Cybermage Demo

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I dug out this Cybermage demo from the December 1995 PC Zone magazine cover disk. No doubt it’s available online somewhere but now you can also grab it from here.

Cybermage is probably one of Origin’s least well-known 90’s games but it deserved to make more impact than it did. It was their only pure FPS (although they got fairly close with Shadowcaster and System Shock), but in typical Origin style it is far more than a Doom clone and incorporated a storyline, magic and conventional weapons, an inventory, an actual plot, the ability to control vehicles both on the ground + air, and finally SVGA graphics. I presonally prefer it to Half-Life but there don’t seem to be many people who have even heard of the game.

For all this, I didn’t buy Cybermage until years after release despite already being something of an Origin fan boy back then. Admittedly I was an impoverished student and couldn’t afford many new titles until I’d started to earn my own way in the world. I do remember playing the demo but I recall finding it quite difficult at the time and not being all that impressed.

Having just played the demo for the first time since 1995, I fully understand why I didn’t buy the game as the demo does a terrible job of selling a great product.

First I’ll go for the good points. The demo is played on an original level designed to show off the features of the game. The plot involves shutting down the combat training facility, penetrating the main fortress and verifying NeCrom’s involvement in some dastardly deeds that aren’t described in the brief text file instructions.

Since it’s showing off the game (in theory), the level includes both tank driving and flying car piloting which were both cool features at the time when you compare it to the opposition. The demo level is huge, took me ages to play through and features loads of weapons and powers from the main game and plenty of varied terrain.

Now the bad points. First and foremost, the options menu in the game hasn’t been implemented and all the keys and controls are unchangeable. Not necessarily a big deal, if the chosen keys weren’t so impossible to use. Many standard commands involve combining keys even including bringing up the help menu! I understand that WASD wasn’t standard back then, but these have to be among the worst FPS controls I’ve ever seen. I had to play through this demo without strafing, which is never a good idea in any FPS.

The demo has limited sound card support and at the time I originally played this I’d have been stuck with adlib. I was never that keen on adlib but the music in this is truly awful without general MIDI.

I found playing the demo level seriously hard and there was a lot of reloading after I was killed. This is made more frustrating than it need be by a lengthy pause between death and being allowed to reload.

The demo doesn’t appear to have the same speed controls as the finished game and the enemies tended to move a little too fast at times in DosBOX. I wasn’t able to alter mouse sensitivity either, which was another major factor in the difficulty as I had to use an unnatural combination of keyboard to turn and mouse for fine tuning my aim.

At no point in this demo map was I aware of any plot or goals. I just meandered around shooting stuff and trying to find new areas. A lot of backtracking was involved to find locations that the last item I discovered would open. The backtracking is to some extent a difference between modern and old FPS’s but the plot was a real strong point in the final game and completely absent here. You wouldn’t even know the game had a comic book theme.

All of this amounts to a level that could have been designed to delay, frustrate and not show the game in it’s best light. The graphics are still nice for the time but that wouldn’t be enough to have tempted me to buy it.

The final section of the level, involves flying my newly acquired police car into a truly lethal area filled with tanks, more flying cars and a monk with an endless stream of Nova spells. My car only survives seconds in this environment and I have to make a beeline for the other side of the room and “hide” behind a rail fence which I learn is impenetrable to everything.

From here I peek around the fence and use the only gun I’ve got that has any ammo left to take out the over-powered monk. A door to a small room opens up and there is a short message on a screen from Necrom stating that he has drawn me out so that he can run off again and wait for me. This is sounding like hide and seek to me but the level ends before I can start counting to 10.

There is a quick advert screen to finish off the demo before I’m dumped back to DOS.

I fully expected to enjoy playing this demo, and while it has it’s good points I can’t say that it turned out to be all that much fun. I wouldn’t like anyone to have judged the final game based on this, but I know I did and I can’t have been the only one. If I could have altered the controls, it would have made a huge difference but it wasn’t the most inspired level design either and I tend to think Origin would have been better off just using the first level of the game. If they had, maybe Cybermage wouldn’t be quite so obscure.

Wing Commander 1 and 2 Demos

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I don’t have many of them but I thought I might have a look at some Origin’s demos. I’m starting with these two which are both new to me and were downloaded from WCNews. Since they are both short, I’ve put them up on Youtube.

Wing Commander 1 is a rolling demo with a good mix of cutscenes and in game action. This would have sold me on the game at the time but is the least interesting of the two as there isn’t much new here. There are some changes to what appeared in the game with the most obvious being the cockpit art and the fact that Origin FX was the Origin sound And graphics system at this point.

The Wing Commander 2 demo doesn’t show any gameplay but instead has a short piece of the WC2 intro. The majority of this was changed in the final game with several cuts to dialog, whole scenes removed and new voice acting. Some of the changes were for the better but I expect others were made to save on the already ridiculous number of floppies the game shipped with. My 3.5 DD version came on an insane 14 disks as it was, not including the speech pack. The lid barely even goes on the box.

Out of the new bits, I especially like the long flight to the palace and the sequence with Thrakhath walking past all the guards. Both would have added to the final game. I’m not so won over by the medieval style Kilrathi guards with little cat ears on their helmets.

Ultima 4 – The Trials And Tribulations Of Running The PC-98 Version

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Ultima 4 on the PC-98 is one of my more recent acquisitions and it was my first (and so far only) purchase off a Japanese auction site. I’ve never really gone in for collecting all the foreign versions of games but I was intrigued enough by this to want to try it out and above all I liked the price.

It was published in 1987 (according to the title screen), converted from the original by Pony Canyon, and comes in a plastic case which is a lot tougher than the old cardboard boxes I’m used to. I do prefer the more traditional boxes but this still looks like new 20 years later which is a definite advantage. The documentation is a close reproduction of the original (after being translated), with some snatches of English in there. It’s a nice package overall, only let down by the disks themselves which look completely out of place.

The PC-9801 was a Japanese computer system which I’ve not had any exposure to until trying to run this game. They were an expansion to the earlier PC-88 series and were around for many years but little seen outside of Asia. It was an IBM-PC variant but had its own features such as high-resolution graphics. Combined with the inevitable advances in technology since their original release, this meant that ports of familiar games to us Westerners often got something of an upgrade when they were made, Ultima 4 being no exception. There is an excellent article at Hardcore Gaming 101 on Japanese systems for anyone who wants to know more.

An upgraded Ultima 4 has to be worth a look so I thought I’d see if I could get it running. I naively went into this expecting not to have too much more trouble than running a game using any other emulator. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

First off, there was the matter of getting the game onto my computer. Whatever your take on roms and abandonware, it has to be said that the internet is a great resource for being able to get hold of games that you do actually own but wouldn’t be able to play otherwise. That is unless you own it for PC-98 it would appear.

I was able to find a very few sites with PC-98 roms and thought I had lucked out when one of the first claimed to have Ultima 4 disk images. However, it turned out to be a misnamed Ultima 6 so that was no use. This left me downloading “complete” romset torrents for the system none of which turned out to be complete enough to include a single Ultima either.

At this point, my final option was to try to read the original disks. I’d already had a go at this with the Kryoflux and not got a usable image out of it. It would have helped if I knew or could find the technical specs for PC-9801 disks, as native support isn’t built into the Kryoflux software. I went back for a second attempt though and after some fiddling around I figured out that it would read them if I changed the revolution rate to 360 and upped it to 1024 bytes per sector, instead of the usual 512. I now know that the disks use a format with 77 tracks, each with 8 sectors and each of those having 1024 bytes making it slightly larger than a regular 1.2 Mb HD floppy. It uses a regular filesystem however, and while WinImage didn’t think much of the image due to its strange format, all the files were visible and extractable using MagicISO.

Now I just needed an emulator. There are several of these available although they were all developed in Japanese making them a little hard to use at times. I did find English translations of all of them however so I didn’t have to work out the menus by trial and error. The three that I actually got working were Neko Project II, Anex86, and Visual 98, all of which are reasonably easy to set up and use once you have found the required ROM’s. I’ve heard that which one of these a given game will work with is a case of trial and error, but most games should potentially be runnable in at least one of them.

Having got the disks imaged and the emulators running, the hard part should have been out of the way but this is where things started to go wrong. Just to be awkward, each of these emulators has its own floppy disk format none of which appear to be used anywhere else. This left me looking for a tool to convert disks and the only one I was able to locate was vfic (Virtual Floppy Image Convertor). I initially found this in Japanese and Greek but there is an English version available on the authors website.

Vfic is a simple app which you drag your floppy images onto and it spits them out in one of the other formats. This is great for converting images between the different emulator formats but it doesn’t support regular ISO/IMA images so it turned out to be a dead loss from my point of view. I looked around for a convertor to one of the other vfic formats so that I could convert the disk in two stages but got nowhere.

My last resort was to copy the game files onto an existing disk image – this is complicated somewhat by the fact that all these PC-98 games are booters. I found another tool for this job called DiskExplorer which entirely failed to read blank disks created by the emulators (probably because I hadn’t formatted them), but would read the Ultima 6 disks I’d downloaded earlier and allow me to edit the contents. I got rid of the U6 game files (leaving the bootup system files behind) and shovelled the Ultima 4 files in there via MagicISO. When I booted this up in an emulator, it got as far as the first text title screen at which point it would crash.

I nearly gave up here but I reasoned that since it had different system files on the U6 floppy, I might do better with an alternative operating system. This led to me hunting down a copy of DOS for PC-98 which I found on an Italian website of all places. Rather than keeping it simple and having the 3 disks in a zip file, it had them in some format that could only be extracted by vfic which I’d thankfully located earlier. I’m glad to say I didn’t have to install DOS on a virtual HD and could simply boot the PC-98 from the first disk and quit out of the shell that launched. This leads to a regular dos prompt which works with the same commands as good old MS-DOS.

From here I put the hybrid Ultima 6/4 disk in the other drive, ran U4.exe and it ran all the way to where the music should start and hung. I turned off the emulated sound hardware, tried again and finally had the game running or at least the introduction sequence. As soon as the character creation is over and the game starts it appears to keep asking me for Disk 1, although given that it’s in Japanese I could be entirely mistaken on this. There was an anomaly on the final sector of both disks when I was imaging them. This may be standard for PC-98 for all I know, but I’m assuming that it’s copy protection which isn’t on my recreated disks and it refuses to start the game.

So that’s as far as I got after several hours of trying. The issue might not be copy protection but it’s hard not to think that being able to use the original disk images wouldn’t help. Even then the protection may not be stored in the IMA. My only other idea is that it could be something to do with having to create a player disk. I may play around with it a bit more before I give in. Any ideas on how to get this working would be very welcome in the meanwhile, or just a set of ready-made working disk images for that matter. I’ve found the ideal forums to ask for help but 24 hours later my registration confirmation email still hasn’t arrived so I can’t actually post anything.

Since I spent so long on it, I’ve attached screenshots of all the intro gfx below. As can be seen, they are faithful to the original but at a higher resolution and don’t look bad at all. At least that’s some reward for my efforts but I’d love to have at least tried the main game and walked round a few dungeons. It would have been tricky to play it properly what with it being in Japanese and all, but I reckon I know it well enough that it might be doable.

Wing Commander Prophecy (GBA) – Part 2

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I had a giant length podcast to listen to so I pressed on with the game while doing that and managed to finish it a lot quicker than I expected (quicker than the podcast at any rate) . There is no way I played through 48 missions so the total must have been including branches. I’m sure that some of the original missions have been skipped but the majority were present and it follows the PC original closely throughout. I can’t say that I ever got entirely used to the controls but I did start to learn how to play this specific port a little more and was considerably less frustrated in the later missions.

Once the game has got going, there definitely are tactics involved in regards to which ships you take out first and possibly in ordering wingmen around (although I’m unconvinced they ever followed my orders). The improved ships I got to fly in later missions is what made the biggest difference though. I’d already had the hardest fighters thrown at me, and the game got easier and more fun to play with a little extra firepower.

On the subject of firepower, I soon got to fly bombers and take out some capital ships. All of these look great in the engine and there is very little slowdown. Unlike the PC game, I can’t go around blasting turrets of course and there aren’t any sections of the ship to aim at. Like all the ships in the game, capships just have one shield (no front and back) and I simply blast it until it dies with everything I’ve got. I found all these missions extremely easy as it was just a case of afterburning behind the ship and holding fire. There is no need in this game to clean up the fighters after this and I immediately autopilot back to the Midway. As a consequence, the final sections of the game were quickly passed and I got through to the wormhole gate in no time.

I should mention that I could have aimed for bonus tasks such as taking out a percentage of the fighters in many of these missions if I’d wanted more challenge. Also I did have the choice of bomber or fighter for several missions depending on which part I wanted to fly. I’ve always had a preference for bombers since the Broadsword missions with Doomsday in WC2.

The final wormhole gate mission appeared to be a case of surviving for a few minutes and was also relatively easy, with the main challenge being knocking out all the fighters at the first nav point. There are no inflight comms in this game beyond a few instructions I can give to my wingmen, so it does help to have knowledge of what went on before playing the game in missions like this if you expect to follow the plot. The basic outline is in the briefing but there is no tension developed here as Dekker slowly works his way around the structure or anything like that.

At the end of the mission, there is a brief cutscene showing the gate blowing up to finish off and some dialog and stills from the original closing FMV. The dialog does come across as more cheesy as text than it was in a movie and Prophecy’s movies were not its strongest feature in the first place. It does end the game appropriately although it isn’t much reward and does leave me wanting the sequels we never got. I noticed a few familiar names in the credits after this and I think the WC community was heavily involved in editing dialog and the like.

I suppose I have to look at this game within the context of mobile games back in 2003 which were still quite primitive. It would be so easy to do a fantastic job of putting Prophecy on the PSP complete with the movies though and I can’t help but wish that this game had come a few years later. Prophecy on the GBA is technically a triumph for what it achieved on the system but not as much fun as I might have hoped. I’d have liked it at the time just on the basis of the 3D graphics on a portable device. Coming to it now I don’t find it easy to see past its limitations and it’s a pale shadow of PC Wing Commander Prophecy. It’s worth a look for fans and the multiplayer could be good fun but it seems to me that due to the nature of the game and it’s choice of platform it’s badly dated even if it is less than a decade old. If I want to play Wing Commander on the move, I expect I’d do better sticking the Playstation versions of WC3 & 4 on my PSP, or WC1 & 2 on my Pandora for that matter.

Speaking of which, I wouldn’t have minded having a look at those Playstation ports at this point having never actually played them. I’ll take any excuse to play either of those games again really and with the 3D hardware they have the potential to be better than the PC. I don’t own either of them yet though and I’m still flat broke thanks to a certain Mr. Shelley so they will have to wait until I’ve paid the bills. It’s not exactly an easy time of year to be saving money so that could take me a while. On that basis, I’ll switch over to Ultima ports next and get back to the previously promised Ultima 4 on the PC-98.

Wing Commander Prophecy (GBA) – Part 1

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Wing Commander Prophecy was published on the Gameboy Advance in 2003 by Destination and developed by Raylight. From what I understand, Destination had previously secured rights from EA to publish mobile versions of their games. Raylight wanted to do a new Wing Commander game and created a demo of their shiny new 3D engine which was presented to Destination to persuade them to grant access to the license. However, there were copyright issues for Wing Commander 1 with some work being done by contractors and owned by them (e.g. the Fat Man’s music). WC1 isn’t the obvious choice for a pure 3D engine either since it used sprites so in the end Raylight secured the rights to do Prophecy instead of the original Wing Commander and this game is the result.

The Gameboy Advance was initially marketed at least partly on its 3D capabilities but not many games had exploited this making Prophecy one of the most technically advanced games for the system. Whether this translates into the gameplay or not, just fitting the game into a ROM less than 4 Mb is impressive.

It gets underway with a 3D introduction cutscene which mirrors the opening FMV on the PC. On a tiny screen this doesn’t look too bad and it does the job of setting the scene within the limitations of the GBA. There is no speech of course and the dialog is done with captions.

Once on the Midway, the in-game cutscenes are a little strange. They all have still backdrops with head photos which swap depending on the mood of each character. From what I’ve seen so far, the original script is nearly all there but I’m not sure how easy it would to follow if wasn’t already familiar with it as there is no context for a lot of the dialog. I assume this game is aimed at fans of the original who want to play it on the move, in which case it does the job.

I have to mention the background music which has been the same for all of these scenes and is the most god-awful dirge I’ve heard in any game for some time. Not only that but its on something like a 6 second loop. If I’m utterly sick of it now, I can only imagine what I’ll be like after another 40 missions. I’m not going to be taking my time over reading the dialog in this game as my ears won’t take the punishment.

Music aside, I can wander around the usual rooms in the ship and get the familiar cutscenes (sort of). The briefing is a simple text only affair with no 3D wire-frame graphics but the missions themselves are based around the PC originals which I really didn’t expect. I was assuming it would be cut down but I gather there are 48 missions in the game. This could keep me occupied for some time.

On launching into the actual flight part of the game, I’m impressed with the graphics which really do look like a tiny version of the original. The launching sequence is present (complete with speech), my cockpit flashes with coloured light when I fire, the missiles all lock on correctly and all the different ships are there. It really is a portable version of WCP, admittedly with some cutbacks and simplifications. It isn’t without problems though.

The biggest of these is that the GBA has two fewer buttons than the SNES gamepad and it shows in the controls. They aren’t entirely dissimilar to the SNES but the shoulder buttons are used as modifiers instead. This means that to change speed you have to hold R down and press up or down. This is awkward and the best of times and impossible to do while steering making tailing ships extremely tricky.

Dropping decoys uses the select button which I often can’t find quickly in an emergency either. If someone fires a missile at you in this game you get about half a seconds warning in which time you need to afterburn, steer away and drop decoys and it is physically impossible to do all these at the same time.

I initially started playing the game on my DS but found the controls so awkward that I went back to using an emulator instead. This is as much about the DS as the controls, it’s just too small for my shovel-like hands (anyone would think it was designed for kids). Playing this on the DS was like a miniature equivalent of twister for my fingers and they still feel sore a day later. Using a proper gamepad on an emulator is more comfortable but the graphics don’t look all that nice simply because of the larger screen showing them up.

Another issue with the controls is once again the lack of analog input. I’d got used to this on the SNES but I’ve found it trickier here and my initial impression is that it hasn’t been as well implemented. The aliens in Prophecy are a lot more twisty and turny and they are tricky to hit at the best of times. They don’t have the same problem with me however and if they get on my tail, I’m usually dead in seconds as they spam me with missiles.

A final annoyance is that there is no way to lock onto a target and which target the game auto selects is almost random. With a tiny little radar, it’s really hard to keep track of each dot at times and it makes it difficult to find a specific ship again after it has gone out of sight. The auto selection doesn’t even limit itself to enemy ships and I often find it locking onto my wingmen which really doesn’t help.

All this combines to make this game properly hard. It has required multiple attempts at most of the missions so far, and if you haven’t played a few Wing Commanders you would have little chance of getting anywhere. I wouldn’t say that it’s so much a case of learning how to approach the missions as just lucking out, although there is plenty of skill needed as well.

I’ve got about 8 missions in and I’ve got mixed feelings about the game from what I’ve seen. It’s technically impressive but not as much fun as Secret Missions was as I’m fighting my own ship more than the aliens. I can’t see myself getting used to these controls in all honesty. With the shoulder buttons doubling as afterburners, I keep stopping my ship by accident when I steer straight out of an afterburn and it’s all a little frustrating. There is clearly a decent game in there but I’m struggling to get at it.