basically not at all.

It's a bit tricky getting this one to run. At first it didn't work in Mednafan, so I tried Xebra. That worked fine, except I couldn't properly change my controls and it crashed too much. After fiddling around with Mednafan some more, I could start the game, so long as I set the controller to a Dualshock controller. Funnily enough, Mednafan doesn't allow you to load off an actual disc, just an image file. So for a game I actually own, I have to get a rip off the internet, because ripping a multi-track CD game is just so annoying to do. And that music is important.

The story is that our protagonist, Keaton has recieved an invitation from his uncle Parkinson, to his newly built and highly extravagant mansion in Miami. So Keaton drives from his home in Chicago all the way down to Miami. Unfortunately, his beater broke down, and his uncle is nowhere to be seen. Looks like he has to wander around, also, it's April 1st and your uncle is one hell of a prankster.

To state it simply, we're in a big mansion, but unlike other games, the owner doesn't want to kill us, it has the atmosphere of a silent comedy and it's sunny out.

There's a loading mini-game in the opening loading screen, it's one of those sliding block puzzles. I never took a screenshot and I never won one either.

I can't decide if Keaton is just wearing clothes that are too small for him or if they intentionally made him look like a balloon animal.

We get to see this intro concept like three times, the first with the manual, the second the opening credits and then a FMV. If you count just seeing Keaton's car explode, that's on the cover too. Somewhat excessive, boys. I note that in this intro Keaton's animations are lackluster, imitations of real movement lacking the weight of how even a cartoon character should move. The game itself is fine in this regard though.

And now the game begins. I complain, but it's all of 2-3 minutes. Smooth jazz plays. The game controls on a grid, tank controls, but this is more akin to a puzzle game than Resident Evil and the ilk. Keaton usually moves up and down as needed. Square is a general purpose action button, doing everything from interacting to running. Circle allows you to use items, start opens the menu, start again opens the save menu, and start again saves. It's a save anywhere kind of game.

It's kind of slow, even for something requiring tank controls. You have to start running while standing still and nothing is in front of you, hold down square and then forward. It feels off in a 3D space like this, especially since you're rigidly going on a grid.

This is the only time something funny happens for a bit.

This is the kind of comedy you can expect here. All the doors except one are locked and this staircase turns into a slide. Whenever Keaton gets hurt, he can't die, he sits down like in a cartoon until you press something and a laugh track happens. Oh, yeah, you get little Japanese texts that pop up afterwards, but they zoom by so fast I only get the rough gist. Exploring requires really searching the place, just examining everything you can. Any object could be something vital. Even a toilet. This apparently activates something far away on the second floor. Curiously, as I explore the hallway this area is in, I discover that you don't open doors with square, you just walk into them.

The next room over I find a blue book. So, let's get into items. After picking them up, you can search them or use them. In this case, it's Webster's Dictionary. As I try to leave the room the game crashes. Sigh...At this point I switched back to Mednafan from Xebra. I take another five minutes to return to here, then check the rest of the house. Turns out I have exhausted all my options, because all the doors are locked, both in the lobby and the hallway leading to those two side rooms. I must have missed something...and it turns out I should have looked at the side of the bed for a key. A red key, so you know something of a theme is developing with these items. You also need to search every square you can, because it isn't obvious.

"SAVE ME!"

There are quite a few red doors, it turns out the one I wanted was in the lobby. That's going to be the theme of this game, what door does this key go to, even with color coded objects. Gotta say, this here close-up is less charming/funny and more creepy.

This room actually makes sense as it is, compared to a lot of others, since a room like this would naturally want less furniture to obscure the pictures.

This is a red...uh...photograph room. Which has photographs belonging to Parkinson. I find a red book. The Sorrows of Young Werther, which I haven't read, but sounds very charming and appropriate for a light-hearted comedy game. (if you don't know, it is most assurdedly not) Parkinson's epic prank of Keaton? What's next, Candide? There's a key on the table. Is that all this game is going to be? Find keys for doors? How disappointingly boring. Oh, yeah, the silver key works on the brown-redding door. Thanks game, for breaking your color coding scheme. For a comedy game there hasn't been much comedy beyond being able to hurt Keaton's hands on the windows and the stairs bit.

Slightly funny, anyway.

...I spoke too soon. This brown room has a record on a dining room table, Que Sera Sera by Doris Day, that is the version from Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, the remake not the original. I already knew this song would figure into the game somehow, because it's on the back of the box.There's a grandfather clock constantly ticking away but you can't do anything to it. Finally, a fireplace, which has an item I was confused by until I realized it was garlic. The door this room has I can just enter and go into, without having to find another key. Huzzah!

Let me complain for a moment. The way this game works is weird in regards to confirming things. When you open the map to save, you press start, use the d-pad to switch to yes, then press start again. To use items, you press circle again after you open the menu with circle. To get items...you press square after pressing square. Technically, it's consistent, but it's so annoying.

Fridge logic, why would the bread box be in a position you can't actually reach?

Next, the kitchen. It's not a very high end kitchen, if I may offer my humble opinion. This is the first puzzle that isn't just key in lock, and despite it's simplicity, I found it kind of neat. So there's a box on top of the refrigerator you obviously need to look in. If you interact with the fridge, you open the door, which reveals a secret passageway. So instead you have to open the stove, climb on that, then climb on the counter and walk around. Kind of lame he couldn't just reach up there, but cool they took advantage of a game mechanic.

There's another door here, naturally it's locked, and a yellow book on one of those serving carts. It's a cookbook, for a recipe I don't quite understand and definitely couldn't cook, but I know it's some kind of chicken and needs tomatoes, eggs, garlic and some other stuff I don't recognize. The fridge leads to a whole other area, with new music. There's nothing but some barrels and crates in this room, but downstairs...

He's talking about how he'd have to fly to get over this.

...there's this. A puzzle. A jumping puzzle, triangle jumps, in a break from square being the action button. Well, I guess if this is a parody of survival horror games, that makes sense. This is more of a puzzle than you usually get. After each jump the floor rises and lowers according to some reasoning I don't understand. Which makes it worse that the game picks the worst possible angle. Could we not get the ability to change our view? This is in actual, real-time 3D. Where the hell am I even going?

I would genuinely expect a classic cartoon to pull of something like this, but in that case they'd acknowledge that the barrel went through his head, this is just poor animation.

This leads to the garage. That means the entire basement basically consists of a secret room, a weird puzzle room, and then the lower half of a garage. In the downstairs half, I find a switch, as big as Keaton. Hopefully that toggles the stairs to the second floor. There's this gag, obviously set up. The barrel clips through Keaton, which is just eh...it is necessary to open the door next to him. The car here has nothing, maybe it's a puzzle? This leads back to the hallway and I can go up the stairs!

The upstairs hallway shows off most of the floor straight off, but naturally the doors are mostly locked. There's a central room I go around at first, finding a fire extinguisher I can't do anything with yet, and a mirror. That's...weird. This seems somewhat high tech, but I'm guessing it's just another Keaton model. I try to interact with it, but I end up walking through it.

As someone who vaguely understands how 3D works, it's neat to see a classic game make a winking joke about this.

No, that's actually exactly what it is, someone who looks like Keaton, if my Japanese is correct, his cousin, and he gives me a blue key. Not sure exactly what his deal is, as the model just sitting there looks like he's seen some stuff. This feels very Twin Peaks for some reason. This actually makes things worse for me, because now I have to keys to try on every door. None of the doors on this floor seem to be unlocked by either, so I go up to the third floor. This one isn't trapped.

In retrospect, I get this, but considering the game I thought this looked like some kind of spring trap at the time.

And I'm blocked off once up there, by some boards. I assume that's what it is, it looks very weird. So I double check the doors.

For when TV's so bad you'd rather watch some fish.

A blue door turns out to be the answer for the blue key. Good. It's an aquarium. I find another record on the table, Bobby Hackett and His Orchestra's version of In the Mood. There's a TV I can't turn on, door's locked...and the camera changes to a view of the aquarium that suggests I can climb into it. Oh...no...I can't, but I suspect I need to fish something out later. Okay, what did I miss?

It turns out the door in the kitchen isn't as locked as I thought it was. Guess I didn't actually check. This leads to a bar. I like the way this room looks, very high color. I find a white book behind the bar, in case someone needed to figure out how to make a gin and tonic or a rum and coke. I'm kidding, its Tolstoy's War and Peace. The perfect bar time reading! There's also some brandy, which you can't drink. This also links back to the lobby, using the door unlocks it. There's a jukebox/record player in one corner. It turns out this was less a puzzle and more a method to change the music in this room? Huh, well, there's still another door here.

This leads to a pretty good outside view. If Keaton wanted to leave this place he could easily do so from here.

Rake up the backside is a new one.

Instead Keaton has to fall for the really obvious pratfall gag. Actually not in an obvious way, if he uses the doghouse it suddenly barks, then he jumps back and hits himself with the rake. You can walk over it as much as you desire. I'm starting to feel underwhelmed by this game. There's a pool with a diving board, can't use it, and a door to the outside, which I can't do anything to yet. Now what? My only key doesn't unlock a door I can reach and none of my other items seem to have an obvious use. What about the other record? Is the jukebox like the ghost dancers in Alone in the Dark? No. Oh, aha, I missed a door that was unlocked.

Well played, game. Well played. I hate how this game's puzzles seem to be boiling down to, don't have an item, you missed searching something earlier. This is a huge house for your movement speed. I missed two items in the kitchen, because I had no idea they even existed. You check the doors of the oven and the fridge after you open them. I repeat, you check the objects you can clearly see are just blocks. Great design here, the next evolution of the pixel hunt, invisible objects!

1920s rhythm games were very primitive.

I find out what I need to do to advance quite by accident. Checking the manual again, I realize you can back up to sit down on chairs. Before I've just been standing up on them. Doing this in the aquarium room on the chair facing the TV opens the door for me.

Inside there's a thing on the wall that I can't do anything to. I try my books, I try the key and I try just using it. No dice. So I walk away...and the door is locked. The walls start closing in. It's a Keaton sandwich! The second these things start approaching me I immediately understand what's about to happen. This isn't the kind of game which kills you.

I've advanced, thanks to Keaton becoming a piece of paper. (not showing it, but I like how Keaton kicks open that glass door in a moment) It's another hallway, disconnected from the main one. That balcony leads to another room, which is locked. The actual door into that same room is locked.

Another bathroom. Now I can have Keaton sit on the throne like a man. I suspect the developers were of similar mental maturity, because when I search the toilet, I get a pink book, which is a fake book containing a key. That's going to be useful for later, but for now my quest down this hallway has me use the gold key, finally.

It's a very yellow room. I find a chef's uniform, which is useless, and a love letter straight off. I suspect it's humor I can't yet enjoy, because there are a bunch of French words, including meuniere sauce and escargot. I've heard of the snails, but the sauce is new to me and I'm not typically ignorant of international cuisine. I didn't catch it until later, but this is a lady, Allegro Adagio and the person sending it is Escargot Aperitif. Very Japanese joke names. I also find a net, like for butterflies and a hacksaw. I think the net is for the fish, but the hacksaw is a mystery, hopefully a fun mystery. Wait, if I need to get a fish, that means I might need to make that meuniere sauce, that's for fish. Where the heck is this game going?

he locked room I now have the key for. It's a girls room, I guess, if that girl is into skateboarding and had a poster of Marilyn Monroe on her wall. A phone rings, I go to answer it, and a trap door opens. Considering the game's previous niceness to the player, I figure the hacksaw is supposed to be used on door blocks by one of those wooden things, but no dice. I reload to check I didn't miss anything. (I suppose it might be possible to return via the crusher room, but that's slow)

Further exploration is very fruitful. There's a bed and a dresser, containing a diary. That just says that someone came over, Monsieur Aperitif and the owner's French, but has the name Jack Smith. I wonder if this is implying something. The real clue is the bed here, obviously it closed at first glance, it's connected to the cabinet next to it, but to close it you need to turn a wheel in the corner. There's a brown key under it, and naturally it crushes Keaton.

After a bit of wandering around, I realize I can use the hacksaw on the boards blocking my progress on the third floor. There are two doors here, both locked, but the brown key works on one of them. This leads to a room full of boxes to climb over and paintings. There are three paintings, one of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and I think Napoleon. The problem is you can only carry one painting at a time, and after dismissing the possibility that I needed to shuffle them, I figured I just needed to bring them down to what I thought was a dumbwaiter back on the second floor. This, incidentally, requires a lot of pointless walking back and forth.

This opens up a library. There's a bookshelf in every color book I've found, except white, and then a bookshelf with green books and black books. I hope this means I don't need to cook that chicken. Since at this point I'm tired of the game's busywork, I look up where I missed the books. Okay, the black book is kind of clever, there was an oil drum back in the pool area, you use that to turn the white book black. The green book, meanwhile, is in the green room, which I need to get into via the painting in the yellow room.

This is fine, I guess. Here there's an Emperor record, very anachronistic, a green key and another note. It's from the same guy who the cook's note was sent to, complaining about the hole in his wall. Yeah, that makes sense. With the green key, I open the other green door on the third floor and find a green book in a piano. I think it's a book on Napoleon, which explains the painting puzzle. Continuing the humor, I can get Keaton's hands smushed again on the piano.

Considering that Japanese games have a nasty habit of misspelling that word, it's as much to themselves as to the player.

The black bookcase opens after all the books are placed, and I find a secret room in which there's a message telling Keaton to come to my room. Using a switch, I turn a set of stairs down to the door I fell out of, from which I can see a strange man on the pool. The music has changed too, to something classical. It quickly gets annoying.

This looked fine at the time, but now I realize this dog may have slight issues with it's back paws.

Once there, I find a dog, blocking my way into the pool. I guess this means I need to feed him something. Quickly checking a walkthrough again, because I forgot the ingredient list...I find out that now the game is a fetch quest. Much like how in Resident Evil, new monsters appear in places you once cleared out, now the residents of this mansion are walking around. I need to give them stuff. At first I was going to complain that the game was way too short, now I'm going to complain there's way too much padding here. This game isn't going to win.

I guess he really wants to rev up his Allegro.

The first character I have an actual objective for is Escargot, the chef. He wants me to give his love letter, which I picked up earlier, to Allegro. This all should be funny, but this feels less goofy funny, and more goofy I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm talking about cars. My mind is not comprehending this!

I wonder if the disconnect I'm noticing between actual gameplay and these screenshots after the fact means that this game looks a lot better in motion than in stills.

I guessed that Allegro is in one of the rooms with instruments. She's the woman I saw on the portrait. That's darkly amusing. She complains about Escargot, and how he beats cymbals in his room all the time, the bastard. So why were they in her room then? I get the feeling this isn't going to go in the chef's favor, give her the love note...and then she apologizes, but she has a fiancee from a rich family, here's a tomato. I recognize the humor, and I want to laugh, but this is just so bizarre at this point.

Jack looks like a stereotypical Japanese bad guy, I wonder if that's implying something.

This guy, Jack Smith, just talks about how he'll fix Keaton's car as soon as possible, but it's a piece of junk and he should buy a new one. He speaks in Japanese exactly as you'd expect this kind of guy to talk in English. He is not just a handyman, but a handyman artist! And he walks eggs, apparently. Gotta get those macros. Or not, because I can't give them to him. I get a silver key if I give him back his diary.

It's probably supposed to be a bone, but it looks more like a heart.

Well, it turns out that I have to give the recipe page I found earlier to the chef, then the ingredients, including a lobster I got from the aquarium by first using the empty net, then a fish I got from the aquarium. This gets me a dish, which I give to a dog. This dog is eating better today than most people do. This gets me a heart-shaped white key. Don't ask where it came from. Now what? I have two keys and no doors left to open. They don't open the front door, that's for certain!

Keaton! Using your reactions I have developed the ultimate life form! Muahaha!

After wandering around and checking a walkthrough again, I realize that the map screen lied to me. Thanks, game. Right of the staircase up to the second floor is a metal door I forgot about, because the other one was just completely unopenable. Uncle Parkinson. It seems like a setup for one last gag, so I check the room, seeing nothing, I approach. Parkinson, among other things, explains how Napoleon's marriage happened on this day. Second marriage, but who's counting? Worry not, your car is getting fixed, but we shall do this again.

It's a good thin Keaton's world operates on cartoon logic, or he'd be dead.

That confuses me, as if I try to talk to him again, he just says the same thing. Nothing else has changed, so I walk out. The game ends. We get a cutscene of Uncle Parkinson smiling out the window as Keaton enters his car. Very suspiciously, knowing his uncle. He gets in, drives off, and the steering wheel comes out of the steering column. To be continued.

Then there are neat little credits showing the names of the characters while the credits roll in proper Japanese. That was Welcome House. On the whole, this game degenerates a bit too much into simple lock and key puzzles, and it isn't fun having to rely on luck, as it isn't guaranteed that the key's color will match the door's color.

Once you get beyond that reliance on lock and key puzzles, we get some minor flashes of fun. We even get flashes of brilliance. Uncle Parkinson committing to his love of pranks so much he named his dog after someone who had one of his marriages on April 1st, then sprinkling hints around to that effect is really clever. It does a good job of setting itself up for later. It's a lot more effort put into the overarching narrative than I expected.

But, for far too often, the game is just all about running back and forth. This is not a long game, this is a very short game. It doesn't really live up to the comedy aspect, you get maybe a dozen pratfalls. It's no brainteaser, I just failed some spot checks. It's just a really bland game. I would have liked it if it were what it said it was going to be, but it just isn't.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
None.

Non-Enemies:
They only appear at the end of the game, and in a very limited capacity at that. Still, I did think they were a little neat, despite their simple puzzles. 2/10

Levels:
The mansion provides some variety, but rooms are quite bare and by design, the game stretches itself out twice over it. The final bit is no Resident Evil in opening up previously locked doors, merely an exercise in padding. 3/10

Player Agency:
Playable, but confusing and slow. Grid-based movement is fine, but even running is slow. Each group of actions is also weirdly executed. It makes sense when you think about it, but it's something that seems wrong. 3/10

Interactivity:
You don't really do anything beyond some simple item puzzles and looking at various objects. 3/10

Atmosphere:
I want more. The game promises something of a classic cartoon style in a video game shell, but it doesn't quite deliver. On another front it seems to be trying to emulate a silent comedy, but still fails to deliver the same volume of jokes as one of those. 3/10

Graphics:
Serviceable. Everything from the animations to the rooms themselves provide nothing truly worth complaining about, but nothing exciting. Animations have obvious cut and start points. Models have a weird, creepy quality to them. Rooms are incredibly bare, good for puzzles, bad for the look of the place. It looks more like what you'd get out of a beta than a finished product. 3/10

Story:
For a game I sort of wrote off the story for, there's some surprising depth to it. We get subtle clues to our uncle's love of Napoleon until it's slammed in our face, and while I found some of the backtracking in the second half annoying, hey, it was cool seeing people I expected would just be words in a note file. 4/10

Sound/Music:
I feel bad for the guy who made most of the music. I can tell he put some effort into making some good jazz music, it's kind of like that, but it's way too short for the length of the game. Meanwhile, you can listen to three random tracks in one room for some reason. Sound-wise, it's fine, but a bit low-quality. 4/10

That's 25. Even for what it is, it's somewhat disappointing.

There's a sequel, released in the same year, which I'll get to next year. Perhaps that will be what I wanted from this game. In the meantime, it's time for Resident Evil.

Strike Base (1996)

Name:Strike Base
Number:195
Year:1996
Publisher:The Learning Company
Developer:Max Design
Genre:Vehicle simulation
Difficulty:5/5
Time:7 hours 30 minutes
Won:No (78W/63L)

Strike Base is a weird game, even by first glance. Developed by Max Design, who are better known for their strategy games like the famous Anno 1602, and in the US published by a The Learning Company label in the cheapest possible packaging, this is a weird futuristic sci-fi strategy/action game. Command, then conquer the enemy yourself. Well, not quite a real-time strategy game like that implies.

The menu, note you can't change any options until you're in a game.

The story according to the back of the jewel case is that it's 2218 AD and the solar system has been colonized. Contact has been made with aliens, and while in negotiations they attack and kill 275,000 men. You are the last means for survival, now we're going to kill all of them! I'd make a joke about us being the good guys, but they did break off negotiations. The in-game intro is just showing some random action scenes while generic midi metal plays in the background.

The manual actually goes into quite a bit of detail about this, but contradicts the back of the box in several key aspects. We're apparently already out of the solar system, the PC's father died saving the remainder of the fleet, it's not just that we lost those men, those were our military forces and most of our space force. That feels like a weird point to stress, considering the enormity of the situation. So we're going to fight back with a new generation of commando units, whose bases can be transported from planet to planet in order to deal the most damage to the enemy. I also note that you have to play the game on the third difficulty out of four, Colonel, in order to reach the end levels.

You get these animations every time you send out a vehicle, in addition to them coming out of the underground hanger, even in the middle of a mission. Yes, it's annoying.

The first level functions as the training level. The whole equip part of this is sorely lacking at this stage. My options are two fighters and whether or not to fill up the shield and energy. Energy is basically fuel in this case, only draining when you move. This doesn't seem important right away, but past 50%, it's less efficent to charge up a shield or energy. As I only have 8 units of energy and shield, it's most prudent to keep them both at 50%.

As a combat game, this is easy to understand. 1-6 (or A & Z) control the speed of your vehicle, while you follow where your mouse is aiming. It's fairly smooth, but I'm somewhat unused to mouse aiming a plane. The cursor isn't quite where your plane is going. Left click shoots and you get a weak laser here. I didn't realize it while I was flying, but apparently it's really easy to miss with this, I only hit half my shots even though I wasn't engaging in my usual spray and pray tactics.

The plane doesn't really control like a plane, more like a hover craft. There's a hard limit to your height and turns are like a banked turn in a car. Whenever you crash into something, you get bounced back like a bumper car, the whole thing is weird.

The HUD is quite helpful. You have your vehicle's systems and secondary weapons in the lower right, in addition to get hard numbers for all vehicles in the lower right, in addition to whether or not they're under attack or on autopilot. Radar at the bottom shows the immediate area, and with Q & W, you can zoom in very close or very far away. Every single important notice gets a little voiceover in case you missed it. Heading, time, and enemy destroyed/player destroyed on the front. And when relevant, whether you're under attack, you have low shields or energy.

This is actually very hard to do. It's hard to dodge enemy fire, since you're a plane. This mission is just against enemy tanks and artillery and they manage to get me enough times that it's more about endurance. You can take them out in one swoop if you're lucky, but if you're unlucky you'll crash into them, thus knocking you backward and damaging your ship. Returning to the hanger by pressing L and slowing down when near the entrance and you can recharge.

How does the tactical aspect work? Well, I'm not really clear on a lot of it, but from what I've seen and how it works, a poor use of both bits. The AI is competent, but it only avoids enemy fire, you are the only one who attacks. I assumed that since the game gave me the option to pick one of four vehicles at a time that I would be picking one and leading the rest in combat, but I just fight, one against many.

Which is funny, because this basically makes the "strategic" aspect of the game completely pointless. The only point is for me to keep a tank near my base for defense, which I can't do here. Activated vehicles cost energy, so that plane might even be stupid anyway. All I can do in tactical mode is set movement waypoints.

Considering there are about a hundred enemies and one me, that's a recipe for 15 very long missions, assuming you don't end up dying dozens of times like me.
There's also time acceleration, which I wrote off at first. It just increases speed by a certain threshold, you still move and shoot while doing this. That means for tasks like destroying buildings that have stuff you need inside them, you can just increase the speed and fire until destroyed. Or the endless back and forth.

Very luckily, I win the mission with just a bit of shield left on my second (of two) ship. There are three problem areas I was able to identify. Firstly, because tanks can't just be taken out in one charge, you need to attack them multiple times. Solution? Attack from behind where the enemy can't see you. Certain turrets can't be hit, though they also don't shoot at you. Just aim off-center. Finally, the rest of the turrets are hard to dodge. Solution? So far, just tank them, it's hard to dodge while you're charging at something.

You get one of these at the start of every mission, annoyingly, you can't save until afterwards and this functions as a message log.

Level 2, now I get to try out the bombers...against enemy fighters. Uh...actually not that bad, because this level also introduces secondary weapons. You add them in back at base, then you right click to fire, and press space to switch between the two you can carry. Firstly, missiles, they're glorious and they take down everything that can fly here. Then we get bombs, they're not all that powerful and seem to go through buildings, they only hit the ground. They take out most ground targets in one but the range seems strange. It has more than I'd expect. Then, laser power-ups. These might just work automatically, but it's hard to tell their benefit here.

Now the bombers are slightly less useful in terms of laser firepower. They get two lasers compared to the fighter's four, but it doesn't seem that much worse in terms of damage. That said, it can be kind of hard to tell since everything on this level just eats up laser strikes anyway. I like the alien's equipment design. Kind of like the stuff they have in Half-Life, but a civilization is built around it rather than whatever it was that game was going for.

An enemy worker unit, moving resources from a resource facility to a factory. I'm sure some RTS works like that, but none spring to mind.

 Level 3 adds in enemy production facilities. Yippee. Also tanks, this mission is about tanks. Tanks are terrible and their inclusion in this game is not helpful. Tanks have one advantage over the planes, they can stop and reverse. It's really hard aiming up at enemy planes, and worse still, they crash into the ground as they advance. They're further divided into combat tanks and rocket tanks. One can carry long range missiles and the other cannot. Missiles seem to be about the only thing these tanks are good for, though the game talks up the wonderful advantages of teleportation.

You control these missiles you fire, they're like little planes. Except they explode on contact and after a certain amount of time. The later is actually really annoying because they also seem like they're slowly falling to the ground after a certain amount of time. This, along with their low explosion radius and therefore low damage, makes them far less useful than you'd think. Which brings us to the satellites. Energy is only used while you move, you can shoot indefinitely so long as you never move. Satellites automatically fire when activated, they're satelites in the "floating around something" sense. Basically defense platforms.

Since this mission adds in the enemy producing things like in an actual RTS, this means they have unlimited firepower compared to you. So, place two tanks which can use the satellites in key positions, then use a missile tank to take out one of the enemy's production facilities, using the teleporter. (press T on green light pads) As simple as it sounds, it isn't, like I said, moving around with the tanks is a pain because you feel every bump in the road. It's somehow easier dodging enemy fire, but you can crash into tanks. Worse, the transport trucks can kill you just by driving into you. Sigh...

I win the mission, after a few tries. But this seems like luck rather than skill, and eventually I'm going to run out. In RTS terms, it's like you're in a mission where you have only a few troops to protect protect an ally's base against a numerically superior foe who has a base. Only your ally does nothing. Only a small number of troops can attack without your say so, and you can only control one troop at a time. This is not a strategy game, it's just a game with the worst aspects of a RTS grafted onto an action game and then you're expected to play it like a RTS. I'm sure this sort of thing would be funner if you were say, a high level RTS player, but I'm not.

In theory, the idea is to use a bomber to blow up any installations that require a good amount of shooting, then gun down any enemy planes. Once that's clear, slowly take out the turrets with a tank. In practice, I should have used the bombs on turrets, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. I get a ton of short range missiles in pods, but it's kind of hard aiming these at a target above. At least it's easier than aiming at a target below. There's a lot of peeking around corners to snipe enemy turrets though.

The actual objective, as such, is to retrieve a teleporter from the central enemy area on one island, then drop that on the other island with the bomber. This is a pain because the game isn't specific about where it should be beyond a level surface. I then find some escape pods, guess my requirements this mission weren't just to kill everything. After finding two, I win, at 90% enemy killed.

Level 5 is exactly the same as level 4 in requirements. Only now those pods are inside a building, and there are SAMs now. Despite this, the mission isn't that bad as long as I keep using tricks I have been using. I've gotten very good at shooting at turrets at angles, and at the very edge of the distance I need, so I can take them out with a minimum of shield loss. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do to make shooting down planes more efficent beyond using missiles.

Basically at this point the game is, drive a tank through turrets until you run low on health or energy, return to base then repeat. If a plane appears, destroy any turrets you can, return to base, shoot down plane with missile. The enemy tanks throw me for a loop, until I figure out the plane strategy works against them too.

At this point, I become acutely aware of the limits of energy. As each mission is a hour or more in length, you naturally become reliant on speeding through areas. Unfortunately, like in real life, that uses up more energy. So no completing a mission in a reasonable timeframe anymore, you have to slowly drive across the map, with time acceleration barely making it passable, in case you don't want to have to restart this mission after you've already basically won it. Fly anyway, tanks just drain energy if they're moving if you go at the lowest speed or the fastest speed. Oh, yeah, the whole capture escape pods, despite being one of the objectives, is effectively pointless because you have to kill everything anyway.

Level 6, take out this factory producing super deadly planes which also patrol over the entire map. Btw, you only get one bomb to do this and then you need to take out tank factories. No pressure. Well, the first part is easy enough after referring to the database (F9) and taking a few test runs. The problem with those planes is that you can't sneak up behind them, they can shoot at a 360 degree angle. The bigger problem is the crashing. After selecting the map before starting, for some reason this level seems to cause the game to crash if you just go straight to it. Makes sense that this game would have some underlying instabilities. Oh, no, that means I might get a crash mid-level. I mean, I can save in the middle of a level, it's just that it's kind of annoying.

Can you spot the mine? Can you do it hundreds of times in one mission?

There are mines now too. How do you avoid them? Trial and error, mostly. So much for completing each level in one go. The only way I could figure out where a mine was, well, was to drive over one. They're very hard to see. They blend into the ground, and worst of all they seemingly can't be shot or bombed. Turning a tedious drive back into sheer terror. While this hasn't been a good game, this changes it from a flawed into an outright bad game. At least I have enough energy in one tank to go in, avoid the mines, destroy all the buildings, and then bring back some bombs.

At least this one has a reason for an objective beyond destroying everything.

Level 7, intercept enemy transporters, then destroy enemy forces. Four minutes on that first objective, no pressure. The game says they're south, which is true, you start on the far north-eastern side of the map. They are fairly close by, but they go off in three directions and they're heavily guarded. Practically as soon as you leave your own base the skies are full with enemy fire. There are just so many turrets, meaning the whole level is a slow slog. Again.

At least once you take out the transports you can go through it somewhat leisurely. It's be an okay mission were it not for the poor layout of the location my base is at. Would it be too much to ask for the game to allow me to drive through something that looks driveable? It's the same as the last missions except you actually need to put in those additional energy tanks to reach the other side.

Level 8, now there are gliders which drop aerial mines. Just when I think the game can't get any more annoying, it succeeds. This is a far more mundane mission, just take out enemy planes. The glider that drops the mines doesn't even shoot at you, so it's not quite as lethal as other planes since you can actually shoot the mines it drops. For once I beat a mission in under ten minutes. This completely perplexes me.

I'm currently dashing to the guy attacking my base, presumably a plane. Meanwhile before I can go back to advancing on the enemy, I need to take out the tank I can see approaching to my left.

Level 9, the usual take out the enemy base mission. Only, you don't get to fly a plane, no, you have to take them out with tanks. Enemy tank factory, but you get satelites again after so many missions without them. Fat lot of good that does me. The enemy base is much closer than in previous missions, but the enemy defy my attempts to block them with satelite protected tanks, either they just shoot them enough that having them as defense is moot or they just drive around them. Or even better they kill them.

And you know what. I don't have to energy to deal with this bullcrap. The game expects an unrealistic amount of multi-tasking from the player. It wouldn't be a problem if the game just let tanks I'm not controlling shoot back at enemies, but I have to be the only one to do anything. Between the delay you have with missile animations, thus meaning you can't take out enemy factories in a swift fashion, lest you end up being in a position where you have to wait seconds before switching over on top of an already slow switching sequence. And my reward is going to be another tedious mission where I have to deal with all this. No, I'm not dealing with this. This game takes the worst aspects of RTS games and the worst aspects of vehicle combat games from this time and puts them together in just the most unfun package.

Weapons:
I like the concepts, I hate the execution. The flying missiles and bombs are all right, but the ground missiles are just terrible to use. They have practically no splash damage, so you need to nail an enemy right on them. The lasers have similarly unsatisfactory accuracy, but those aren't in limited supply. It's just a pain to aim anything. 2/10

Enemies:
There are about two tanks, four turrets, and three gliders of varying deadliness. Pretty well thought out, but gives the enemy considerable advantage over the player. 4/10

Non-Enemies:
I would say none, since technically I don't have any allies in this game. It's all me, trying to do the tasks of five difference people. Arguably, that's worse than if there were no allies at all. The pathfinding system would be an okay substitute, were the game's pathfinding not terrible. 0/10

Levels:
At best, each level is just a slog of slowly taking apart an enemy base, at worst, a maddening dash to do the same before you get overwhelmed. Neither of which were very fun. 0/10

Player Agency:
Turning around is just so slow. And all of the little strategy elements make the game worse. You use the first four function keys to switch between the location that vehicle is in, with it automatically taking you back to base if it is. Only if you don't have something in that slot, it does nothing. This should have taken you back to base. Switching between all the menus is also slow, and because it doesn't automatically pause, costs you valuable time. The energy mechanic of each vehicle running low as it goes over somewhere massive made the game worse. 2/10

Interactivity:
Destructible buildings and trees. 1/10

Atmosphere:
Sheer mindnumbing tedium. 0/10

Graphics:
The art direction is nice, but the viewing distance is just so short. Enemies always get the first attack because of it, even if you abuse the heck out of the radar system. 2/10

Story:
Your basic RTS non-story, some explanation of why this happened, go shoot stuff in-game. 1/10

Sound/Music:
You get a soundtrack of generic midi rock. Each level has it's own track, which goes on for the usually hour long length of it. Yay. Sound is fine, though it cuts off far too often. 3/10

That's 15, but I'm removing 2 points for wasting my time. So 13. I don't have anything else clever to say, I'm just glad it's over.

Soon, October, and with it, arguably the most important survival horror game ever made. But first something of an unintentional parody of the genre.