Noctropolis Update

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Noctropolis and it’s clue book have arrived which has given me a chance to look them over. I can confirm that the clue book was published by Origin although they haven’t gone out of their way to advertise this. The game initially appears to have no mention of Origin, until you read the technical manual and learn that if you want to get help you have to get in touch with Origin technical support. In fact the manual itself looks exactly like one of Origins from this period.

That’s the only mention of Origin I can find. The game itself was developed by Flashpoint Studios who were an independent developer who got bought out by Bethesda in 1996. My guess is that when EA signed up the game, they wouldn’t rely entirely on an external company to simply hand over a finished product so Origin were brought in during the final stages to publish, test and support it. I’d have expected it to say Origin on the box rather than just EA under these circumstances, but I guess that would be up to EA. The only other game on Mobygames from Flashpoint was a golf game published by Sega so this appears to be their only title published by EA.

It’s not unheard of for Origin to publish external developers games although I expect they would usually have more involvement than this, e.g. Ultima Underworld and System Shock. There was also Shadowcaster which was developed by Raven and Abuse which I don’t think had any Origin involvement at all. Abuse was possibly the most obscure but the box did at least carry the Origin logo (although you wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it). It’s less clear with Noctropolis but from the evidence I’ve got it deserves a place in the blog as much as Abuse did so I’ll be playing it after F-15 to finish off (as far as I know), the complete list of games published and/or developed by Origin.

I still haven’t started F-15 as I’ve been busy imaging all my disks with the kryoflux. I’m glad to say that these are more or less done and uploaded for the Software Preservation Society to use as they see fit. I’ll start on F-15 today, which I can’t say I’m especially looking forward to but I am quite interested in playing Noctropolis when I’ve got it out of the way so it’s giving me the incentive to get going again.

Wing Commander – Freedom Flight

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This is the first novel I’ve read for this blog and the first in a fairly long series of Wing Commander novels. It was published in 1992, which puts it around the time of Wing Commander 2. The story is set, however, during the Secret Missions 2 campaign and is a retelling of that expansion pack.

The story is told mainly from the point of view of Hunter who takes the role of the maverick hero, but is also told from the perspective of Hobbes and K’Kai (a Firekkan pilot). The book starts out with Hobbes defection from the Kilrathi. A small group of Kilrathi have realised that the war is pointless with neither side able to gain superiority and therefore bringing no honour to those involved. This rebellion aims to overthrow the emperor and needs the aid of the humans to do it so Hobbes is ordered to surrender the ship he commands.

Meanwhile, Hunter is taking leave on Firekka and getting very drunk with K’Kai a Firekkan pilot who is something of a rebel to have volunteered for pilot training in the first place. He is recalled back to the Tigers Claw, extremely hung over after his first night to fly patrols after some Kilrathi have unexpectedly shown up in the area. He ends up rescuing Hobbes’s Fralthi as it comes under attack from other Kilrathi ships and in return Hobbes transfers the loyalties of his second in command (Hirha) to Hunter himself, resulting in Hunter now having his own slave Kilrathi which he is less than thrilled about.

From here on the plot follows the game fairly closely with the Kilrathi arriving in force for their ceremony, which Hobbes gives the details of. The humans disrupt the ceremony by attacking it with marines which leads to the shaming of all Kilrathi involved and they all retreat since they no longer have the favour of their war-god. This is more or less where the game ended. However, in the book the Firekkan leaders are kidnapped by Thrakhath. Confed are doing nothing to save them and Hunter, Kirha and K’Kai end up hatching a plan to go in and rescue them from Kilrathi space single-handedly. They plan to hijack the Bonnie Heather for this but Paladdin and his comms officer Gwen agree to go along. Suffice to say that the plan succeeds and they rescue the leaders with the unfortunate death of Gwen. At the end of the novel, Hunter releases Kirha from his bond and makes him a free Kilrathi.

The plot is simple enough then and follows the game very closely. It’s written in a fast paced, easy to read style with a lot of background on the characters and cultures that there wasn’t room for in the game. It’s certainly a change of style from the confederation handbook, which was heavy on the science and this is far more along the lines of your typical space opera and was an entertaining if unchallenging read.

It’s not at all what I expected actually. I didn’t think it would be so faithful to the games but it didn’t come across as rehashing old material either. I’ve only read a few novels based on games, namely the Tex Murphy and Gabriel Knight novels. Both of these were decent enough books but they simply retold the story from the game and didn’t add anything. This on the other hand fleshed out the storyline of Secret Missions 2 and for the most part happened away from the games plotline whilst being based around the same events. The game was extremely limited in the story it could tell with nearly everything happening in either the bar or the briefing room. With these constraints off, the story gets some room to move and is far better for it.

I will say that the book did get a little cheesy at times with, for instance, all the usual rubbish about alien races not understanding each other that you could read in a million other sci-fi books. Also, I wouldn’t say the characters were one-dimensional but they are only really caricatures. Wing Commander wasn’t known for its intellectual storylines though and it all fits in with the game perfectly. I very much enjoyed reading this, far more than I thought I would. You can get through the whole book in a few hours and if you are a Wing Commander fan, it should be compulsory reading.

Wing Commander Confederation Handbook

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I’ve still not started on F-15 but I have been reading one of my recently purchased books, the Wing Commander Confederation handbook.


You’ll notice from my scans that this is a second-hand copy, originally from Carson City Library over in the States. It still has the sheet with the date stamps in the front and it was borrowed all of 3 times from 1999 when the book was published. Not what you would call popular then.


The term handbook is misleading since this is several times larger than your average paperback. The book is a guide to the history Wing Commander universe, clearly brought out to tie in with the movie rather than being aimed at fans of the games, despite what it says on the back cover. Large format colour books like this immediately make me think that it will be full of photos and not much content but there is a reasonable amount in there, even if it’s not what you would call heavy reading.

The book is 128 pages long, with the first half being in full colour and the second half giving way to black and white which is a little cheap in a book that would have cost $20. The content is best described as scene setting for the movie with information on characters, ships, history of the war and details of the technology used in the movie. It is presented as though you are using an information terminal, complete with buttons at the tops of the pages and headers with metadata. It’s all a bit unnecessary but may have appealed to a younger audience at the time.

If they are aiming for a young audience then some of the technical information is possibly over the top, with for instance details of how the jump drives work that contain lengthy details about graviton particles being used to create gravity wells, and objects on the event horizon of the well instantly hopping over the “gap” it creates thanks to the medium of subspace momentarily filling in the hole and bridging it. The science doesn’t quite stack up if you ask me but it’s a decent attempt at explaining jumping. I always enjoy sci-fi when it actually contains some science and it doesn’t happen all that often.

There are photos and stats of all the ships in the movie, with schematics of the Concordia. These aren’t especially interesting and I’ll never like the movie ship designs which look even worse in still photos. There is more pseudo-science about how the ships engines work. Apparently, they use a fusion reactor which powers itself with matter gathered from space using gravitic scoops which extend over a large area around the ship. These scoops cause a friction like effect as the ships speed up, which is why they handle the way they do and have top speeds. I may have missed it elsewhere but that’s the first explanation I’ve ever seen for this. It goes on to say that going faster increases the rate and which fuel is spent but this is balanced out as collection is increased since the scoop is travelling through a larger area of space. Afterburners, however, burn up this fuel and it has to be replenished by the capship. The obvious problem with all this is that if you are flying in a wing of fighters, the collection spheres would overlap and you would all run out of fuel.

Other parts of the book deal with the history of Earth venturing into space, including the war with the Pilgrims. This isn’t part of Wing Commander as far as I’m concerned but it comes across better here than it did in the movie. There are then technical details on marine equipment (basically an excuse to use some prop photos), background on all the characters in the movie, a thesis on the abilities of the Pilgrims and the book finishes with some correspondence between Taggart and Tolwyn as he is sent off on his secret assignment. The content is generally quite random and jumps around from one page to another. By the end, it covers more or less everything you could think of without actually saying anything about the plot of the film. Basically, if the film had been packaged like an old PC game, this could have been the manual.

There are no real revelations about Wing Commander in here but I still quite enjoyed reading this one. I would have enjoyed it more if it was based on the game rather than the movie universe but it was a whole load more interesting than the movie itself. Right now I can’t recall any aspect of the movie I actually liked so that’s not a glowing endorsement but clearly a reasonable amount of effort went into creating the universe for the movie to be set in. It’s possible that I might even like the movie slightly more if I were to watch it again having read this. I’m not sure I’m prepared to take that risk though.

Anyone know anything about Noctropolis?

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I was going to start on F-15 a couple of days back but the Windows 98 PC which I’d only had working for a few days has already conked out. It still works to some extent but there is something wrong with the cmos. If I clear the bios settings it boots with defaults (which are too fast so it crashes shortly afterwards). If I update the settings then it locks as soon as the machine tries to boot again until the bios is cleared. The motherboard was ropey in the first place which was why the PC was shelved several years back, so I’ve given in on it and bought a salvaged Pentium 4 off Ebay, basically for the price of postage. That’s arrived but it still needs everything setting up.

In the meanwhile, I thought I’d put this post up to see if anyone knows anything about the game Noctropolis. I noticed in the playtesters bio’s in my last post that a couple of the testers had moved onto Noctopolis after Wing Commander Armada. I’d not heard of this game and figured it was possibly a project that got cancelled. So I looked it up and it turns out to be be a comic book adventure game which was developed by another studio and published by EA in 1994. I would assume that the testers were simply shifted around within EA but it turns out that the clue book for the game was also published by Origin.

This makes me wonder just what Origin’s connection to Noctropolis was. Have I found another game I ought to be playing in this blog? Even if it doesn’t make it into the blog, I’m always up for a new adventure game so I’ve ordered copies of both the clue book and the game but it will probably be 2 weeks before I get my hands on either of them.

If anyone can shed any light on Origin’s involvement, I’d like to hear from you. From looking at the credits on Mobygames, it appears that Origin staff just headed up the QA on the game although that doesn’t entirely explain why they ended up publishing the cluebook.

Wing Commander Armada Playtesters Guide

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I got my replacement Kryoflux board last week and have been playing around with that in my spare time in the last week, but my first lot of books arrived today which has prompted me back into action again. The first of these is the Wing Commander Armada Playtesters Guide.

In all honesty, I was a little surprised to see that this game warranted a guide book when I found it on Amazon. It would be unfair to dismiss Armada as filler before Wing Commander 3, but it did come fairly close and was certainly not one of Origin’s best efforts. It’s a game I bought when it came out and while it did provide a brief amount of fun with the excellent 3D engine and split screen combat, the novelty wore off very quickly and it was soon forgotten.

It’s fair to say then, that my hopes for the guidebook were not high before I started. It’s 96 pages long and if you think it would be a difficult job to fill all those pages you would be right. The book goes into highly unnecessary details right from the start with 20 pages describing each of the ship types. It does give some details on tactics to use with and against each ship and these could possibly be helpful but it’s all obvious stuff in all honesty.

The next section is worse with several pages on how ships take damage, including needless descriptions of what shields and armour are. There are tables of how much damage each type of weapon does and the like which may possibly be useful I suppose but I’m not convinced. The book then moves through sections on tactics to use both in combat and in the tactical section of the game, maps of all the sectors in campaign mode and finally some quick combat advice for winning fights in a hurry.

All the strategy advice in the book is heavy on text and you would have to read the whole thing to get the useful nuggets out of it. Every angle is certainly covered from what to do in each section of the game, and on different sizes of map. Playing against the computer, I can’t imagine anyone needing help in all honesty but I could see some of the advice possibly helping out against human opponents. The game wasn’t half as much fun as you would expect against a human opponent though so I certainly didn’t play it enough for it to get that competitive.

This isn’t a badly constructed guide by any means and contains all the information you could ever need to make you more competitive when playing the game. The problem is that Armada wasn’t a complex enough game to justify all these pages and that makes this book largely pointless as far as I can see.

There was a brief section at the very end about the playtesters for the game. I include scans of these below for anyone interested.