Antares: Wrap-Up and Final Rating

     

Antares
Nightmare Productions (developer); Bomico (publisher)
Released 1991 for Amiga

Date Started: 7 July 2015
Date Ended: 19 September 2015

Total Hours: 23

Reload Count: 24

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 106/199 (53%)

For most of the summer and early fall, I was thinking that Antares would turn out to be a kind of ongoing source of humor on my blog. The game fell into a kind of tedious rhythm--survivable, but only in small doses--and I saw myself making one Antares posting in between other games, maybe covering one dungeon level per entry or something. Eventually, it would stretch into 2016, and after every post, commenters would wonder why I was still playing the game. But I'd plod on, probably reaching a conclusion around the time that I finished 1991 in general.

But after my unintended hiatus of the past two months, I've changed my mind. Even though it would be fun to be the only one online to document ending of this little German oddity, it's not going to be me. I couldn't even get through another dungeon level. The mechanics of managing light, food, fatigue, and healing are too much for what the game offers in return--a nonsensical, wandering plot and combat involving only the most basic of "tactics." Whatever percentage of the game I experienced during my play, I feel like I hit the highlights.

Messages strewn in the dungeon corridors show the game's Bard's Tale heritage.

Antares clearly draws from The Bard's Tale in its basic approach to exploration and turn-based combat, particularly in the variety of messages on dungeon walls, riddles, and static NPCs. But it joins other German games like The Legend of Faerghail and Dragonflight in offering a selection of gameplay mechanics and elements that are highly original but, unfortunately, not very good. I must both admire the game for deviating from the norm and chastise it by noting that the norm, however ordinary, makes for a better gameplay experience. Some of Antares's original deviations include:

• No character creation system; instead, the player selects 5 from 12 pre-defined characters, including androids, mutants, and robots, each with different skills in fighting, technical ability, medicine, language, psychics, and cooking.

• A food system by which a party's "hunger" meter slowly depletes and is restored by cooking ingredients found in shops and combat. The amount restored on the meter depends on the ingredient and the cooking skill of the character.

• Division of hit points into physical and mental health, with different enemies and different attacks having various effects on both. Different items heal the two types of health, dependent on the character's healing skill.

• Combat likewise is divided into physical and mental attacks, with the mental attacks sort-of replacing "magic" in a typical RPG, but without nearly as many options.

• A strange approach to sound: no sound effects, but a track that plays different techno music selections when a party member uses certain found devices like Walkmen.

• A weird sleep system: each character sleeps independently of the others, while the party is otherwise moving around and even fighting, slowly restoring the fatigue bar.

• A selection of languages that the characters must translate by finding the appropriate books.

• Part of the status display tells you what level of monster you're likely to encounter at any given moment.

Some of these don't sound too bad, but the combination of them--fatigue, health, and hunger, primarily--create a frustrating experience in which the player constantly has to juggle these logistics. Such considerations can be done well in RPGs, when made fun or particularly challenging, but here they're just tedious.

Still, we have to recognize a few things that the game does well. The monster portraits and other visuals don't represent the height of artistic achievement, but they are highly creative and very different from what we find in other games. The developers did a good job with dungeon design and wall textures, eschewing the bland repetitiveness of The Bard's Tale and Wizardry and really making each dungeon feel like a different place. I love that you can get hints and observations from your party members as you explore. The inventory system is reasonably well done, requiring some investigation and experimentation to determine what items actually do. I appreciated touches like the storage depot to store excess equipment. And in an era in which the default game seems to allow saving anywhere, any time, I appreciate that Antares offered a greater challenge by refusing to allow saving in dungeons.

One of the game's original monster portraits.

    
To recap the story, my party consisted of the remaining crew of the Auriga, a ship dispatched in 2314 to the Antares system to find out what happened to Earth's first interstellar spaceship, Hope, which had broken contact 34 years earlier. The same thing happened to Auriga that happened to Hope: shot down by an unidentified alien spacestation, with the crew stranded on the planet Kyrion. Among the remnants of the Hope crew--who were mysteriously sterile--I learned that the Antares system is home to three alien races: the Umbeken, the Questonaten, and the Vuronen. The latter are the evil masters of the system. Some mysterious being or force called "Tahun" seems to be influencing things.

As I progressed from the opening area, through the first dungeon, and to the first two cities and their associated dungeons, a mysterious "projection" kept popping up to help guide me along. Eventually, he said I should seek out an Umbeke named Ranishtar in the city of Akrillon. I was in the process of trying to find him when I last blogged.

An NPC offers to sell me information about Ranishtar.

I can fill in some of the rest of the blanks from the document that my commenters so helpfully translated. Ranishtar turns out to be a severe, war-weary Umbeke revolutionary who's also being visited by the mysterious "projection." He tells the party that the Vuronen live in a domed city to the north and suggests they build a bomb to use against the evil aliens. He gives the party a list of ingredients and parts needed for the bomb.

The next few dungeons seem to be full of riddles and puzzles as the party tries to find the parts for the bomb. If I had kept playing, I would have found several characters--including an android and an Umbeke--who would join the party and fill in the last character slot. Another race called the "Lepers" would have made an appearance, as well as a blue dwarf that keeps popping up and offering to sell advanced weapons for absurd amounts of money.

Eventually, the party makes its way to the domed city with the assembled bomb and starts sabotaging key industries and factories. Through a series of dungeons, it becomes clear that the Vuronen are working on a virus to destroy other life forms, and that they are capable of easily cloning and replacing themselves. They encounter the TAHUN, which seems to be a big glowing crystal that psychically impresses people to calmness and obedience. The party briefly falls under its power, but one of the robot characters is immune to the influence and guides the rest of them away (I have no idea what happens if the party doesn't have a robot at this point).

The projektion was up to no good.

    
Somehow, the party gets captured and tossed into something called The Death Zone. There, the helpful "projection" reveals herself as a female Vuroner named Stasia who has been using the party to sow chaos so that she can take power. At the end of the Death Zone is a final confrontation with Stasia. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything in the document that looks like congratulatory or end-game text. [Edit: my commenters found it and translated it! See the comments.]

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 3 points for the game world. I'd like to go higher, as it is original and unusual, but it just doesn't hold together well. Elements of the back story and plot make little sense; major revelations are handled in a banal, deadpan manner; and several plot threads are simply dropped. The storytelling is as blithe and careless as it is original.

• 3 points for character creation and development. The skills system is a good idea and creates a logistical challenge in party creation, but I don't like selecting pre-designed characters, and there's hardly any satisfaction to leveling. I guess characters get a little stronger, but their skills don't increase and there are no choices during the leveling process. You don't even get a notification that it's happened.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Discussion with a variety of NPCs advances the plot of the game, but it's all Bard's Tale-style, with no dialogue choices or role-playing options.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The highly-original monster names and pictures become bland when actually faced in combat. There, they devolve into two basic types: physical creatures and mental creatures. Other than monsters, there are a lot of riddles in the game, though translation issues make it difficult for me to judge their quality.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Again, the division between mental and physical attacks and defenses is original, but it doesn't end up doing much for combat tactics. Overall, combat is even more rote and boring in Antares than in the games that inspired it.

• 4 points for equipment. The long and varied list of items that you can buy and find make for a challenging puzzle. There aren't nearly enough inventory slots, though.

The halogenlampe lights up the dungeon. I never figured out what the Atari ST was for.

• 3 points for the economy. You get money for killing enemies and spend it on food, healing items, and other equipment. I never felt particularly rich or poor. Nothing good or bad here, just bland.

• 2 points for a long, meandering main quest with no side-quests or role-playing options.

• 4 points for graphic, sound, and interface. The interface is well-explained in in-game documentation, and the graphics are both original and serviceable. The lack of sound--other than occasional techno music tracks that I turned off after a few seconds--is a major liability.

• 2 points for gameplay. While the challenge is pitched okay, the game is ultimately too linear, too big, and too long.

The game features a fairly useful in-game help system.

The final score is 30, in that uncomfortable zone where I can't quite recommend the game, but if it were still 1991, I'd encourage the developers to try again. Just teenagers when they developed Antares, they definitely showed promise with design and programming. Alas, they didn't take my hypothetical advice. This is the only title from Michael Wyler, Kjell Marc Droz, Olivier Schraner, and their company, Nightmare Productions. Droz wrote to me briefly back in July, but I haven't been able to get him to answer a list of further questions about the game and its development.

With this, another German game has defeated me. I lost Faerghail because of a bug, The Ormus Saga and Dungeons of Avalon because I couldn't figure out how to win, and Antares because I wasn't willing to invest any more time. We'll see soon whether I can break the pattern with Drachen von Laas or Rings of Medusa II.

****

And with that, I'm back! Things have finally quieted down, and I have two more postings in the pipeline, so I hope to maintain a consistent schedule for at least the rest of the year. Finally settled into my new house (regrettably, only a seasonal rental), I plan to take an entire two weeks off in December, focusing on my blog during the day and Fallout 4 at night. Hopefully, by the end of the year I can make up for all the time I missed this fall.