Mines of Titan, Ship of Theseus

Dumping off a dead body in a nightclub.

Mines of Titan has a perhaps unique approach to the idea of a "party" and associated character development, though I don't necessarily mean in a good way. You get so much experience from combat, and combat is so plentiful, that it's relatively easy to train each character to the max in skills and attributes in short order. At the same time, combat is so lethal that you're bound to lose even the most experienced characters occasionally, requiring you to recruit and train another if you want to avoid too much reloading. The game seems specifically designed for this dynamic, as without it, your characters spend most of the game not undergoing any development.

Quaid is eager to learn; there's just not much I need him to learn.

Oddly, the existence of the "party" seems to continue despite the replacement of the original members. If a previous character broke into a computer terminal and saved $5,000 by hacking the transport reservations system, the party will still have the reservations even if none of the same party members are with you when you arrive at the speeder terminal. The same goes for access to the "war room" (the only place to train on automatic weapons, arc weapons, and battle armor). Quest points that you've already experienced remain experienced. It's very odd.

Sneaking into the war room.

I've rotated through about 9 characters since the first posting. Gideon is still going strong, and is trained to the max in everything I would possibly want to train him in. Everyone else has been replaced a couple of times. I've found it impossible to keep all six characters alive at any given time. Eventually, I settled on four as the optimal number; there's less distribution of experience that way, and it cuts down on the length of combat (I'm 95% certain that the number of enemies that appear is based on the number of members in the party).
 

Increasing stamina at a "personal development institute."

Even from the beginning, I allowed myself to reload if my entire party was slaughtered--you lose all your money if that happens, and money is a precious resource for training and equipment. Also, towards the end of this session, I started playing a part of the game that takes place far away from the cities, and I decided to allow myself to reload during character deaths in this area; it would simply take too long to walk back to a city every time I want to replace a character.

Plot-wise, a lot has happened since my first posting. I've been to three of the four cities on the moon and I've solved (I think) most of the quests. Here are the higlights:

1. Computer hacking. I got Gideon's "Programming" skill up high enough that I was able to hack into a computer terminal and accomplish a bunch of things, including:

• Access to the "war room" for training.

• A bunch of classified documents that suggest intelligent alien life forms have attacked the city of Procenium and have infiltrated the mines; hence, the loss of contact with the city and the announced shut-down of the mines. This attack might have been provoked by an agent's killing of one of the creatures. The creature itself is reported to be a "small reddish-brown sack that resembles a partially-filled rubber balloon."

• Information about how to reprogram "golum armor," which is normally customized for each individual. I haven't found any golum armor yet, though.

• The ability to modify police records to remove fines and warrants.

• A back door into the "speeder reservation system" where I can make reservations without having to pay the $5,000 it normally costs.

• E-mail exchanges between systems operators at different cities, arguing about one's hoarding of an "interface card."

2. The missing specimen. I traced some pink footprints in one part of Primus and found a group of dirty cops who had stolen the specimen from the library.

They fail to kill the witnesses.

In a long combat that left Benny dead, I defeated them and recovered the specimen, which had fallen from its bottle during the fight. The specimen--clearly one of the sentient creatures, or at least a part of it--absorbed itself into my hand and gave me a vision of what had befallen it, with a group of "incompetent scientists" vivisecting it. I recognized the leader as the Surgeon General of Primus.

3. Cybil Graves. The owner of the munitions shop, Cybil Graves, had asked me to go to the surface and find a group of Nomads who were supposed to give her a box. The Nomads, you may recall, are ex-convicts from the cities who have somehow found a way to survive on the surface. I found them with only a few minutes of wandering around.

The Nomads gave me a device that directed me to Cybil's box, as well as the entrance to some underground caves. I explored them a little but found the monsters fairly tough, so I returned to Cybil and got my $4,000 reward.

That seems ominous.

She soon appeared among the police bounties, "wanted dead or alive," for having "aided the outlaw nomads by running guns and ammunition" and "attempting to release a toxic gas into the Parallax air ducts."

Much later, I found Cybil in an armor shop in Parallax, trying to buy armor for her Nomad friends. I got annoyed with the game in this section. There was a scripted set of screens in which Cybil offered me $4,000 to let her go and I weighed the offer in comparison to her $3,000 bounty. See what the screen says:

Would it have been that hard for the developers to allow me to decide whether to accept her offer, turn her in, or "do both"?  This seems like a role-playing choice that shouldn't have been taken away from me. In any event, I shot her, turned her in, and got $7,000 from the whole deal.

4. Warring SysAdmins. Okay, the game calls them "SysOps," but that was before it knew any better. In accordance with the e-mail exchanges I hacked, I got a quest from the Progeny SysOp to steal a prototype interface card "devised to crack any computer system" from the Primus SysOp.

A rare role-playing choice in the game.

I went to the Primus office, and I had three choices: try to buy the plans, take them forcefully, or talk him into giving it to me. I suspect the first option would have worked with more administration skill and the third with more charisma, but I didn't have either, so I just robbed the guy. It got me wanted by the police, but I hacked a computer terminal and removed the bounty. When I returned the card to the SysOp in Progeny, he gave me a "prototype terminal," but I'm not sure what that did for me. Perhaps it would have allowed me to hack stuff if my hacking skill wasn't already so high.

5. Miscellaneous Progeny Quests. There were two quests on Progeny: helping an armor shop owner named Herb figure out who'd been breaking into his shop, and finding a wanted criminal who was hiding in the mines. Neither required any role-playing choices; I just wandered into the right places and watched as a series of narration and cut scenes left me victorious. I did get some good money and a couple nice sets of battle armor for my troubles, though.

6. The Alien Conspiracy. A few events came together to depict what I assume is the main quest. When I visited a hospital, a grotesquely burned man somehow divined that I knew of the aliens' existence and shouted at me to "stop these fools before it's too late!" He said that someone named Clinton Cain knew how to find the entrance to their home.

I found Cain by accident in the university in Progeny. He related that while collecting specimens on the surface, he came across a creature that had been wounded by laser fire. The creature "touched his mind" and revealed itself as a "member of an ancient race that does not have any written language or tools," using mental powers for everything. He further said that humanity's actions had "caused them to think of our race as a hostile force that must be eliminated."

Getting the main quest.

He suggested that if I find out what happened to Proscenium, I might be able to stop it at the other colonies and "save Titan." He set my "finder" (I guess the box I got from the Nomads) to direct me to the relevant caves and bade me good luck. I suspect it's pretty obvious what happened at Proscenium, so I don't know how going there is going to help, but whatever wins the game.

Solving these various quests involved visiting all three primary cities: Primus, Progeny, and Parallax. They were relatively indistinguishable from each other, all having the same look, services, and enemies.

I have no idea why the game felt it was necessary to put so many computer terminals near each other. You have to use them basically once in the game to get the hacking information, plus maybe a few other times to get speeder reservations. One per city would have been fine.

I moved between them on speeders, which normally cost $5,000 per trip but are free with my hacking abilities. When you go from one city to another, you have the option to take a "window seat" and see the terrain fly by as you zoom along.

All cities delivered up plenty of opportunities for combat, though later as I developed my "administration" skill, I was able to avoid a lot of them. Choosing between tactical combat and computer-controlled combat is tough. 95% of the time, the computer does fine and all my characters survive, but that means 1 in 20 times, someone dies. To ensure survival, I viscerally want to be in control of the battle, but to be honest, I lose characters at a greater frequency than the computer does. Thus, I either have to watch my guys die with no control over it, or I have to take control and more thoroughly ensure their deaths.

Here, I'm trying to use the terrain to bring them to me one by one, but it never really works. I keep getting into situations where they can shoot me from around the corner, but I can't hit them.

More random notes:

• It appears that your skill level with weapons and medical equipment defines what you're allowed to buy. As my skill with handguns, rifles, and automatic weapons rose, so did the available choices in the stores. More important, as my skill in medicine rose, so did the medical devices I could buy. Characters with a high enough skill can by "Medkits" and automatically heal the entire party after each combat. Very handy.

• The game has an infrequent "copy protect" mechanism. When you try to train in advanced weapons in the war room, it occasionally asks you a question that you can only answer by looking at diagrams in the manual.

I like to imagine my party members frantically paging through their notes at times like this.

• I couldn't role-play any of the quest-related stuff, as above, but this is apparently the game's idea of a "role-playing choice."

What kind of deviant says "yes" here?

• The caves are full of steam and lava traps, but it's mostly just a waste of time, since my characters with medical skill immediately and automatically heal everyone anyway.

Basically, this does nothing but slow my progress through the caves as I have to pause and read the message.

• The screens in which your party moves as a unit are essentially identical to BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, the previous Westwood/Infocom offering. In fact, many of the interface elements of this game are identical to BattleTech.

As I close this posting, I'm stuck in the caves. Every few steps, I have a tough combat with a series of alien creatures capable of inflicting mass damage.

My party bathes in a sea of chemicals shot by the creatures in the lower left.

Throughout the caves, I've encountered those red balloon creatures. Some of them have granted me a vision of unlocking a door. Others grant me a "mental ability" but these manifest themselves in items that I can pick up, including a "Render," a "Synapse Beam," a "Mind Melt," and a "Reaver Rifle." I assume some of these are weapons, but other than the rifle, I'm not sure what classes. I'll have to experiment.

I was playing part of this game in an airport. You don't want to know what "small, reddish brown, partially inflated rubber balloon" made me think about.

But I'm stuck. The only way out of the caves, other than the way I came in, is a passage surrounded by four chemical vents that he game won't let me pass. I've tried all of my items here to see if any of them will work, but none of them do.

It's possible that I missed something in the cities or I need to be wearing some special kind of armor to pass. Either way, it's a long trek back to the cities, and I'm not looking forward to it. I wouldn't mind a little hint here if there's some way to move forward without returning to civilization first.

As you may have noticed, there are plot elements here that are similar to Total Recall (the REAL Total Recall), especially given that the original game, Mars Saga, was set on Mars. We have a shadowy, profit-motivated corporation running things through corrupt "agents"; an outcast class (mutants in the film, Nomads here); a hostile exterior environment; and rumors of ancient civilizations. But the game precedes the film by a couple of years. It's possible that the developers were influenced by Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, on which Total Recall was based, but the story doesn't really have all of these elements. It's much more focused on the "hidden memory" aspect. It may all just be a coincidence.

I'm looking forward to seeing what I find in Proscenium, if I ever get there.