Game 295: 2088: The Cryllan Mission (1989)

The Apple IIGS has less a "title screen" as a "title arrangement of windows."

          

2088: The Cryllan Mission

United States

Victory Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Apple IIGS

Date Started: 24 June 2018

As much as I wasn't looking forward to an Apple IIGS game--I always have problems with the emulator--you have to love the background story of Victory Software, formed in Houston, Texas, by the three Pai brothers, whose names all begin with "Vi": Vinay, Vivek, and Vijay. They produced three titles for the under-served platform: 2088, its 1990 Second Scenario, and Secrets of Bharas (1991). Sales of the three titles capped at 2,000, but we need not feel bad for the trio, as they went on to successful careers at Intuit (Vinay) and Google (Vivek and Vijay; things must get tense when they get together with cousin Ajit at Thanksgiving). In a 2016 LinkedIn interview, Vinay described Victory as a "good failure" in which he "learned a lot." Whether the games were a "failure" because they were bad or because there just wasn't a robust Apple IIGS RPG market is something we'll soon determine.

2088 takes place in a Star Trek-like future in which the Earth-based National Space Exploration Council boldly goes where no one has gone before. The titular mission involves investigating what happened to the U.S.S. Houston, with which contact was lost shortly after it discovered a humanoid civilization in the Gamma-Chi sector, on the planet of Crylla. Why the mission is necessary is a bit of a mystery, since the Houston's captain's own logs say that the planet is about to "pass on the far side of the binary stars," which will block deep-space transmissions for at least nine months. Meanwhile, the Cryllans have been nothing but friendly and appear to have no weapons. Nonetheless, the Strategic Defense Division of NSEC has scrambled your team to investigate.
          

Creating a new character.

          
The game begins in a separate application where you create your party and send them to "training." The way the manual describes the latter process, I thought I was in for some MegaTraveller-style character backgrounds, but alas, it's not that complex. The game randomly rolls for five attributes--marksmanship, intelligence, kinetics, dexterity, and stamina--and then allows you to supplement the initial rolls with a pool of points. Certain minimums are needed for the game's four classes: soldier, science officer, nurse, and doctor. Then, once you finish, the game tells you what bonus points you earned during "training." They generally just boost the classes' existing prime requisites [entry just added to the glossary].
       

The new party. Programmers will be happy to see that the game numbers the characters 0-5

       
After creation, your six characters start on the Cryllan landscape with rifles and thermal armor, a few months' worth of food, and no money. It's not clear how they got where they are, since there's no ship nearby or anything. The party soon comes across roads, towns, and people, all of which are so indistinguishable from Earth that you start to wonder if the party ever actually blasted off.
            

Starting out. Who knew that dotted lines in roads were an intergalactic standard?

           
Given that the Apple IIGS was an "almost-Mac," the interface is similar to a Mac in that the game windows can be moved and arranged to the player's preference, and all of the commands are available from menus. (We'll see the same in the next game, Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep, for the Mac.) The game is too in-love with the mouse, requiring it for movement (you click where you want to go) as well as most commands, though a few commands are backed up with keyboard shortcuts using the Apple key.

The basic interface has something of an Ultima-esque feel. Outside, you navigate a large overland world of islands connected by bridges. Occasional enemies appear as icons in the game world. When you run into a town, you enter and open up a larger-scale map.
           

Arriving in a town.

        
If there's one original element to be found in 2088, it's the combat system. When you attack an enemy or one attacks you, you're taken to an 81-square grid based on the terrain you were standing on when you entered. Enemies face you across the field. You set an action for each character--move, attack, rest, throw a grenade, heal another character, or flee--and then hit "begin combat" to execute them all at once. In other words, it uses a Wizardry-style action/execute system with an Ultima IV/V/Gold Box-style tactical window. The grid to the right helps you keep track of who's who.
         

Setting combat options.

         
However, you can eschew all of this by letting the computer fight your combats. This is tempting in the initial stages in which everyone has the same weapons and no one has any grenades. Even better, you can set a number of preferences for computer-controlled combat that together ensure that the computer would have done what you would have done anyway. Since computer-controlled combat is over in about one-tenth of the time, this is tempting. The only drawback I see is that pathfinding is relatively poor, and characters often have trouble moving to a place where they have an uninterrupted line-of-sight to the enemy.
             

Fine-tuning auto-combat options.

         

The computer does a decent job lining people up uselessly behind each other.

        
After combat, the doctor or nurse can instantly heal anyone to full strength with something called "GammaPlasma." You have a limited supply, and I assume I'll have to buy more eventually. If a character dies, a doctor (but not a nurse) can resurrect him with something called "TanaShanti" (the Internet suggests this is Hindi for "body peace"), but he suffers with low attributes for a day or so. Combat delivers experience points, money, and occasionally equipment.
       

The doctor heals injured party members.

          
That said, who are these people? Why am I fighting them? How does their hostility jibe with the Houston's report of a peaceful, weaponless population? Did the Houston crew arm them? Corrupt them? Are they remnants of the Houston crew? The game doesn't pause for such questions.
           

Do the Cryllans just happen to have the same name structure as Earthlings? Or is Willy from Earth? You'd think that would be the first question we asked.

          
Things don't get any clearer when you enter the towns. They're like regular towns in a typical fantasy RPG with shops and NPCs, but it's completely unclear whether these are aliens or remnants of the Houston. They sell weapons, armor, food, and other goods for a currency called "terraens," which sounds a lot like they come from Earth. NPCs so far have just been normal people who complain about their work and offer a few hints about how to navigate the landscape. So far, I've found nothing about the Houston or even clues whether I'm talking to Cryllans or humans.
          

Where did the Cryllans get all these weapons?

         
I haven't gotten very far, but I figured it was time to get the blog re-started, and I was otherwise having difficulty motivating myself to play. I'm having the same issue I keep complaining about with top-down games where the terrain is a bit too large and there's no easy way to map it. (The science officer's "Terrain Scan" covers only about 40% more than the regular window.) I tried to cheat by looking for a map online but couldn't find one.
           

This would be more helpful if the regular window didn't already show, like, 6 kilometers.

          
A funny thing about the dialogue. This gets into a stereotype but it's not exactly a negative stereotype so I hope no one's bothered. I have two Indian co-workers, one close enough to call a friend, and I've noticed a particular pattern to his speech. If I say, "Hey, want to grab a drink tonight?," a typical American might answer, "Nah, thanks, my son's got a baseball game." That would be the end of it. But Ayan or Lakshman will respond with entire paragraphs, each expanding in more detail on the central theme.

         
No. No, I'm sorry, I cannot go. I would like to go but my son is playing in a baseball game. My son is very proud of his accomplishments on his baseball team, and he would be very disappointed if I were not there to watch his performance, so as much as I'd like to, I will have to ask your pardon on the drink. You must understand that it is very difficult for an Indian boy to find acceptance on an American organized sporting team, and that . . .

           

At some point I have to tell him, Ayan, man, I get it, no problem, because otherwise I'll get his whole family history, and the history of baseball besides. Anyway, I never knew whether this particular speech pattern was unique to these two men or something commonly found in Indian culture. I still don't know for sure, but I broke out laughing when I saw the NPC dialogue system in 2088, which not only features the same sort of dialogue but structures it as such. An NPC will introduce a topic and then you can click on "More Detail" and see him re-state the same topic but with a couple more details. More often than not, you can click a third time and still get no new information, but more words. At least, that's how it's gone for the few NPCs so far. It means I mentally hear all the dialogue in a typical Indian accent.

              

Rala Mahana takes a long time to say, "Listen up."

         

I'm assuming a lot in tying these observations together, since as far as I know the Pai brothers were eighth generation and fully Americanized. If not, this game may be a "first," in that I don't remember any Indian names among previous game designers (at least, not lead designers). I have some hope that even if the game turns out to be boring and derivative, I'll at least be able to identify cultural influences like Hindi source words and expansively redundant rhetoric.