I decided to try to conquer my severe phobia of real time strategy (RTS) games. Plus, tonight’s game looked genuinely interesting, and its MobyGames entry needs screenshots besides. My first exposure to the game Star Wars: Force Commander — an RTS set in the Star Wars universe — was through a trailer scavenged from some other LucasArts title. I have uploaded the trailer to YouTube for your review. The thing that will strike most Star Wars fans right away is the curious re-imagining of the standard Imperial March theme with a decidedly edgier arrangement:
The game opens with a cinematic of a fleet of Imperial star destroyers descending on a planet for an invasion. Inside a troop transport bound for the surface, the game establishes two characters by showing two stormtroopers without their helmets. One is telling the other to be careful out there. Wouldn’t you know, when the invasion is winding down, one of the characters gets shot. He recovers while the other character gets promoted to a command position. This is your character.
Star Wars geek note: The opening intro depicts TIE Bombers flying in an atmosphere, something I don’t remember ever seeing in a movie. In fact, I think I read somewhere that TIE starcraft can’t fly in atmosphere.
The game proceeds to tutorial mode where a senior officer instructs you on how to control a unit of soldiers from the safety of your command console high up in an orbiting starship. Your team starts off small — just a few sandtroopers, some riding dewback, and also Dellis– the dude who was shot in the intro. This is where you get to learn the camera controls and there are a lot of them. My used copy of the game still includes the cheat sheet for mouse and keyboard commands. It’s quite detailed and intimidating, naturally. But the senior officer patiently walks me through the essentials. After I bumble my way through these basic exercises satisfactorily, the officer actually states that he has never seen anyone learn as fast as me.
Star Wars geek note: The preceding praise explains so much about Imperial management.
The above screenshot shows your command console as well as your unit getting dropped off on a certain desert planet in the Star Wars universe for the training exercise. The story cleverly intertwines with the primary SW arc as the senior officer advises you to check out an escape pod that is known to have landed close by. The cargo? 2 droids carrying stolen, top secret Imperial data. I was a little confused about how to proceed at this point. So I just started marching my guys around the big sandbox. Sometimes, some Tusken Raiders would appear and — rather foolishly — try to start something with my crew. This was good practice for how to react in a battle situation. The rest of the time was spent getting used to controlling a bunch of soldiers at the same time.
Doing anything in this game gets annoying pretty quick since the troopers feel it necessary to give obsequious auditory feedback in response to every order received. What they lack in brainpower and initiative, they compensate for with loyalty, enthusiasm, and boundless positive morale:
Me: “Move 10 meters in that direction.”
Sandtrooper: “For the empire!!”
But I’m being unfair. True, the guys can get stuck near trivial obstacles on occasion. But they’re smart enough to stay out of the Sarlacc-looking pit even if you direct them to walk in that general direction.
So after wandering around for a half hour in a game engine-designated patch of desert that probably measures less than a square kilometer, I eventually trip over a giant crate that the game labels as “escape pod”. When the finely-tuned soldiers touch it the mission is finally over. Next, I am told to… I don’t even remember now; something about finding the droids. The instructions are delivered verbally and whiz right past my mind that’s still reeling over the magnitude of the keyboard guide. The game does give the player an option to review the current objectives. However, when consulted, they just inform me to A) follow the captain’s orders (yeah, and what were those again?) and B) keep Dellis (your buddy) alive. I can’t shake the feeling that this game is going to be the Star Wars variant of Saving Private Ryan.
Out of desperation, I tried out some other buttons. I pressed ‘J’ for “open builder shuttle inventory screen”. I have no idea what that is, but the ‘J’ key might as well be a BIG RED button since the senior officer sternly scolded me, “Don’t do that.”
That ends tonight’s RTS endeavor, but I just might try this game again some night. I have at least one other RTS title in the queue, plus I might be inspired to give Gender Wars another shot.
It’s Independence Day here in the U.S.A. and I thought it would be apropos to play the Sega Saturn version of Independence Day (having already covered the Windows version on this blog). However, my Saturn console disagreed. But since the unit was already hooked up, and since I have more than enough Saturn games yet to play, I’ll try a recent acquisition– Defcon 5.
Regrettably, this post will be done entirely without the help of visual aids. I don’t have the capacity to capture from my Sega Saturn on my new PC. I did take the time today to finally crack my new DV capture bridge, purchased some months ago along with the new PC. However, it does not capture from the Saturn. I’m still working on solving that problem (GameCube/Dreamcast/PS2/VCR, no problem). The disc also has FILM files for FMV. Regrettably, none are anywhere near interesting enough to commit to YouTube.
Moving on to the actual game, the affair starts off with an overwrought intro FMV characteristic of the early days of CD-ROM games. I fear that this is a prelude to interactive movie-style gameplay. The story has something like — let’s see if I can synopsize this correctly — a mega-corporation that does interplanetary mining has a bunch of space stations to protect their mining operations from alien threats. Thing is, no aliens have ever been encountered in the history of human endeavor, so these stations are really just a paranoid measure whose continued operational costs are increasingly difficult to justify to the beancounters. Budget cuts demand that these stations will go unstaffed in 60 days and will need to have their software upgraded so that they can operate autonomously. The lead engineer — excuse me, cyberneer — on the project got killed upgrading the second to last station. Your job is to upgrade that last station’s software.
Great, so this game simulates the menial, trained-monkey action items performed by futuristic IT peons. However, wouldn’t you know, just as you are trying to carry out your upgrade mission, unidentified spaceships start closing in on this last space station. Could they be the fabled aliens whose appearance might have justified the space stations’ operating budget?
Personally, I tend to think the so-called alien threat really consists of disgruntled, laid-off space station employees in disguise, Scooby-Doo-style.
Anyway, the gameplay consists of Wolfenstein 3D-type gameplay as you wander around this station while a digitized voice implores you to find the control center to upgrade the software. The graphics are primitive by 1995 3D standards but I’m relieved that it’s not a pre-rendered FMV maze. That relief trend sharply reverses as I begin to navigate the corridors. Either my character is a stereotypically, grotesquely obese IT knowledge worker, or there is horrible hit detection in this game– it’s almost impossible to walk between 2 support posts that are more than a meter apart from each other. Plus, you bounce backwards slightly but sharply when you contact an object which makes walking a tedious exercise.
I had a weapon and I know I was supposed to encounter aliens in short order because that’s what the nice lady computer voice kept foreshadowing. But I just didn’t stick around long enough. I later examined the instruction manual that saw fit to publish a 12-step walkthrough for how to complete the first tedious task in the game.
This is what happens when IT employees carry their professional experience over to game development.
My recent batch of acquisitions included not only a plethora of actual games, but a number of sample discs as well. One is a Generator disc, volume 1 of a series of Sega Dreamcast sample discs. I have yet to delve into this one.
Next is a fairly non-descript optical disc simply labeled “Merchandise Video” and bears the ubiquitous PlayStation symbol. The circumference of the disc lists a number of games. I pop it into my DVD player (which doubles as my PlayStation 2) and it begins playing immediately. The disc plays a brief commercial for each of the games previously listed and loops when it gets to the end of the string. Pressing “Menu” seems to just reset the commercials. This leads me to believe that this disc is meant to be played on autopilot in a sealed PS2 kiosk. The promotional material for God of War is enticing but nothing else on the disc really impressed me.
Next up is the Ubi Soft Product Catalog 2004-2005. This is perhaps the most fascinating disc of the crop if only for the dire message: “Content not approved for consumer use. Not for distribution to the public.” Forbidden material– I’m intrigued. The disc is a CD-ROM that contains promotional material for a number of Ubi Soft games for a variety of platforms. Each game comes with some screenshots and some general artwork. Several come with trailers and other video files that are encoded in a diversity of multimedia formats. Nothing too special so far. The most interesting aspect is that every game entry comes with a “fact sheet” — a .DOC file that describes the game in a single printed page — as well as a directory named “Product Presentation – NOT FOR PUBLIC USE”. This contains a PowerPoint presentation that basically sells the game. My question was, “Sell to whom?” At first, I figured that maybe this was for investor relations, a sort of video game company prospectus. But on deeper examination, it appears that the slides attempt to sell the game to a retail establishment. This is a fascinating glimpse into the video game industry. I’m pretty sure the slides are trying to convince retailers why they should devote shelf space to these titles, or perhaps give particular titles more prominent real estate on the selling floor. For example, many of the presentations have a slide devoted to “THE BRAND” which documents the strong selling history of the franchise (and most of these games belong to franchises; Ubi Soft is not known for taking chances on unknowns, though neither is any other publisher).
A lot of the material reminds me of documents I see on the inside of corporate America that are customarily marked “Company Confidential — Not For External Distribution” (which is something that makes every corporate drone chuckle with the knowledge that no one inside the company could possibly care about the document, much less an outsider). Anyway, I doubt that this is actual confidential material. As mentioned, this is probably intended as industry marketing material. There is also the fact that the marketing material is not yet finalized. For example, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is still known as Prince of Persia 2 throughout the disc’s material.
As for the audio/visual promotional material, there is nothing that really catches my eye. Sure, all of the screenshots and artwork are sharp. But there are no videos that deserve instant YouTube treatment. However, I couldn’t believe the timeliness of this screenshot from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory:
That brought back fond memories of Crystalis’ prophetic “End Day” (1997/10/01).
The last sampler disc is called Sega Screams Volume 1. It is for the Sega Saturn. I have not explored it using my Saturn console yet, but I can view some of the files on it. Here is one movie that’s fun enough to upload to YouTube, the intro of the Saturn version of Virtual On: Cyber Troopers:
