Revisiting: Alien Fires: 2199 AD

    
One day, probably, we'll have computers designing video games entirely on their own, combining modules from popular engines and stringing together bits and pieces of stories and NPC dialogue. At first, those games designed by computers will be completely identifiable as such, but eventually we'll start doubting, and some years after that, we'll be totally fooled.

Alien Fires: 2199 AD doesn't fool me. It was designed by robots. I don't know who "Jeff Simpson" and "Sky Matthews" are supposed to be (I truly don't; Google searches for the most promising subjects don't have anything in their histories about Jagware or game design), but I suspect they're pseudonyms for an advanced AI that combined all of these weird elements into a game.

The AI certainly had access to a lot of pop culture. You can sense it trying to create the perfect assembly of elements that young male players of the 1980s would like. For the plot, it crunched the numbers and figured out that 70% of video game-playing nerds were Dr. Who fans, so it made the main character a "Time Lord" spinning through space in a TARDIS-like vehicle. What do Time Lords look like? We'll make them look like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen! Where should the game take place? Let's search our nerd database again, and--of course! The Hitchhiker's Guide series! We'll just change the Restaurant at the End of the Universe to "Galaxy's End." The AI was on a roll.
   

The death screen makes about as much sense as anything else in this game.

    
An alarm bell went off. We're getting a bit too nerdy here. Time to spice things up, perhaps with some material from a pretentious film that young 1980s edgelords like to quote. Apocalypse Now. Perfect! The Time Lord will be on a mission to find Dr. Kurtz. Let's throw some rock and roll into the soundtrack; teenagers love that. NPCs? No problem! Let's just head to the database. Alice in Wonderland, WKRP in Cincinnati, Looney Toons--there's NPCs everywhere! Let's mash 'em together in a multi-level dungeon and we've got ourselves a game.

But where a computer AI could get the elements of a game right, it just couldn't get the tone. Join me in watching this video of the first 4.5 minutes of gameplay (courtesy of sometimes-CRPG Addict commenter Felipe Pepe) and tell me that it doesn't fail the Turing Test.

Those four and a half minutes are about as far as I got when I attempted the game in 2010, and I hope you can understand why. By the time you get to "Dr. Fever," who seems to think he's an organic being and calls you a "boob," your ability to absorb any more of this wackiness has been thoroughly crushed. (Though I do appreciate the part where the elders "see much promise" in a Time Lord who died in 4 minutes and spent most of that time saying "f@#$ you" to every NPC he met.)

Jokes about the creator of the game aside--and I really am only 50% joking--we of course see some starkly original elements in that video. It clearly capitalizes on the superior (for the era) graphic and sound capabilities of the one-year-old Amiga. It has a complex text parser that recognizes full sentences and delivers responses in fully-digitized audio. It has NPCs who get offended when you swear at them. It has continuous movement in the corridors, something we'd only seen up to this point in (I believe) Alternate Reality: The City (1985). Of course, as we'll see, "innovative" doesn't always mean "good."

Let's back up for those who didn't watch the video or who didn't see everything. The backstory casts you as an apprentice Time Lord sent on a mission to Galaxy's End to search for a scientist named Samuel Kurtz. He's created an "awesome device" that "threatens to twist the very fabric of time itself."
    

The introductory screens give the player his mission.

   

Character creation is a process of deciding a name, then allocating 99 points of experience to a group of 7 skills, all of which start at 20: fighting, marksmanship, diplomacy, dexterity, understanding, tracking, and quickness. These skills can go up and down during the game based on the assessment of the "Time Lord Elders." Since so much of the game seems to involve talking to NPCs, I made "diplomacy" my highest skill.
     

     

The next screen shows some kind of octagonal spacecraft, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the player's transport to Galaxy's End or Galaxy's End itself. It oddly says "Octo" on it, which seems to be the name of the organization your enemies work for, so I guess maybe it's the station. Whatever the case, a few presses of the arrow keys puts you in the station's corridors.
    

    
A few steps later, you meet your first NPC: Tristar the Mechanic. "Hello," he says. "I hope you have come to help us. There is not much time. You must go to the next level and talk to Angel. But beware: there are Octo agents everywhere."

The speech is fully digitized in the Amiga version, and while there's an initial "wow" factor to this, it swiftly becomes old as you have to ask the same question several times to understand the answer. The digitizer isn't very good. "Supplies" is pronounced as "su-PLEES," for instance. Since the dialogue is digitized, and not recorded, the text must exist in the game files, but there's no way to simply display it. Thus, for all the superiority in graphics and sound of the Amiga version, I'd almost rather play the DOS version where the dialogue is in text and I can actually understand it.
    

Typing a question to Tristar the mechanic.

    
The parser is pretty sophisticated. You can't just feed single keywords, except those that constitute complete sentences, such as "HELLO" or, as we saw in the video, "DIE." In the case of Tristar, "OCTO" and "AGENT" produces nothing but "I don't know." But ask "WHAT IS OCTO," and you get an answer. This was my dialogue with Tristar:

• WHO ARE YOU? I am Tristar, the chief and only mechanic of Galaxy's End, at your service.
• HOW ARE YOU? I am okay, I guess.
• WHAT IS OCTO? Octo is a scientific research company. They are very secretive. They often land here for supplies and shipments of [something] from the mine.
• WHO IS ANGEL? Angel is a reporter for Scientific Galaxian. She's here doing some research on Octo.
• WHERE IS THE ELEVATOR? The elevator is in the elevator shaft.
• WHERE IS THE ELEVATOR SHAFT? [Several unintelligible words.] You must talk to [something like "Witty"]; he will tell you how to get there.

The next room had Jessica, a starship pilot. She had most of the same responses as Tristar, except in response to "WHO ARE YOU"? Further along was Dr. Fever, and then Mango-Tango the rabbit-horse, who offered to trade his hunting knife for a pocket watch.
   

I will always remember this game for Mango-Tango, the pipe-smoking rabbit-horse.

    
The corridors of Galaxy's End are twisty and angled, with numerous alcoves, nooks, and secret doors. Impossible to map using conventional means, I ended up hand-drawing the level when I got lost, and this is what I came up with, although the proportions are all off. I know there's missing stuff because my map doesn't have a way back to Tristar or the airlock I entered in.
     

My attempts to map the first level.

     
As you come upon objects or NPCs, they often take a few seconds to render, and by then you've generally pressed one of the movement keys so that you end up moving past them. You then have to turn around and re-enter their squares.
    

Mango-Tango gives me his "octo knife." Everything is "octo" in this game.

    
Eventually, I found Mango-Tango's watch and got his hunting knife, my first weapon. It did nothing to help me in combat against the occasional random Octo agents I encountered. Combat in this version requires you to right-click, select your weapon, and then click furiously on "fight," watching as you and your opponent do damage to your various body parts. I've lost every fight so far and had to reload.
    

I don't even have time to get a screen shot before I die.

    
I had hoped to close this entry having gotten further in the game than my 2010 counterpart, but alas I can't seem to find the elevator. I've found this weird looking graffiti-covered wall that looks like it could be the elevator; compare it to the image below of the DOS version elevator.
  

Where I'm stuck.

The elevator in the DOS version.

     
Unfortunately, my interface disappears when I walk up to it, none of my keyboard commands do anything, and I can't get it to work. I've tried clicking all around the screen and off it. So, barring rescue from someone who knows what they're doing in the Amiga version, I'll probably have to switch back to the DOS version, which has the advantage of readable text.

Tera was a weird game that turned out somewhat interesting, so I do want to figure this out. But with NPCs like Mango-Tango, Speedy Gonzalez, and Dr. Fever, the groan quotient here is pretty high.

Time so far: 4 hours