Antares: Ersten Beobachtungen

What I think is the entrance to the game's first dungeon. I need a key...

Playing Antares is slow going. If a German game had come out in 1985, I'm guessing it would have a lot less text. I'd have to learn three or four words and I'd be off to the rennen. But increasing verbiage is a characteristic of the 1990s, so I'd better get used to it as soon as possible. I have games coming up in languages far more difficult than German.

Since I last blogged, I haven't done much more than explore the opening area, which I've determined is 20 x 20. The spacecraft landed in the northeast of the map. (That's if I've oriented things right. I don't have a compass yet, but the opening narration said that a signal came from the west, corresponding roughly with Kirk Hammett's house.) I found four NPCs (including Kirk Hammet from the last time), five food stores, and five regular stores that seem to sell the same merchandise: a combination of bandages, weapons, and armor.

The opening area.

I originally though the trenches were larger inside than outside. This turns out to be wrong. Heading "down" into them really just changes the textures on the game screen. They're full of generic, empty houses, just like The Bard's Tale, with an occasional shop or NPC.

I've been attacked by a variety of creatures (all original to the game), and I've learned through experimentation that some respond only to physical attacks and some respond only to mental attacks, so it's a good thing that I have a balance of skills in the party. Physical attacks increase with the weapons that you find or buy, but I'm not sure what causes psychic attacks to improve. Just character leveling? Again, I'm at a loss without a manual. I can only guess on the relative value of weapons based on their sale value in shops.

Checking sale prices in a store.

There are at least three mental attacks: telekinesis, hypnosis, and group hypnosis. I assume the last one has a chance of working on parties (only one of my characters has the psi skill to use it), but I don't know whether telekinesis and hypnosis do two completely different things and thus vary which enemies are affected by them or what.

The Mantok response to a psychic attack.

          
Combat is the only way to advance in experience, gold, and equipment (at least, so far), but already it's getting very old. The descriptions of a character's actions scroll by at maddeningly slow speed, and this doesn't seem adjustable in-game. Antares would definitely benefit from a "quick combat" command.

Victory after combat includes some money, a penknife, and some food.

As I mentioned, I encountered three other NPCs. They each had over 10 screens of text, so translating what they had to say took the longest part of this session. Here's the rundown:

Kevin McFly was living in a cave to the northwest, near a locked door that seems to lead into some kind of dungeon. He was beat up and disfigured, as if the veteran of lots of combats. He offered me a key to Eriankeller (I'm guessing this is the dungeon, unless it's a common word that Google didn't translate) if I could translate some Kyrion text, but it was indecipherable to my party--at least currently.

McFly wants me to translate some Kyrionese text.

Jeannine Berdot lived in an apartment with her mute husband, Claude. She said that she had been born on Kyrion, but that after her, no other children have been born as everyone is sterile. They're not sure exactly what's causing this; rumors say that it's artificially-induced radiation, but she admits that it might just be the result of a pathogen unique to Kyrion. However, she suspects that the infertility is deliberate. What's particularly frustrating is that they don't know the identity of the enemy who is toying with them.

My party asked about Claude and caused her to cry. She said that he went out on an adventure, and he came back in a semi-vegetative state, stuttering about someone named "Tahun" and service.

Is TAHUN the big villain in the game? Only time will tell.

Marek Dvorak was an old guy that Kirk Hammet had suggested I talk to. He gave me the rundown on the intelligent alien species on Kyrion: The Vunorer are apparently the rulers of the planet, but very secretive. (I don't know if I translated one line of text properly, but it seem to suggest that even though they are in charge, they never see one another.) Dvorak thinks they're up to something sinister. The Umbeken live in subterranean complexes and engage in trade with the marooned humans. The Questonaten are connected somehow to the Umbeken, but otherwise nothing is known about them.

Dvorak gave me a tutorial on the Umbeken language and a translation book, which I assume will help me with McFly's puzzle, but I haven't been back to him yet. The text mentioned that Dvorak was pessimistic about my party's chances of getting off this planet, especially given that our predecessors haven't had any luck, but that we'd have to at least try--if for no other reason than to take word of Kyrion back to Earth.

Part of Marek Dvorak's 17 screens of text.

One other odd location is in the northwest corner of the map. Around the borders, the game just tells you that the map doesn't go any further. But in this one corner, you get an image of some kind of wasteland or trash heap. I'm not really sure what it's trying to depict.

A swamp? Radioactive waste?

        
Other things discovered during this session:

• There's a complex techno soundtrack upon starting up the game, but no other sound or music during the game itself. I assume this is an emulation problem because there is a command to turn off the music, which only makes sense if music played during the game itself.

• Fleeing from most creatures works most of the time, but it damages party morale (the top bar in the lower-right part of the screen). With every victory, morale increases; with every flight, it decreases. Resting and eating also help increase it.

• Some enemies are tough to flee from. In particular, pterodactyls are my todfeind. Fleeing almost never works, and they're hard to hit. I've died several times at their claws. Right now, I'm reloading when any character dies. It's cheesy, but figuring out the game is tough enough without puzzling through a resurrection mechanism.

• The number next to the top row of portraits seems to indicate how dangerous an area is. It's been set at "1" when outside and "2" every time I walk into an empty building.

In an empty house. If I get attacked in here, the monsters will be a little harder than outside.

            

• The game world has a day/night cycle that changes the colors and such. It affects when shops are open, but (so far) not much else.

• The game has an original and odd approach to sleeping. Instead of having everyone "hole up and camp," each character sleeps independently. While he's sleeping, his "energy" bar (first one under the portrait) recharges, but he can't make any actions. He can still move around with the party; I guess the other characters are carrying him or something. You want to avoid having too many people sleeping at once, in case you're attacked.

Several of my party members "Zzz..." as I prepare to enter one of the trenches.

           

• The game uses tile-based movement and turn-based combat, but it's not turn-based in the regular game world. Time passes, energy decreases, and like in The Bard's Tale II and III, enemies can attack while you're just standing still. [Edit: I was misremembering. I guess III doesn't do this after all.] There's a "pause" button that can stop this.

• The other two bars under the character portraits are bodily health and mental health. "Cubic," my glowing ball "specter," has no bodily health but also takes no physical damage in combat. Presumably, he's immortal when facing physical-only enemies. Of course, I don't think he deals physical damage, either, so it would be possible to get into a cycle of combat where neither I nor the enemies can damage each other.

Sandkäfer are physical creatures, so they can't damage Cubic at all. But I don't think he can damage them, either.

• Here's how cooking works: As you slay enemies, you find food ingredients on their bodies. Each has a complexity associated with cooking and preparing it, and whether a character can cook it depends on his "cooking" skill. You have to go into the cooking sub-menu to cook the ingredients, and if successful, it adds automatically to the "food" bar (the bottom one in the lower-right). Cooking in combat is no different than cooking outside of combat. Maybe some combats last so long that characters start to starve, and they need to pause for refreshments. No different than the Dragonborn swallowing 37 cabbages in the middle of a battle, I suppose.

Marina tries to cook some food. We're facing one of the exits from the trenches.

          
Frustratingly, I lost a ton of progress because of what I can only assume were emulator issues. I played for about 4 hours the other day, won a lot of combats, got a lot of equipment and gold, and finished the map. I saved frequently, and when I reloaded during the session, everything worked fine. But after I quit the emulator and reloaded later, my party was in their starting location again, just outside the ship. This didn't happen the next time I tried, though. Nonetheless, I'm now coupling regular saves with save states, and I hope it fixes the problem.

I want to thank the commenters who pointed me to (and translated) the basic instructions on a Swiss site run by Kjell Marc Droz, one of the game's developers. I'm going to see if I can get him to comment. Unfortunately, the link to the Windows version no longer works. I was hoping it had a manual.

I'll keep plugging along with the game, but we're likely to see at least one non-Antares posting for each Antares one. Having to leave the game every few minutes to go to Google Translate breaks the immersion a bit.

Time so far: 5 hours
Reload count: 8

***

More on Out of the Shadows

Finding some armor in a chest.

I felt guilty about quitting on Out of the Shadows so quickly, so I invested another three hours in it. This is what I discovered:

• The underworld mimics the outer world. Each dungeon level consists of 11 x 11 = 121 screens, each 15 x 15.

• There are at least three dungeon levels, probably more.

• Almost all the dungeon rooms have four exits and are entirely explorable from a single entrance. Maybe 1 in 8 is an exception, where you can enter the room from multiple directions and there's an interior wall preventing you from traversing completely through the room.

• Each dungeon screen has exactly one chest.

• Chests do not respawn. I didn't come to a decision about whether monsters do. If they do, it's not to the same volume as the original allocation.

• Enemies can knock out lanterns or destroy torches during combat.

• There are weird "periods of peace" in which adjacent enemies refuse to attack--they just move around. Meanwhile, my own attacks miss every time. I don't know what causes this--some programming error, I suspect. They only last about 20 seconds, and then everyone starts getting hit again.

• Weapons and armor can break.

• Exploration improved considerably once I amassed enough money to buy a lantern and some oil. The lantern illuminates a 4-square radius to the torch's 2.

Note the space the lantern illuminates. A fleeing imp just fell down a hole to the next level. That can happen.

          
I explored most of the first level and rose 2 more character levels myself, but I never found the quest object and I'm not willing to invest more time. If someone else wants to play it and get the winning screen, I'll be happy to post it here.