Game 176: Space 1889 (1990)

          

Space 1889

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Atari ST; 1991 for Amiga
Date Started: 22 February 2015

       
I have been trying without success to find articles, testimonials--heck, even rumors--that would explain why Game Designer's Workshop gave Paragon Software the rights to make computer games out of GDW's tabletop RPGs. Did the principals of each company know each other from college? Did Paragon just make a really good pitch? It was a non-obvious choice. Where the union of Dungeons & Dragons and SSI was a match made in heaven, and Flying Buffalo's decision to go to New World for Tunnels & Trolls was perfectly understandable even if the result wasn't fantastic, Paragon should have been far down on the list of developers to turn anyone's intellectual property into a CRPG. Their achievements prior to 1990 were Alien Fires: 2199 AD (1987), perhaps the weirdest (and not in a particularly good way) RPG of the 1980s, and the unsatisfying Wizard Wars (1989). The company got a license from Marvel to do X-Men, a couple of Amazing Spider-Man games, and The Punisher, so perhaps GDW was impressed by that.

Whatever the case, in my assessment, Paragon bungled the job. Traveller and Space 1889 are both interesting RPGs with fairly large fanbases, rich histories told in numerous associated publications, and solid, skill-based role-playing systems, none of which are well adapted in the computer versions. Good computer editions of GDW's properties could have greatly increased their popularity and produced long-lasting franchises, but instead they fizzled right out of the gate, offering nonsensical stories, bad game mechanics, and bafflingly poor combat systems. (I won't see until next year whether Twilight: 2000 continues the trend, but I'm willing to bet that it does.) Contemporary reviews of the titles are best described as "lukewarm," and the games are little-remembered today. While Paragon's efforts didn't cause GDW to go out of business in 1996, they certainly didn't help.

The cover for the tabletop Space 1889 rulebook covers several themes from Victorian-era society and science fiction.

As with MegaTraveller, the 86-page manual that comes with Space 1889 is the best part of the game, outlining the unique universe of the tabletop RPG. The setting uses an alternate history in which the ideas of Victorian-era science fiction writers (and, in some cases, scientists) are a reality. The buzzkill scientific discoveries of the 20th century (there's no such thing as aether; other planets are not only lifeless, but lack water and livable atmospheres; traveling through space is really hard, long, and dangerous) haven't happened, so in this setting, we have steam-powered ships sailing through the aether to colonies throughout the inner solar system, and humans interacting with the crab-people of Mercury, the lizard-men of Venus, and pointy-eared Martians. A key element of the universe is "liftwood," a plant that grows on Mars and has anti-gravity properties, greatly facilitating space travel.

In the computer version, the player controls a party of five characters, one designated as the lead. The five characters, all with some archaeological background, meet in London at an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts. They overhear two men discussing the recent discovery of King Tut's tomb and a forthcoming German expedition to excavate it. On the spot, the party agrees to beat the Germans to the tomb and its treasures. Somehow, we're going to get from there to Mercury and Mars.

From the opening screens.

The character creation process isn't as fun as MegaTraveller, but it's still pretty interesting, and as with MegaTraveller, I suspect it's destined to be one of the more enjoyable parts of playing the game. The process begins by choosing a sex, name, and portrait for the character from an all-Caucasian selection. While the male portraits do look like characters out of a Jules Verne adaptation, the women all have distressingly-1980s hairstyles.

Space 1889 uses six attributes--strength, agility, endurance, intellect, charisma, and social standing--each ranked on a scale of 1 to 6. Each attribute has 4 associated skills; for instance, strength has fisticuffs, throwing, close combat, and "trimsman" (the ability to "maintain a liftwood vessel in proper order") and intellect has observation, engineering, science, and gunnery. For each skill, the character can achieve a rank between 0 and his level in the associated attribute (e.g., a character with a strength of 4 will never go higher than 4 in "fisticuffs"). As with MegaTraveller, I have no idea which skills are going to turn out to be vital for 1889 and which are going to be useless.

Each character has a primary career that automatically assigns a selection of skills and skill levels. I loved reading through the list of careers. There are 27 of them (some with multiple levels) organized into 7 groups: government (e.g., army, navy, foreign office); exotic (big game hunter, adventuress, reporter); service (actor, governess, groundskeeper); mercantile (inventory, mechanic, seaman); professional (detective, doctor, scientist); and criminal (poacher, smuggler, anarchist). There are attribute minimums associated with most careers (e.g., you have to have an agility of 4 and an endurance of 5 to be a big game hunter) and some careers are only available to characters with low social standing. Sex plays a minor role: only women can be "adventuresses"; the career of tutor/governess changes title based on sex; and technically women who enter military careers are assumed to be passing for men.

You can choose a primary career and secondary career, or choose just a primary career and then assign other skills from a pool of points. One career, "master criminal," can only be taken as a secondary career by a character who has a primary career based in crime. You can even create your own career and assign the appropriate restrictions and skills!
 

I was briefly tempted.

Attribute rolls are random and not dependent on each other, so with a little patience it's possible to create a character with every attribute at 4 or above. For my team, I went with:

• Griffin, highest attributes in social standing (6; making him a member of the aristocracy), strength (5), and charisma (5). He had a career as a navy officer and develped skills in eloquence, riding, piloting, leadership, observation, and fisticuffs. I used the extra skill points to bolster what he already had and give him ranks in "trimsman" and "bargaining," since no one else had those.

• Prendick, who had 5s or 6s in everything but social standing (2). I made him a big game hunter and developed his skills in stealth, marksmanship, travel, and observation.

• Perdita, the only character to whom I assigned two careers. She could have done almost everything with her 5s and 6s in the first five attributes, but her social level of 1 relegated her to the working class. She became a thief and then a master thief, developing high skills in fisticuffs, stealth, crime, travel, observation, eloquence, and theatrics.

Perdita got a pretty rad attribute roll, if you don't care about social standing.

• Dejah is Perdita's opposite: a detective with 4s and 5s in all attributes. She duplicates some of Perdita's skills but also has engineering, a little science, riding, and medicine.

• Julian is the classic Victorian gentleman inventor of the group. He has very low strength and endurance (2s) but high intellect and agility. He excels in mechanics, observation, engineering, and science, and has a little skill in gunnery.

The completed party. I'm on Perdita's statistics and attributes.

Character creation is fun, but after that everything goes to hell. The game starts at the British Museum exhibition, with a long journal entry from the main character (in my case, Griffin), where he concludes that "I became a skilled professional in the [navy] career. But, after seeing these priceless treasures, I fully realize that I cannot hide from my true identity--I am an adventurer!"

The intro goes on to say that the main character overheard a German named Claus von Schmelling talking about an upcoming expedition to the Valley of the Kings. Determined to get von Schmelling's map, Griffin rounds up the other 4 party members, all attendees at the exhibition, and with little trouble, persuades them to join him.

The opening narration.

After the intro screens, the game transitions to London--perhaps better referred to as "London," a small walled city of trees, grass, ample cobblestone walkways, about 5 buildings, and about a dozen NPCs. No need to grab a bus to Amesbury; Stonehenge is right there in the city limits. And if you head outside the gates, you can walk to Egypt in about 30 seconds. Who knew England was so conveniently-located?

The main adventuring screen. The portrait and statistics show the character currently in the lead. The bottom of the screen shows the available commands.

So far in the game, I've been to London, San Francisco, New York, and the "City of Egypt," and all of them look exactly the same. The game makes no effort to evoke the feeling or culture of these cities in the late 1800s except in the briefest of nods to contemporary stories like the Whitechapel murders. It's extraordinarily disappointing to see such bland results from what could have been the richest of settings.

London contains an archaeologist who will identify found artifacts, a cave that you can't explore until you get a light source, the British Museum, a food shop, an inn, a tavern, and several wandering NPCs. Most of them are generic folks who just say "greetings!" and whatnot, but there are a few named ones with side-quests and interesting things to say.

Outside the archaeologist's shop.

The main quest seemed to involve finding Claus von Schmelling, and it didn't take me too long to run into him, still walking around randomly two weeks later. He offered to sell the map, but I figured why bother to buy it when I had such a skilled thief in the party? I used the "rob" command to pickpocket his documents. They mentioned a Hans Ogleby in New York City.

I knew I brought a thief along for a reason.

Nearby, I found a gun shop and outfitted several of my characters with rifles, handguns, and associated ammunition. I discovered at this point that I started with a ton of money, probably enough to finance me for the entire game, thanks to the high social standing of several characters.

One of the wandering NPCs was Chief Inspector Doyle, who offered a reward for "the capture of the Ripper, dead or alive." It wasn't long before I found someone who looked like he fit the bill.

Although he warned me about the Ripper, his tune changed when I approached him with a female character in the lead. Again, we have what could have been an interesting sub-plot handled in the most ham-handed way.

This man has some issues.

This interaction triggered the game's combat system. It's quite bad, perhaps even worse than MegaTraveller. In it, you cycle through the characters and issue various orders: attack, change weapons, reload, move, block, and flee. You obviously have to move characters up to the enemy to engage in melee attacks; characters with firearms will shoot from a distance but have to have a clear shot (no other characters in between), so combat is a lot of micromanagement of movement and positioning, hampered by unintuitive keyboard commands. Jack the Ripper went down quickly, but I imagine larger combats will get annoying.

Fighting Jack the Ripper. The bottom part of the combat screen lists all characters; the letters at the bottoms of their sections annotate the 7 actions they can perform.

As I fought Jack, for some reason other NPCs in the area decided that they were part of the action and started firing on my characters. Fortunately, I was able to exit combat after killing Jack, but what the hell?

In any event, Jack's body revealed a knife and his scalpel, which I took to Chief Inspector Doyle for a $2,500 reward--barely a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands my characters already had.

That felt a little too easy.

Another side quest came along in the British Museum, where I encountered the famous proto-archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. Speaking in a kind of pig-German which might be considered a little offensive to actual Germans, he relayed that he would reward me for any artifact that proved the existence of Homer, the Greek poet. [Edit: Apparently, what's happening is the lead character failed a "linguistics" check, which causes random garbage to be interspersed with the actual letters. This was not an attempt to render German or to make fun of Germans. I apologize for the error.]

In the tavern, an NPC named James Alexander Grimes (not based on anyone historical, at least not as far as I can tell) sold me his blueprints for an "aerial flyer" called the Pride of Sussex.

At some point during my travels, I noted that the game kept telling me that the characters were hungry. The game has both a hunger and fatigue system. The former is easily addressed by buying hundreds of days' worth of food from the food shop; it barely costs anything and weighs nothing. As for fatigue, I don't really understand it. Time passes quickly and relentlessly in the game. Nothing pauses it except the "pause" command. Days blow by while you're walking down the street, buying items in a shop, or just looking at the party inventory. Given how rapidly time passes, I'm not sure what good it does to periodically rest for one night in an inn.

When I was done with London, I headed outside to go to New York City. I'm happy to say that the game doesn't let you walk there. Instead, you have to go to a harbor and rent a dirigible or boat for a fixed time period. I rented a dirigible for 30 days, sailed across the Atlantic, and returned it at the harbor on the other side, getting a refund for 17 days. The area was swarming with buffalo and Native American NPCs.

America at last! My zeppelin hovers outside the entrance to New York City. A pawn shop sits to the southeast, and a couple of American Indians wander nearby.

There was a pawn shop just outside New York City. It sold everything but weapons, so I stocked up on adventuring gear, including books (Conklin's Atlas of the Worlds and Handy Manual of Useful Information; Robb's Medical Companion and Household Physician), navigation instruments, tools, shovels, armor, lanterns, rope, and gunpowder.

Some of my new stuff.

I end the game having entered New York City, which is indistinguishable from London in its tree-lined cobblestone streets and expansive farmland. When I next write, I'll pick it up from my encounter with Mr. Ogleby.

Some random notes:

• The manual doesn't say anything about the possibility of improving characters' skills. Like MegaTraveller, Space 1889 doesn't feature any experience or leveling, but at least in the tabletop version it's possible to acquire new skills and improve existing ones. I'm not sure it's possible in the computer version, making the game technically not an RPG by my rules.

• In the 176 games I've played so far as part of this blog, I think maybe three have featured textual descriptions of inventory items. This game is one of them. I look forward to seeing more of this as the 1990s develop.

• The British Museum was full of chests, but there doesn't seem to be any command that opens them, unless I'm missing something.

• The pawn shop outside New York City sells a metal detector. The manual says it's supposed to weigh 100 pounds, but it actually weighs 1,000, meaning no one can effectively carry it. I bought one, but I sold it back when I saw the bug. Maybe I won't need it.

• My dialogue with a Native American needs no embellishment:

I'm surprised they didn't just add "me smokum peace pipe" for good measure.

My initial experience with Space 1889 makes me want to play the tabletop RPG and stop playing the computer RPG. Let's hope it gets better or, at least, doesn't last very long.

Time so far:  2 hours

Reload count: 0