Quest For Clues

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I’m going to attempt to write up a book a day while I wait for stuff to arrive in the post. I don’t have a lot of time today so it’s another quick one, Quest for Clues.

This was published in 1988 by Origin and was edited by Shay Addams who would go on to write the official book of Ultima. It’s an over-sized cardback and contains a considerable number of pages so there is a lot for your money here. In fact the blurb on the back goes on to say that the solutions contained in the book would be worth $175 if bought individually rather than the $25 this cost to buy at the time. The idea of buying an individual game solution seems strange now but with no internet, plenty of people used this sort of service back in the 80’s. I remember using an 0898 automatic phone service when I was playing Alone in The Dark 2 which must have ended up costing me half the price of the game by the time I finished it.

The book is a collection of solutions for a wide variety of RPG and adventure games from the era, all of which have been written and contributed by members of the Questbusters Guild. This “guild” was a group of gamers who would write in with a walkthrough for a game which the guild could then publish. In return they received a copy of any game of their choice. Given how expensive games used to be, this strikes me as a pretty good deal.

The introduction to the book is the most interesting part and I attach scans of it in full below (with clickable thumbnails of a sort). I’ll be scanning in selected sections of these books on my way through if they aren’t available on replacementdocs. I won’t make any great effort to tidy the scans up but they will be more than adequate to read the content.

This introduction tells the story of the birth of adventure games, including interviews with developers of several of the industries founding games. There is nothing ground-breaking here, but I always enjoy reading about this sort of thing anyway. After this it’s straight into the solutions. These are straight forward walkthroughs, usually with a basic map at the end. The only slightly unusual feature is that some words are shown in code and you have to decrypt them with a key printed at the back of the book. The code is so simple that you can usually see straight through it, but I suppose the idea is to stop you from inadvertently reading a solution to something. With the rest of the sentence in plain English , I’m not convinced that this would be very effective but it’s better than nothing.

As a sample, I’ve included the solution for Autoduel below. Each game usually has a black and white picture on the title page, with a little bit of an introducion and an opinion on the game. Some familiar art from Ultima manuals also makes it’s way into the book.

There are 50 solutions contained in the book making it a very useful resource for anyone who likes to play old RPG’s and adventure games. Finding decent solutions for some of these games on the internet these days would be tricky as they are too old/obscure to have FAQ’s on the usual sites. I’ve certainly found it extremely useful at times with games like Moebius.

I’m not sure how Origin ended up publishing this as it isn’t obviously linked to to them. It does contain solutions to several of their games but no more so than Sierra or any other publisher. They went on to publish 5 more titles in this series (with a slight name change after the first 4), all following the same format. I’ve found all of them extremely useful over the years. If I’m struggling in an old RPG/adventure game, you can more or less guarantee that the answer is in one of them, but unless you play a lot of old games there isn’t any reason to go out and buy this. The solutions are simplistic and while enough to get you through the game, they don’t tell you how to score maximum points, or mention hidden areas and alternative paths. This is probably a book for Origin collectors or avid oldskool gamers only.

I’ll move onto something considerably more substantial tomorrow with the Wing Commander 1 & 2 Strategy Guide, including a full scan of the Chris Roberts interview.

Ultima 3 Cluebook

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I’ve started putting a Windows 98 gaming PC together. I’ve already got the base PC up and running but there are a few drivers I need to locate and some hardware I’m waiting for in the post. The PC is an old Athlon which should run at 2 Ghz if I remember right but refuses to run stably unless I underclock it to 1.2 GHz. That’s still more than fast enough for Windows 98 gaming so I won’t worry too much about tracking the problem down. I’ve bought a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 off Ebay for around £4 which will give me native Glide support for both Dos and Windows games + an AWE 64 from the same person. Finally, I’ve bought a Thrustmaster Top Gun joystick for the grand price of £3.50 which I’m seriously pleased with. It’s an old style 15-pin joystick so it will work with DOS games as well when it’s plugged into the AWE64. It’s going to be a while before all this stuff arrives but it looks like I’ll have managed to get this PC up and running for £15 + a bit of time which makes me wonder why I didn’t do this ages ago. I’ve got quite a few games I’m looking forward to playing on it but it will be Longbow 2 first.

I’ve still not had any luck with my Kryoflux and have had to arrange for a replacement. It’s just my luck to get a faulty board and seemingly impossible given that the board had been tested twice before I got it. I hope the next one works for me. It leaves me time to do something else on here and I’ve decided to start working my way through all of Origin’s various books and cluebooks that I own and reviewing them. This is something that I talked about doing right back in the early posts of this blog but never got around to.

I’ve amassed a fairly large number of Origin’s books over the years. I wouldn’t say that they are something that I’ve ever actively collected, with the exception of the Ultima cluebooks. It’s more a case of picking them up whenever I happen to see one. I’ve just been on a shopping spree on Amazon and abebooks picking up near enough all the ones I don’t own though. None of them were more than a couple of pounds although I don’t expect them to be in mint condition or anything. There may be others but the only one I know I’m missing is the System Shock clue book. There is no way I’m paying over $100 although being realistic it’s never going to be cheap. The main purchase was all the Wing Commander novels which I’ll be interested to read. I’ve even heard that the novel of the Wing Commander movie was actually quite good but I’m not sure if I believe it.

Obviously the books vary from basic game guides, through to full blown novels so I will have a lot more to say about some than others. Quite a few of the clue books are interesting in their own right with back stories and developer interviews. Others are very simple and there won’t be much I can say about them but it gives me an excuse to read through them all. There are plenty to be going on with and I’m realising about now that I could keep this blog going for years……

I’m not going to continue in any order but I’ll start right back with the first of Origin’s clue books, Ultima 3.

The first thing that strikes me about this is the textured card cover. It’s similar to the covers for the magic books that came with Ultima 3 so it all fits in well as a package. The book starts with a brief introduction, stating that the book is the result of couriers being sent out to gather knowledge of the realm. It also mentions Shamino returning as a “pitiful figure” who’s “mind no longer controls his voice”. He obviously made a full recovery by Ultima 4 although I don’t think he even is in any of the games before this mention (other than owning a castle in Ultima 1 anyway). Ultima never was too strong on continuity, especially with the first trilogy.

The book is essentially a collection of maps. The maps are a truly basic affair and are printed in ASCII, presumably straight from the code of the game. Having said that, they are a perfect representation of what is in the game so they do their job. On the opposite page from each map is a brief text description of the town/dungeon written by some names that will be immediately familiar to players of later Ultima’s such as Iolo, Shamino, Dupre, Sentri, etc… The text for the most part amounts to little more than some fairly clear hints on what there is to do in each area. Iolo’s section is written in verse but other than that they all have a similar style to them.

The section on Ambrosia is interesting. It says that the continent was once inhabited by a strange and sensitive people who developed the power to alters one’s physical self before being enveloped by a whirlpool. It at least provides a little backstory which I don’t remember getting in the game itself. The book ends with a brief message from Lord British wishing you luck on your quest.

There isn’t a whole lot to write about with this. You can read through it in 5 minutes. It’s as noteworthy for what it doesn’t contain as anything else. There is no guidance on weapons, armour, enemy stats, character generation, or even what to do to beat the game. It really is just a guide to the realm and you have to work everything else out for yourself. I quite like this actually and it shows one of the differences between games now and then. There isn’t any advertising blurb on the back of the book saying what it contains either. It’s so much in character with the game that using it almost doesn’t feel like cheating but it certainly would (and did in my case) help you through the game if you don’t feel inclined to map every dungeon. It’s very short on extra story but still worth a quick flick through for any Ultima fan. It’s available on www.replacementdocs.com for anyone interested.

Day 219 – Longbow 2

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All in all, I’ve not had the most successful weekend and my attempts to play Longbow 2 haven’t gone well. It appears to be one of those games that just doesn’t like modern PC’s. I’ll decided I’d write a post anyway and will carry on from here if I ever get it running properly.

Longbow 2 was originally released in 1997. The fact that it was developed by Origin is well hidden and it was marketed under the Jane’s brand with Origin only being mentioned in the small print on the back of the box. As you would expect it is another helicopter simulator and basically a new and improved version of Longbow 1. This time it supports 3dfx graphics acceleration and has an interesting campaign mode which models a battlefield rather than having a set mission structure. I gather that this means that your actions directly affect the war, and it also introduces a random element meaning that you can replay the game and get a different experience each time. Despite the name of the game, there are also extra helicopters to fly in addition to the Longbow to add a little variety.

Usually I like to read a games manual before I start, but I decided to make an exception here due to the scale of the thing. There are in game tutorials which is where I decide to start instead. I did play Longbow 1 some time ago so I’d expect be up to speed fairly quickly anyway. As much as I love space sims like Wing Commander or X-Wing, hardcore flight sims are not my thing. I still decided to start off on all the default realism settings and give it a chance before I tone them down but I’m using casual rather than realistic mode. The mindset of the flight sim player is not something I’ve ever truly understood. I saw an article on The Gadget Show last week about a guy who had built himself a simulator in his house and was going to do a flight around the world complete with crew in this thing, over the course of several days. I would imagine this boils down to flying in a straight line for hours on end and would be about as interesting as driving a dead straight line through a desert. At least in Longbow 2, I’m going to have some combat to liven things up, but not before I go through the basic training.

I gather that this game is still popular with flight sim fans and there are instructions on the web about getting it running on modern machines. The crux of this is to turn off your extra processor cores.  Having done this the game initially appears to work in Windows 7 apart from the intro movie using an incorrect palette. I jump into the basic flight training, which covers simple maneuvers, taking off and landing. The instructions are all given verbally and it’s easy enough to follow. Some of the terminology seems a little strange like “applying collective” to increase lift but you get used to it quickly enough. Despite being such an old game, it worked perfectly with my modern joystick/throttle. I bought a Saitek X52 Pro ages back, mainly for playing space sims but it comes into it’s own with this sort of game and there is something strangely satisfying about controlling the game without using the keyboard at all.

I can’t say that I’m immediately impressed by the graphics although the terrain may well be more interesting in a real mission. The ground is extremely flat and there is a strange effect with the ground texture. It appears to stretch and contract as the helicopter bobs up and down. It may be an issue with the glide wrapper but it’s been ok in other games. I’m unable to get any screenshots as Hypersnap decided to play up on me but there wouldn’t have been much to see in these training missions anyway.

The training mission went well enough until the game decided to crash at the very end just after I landed. Not to be put off, I restarted and had another go at the next mission which was basic Blackhawk training. The Blackhawk is a much smaller, less well armed helicopter than the Longbow and only includes a side gun which I was about to learn how to use when the game crashed again…. At this point I decide that I’d better give this a go in XP instead, so I boot to that only for the game to not even want to install. I’ve gone back to the website giving advice on getting the game running and having read the whole article, the guy who wrote it can’t actually run the game himself any more without these crashes and has also given in being able to play it. This is despite being a big enough fan to have been playing it for 12 years before that and setting up the website in the first place which doesn’t make me hopeful that I’m going to get this running. It’s looking a bit like my attempts to finish all of Origins games may have just hit a brick wall with this one. I could try using a virtual machine running Windows 95 but that would mean that my joystick won’t work since there are no Win95 drivers for it and 3D acceleration support has been extremely poor when I’ve tried it in the past. It could be a case of either having to wait for Windows emulators to catch up before I can play this one, or putting together a Windows 95/98 PC.

It’s not something I’d use much but I quite like the idea of building a Windows 98 PC actually. Dos games are covered by Dosbox which works with more or less anything you throw at it as far as I can see, with the possible exception of some of the Glide games. I’ve struggled with quite a few Windows games though. Virtual machines are fine for running applications but there are always issues with controllers, sound and graphics in games. I expect that building a retro PC wouldn’t cost very much so I think I’m going to give it a go. I’ve probably got most of the parts I need kicking around already. I will need to buy a 3dfx graphics card (preferably one of the last generation) and an old fashioned joystick. Until I get that sorted out then Longbow 2 is on hold.

I got my Kryoflux on Saturday so that should mean I’m moving onto Ultima 1 instead but I’ve not been able to get the Kryoflux working either after trying it with four different drives. No matter what I do, I’m getting a no disk error with any disk I try. As far as I can see, I’ve either been extremely unlucky with the drives I’m using or it’s somehow managed to break itself in the post. I’ve not given in yet but I suspect it’s the latter and I’m going to have to swap it, which is something of a pain. I’ve ended up spending a large part of the weekend fruitlessly playing around with floppy drives, although on the bright side, all my old drives appear to still be working if I connect them to a PC in the usual way and the disks I’ve tried actually read ok which is something of a surprise. I expect it will be a minor miracle if my Ultima 1 disk still works but I’m more hopeful than I was.

Floppy Disks and Collecting

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I initially intended to start Longbow 2 straight after finishing Super Wing Commander but it’s taken me a while to get going in the end. I’ve been distracted by other things as always happens but I’ve also been put off by the sheer size of the manual which is possibly the largest I’ve ever seen. I’d more or less decided I was going to try out the California Pacific version of Ultima 1 first as I’ve recently purchased a usb floppy disk reader from http://www.kryoflux.com and I quite like the idea of being able to read my Apple II disk with it and actually play my own copy of the game, rather than getting a copy which has probably been altered off an emulation site. This is assuming that the disk is still readable, of course. However, despite being one of the first to order (within 30 mins of the store opening), it appears I was one of the last to get my order shipped so I’m still waiting for it to arrive…

I’m sure it will be worth the wait. Kryoflux is an interesting looking product for anyone who wants to back up their game collection. I especially like the fact that it will read any format of disk from any platform. Usually I would just download a game from an abandonware site but playing cracked/altered versions of games is something that always bugs me slightly and this is the perfect solution. At around 100 Euros, it’s very much a product for enthusiasts only but I seem to often find myself wanting to use an old floppy drive for one reason or another and getting it working is so much grief that this is easily worth the money for me. I’ve also got loads of games which I’ve not been able to previously attempt to back up due to copy protection. If you fancy one of these boards for yourself, the bad news is that they sold out almost immediately and you will probably have to wait until the next batch arrives at the end of December. I expect with a product like this that there will be a load of people like myself, who have been waiting for something like this for years and will buy it immediately but that once these people all own one the demand will be extremely limited. I doubt whether it will be viable to keep producing them after this demand has died down but I hope I’m wrong about that.

I’ve also been busy finishing off my Origin collection. I still haven’t found a copy of the long sought after Caverns Of Callisto, other than the one copy on Ebay for a frankly ludicrous $2500. The same guy is/was trying to get $2000 for a shrink wrapped copy of U9 Dragon Edition on Amazon and I could go on with more examples. I know that I don’t (and under no circumstances will) have to pay these insane prices myself, but I don’t like it when someone who is a collector themselves and knows the true value is attempting to rip people off. I find it offensive that anyone would end up paying this much and presumably people do or he wouldn’t do it. I’ve always found that the collecting community is all too willing to help each other out and this sort of profiteering rubs me up the wrong way. It’s a far cry from the likes of C. E. Forman over at Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe, who offers a real service to collectors.

I may be unwilling to spend $2500 on a game but I have decided that all the UO games are now cheap enough that I’m going to buy them even though I’ve never had any real interest in Ultima Online. Buying games you have no intention of playing is as sure a sign that you are a true collector as anything I can think of. I’m only picking up the ones with the Origin logo on and got the lot for less than the price of a new game so it’s not broken the bank. On similar lines, I’ve also picked up the 5 action figures that were based on the Ultima Online 2 game which never got released. I’m glad to say that I’ve never been into action figures, which are dolls for geeks in my eyes and now I’ve got some I’m less that sure what to do with the things. I expect they will end up on the tops of my bookcases “decorating” the games room. They are being all but given away on Ebay and Amazon or I wouldn’t have bought them – the demand for figures based on a game that never happened must be extremely low.

I remember all the Ultima fans being up in arms around the time Ultima Online 2 was being developed about the technology element being mixed into the world and looking at some of these figures, I can see where they were coming from. A cyborg Blackthorn is not something I ever expected to see. On the other hand, a series should evolve and I felt that Ultima got too stuck around the virtues in it’s later episodes. It’s not like advanced technology in Ultima games is unprecedented with Ultima 1 containing phasers, light sabers, space combat etc…
That said, I’d probably side with the people who hated the idea as it feels grossly disrespectful to the series. I’ll be able to decide better once I’ve read the trilogy of novels, that I’ve also bought. These “Technocrat Wars” novels were again intended to be released alongside Ultima Online 2 but then re-branded to Ultima Online and released anyway when UO2 was cancelled. I was half expecting these to be rare and therefore expensive but I picked them all up very cheaply. It’s curious that all this merchandise is available for a game that never existed but I gather it was contractual. It must all have been much to the bemusement of anyone who bought this stuff at the time, expecting something related to Ultima Online. The fact that I can pick up the action figures new and sealed so easily for 99p 10 years later, suggests that someone lost a lot of money on these things. It’s kind of like the situation the British government finds itself in at the moment where after recent budget cuts they are stuck building an aircraft carrier even though they won’t have any aircraft to put in it. I may well write reviews of the books anyway when I’ve read them. Reviews of all of Origin’s books was something I talked about doing a long time ago in this blog, but have yet to get around to.

To get back on topic, I’ve got a bit of time on my hands this weekend so while I’m waiting for my Kryoflux board, it must be time to get started on Longbow 2. This post was originally going to be an intro to that but since I’ve managed to ramble on at such length, I’ll file this under off topic and start a new one.

Day 219

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Since the last post, I’ve gone back and had a look at the storyline for SM2 which I’d apparently managed to forget most of. It appears that contrary to every description of Super Wing Commander I’ve seen, this “new” campaign is in fact a reworked version of the original Secret Missions 2. It’s taken all the main themes such as Bossmans death, Ralgha’s defection + Jazz & Doomsday joining the crew and reworked them into another story. The missions themselves are different and the conversations have been rewritten/reworked but all the major events are still there. That makes the new campaign an alternative Secret Missions 2 rather than a new set of missions taking place between SM1 & SM2.

This begs the question – Why was the rest of the game, almost word for word the same and this part changed? I’d speculate that it’s because SM2 introduced another alien race of giant birds which joined the confederation at the end of the game. Any mention of other alien races then vanished from subsequent Wing Commander games, so it’s possibly an attempt to remove an inconsistency in the storyline. Without the alien race to save on the planet, there would be no reason to hang around when the Kilrathi invaded the system in an attempt to hold their ceremony. The Tigers Claw could just pull out and leave them to it which meant the whole story needed changing. I’m guessing here so if anyone knows better, please let me know.

This being an alternative SM2 explains away nearly all the problems with the storylines inconsistencies. I still don’t think Shotglass should be talking about stealth technology rumours though. This sort of reference is clearly trying to link the story to Wing Commander 2 in the same way as Jazz’s over-curious questioning.

Mission 9 is the last secret mission. It’s roughly the same as ever where I have to fly to a nav point in a Dralthi and receive a signal. There appears to be a  bug however as when I try this the capship I’m inspecting appears out of nowhere just as I arrive at the point, then blows up. When I get back I’m told off for destroying it but as I don’t seem to have any other options here I press on with the next mission.

For mission 10 we are closer to our strike target so we need to take out the defenders. It’s a 3 point patrol with Jazz. This is a really tough mission. There are 2 Snakeirs to take out and loads of Gratha and Jalthi to cope with. They must have turned the skill level up to maximum on these ships as they don’t give me a moments peace. The Snakeirs are too tough to take out with the fighters around so I have to do it the hard way which takes a good number of attempts.

For mission 11 we have to destroy an incoming convoy. We fly a direct strike on the convoy. There is an unguarded Fralthi in an asteroid field on the way in which makes an easy target. Then we have 3 Lumbari + supporting fighters at the nav point. After the last mission, this one is straightforward.

Mission 12 is the final assault on the research base. In the briefing I learn that we have proof that this base is currently developing stealth technology and it was responsible for the Sivar. It’s another tough mission but fitting for the end of the game. I take out all the fighters first and then go after the star post. This thing seems to be moving away from me at serious speed. I’m not convinced it’s not a bug but I have to afterburn half the time to keep up.

The moment it blows up, the final cutscene starts…..

 

For all the improved graphics I can’t recommend this version over the original Wing Commander. It’s a decent game but the cosmetic improvements in some areas are let down by poor ship design, awful acting and the glaring omission of the cinematics showing the progress of the war. The new missions are the best part of the game, although there were similar improvements with SM2 and I prefer the original storyline. If you really want to play these new missions, I’d skip through the rest of the game using a cheat. Usually, I’m all for faithful remakes of games but I think the problem here is that CD games were just too new at this stage and it wasn’t long enough since the original game. It’s ended up being not much more than a good port and ultimately pales next to the original game at least with the benefit of my nostalgia for the PC game.

I’m going to move straight onto Longbow 2 next, which will be followed by F-15. There was some disagreement about whether F-15 was developed by Origin or EA Baltimore depending on where I looked but the copyright information on the back of the European F-15 box has it down as Origin which is good enough for me. Those are the last 2 games published or developed by Origin, at least that I’m aware of. The only ones I’ll have missed are Ultima Online and its various sequels, which I’m ignoring since they are uncompletable (and also I have no interest in MMORPG’s). The manual for Longbow 2 is a bit of a whopper so it may be a few days before I wade my way through it and actually start playing the game.