System Shock – I.C.E. Breaker

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This is the last of the books that is already in the downloads as I purloined the scans from one of the Looking Glass forums. It was published back in 1994 by Origin. Being a collector who was only missing the one book, I wasn’t satisfied with just having scans of course, so I had to buy the real thing and it was comfortably the most I’ve ever paid for any of them. I’m not sure if this is actually any rarer than many of the other books but the demand certainly outstrips supply. Maybe the Ultima 3 or Martian Dreams cluebooks would be worth more, but I got them both years back so they were relatively cheap. I can tell you right now that this isn’t worth the money but it was a steal compared to the copy of Akalabeth I bought a month or two back. There is no way on earth I could justify what I spent on that, even if I’d only had to pay the customs bill.

To get back to the subject at hand, this is one of Origin’s older and smaller guides and the only remaining one of these for me to look at. It’s more fun than one of the playtester’s guides as it does have memos throughout the book to add to the story but it’s still largely tables of data, maps and a walkthrough. There is a full bestiary complete with some nice sketch drawings, presumably from the design stages. There is also a list of significant emails/logs arranged by task which could be used to skip finding them yourself I guess. The game allows you to go back through your logs so other than this I can’t see why you would want them here especially, although it does serve as a recap of sorts for me looking at it now, a couple of years since I played the game.

The memos dotted throughout the book give a little of the history of how the hacker actually created Shodan inadvertently when bypassing the security for Diego. It also adds to the games brief ending with a memo after the game ends sent from the hacker to Rebecca, who talked him through much of the game. I can’t help but notice that Shodan is constantly referred to as he throughout the entire book. I suppose you don’t have to consider the gender of an A.I. until you actually have to put a voice to it but Shodan was definitely not female until the CD version was released.

At the end of the book is a single page of design notes which offers a brief description of the philosophy behind the game. This was touched upon recently in a GAMBIT podcast with Austin Grossman who worked on System Shock and provided the voice for Diego. He regarded the conversation system in Underworld as one of the major weaknesses of the game as it took you out of the game every time you talked to someone. System Shock was specifically designed to get around that, with a cast of dead characters and the email/log system. This sort of technique has become fairly common since but I always thought of the conversation in Underworld as one of the game’s strengths myself. It’s this sort of interaction that made it a world to explore rather than another dungeon crawl like Dungeon Master or Eye Of The Beholder. I can see pros and cons either way but I do like to have interactive NPC’s myself and the lack of them was one of the major reasons I didn’t play System Shock until 15 years later. I was looking for another Underworld and this clearly wasn’t it. I’m glad I got around to it eventually, as I was clearly missing out.

For anyone interested in Looking Glass Studios, GAMBIT are doing a whole series of interviews with Looking Glass developers and have another one up with Dan Schmidt now, but I’ve not had chance to listen to it yet.

Pacific Strike Playtester's Guide

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This was published in 1994 and is now scanned in and available for download. This is the last of the playtester’s guides and follows a fairly similar formula to what I saw with the Strike Commander one earlier in the day. There are a few differences though.

The most obvious of these is that the mission guide is much more specific. The individual tips from different playtester’s are gone and you just get told the best strategy. In fact all mention of the playtesters is missing including the biographies at the end of the book.

The mission guide also spells out the games branching structure with loads of losing path missions and 4 different endings to the game. What strikes me with the mission structure is that while the main missions do branch, the opposition you face will depend on how well you have done earlier in the game. If you happen to have taken out a particular carrier, then you won’t face it or the planes it would have launched. This gives a real incentive to do more than just beat the mission and will make Pacific Strike play differently on replay’s even if you win and lose the same missions. I expect it could make the game extremely difficult later on if you are already struggling. The losing path missions presumably give a chance to redress this balance and take some of the opposition out before rejoining the main storyline.

Talking about the storyline, there is some background on your co-pilots with a page of write-up on each giving a little on their history and flying style. That’s the extent of the extras but the story was never Pacific Strike’s strongest area, especially when compared with Strike Commander.

Strike Commander Playtester's Guide

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This was published in 1993 and is now pdf’ed and linked from the download page. Strike Commander is a game that warranted two official guide’s it seems and this is the first and by far the smallest of the two. It’s printed in two colours adding blue to the usual black and white, which makes all the photo’s dotted throughout the book look that little bit nicer.

As for the content, it’s what you would expect for one of these playtester’s guides, which means it’s light on backstory and heavy on the tactics and technical details. The majority of the book, is taken up with the mission specifics, which usually give several possible approaches for each mission and the tips are attributed to a specific playtesters. I do like this way of presenting tactics as there is always more than one way to approach a mission and you can just pick whichever suits you best. All the testers get a short bio + photo at the end of the book.

Strike Commander is a game I struggled with. Sure I made it to the end, but I never actually felt like I knew what I was doing. I’d have taken all the help I could get so maybe I should have used this book at the time. What isn’t covered in here are the basic manuevers as these were in the original manual. Paying more attention to these would probably have helped me more than anything else.

If you are a flight sim novice like myself and you feel the need to play Strike Commander, this should make things marginally easier although I don’t think it addresses my main problem which is an inability to fly jet simulators. I felt far more at home in the later spin-off games where the planes regressed to propellers and everything happened at a more sedate speed.

Cybermage – Origin's Official Guide

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This was published in 1995 and is now available from the downloads page. Cybermage has to be one of Origin’s less well-known titles but this is extremely unfair as it is up there with any other FPS games of its era offering many things they didn’t. For instance, I’m currently playing Lucasart’s Outlaws which is a decent game in the same genre but far simpler, less visually impressive, without any in-game plot outside of cutscenes and it came out a full 2 years later.

Outlaws got a re-release in 2007 but Cybermage appears to be relatively forgotten. I’d have been curious to hear a little more about it but this guide isn’t the place to look. It is in full colour but it has far fewer pages to compensate for this. This means no interviews and there is also a distinct lack of original content.

What we do get is a full guide to all the items, weapons and people in the game complete with little writeups. There are detailed maps of each level, and finally a walkthrough section. The walkthrough section has miniature copies of the maps on each page with copious notes below guiding you through step by step. It also contains transcripts of all the dialog from the game so reading through this will pretty much give you the plot in its entirety.

There isn’t much in here for anyone who has already finished the game, although on the bright side that did mean I could quickly skim through it and tick another off the list. Out of curiosity, I’ve done a quick count and I made it 25 books left including this one, which means I’m getting through them quicker than I expected. It might be time to dig another game out when I’ve finished with Outlaws.

Ultima Collection – Prima's Official Guide

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This was published in 1998 and is available as a pdf on the downloads page. It’s a guide to every single game in the Ultima Collection which is a lot of ground to cover. This means that it has the only printed solution to Akalabeth that I’ve ever seen, although it doesn’t cover many pages for such a simple game. There are also guides to Ultima 1 and 2 which never got their own at the time + the walkthroughs that came with Forge Of Virtue and The Silver Seed.

For the rest of the games, most of the content is straight out of the original cluebooks. There are a few differences in how they have been arranged, and I notice that the ASCII maps from Ultima 3 have now been replaced with symbols instead which makes them easier to understand. There are also extra sections with gameplay tips and full walkthroughs which were conspicuously absent for the older games original cluebooks. These are brief no-nonsense affairs to get you through the game as quickly as possible.

The book came with a tear out colour map in the middle pages, which I’ve put at the end of the pdf. It’s far too large for my scanner so I’ve badly (and I do mean badly) joined a few scans together. This has recreations of the maps that came with the game, with added notes to tell you where everything is.

What isn’t in this book is any interviews or history which is a pity but understandable given just how much had to be crammed in when covering this many games.