Game 126: Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (1990)

 

There are some regrettable gaps in my knowledge of popular culture. Ten years ago, if you had asked me about "Buck Rogers," I would have said something like, "Oh, yeah. That's the show where the guy from The Fall Guy battles the evil Cylon armies of Ming the Merciless." Then I would have strolled away, happily recalling that one episode where Buck Rogers flies through the galaxy in his TARDIS, oblivious to you falling onto the pavement behind me, your aneurysm producing some final muscle spasms in your extremities.

A year later, I would have realized that the Cylons were from Battlestar Galactica, but I otherwise wasn't much better off. Today, thanks to the almighty Internet, I have it all straight: Created by science fiction author Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940), Buck Rogers dates all the way back to 1928, when he appeared in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories as "Anthony Rogers." He was the subject of several short stories (1928-1929), a comic strip (1929-1967; 1979-1983), a radio program (1932-1947), several comic books (1933-present), a film serial (1939), a book series (1981-1993), and two television series (1950-1951; 1979-1981), the latter of which is the one I (barely) remember. His origin story has been retold several times, always updated for the era, but it always consists of a present-day military officer who, through some plot development, gets put in suspended animation for 500 years and wakes up in a universe in which humanity has rebuilt after a disaster and is engaged in factional warfare using whatever futuristic technologies could be imagined at the time. My understanding is that the original stories and comics featured an Earth-based Buck Rogers, but the later TV series and books have been set in space.

Various depictions of Buck Rogers over the years.

The merger of the Buck Rogers universe with TSR is an interesting story. Nowlan originally syndicated his strip through the John F. Dille Company (later the National Newspaper Syndicate), which came to own the rights to the character. (Dille himself also contributed some creative elements to the franchise.) The rights passed through the Dille family trust and ultimately to the hands of Lorraine Dille Williams, who in 1984 was hired by Gary Gygax to manage the struggling TSR. Shortly thereafter, the TSR board ousted Brian and Kevin Blume, who had mismanaged the company, and the Blumes sold their shares to Williams. Gygax tried to have the sale voided but when he failed, he said screw it and sold his own shares to Williams. She was the majority owner, and head of the company, until she sold it to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

With Williams owning both TSR and the Buck Rogers licenses, it seemed inevitable that TSR would publish a Buck Rogers RPG, and indeed Buck Rogers XXVC came out in 1988. Since SSI got the license from TSR to produce the first real D&D CRPGs, a Buck Rogers CRPG was a natural addition to the arrangement.

The game uses the same version of the Buck Rogers universe as the tabletop RPG, created by Williams's brother, Flint Dille. Rogers is an ace military pilot who, in 1990, flies a spaceship into orbit to destroy a Soviet "space weapons platform" called Masterlink. He succeeds, but his ship is heavily damaged, forcing him to eject in space. Back on Earth, the enraged Soviets blanket the U.S. with ballistic missiles, launching the "Last Gasp War," a conflict whose destruction leaves the world so horrified that everyone hastily disarms and forms international alliances to ensure world peace. These include the Russo-American Mercantile (RAM), the Euro-Bloc, and the Indo-Asian Consortium. These three eventually join together into the System States Alliance, which pioneers nuclear fusion in spacecraft and starts to explore, mine, terraform, and colonize planets. RAM takes over Mars, the Euro-Bloc gets the moon, and the Indo-Asians take Venus.

In 2275, RAM rebels against the rest of the Earth government and starts a devastating war that leaves the fascist RAM in control of a planet reverted to barbarism. Refugees flee to Mercury (it is left unexplained how they manage to colonize a planet with no atmosphere, about 1/3 Earth gravity, and a temperature that ranges from -280 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit). A rebel alliance called the New Earth Organization (NEO) forms.

In 2456, Buck Rogers is found floating in space and is awakened from cryo-sleep. In the intervening centuries, his reputation "has been elevated to nearly mythological status by media hype--he has become a symbol as the last martyr of old Earth's foolish political struggle." Rogers soon joins with the NEO and, in a bold plan, steals a squadron of RAM spacefighters and uses them to destroy the base of RAM's power, an orbiting weapons platform called the Gauntlet. RAM abandons Earth to NEO but still launches occasional attacks and is rumored to be mustering its strength for a counteroffensive.

An inspiring speech from my commander.

I rather imagined that the player takes the role of Buck Rogers in the game, but instead you control a group of fresh NEO recruits, eager to join the struggle against the remnants of RAM. As the game begins, the recruits are in the "Chicagorg spaceport," receiving an orientation from their commanding officer, Carlton Turabian, who explains that the recruits will be given "patrol and salvage" missions at the beginning and will have to work their way up to combat. But the briefing is interrupted by a squadron of RAM ships who bomb the base and then engage with ground troops. Within a few minutes, the party is in combat on the first map.

The game uses the same Gold Box engine as Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Champions of Krynn, with only a few changes. The graphics and fonts are more futuristic, of course (though the combat sounds are identical to Champions). Characters have blasters instead of bows. What was "bandage" in the D&D titles is "aid" here. The six core attributes are the same, though there's an additional one called "Tech," or technical knowledge. Experience and leveling proceed as per D&D, and both armor class and THAC0 are present.

The races are all different, of course. You choose from the humanoid Terrans, Martians, Venusians, and Mercurians, or from the bio-engineered Tinkers (small and monkey-like, good with tools) and Desert Runners (canine/felines known for their athleticism). The humanoid races have small adjustments to their stats, explained by differences in gravity and atmosphere, but are otherwise mostly the same. Instead of "classes," we get "careers": rocketjocks (pilots), warriors, engineers, rogues, and medics. Each has minimum attribute requirements.

The biggest difference (so far) between Buck Rogers and the D&D Gold Box games is this game's selection of skills. There are more than 50 of them, including such wide-ranging abilities as climbing, piloting rockets, picking pockets, demolitions, treating diseases, programming, and singing. (Some of them, as the manual notes, aren't even used in this game but are offered in anticipation of the sequel.) You start with a certain number of points to funnel into both "career" skills (those special to the profession) and "general" skills.

This is the kind of thing that ties me in knots at the outset of a game. I have no idea what skills will actually be valuable and which will turn out to be worthless. I have no idea how many points I have to allot to the skills before it's enough. When you read walkthroughs for games like this, you inevitably encounter notes that say something like, "Make sure you put at least 50 points into 'pilot rocket!' If you don't, you won't be able to leave the starting base, and you'll have to start over!" Or, "Don't bother with 'climb.' There isn't a single place in the game where you can use it."

Assigning skill points during character creation.

Lacking the ability to read walkthroughs, I looked over the descriptions, prioritized the skills I thought were useful, and did the best I could. We'll see how well it works out.

The manual notes that you want to have at least a rocketjock, a medic, and an engineer. So many of the skills I thought were important were tech skills that I ended up going with two engineers. My party consists of:

• Austin, a male Terran warrior. Skills in leadership, battle tactics, jetpack use, acting, fast-talking, distracting, and etiquette. (I rolled until I had high charisma and decided to go with him as both my warrior and "party leader.")
• Starbuck, a male Desert Runner rocketjock. Skills in piloting, maneuvering in 0G, mathematics, planetology, and astronomy.
• Dale, a female Venusian engineer. Skills in repairing electrical and mechanical and nuclear engines, jury rigging, demolitions, and weapon repair.
• Bonnie, a female Tinker engineer. Skills in repairing life support and rocket hulls, comm operations, sensor operations
• Elias, a male Martian rogue. Skills in notice, bypass security, open lock, hide in shadows, move silently, pick pockets, climb, fast talk, first aid, tracking, and shadowing.
• Theta Sigma, a male Mercurian medic. Skills in treating wounds, diagnose, treating poisoning, treating stun and paralysis, and library searching.

The character sheet.

After you set your race, career, and name, your roll for attributes (re-rolling as many times as you want), and then pick your skills. After the character is created, just as in D&D games, the game gives you the ability to "modify" any statistics that you'd like, which I'm sure many players use to jack everything up to the maximum. I resisted, but just as in the D&D games, it didn't take too many rolls to get high scores anyway.

Instead of setting weapons, clothing, hair, other parts, and their associated colors, as in the D&D games, Buck Rogers has you pick from a selection of 36 icons of characters in various poses.

The economy uses "credits" instead of gold, but in any event, characters start armed and armored with "bolt guns" and space suits.

Combat. I think those objects are just for visual effect.

Within moments of beginning, I was engaged in my first combat with several "Terrines," or warriors bio-engineered by RAM. It was odd fighting with the Gold Box engine in a way that was mostly ranged rather than melee. There are a few variations from the D&D games:

• Characters with high "leadership" can draw NPCs to the party's side. Sometimes they're even controllable.
• When targeting, the game cycles only through enemies, not PCs.
• The game remembers which enemy you targeted in the previous round.
• There are some new commands, including intimidating enemies, flying to another place on the battlefield with a jetpack (which I don't have yet, of course), and sprinting--which allows you to cover more ground, but at the expense of not being able to attack when you're done.
• You can throw grenades, which I suppose is analogous to using magic items in the fantasy games.
• "Guard" in the D&D games meant that the character would stand ready and as soon as an enemy came into melee range, he'd attack. It works similarly here, but in this case the character stands ready with a rifle or pistol and fires as soon as an enemy comes into missile range.
• At the end of combat, the medic automatically treats injured characters; the option doesn't seem to be otherwise available in the regular movement menus.

There are little icons like fuel pumps on the battlefield, and I was hoping I could do neat things like shoot them to get them to blow up and injure enemies, but I think they're just for show.

The combat victory screen. We have "divvy" instead of "share," but otherwise it's identical to the D&D series.

I'll have much more on combat later, of course, but for now suffice to say that after a few, my characters had upgraded from bolt guns to laser pistols, and from regular spacesuits to "smart suits." I also got a supply of "dazzle grenades," but I found that they generally underperformed regular attacks.

The opening map.

The opening area featured the traditional Gold Box 16 x 16 layout, with coordinates numbered 0-15 starting in the upper-left. I couldn't visit all the areas in the map--I kept getting messages that heat from the explosions was driving me back. There were numerous "atmospheric" messages noting destruction, bodies, and wounded soldiers.

Note the futuristic cityscape in the background.

At the beginning, a dying officer mumbled something about getting to missile control and turning on the disabled defenses. This was clarified by another wounded officer, who told me that it was on the east side of the compound.

The base offered repeated battles with Terrine soldiers--so many that I'm not sure there was a limit on the random encounters the way there is in most Gold Box maps. When I finally found the missile control room, I defeated a group of Terrine guards and found a technician furiously trying to program the system to fire missiles at our base.

The game gave me some cool role-playing options here, starting with whether I should fire at the technician (and risk damaging the equipment) or charge the technician (and give him more time to finish). I chose to charge. I took him out, but he threw a grenade on the ground to destroy the equipment. Here, I had another choice: take cover or throw myself on the grenade. Austin chose the latter, and fortunately, it didn't kill him; it just took his hit points down to about 50%. 

Later, I reloaded and found that if you take cover, everyone dies. So I guess maybe it isn't a great "role-playing" choice.

With the equipment saved, I was able to turn on the missile defenses and save the base. I got a nice reward of experience and money and was whisked away to the spaceport Salvation III, where Commander Carlton Turabian greeted me using a speech from the attached logbook. Impressed with my performance, he assigned me immediately to a space tug.

The spaceport works like a "menu town," where you can visit the bar, buy and sell goods, level up, get healed, and embark on the next journey. All my characters rose to Level 3 (and got attendant skill upgrades), and I dumped the excess equipment I'd been collecting.

Is it possible that we have yet another Gold Box title with a useless economy?

So far, I like the game about as much as any Gold Box title. The combat got a little boring towards the end of the first map, since with such limited equipment, I didn't have very many tactical options. I expect that to change now that I can buy new stuff. I look forward to seeing what else awaits me in the 25th century, including space combat, which promises a much different Gold Box experience.