Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: 3

The party's fame grows.

 
When I was around 12 or 13, I fell in love with the V television and book franchise. (I've resisted watching the two miniseries again for fear that they won't hold up to my recollections.) The series concerns the takeover of Earth by a race of aliens who initially appear as friendly "visitors" but eventually turn out to be bent on stripping Earth of its water and other resources. There's an almost heavy-handed use of Nazi symbology and themes in the series, with children encouraged to join "Visitor Youth" programs, scientists subjected to a kind-of Holocaust, and jack-booted troopers slowly infiltrating local law enforcement. Eventually, a Resistance forms.

The moments that I liked best were those in which the Resistance makes incremental gains against the Visitors through use of guerrilla tactics. An old woman tosses a Molotov cocktail in a parked scout ship. A high-ranking officer is stalked and assassinated. A group of vandals breaks into an office and destroys all the equipment and documents. There's a juvenile appeal to the idea that you can slowly erode an enemy this way; that if you kill enough soldiers and destroy enough vehicles one-by-one, eventually the enemy won't have any left. The evil empire will collapse for lack of resources.

I'm not an expert in military history, but I suspect it rarely works this way in real life. Guerrilla campaigns have been successful, of course, but usually because they've inflicted enough losses to make the enemy feel it just isn't worth it to continue (e.g., the American Revolution, Vietnam), not because they actually depopulated the enemy enough to bring the government to its knees. Also, the entire fantasy requires a state of total war against an irredeemably evil enemy; otherwise, it's hard to justify an explicit goal to kill such a high percentage of enemy soldiers and support personnel.

Another incremental win for the good guys.

But sci-fi and fantasy games can indulge this fantasy, and Buck Rogers does a better job than most in capturing that juvenile appeal. The enemy isn't some lunatic wizard holed up in a tower but a truly evil government, with ships and troops and control of entire planets. The enemy is depraved enough to build a Doomsday weapon to destroy the entire Earth, which removes any moral qualms one might have about annihilating its soldiers and ships. As the game progresses and the party invades various RAM bases and outposts, and destroys the odd heavy cruiser in space, there's a strong sense of whittling away the edges of RAM's power base and making the galaxy safe for democracy.

In the game, "whittling away the edges" occurs quite literally, starting with the outer ring of asteroids. When I last posted, I had discovered that the dread pirate Talon had a secret base somewhere in which he was keeping dangerous gennie (genetically-engineered warrior) canisters, and that an ex-crewmember named Garrity, last seen on Pallas, might have an idea as to the base's location. I had to look up on Wikipedia that Pallas is an asteroid. Nine asteroid clusters form a ring around the explorable solar system, and I had no idea which was Pallas, so I picked one at random and began working my way around them, counter-clockwise.

Arriving at an asteroid port.

Some of the asteroids had "menu ports" where I could visit various bars, shops, and the occasional training academy. Others had explorable bases belonging to RAM or RAM-affiliated pirates. On the Pallas base, I did find the ex-pirate, who gave me a password to Talon's secret base, but he didn't know what asteroid it was on. Continuing to work my way around the circuit, I found a mining asteroid that seemed to fit the bill:

The gennies had escaped their canisters and had killed most of the miners in the base. It was a small base, and it culminated with the discovery of a time bomb that I set to destroy the asteroid. Satisfied that I'd solved that little quest, I continued working my way around the asteroids rather than head to Mars, the location of the next major plot point.

On the next asteroid, I found a hidden RAM base that clearly had been monitoring NEO's communications. The entrance to the base was guarded by a single robot, but it was the most difficult enemy I've faced so far. It was capable of firing explosive rockets and was immune to most of the weapons that I had.

The only way I could defeat it was to fan out and minimize my losses from explosions, and to use my own explosive grenades. This was a bit painful because explosive grenades are as rare as they are useful. I haven't found any place to buy them (or, indeed, any of the more advanced munitions in the game). I had to waste nine or ten before I was able to destroy the robot without losing any of my crew.

The rest of the base was a series of encounters as I chased the base commander from room to room before I finally trapped him behind some communications equipment and made a bit of an evil role-playing choice:

NEO congratulated me and rewarded me with experience for neutralizing the base.

On the next asteroid, I found the real pirate base I had been trying to find at the outset; apparently, the mining base had just been an optional map. After I entered the passcode provided by the drunk ex-pirate, I entered the base to find it swarming with RAM soldiers upset about Talon's failures, waiting for him in ambush. They didn't seem to mind that I wasn't Talon.

Reminds me of that imperial legate at the beginning of Skyrim.

Just as in the communications base, I ended up chasing the commander from room to room before he was killed by one of Talon's robots--the same type of enemy that had given me so much trouble on the communications base. I had to waste a bunch more explosive grenades.

He's also vulnerable to melee attacks, but his low armor class means that I rarely hit.

With the last of the asteroids explored, I now set my sights on the planets. My next official mission was to search for a RAM base on Mars, but operating under the principle of whittling the edges before striking at the core, I decided to check out Mercury and Venus first. Mercury had a single base whose door I couldn't open, so I figured I'd have to come back later.

Venus provided a different experience. Instead of just taking me immediately to an indoor base, the game had me land on the planet's surface--a jungle populated by flowers, trees, and mushrooms.

Somehow, the top was successfully terraformed to the bottom.

Navigating was the same as exploring the outdoor areas of Pool of Radiance or Champions of Krynn, although in this case there were far too many squares to make me want to methodically explore all of them. There were only a few key locations punctuated with numerous encounters with RAM soldiers and local fauna.

Fighting RAM agents in Venus's tropical environment.

Early on, I found some reptilian Venusian "lowlanders," saved them from a RAM attack, and got an NPC companion named "Leander" for my troubles. Leander was helpful, but ultimately I lost him when I had to retreat to my ship for healing and he insisted on staying on the planet.

I don't know, in the game's mythology, where these creatures are supposed to come from.

A prominent acid lake in the middle of the map was inhabited by acid frogs. I'd received some scattered intelligence about them in a bar, including the fact that it was possible to befriend them. Unfortunately, I hadn't given any character points in the "befriend animal" skill, so I just ended up pissing them off, and they dogged me across the rest of the map.

In the northwest portion of the map, I found a decimated lowlander village where I killed the RAM occupants and assisted the few remaining survivors.

Some more role-playing options.

From the Venusians, I learned about their dealings with RAM. Apparently, the lowlanders produce a drug called "Gravitol." I'm not sure what it does, but a rumor I received at a bar says that space travel wouldn't be possible without it. The lowlanders' monopoly on the production of Gravitol was threatened by the continual terraforming of the planet, which would have allowed other races to set up shop there. RAM promised the Venusians that they would halt the terraforming if the Venusian scientists would assist in the construction of a giant lens for RAM's doomsday laser. But once the lens was completed, RAM turned on the Venusians and slaughtered them.

The lowlanders told me the location of the RAM base to the south, and I left the village after rescuing a child from the rubble. For some reason, the child, Zane, stuck with me as an NPC even though he had only 4 hit points and couldn't fire a weapon to save his life.

The RAM base on Venus was fairly small and had several special encounters that led me to destroy a hanger full of gliders and free some imprisoned lowlander scientists (one of them took Zane off my hands). Like the other maps, there were numerous encounters with various choices. While I like these encounters, as I said last time, I think they all lead to the same basic result.

Here's one of the more bizarre "role-playing" choices I've experienced in any game:

I ended up taking it, but I never found a place to use it.

At the culmination of the Venus base, Scot.DOS discovered that the Doomsday device is located "on the third Mercurian mariposa." I don't really know what "mariposa" (Spanish for "butterfly") means in this context, but in any event it seems that the device is in that locked base back on Mercury. Other than that, the only thing I got out of the base with that I didn't have before was something called a "retinal lockpick."

The Mercury base remains as closed as ever, so I guess the next stop is Mars. I know I said I'd have a big combat and equipment posting this time around, but I'm saving it for next time because I wasn't in a good place to video a combat in this last session.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

• There are actually two economies in the game. The first is the standard "credits" received after each battle and from selling equipment, as in a traditional RPG. The second is the "salvage account" that increases as you defeat enemy ships and sell their parts. Salvage account credits are used to repair and refuel the party's ship at the various ports in the solar system; they are technically optional, since repairs and refueling take place for free at Earth's Salvation base.

Spending my "salvage credits" on fuel.

• Ordering drinks and food and talking at bars and restaurants occasionally, but not often, produces some kind of rumor. I don't know if these are based on skills like "fast talk," "etiquette," and "act," but I haven't otherwise found any explicit use for these skills.

I'm going to assume this is a lie.

• Ports also occasionally have libraries, where my medic's "library search" skill sometimes produces a bit of intelligence, rarely all that helpful. It does also provide a modicum of experience to the medic, though.

• Some of the rumors I've received in bars have pointed to an artificial intelligence named "Holzerhein.DOS" in charge of RAM. I thought this was silly, but later on the Venus base, some wall decorations seemed to bear it out.

• All of the maps since the last post have been fairly small. I was worried that every map was going to be as enormous as the one in the asteroid base.

• The game's various "gennies" seem to be a manifest attempt to introduce some D&D-style monsters into a non-fantasy setting. Each has special attacks like poison or extra speed. I'm surprised I haven't found any that can turn me to stone. A quick gallery:

 

My characters are now Level 7 out of a maximum of 8 levels, so either there's not much more to the game or you're going to get a bit of a rant at the end.