A relatively old one from my English blog. This one I'm hoping @"Rincewind" sees.
Year: 1988
Genre: Action, strategy
Developers(s): Cinemaware Corporation
No. of players: 1
Published by: Cinemaware Corporation
You'll recall that in the Battletoads thread I mentioned something that I called the "UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s", which dictated that a game's graphics and audio must be mind-blowingly awesome, but the game itself must be so devilishly difficult as to be almost completely impossible to play. However, a company didn't actually have to be from the UK or Europe to follow this formula. Williams proved itself with Defender; Technos Japan gave us Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (a.k.a. Renegade); and Cinemaware Corporation, an American company, made it not just their game design model, but their life philosophy.
Cinemaware's stated goal was to make “interactive movies”. Today, that term means “games that make you feel more like you’re watching a movie with occasional button prompts”, but their definition was “games that make you feel like you’re playing a movie”; games that told gripping, classic storylines homaging classic movie genres of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (hence the company’s name), experienced through short, straightforward minigames -euphemistically referred to as “arcade sequences”- connected by some form of a mechanically simple strategy game, all wrapped in amazing graphics and sounds (on select machines, primarily the Commodore Amiga, for which they released the majority of their games).
The minigames had awkward controls, unfavorable mechanics, and goals that were not immediately obvious, and the strategy parts were heavily stacked in the AI’s favor; but the audiovisuals were incredible. Here were games that looked and sounded like VGA+Sound Blaster long before any of those things were invented. Defender of the Crown, their first game, was from 1986, but you’d never guess that if I didn’t tell you. It was living in the 24th century while the 20th was still going!
Allow me to let you in on a secret. The Amiga versions of Cinemaware games are not the best. UK/European Amiga retrogamers will always -and often aggressively- claim otherwise, citing the superior audiovisuals as proof. But while they have the best graphics and audio, they usually don't have the best gameplay, as they were most often rushed to market for the purpose of showcasing the Amiga's graphics above anything else, and later ports were the ones to incorporate gameplay elements that the Amiga originals lacked. Which is the best non-Amiga port of which game is usually up for debate; but for me, the MS-DOS PC versions, widely reviled, are the best I’ve played (once you’ve set the DOSBox cycles to the correct speed for each), and the ones that made me a Cinemaware fan in the first place.
Case in point: Rocket Ranger.
——————————————————————————-
The game is claimed to have been inspired by the old “Commando Cody” movie serials of the 1950s, but it’s really more like the “Rocketeer” comics from the early 80s -the Disney movie from 1991 didn’t exist yet-. The year is 1940. Your character is an American military scientist, lost in thought at his lab. Suddenly a bunch of highly-advanced-looking equipment materializes on your desk, along with a note. The note claims it’s from the year 2040, a future in which the Nazis won World War II. Your own future descendants knew the Allies were supposed to win, and sent you a jetpack, a laser gun and other future equipment back through time, so that you alone may stop the Nazis and save the future.
The Nazis apparently won through the use of a substance called “lunarium”, which causes mental deficiency in men (women are immune), and which they are somehow mining directly from the Moon. The object of the game is to acquire 500 units of lunarium plus five rocketship parts, go to the Moon, and sabotage the Nazis’ lunarium mining operation from the source, before the Nazis can conquer the US and/or before the end of 1944.
As I said before, this is a simplistic strategy game where the battles are in the form of simplistic action minigames. The formula goes like this: first you go to your War Room, which shows a map of the world; you check in on the activities of your secret agents, which you’ve previously sent around the world on missions of either infiltration or resistance; depending on their reports and clues, you determine which countries have key Nazi installations; finally, you “take off” with your jetpack to the desired country (or countries) and beat the proper minigames, thus successfully sabotaging the Nazis or gathering lunarium/rocket parts. Most of the minigames have you flying with a 3rd person view, blowing up German fighter planes, anti-air guns, or missiles from a zeppelin; but you also have one for taking off (hit the space bar in rhythm with your footsteps to run faster, then hit Up as soon as you hear a beeping sound), a shooting gallery against a temple’s defenses, or fistfights with Nazi guards for rocket parts.
That’s just a very basic overview – the devil is in the details, as normal. Lunarium is also your jetpack’s fuel, so you need it to fly from country co country, and you have to be careful not to run out of it at the worst moments, especially because you don’t automatically go back to the US every time you finish a minigame. But, it’s also part of the copy protection – what old PC games had instead of DRM. Normally the game would ask you to input a secret word from page X, paragraph Y of the manual, or whatever, in order to prove that you had bought it legitimately. Rocket Ranger uses a physical cardboard wheel -packaged with the game itself-, which, once turned to a starting country and a destination country, gives you the correct amount of lunarium required for that trip, which you must then input in the game -the amount is substracted from your jetpack’s lunarium tank-. If you input too much or too little for the intended origin and destination, you end up somewhere else, or (worse) you die, while recalling your grandmother’s words: “If God had meant for man to fly, He would have given him wings”. The correct values are different between the American and European versions of the game, too. The cool thing about this is that the wheel is also in the game, mentioned as part of the equipment you received from the future; a bit like the “feelies” from Infocom text adventures (random in-universe items packed in the game’s box). Eventually you could download and print text files with the correct amount for every possible trip, but the way they integrated the original concept with the game's story is quite ingenious.
Your secret agents are five, and you may assign one or more to any country. There are two objectives you may assign them: “Infiltrate” and “Organize Resistance”; the former has them infiltrate an enemy country and keep you informed of where key targets are or may be, while the latter has them mount a freedom fighter movement against that country’s occupation. If you organize a resistance in a country with a lunarium depot, they will periodically send lunarium back to the US for as long as possible. They may be ordered to keep either a “high” or “low” profile; an agent with a high profile carries out their mission much more quickly, but runs a higher risk of being discovered and killed (when this happens, you get a taunt from the Nazis when you ask them for a report). You may also assign more than one agent to the same country at once, but the more people there are in a country, the higher risk they run. Keep in mind, as well, that sometimes their report will be vague, like “I hear there’s something going on near the Mediterranean” or similar.
The minigames’ controls, which use the numeric keypad and the space bar, are amazingly responsive, especially for an action game on MS-DOS in the 80s. This is the true “deal or no deal” difference between this port and the Amiga original, which controls like trying to play arm wrestling with the joystick. Most notably seen in the very beginning of the game, at which point the Nazis have already landed a zeppelin on Washingon DC and kidnapped Dr. Otto Barnstorff and his daughter Jane. Where would an old-timey Hollywood movie hero be without a woman to rescue, right? Once you’ve successfully taken off and plotted a trip from America to the Atlantic Ocean, you’re in pursuit of the zeppelin, shooting down its missiles and, eventually, its cockpit, which you must hit without hitting the zeppelin itself; otherwise, it will explode. In the Amiga version, you have lots of momentum and the zeppelin wobbles around a bit, making the gondola an unspeakable pain to hit. In the PC version, there's no momentum which makes the steering feel much more precise, and the zeppelin stays still so you can aim at it more easily. A conversation screen, in which you originally had to pick up the correct response to prevent being mistaken for a Nazi spy and thrown overboard, has been removed; whether or not you’re thrown overboard depends on your performance (or so I think).
The number one problem is the difficulty level in the War Room. Success depends on being able to bring down the Nazis’ performance percentage as low as possible in one go, in order to slow their conquering capacity down -to my knowledge, there’s no way to win back countries they’ve conquered-; but because the key targets’ location is randomized with each new game, being able to stash enough lunarium to strike several crippling blows in a row and going back to the US depends pretty much on sheer dumb luck, which is not a good thing, because the Nazis' efficiency goes up very high very frequently.
Not to mention, time is against you; you can’t spend more than one month in the War Room, or you automatically lose as the government arrests you for cowardice; and every moment not spent crippling the Nazis as much as possible could be deadly. Few people in the entire world have been able to finish this game because of this.
The other problem is the nature of the central design itself. It’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant. It’s a fun minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant, but it’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant nevertheless. Eventually, the minigames become repetitive and quickly learned, and much of their initial challenge is lost.
To be perfectly level with you, I do wish the audiovisuals were better than EGA (16 colors) and PC speaker. Cinemaware could have benefited from releasing “deluxe” or “upgraded” MS-DOS ports of their games, like LucasArts and Sierra used to do. The closest thing they did was the EGA port of Defender of the Crown. But that’s another story for another time.
In conclusion: Cinemaware games prove that better graphics don’t make a better game… by trying to prove otherwise, failing, and then immediately discrediting themselves. Other than the strategy part’s insincere difficulty and its overall very short length, Rocket Ranger on MS-DOS is the best “old pulp rocketman” game you will ever play that’s not called Dark Void, especially when you look at what it has (the tight controls) instead of what it doesn’t have (the supreme graphics). Plus, you get to punch Nazis!
NOTE: Run it on DOSBox at a speed of about 578 CPU cycles for best performance.
Genre: Action, strategy
Developers(s): Cinemaware Corporation
No. of players: 1
Published by: Cinemaware Corporation
You'll recall that in the Battletoads thread I mentioned something that I called the "UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s", which dictated that a game's graphics and audio must be mind-blowingly awesome, but the game itself must be so devilishly difficult as to be almost completely impossible to play. However, a company didn't actually have to be from the UK or Europe to follow this formula. Williams proved itself with Defender; Technos Japan gave us Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (a.k.a. Renegade); and Cinemaware Corporation, an American company, made it not just their game design model, but their life philosophy.
Cinemaware's stated goal was to make “interactive movies”. Today, that term means “games that make you feel more like you’re watching a movie with occasional button prompts”, but their definition was “games that make you feel like you’re playing a movie”; games that told gripping, classic storylines homaging classic movie genres of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (hence the company’s name), experienced through short, straightforward minigames -euphemistically referred to as “arcade sequences”- connected by some form of a mechanically simple strategy game, all wrapped in amazing graphics and sounds (on select machines, primarily the Commodore Amiga, for which they released the majority of their games).
The minigames had awkward controls, unfavorable mechanics, and goals that were not immediately obvious, and the strategy parts were heavily stacked in the AI’s favor; but the audiovisuals were incredible. Here were games that looked and sounded like VGA+Sound Blaster long before any of those things were invented. Defender of the Crown, their first game, was from 1986, but you’d never guess that if I didn’t tell you. It was living in the 24th century while the 20th was still going!
Allow me to let you in on a secret. The Amiga versions of Cinemaware games are not the best. UK/European Amiga retrogamers will always -and often aggressively- claim otherwise, citing the superior audiovisuals as proof. But while they have the best graphics and audio, they usually don't have the best gameplay, as they were most often rushed to market for the purpose of showcasing the Amiga's graphics above anything else, and later ports were the ones to incorporate gameplay elements that the Amiga originals lacked. Which is the best non-Amiga port of which game is usually up for debate; but for me, the MS-DOS PC versions, widely reviled, are the best I’ve played (once you’ve set the DOSBox cycles to the correct speed for each), and the ones that made me a Cinemaware fan in the first place.
Case in point: Rocket Ranger.
——————————————————————————-
The game is claimed to have been inspired by the old “Commando Cody” movie serials of the 1950s, but it’s really more like the “Rocketeer” comics from the early 80s -the Disney movie from 1991 didn’t exist yet-. The year is 1940. Your character is an American military scientist, lost in thought at his lab. Suddenly a bunch of highly-advanced-looking equipment materializes on your desk, along with a note. The note claims it’s from the year 2040, a future in which the Nazis won World War II. Your own future descendants knew the Allies were supposed to win, and sent you a jetpack, a laser gun and other future equipment back through time, so that you alone may stop the Nazis and save the future.
The Nazis apparently won through the use of a substance called “lunarium”, which causes mental deficiency in men (women are immune), and which they are somehow mining directly from the Moon. The object of the game is to acquire 500 units of lunarium plus five rocketship parts, go to the Moon, and sabotage the Nazis’ lunarium mining operation from the source, before the Nazis can conquer the US and/or before the end of 1944.
As I said before, this is a simplistic strategy game where the battles are in the form of simplistic action minigames. The formula goes like this: first you go to your War Room, which shows a map of the world; you check in on the activities of your secret agents, which you’ve previously sent around the world on missions of either infiltration or resistance; depending on their reports and clues, you determine which countries have key Nazi installations; finally, you “take off” with your jetpack to the desired country (or countries) and beat the proper minigames, thus successfully sabotaging the Nazis or gathering lunarium/rocket parts. Most of the minigames have you flying with a 3rd person view, blowing up German fighter planes, anti-air guns, or missiles from a zeppelin; but you also have one for taking off (hit the space bar in rhythm with your footsteps to run faster, then hit Up as soon as you hear a beeping sound), a shooting gallery against a temple’s defenses, or fistfights with Nazi guards for rocket parts.
That’s just a very basic overview – the devil is in the details, as normal. Lunarium is also your jetpack’s fuel, so you need it to fly from country co country, and you have to be careful not to run out of it at the worst moments, especially because you don’t automatically go back to the US every time you finish a minigame. But, it’s also part of the copy protection – what old PC games had instead of DRM. Normally the game would ask you to input a secret word from page X, paragraph Y of the manual, or whatever, in order to prove that you had bought it legitimately. Rocket Ranger uses a physical cardboard wheel -packaged with the game itself-, which, once turned to a starting country and a destination country, gives you the correct amount of lunarium required for that trip, which you must then input in the game -the amount is substracted from your jetpack’s lunarium tank-. If you input too much or too little for the intended origin and destination, you end up somewhere else, or (worse) you die, while recalling your grandmother’s words: “If God had meant for man to fly, He would have given him wings”. The correct values are different between the American and European versions of the game, too. The cool thing about this is that the wheel is also in the game, mentioned as part of the equipment you received from the future; a bit like the “feelies” from Infocom text adventures (random in-universe items packed in the game’s box). Eventually you could download and print text files with the correct amount for every possible trip, but the way they integrated the original concept with the game's story is quite ingenious.
Your secret agents are five, and you may assign one or more to any country. There are two objectives you may assign them: “Infiltrate” and “Organize Resistance”; the former has them infiltrate an enemy country and keep you informed of where key targets are or may be, while the latter has them mount a freedom fighter movement against that country’s occupation. If you organize a resistance in a country with a lunarium depot, they will periodically send lunarium back to the US for as long as possible. They may be ordered to keep either a “high” or “low” profile; an agent with a high profile carries out their mission much more quickly, but runs a higher risk of being discovered and killed (when this happens, you get a taunt from the Nazis when you ask them for a report). You may also assign more than one agent to the same country at once, but the more people there are in a country, the higher risk they run. Keep in mind, as well, that sometimes their report will be vague, like “I hear there’s something going on near the Mediterranean” or similar.
The minigames’ controls, which use the numeric keypad and the space bar, are amazingly responsive, especially for an action game on MS-DOS in the 80s. This is the true “deal or no deal” difference between this port and the Amiga original, which controls like trying to play arm wrestling with the joystick. Most notably seen in the very beginning of the game, at which point the Nazis have already landed a zeppelin on Washingon DC and kidnapped Dr. Otto Barnstorff and his daughter Jane. Where would an old-timey Hollywood movie hero be without a woman to rescue, right? Once you’ve successfully taken off and plotted a trip from America to the Atlantic Ocean, you’re in pursuit of the zeppelin, shooting down its missiles and, eventually, its cockpit, which you must hit without hitting the zeppelin itself; otherwise, it will explode. In the Amiga version, you have lots of momentum and the zeppelin wobbles around a bit, making the gondola an unspeakable pain to hit. In the PC version, there's no momentum which makes the steering feel much more precise, and the zeppelin stays still so you can aim at it more easily. A conversation screen, in which you originally had to pick up the correct response to prevent being mistaken for a Nazi spy and thrown overboard, has been removed; whether or not you’re thrown overboard depends on your performance (or so I think).
The number one problem is the difficulty level in the War Room. Success depends on being able to bring down the Nazis’ performance percentage as low as possible in one go, in order to slow their conquering capacity down -to my knowledge, there’s no way to win back countries they’ve conquered-; but because the key targets’ location is randomized with each new game, being able to stash enough lunarium to strike several crippling blows in a row and going back to the US depends pretty much on sheer dumb luck, which is not a good thing, because the Nazis' efficiency goes up very high very frequently.
Not to mention, time is against you; you can’t spend more than one month in the War Room, or you automatically lose as the government arrests you for cowardice; and every moment not spent crippling the Nazis as much as possible could be deadly. Few people in the entire world have been able to finish this game because of this.
The other problem is the nature of the central design itself. It’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant. It’s a fun minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant, but it’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant nevertheless. Eventually, the minigames become repetitive and quickly learned, and much of their initial challenge is lost.
To be perfectly level with you, I do wish the audiovisuals were better than EGA (16 colors) and PC speaker. Cinemaware could have benefited from releasing “deluxe” or “upgraded” MS-DOS ports of their games, like LucasArts and Sierra used to do. The closest thing they did was the EGA port of Defender of the Crown. But that’s another story for another time.
NOTE: Run it on DOSBox at a speed of about 578 CPU cycles for best performance.
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