Game 387: Defender of Boston: The Rock Island Mystery (1992)

This is not a confidence-inspiring title screen.

          

Defender of Boston: The Rock Island Mystery

United States

Independently developed and published as shareware

Released in 1992 for DOS
Date Started: 26 October 2020

         

Defender of Boston is set in 1921. The player is an agent for the Faunus Foundation, protecting the world from "the terrors that lurk beyond space and time." An associate of the foundation, Fred Black, has disappeared from a small island off the coast of Boston, where he was studying a "dangerous artifact." (There is a real Rock Island southeast of Boston, in Quincy, but despite its name, it's a peninsula.) The Lovecraftian setting and allusions are intentional.

         

The in-game backstory.

      

Character creation involves allocating a pool of points to 21 different attributes and skills, including "Strength," "Shooting," "First Aid," "Fast Talk," "Ti-Chi" [sic], and "Listen." Different skills require different points to add a level in that skill, from 45 for "Ninjutsu" to 2 for "Listen." The player selects a portrait from 11 options, all badly degraded from television and film stills. The "name" field will not accept capital letters.

 

Portrait options. I get Sylvester Stallone, Cybill Shepherd, and MacGyver in the top row and Charles Bronson and Columbo on the bottom. The rest is a mystery. Maybe Kim Basinger in the third row?

       

The game begins in the house that the Faunus Foundation has rented for you on Rock Island. The tiny window makes poor use of screen real estate. Icons on the left correspond to searching, fighting with a melee weapon, shooting, fighting with hands and feet, inventory, various object-oriented actions, and talking. A clock tells the current time, minutes passing at about a rate of one every 15 seconds. All actions are driven by the mouse; the only keyboard commands that seem to work are F)ight and T)hrow, plus the arrow keys for moving between rooms.

        

Character creation. I'm going to wish I put some points into "ninjutsu."

       

The character comes with some letters that flesh out the back story. The first is written to the character from Gina Faunus from the Faunus Foundation. It says that not only has Fred Black disappeared, his house was burned to the ground and his wife was found shot to death in the back yard. That feels like information that should have been included in the backstory. The other four letters were written by Fred Black to the Faunus foundation. They describe an artifact that Black found, about which he grew increasingly paranoid. It's hard to know whether to take his frequently-ALL CAPS writings at face value, but he says that the THING emits a "hyper field" which "burns the minds of men as well as animals." The artifact seems to have arrived as a meteor, which spooked some other organizations, as strange men in suits were swarming all around the crash area that night. Black managed to find and retrieve the artifact anyway. Later, however, it went missing. Black claims to know exactly what the THING is, although he won't write it; he says that it has the potentiality to destroy life on Earth.

        

The action begins.

       

The fourth letter asks the reader to disregard the previous letters. The THING, he says, has been found--it just rolled under his nightstand. He discovered a tag on it claiming it was the property of a Dr. Novac, to whom he returned it. It's not dangerous after all, just an Indian artifact. Everything is fine here. The implication is that this fourth letter was written by someone else, who wanted to avoid a Faunus investigation.

        

One of Fred Black's letters. It's hard to tell whether the spelling errors are diegetic.

       

The rented house has a few rooms with a few items, like hip boots, an extra shirt and pair of pants, and a blanket. There are a couple of dark rooms that I can't explore until I find a light source. Clothing and a backpack are otherwise the only two items that I start with.

   

So far, I've described a game with a potentially-interesting plot but an amateur interface. Everything goes to hell the moment you leave the house, however, and suddenly enter an interface that makes no sense. A small map appears in the upper-left corner. The main view screen changes to some kind of weird radar on which you can see other entities approaching you (I am almost immediately swarmed by dogs, though they seem non-hostile). To move, you use the arrow keys to turn your facing direction, as reflected in the compass, and then use forward and reverse keys to move in those directions. Once you start moving, it's hard to stop, as if you were flying through space rather than just walking through a field. You actually have to hit the "reverse" key to slow and stop your forward movement, but you don't want to hit it too many times because then you're actually walking in reverse. It's a system that would make a lot more sense for vehicle travel than foot travel.

       

Coming upon a neighbor's house.

      

Some experimentation suggests that the "V" key helps you lock on to people and other targets, as does clicking on them. Meanwhile, using the "Search" button at random places in the wild gets you plants, like berries, an ear of corn, and a sprig of poison ivy.

    

It's easy to get moving so fast that you get lost, so I very slowly creep down the driveway to the road, then across to another house. The game identifies it as the "Vela house." I knock on the door. Some man answers, which gives me a chance to try out the dialogue system.

    

Dialogue is beneath six initial buttons: "Ask question," "Fast talk," "Super cool," "Nasty," "Apologetic," and "Friendly." All the options except for "Ask question" seem like initial poses; how the NPC reacts to them determines whether he'll even answer the questions under "Ask questions." Various skills come into play here.

      

Dialogue options with Mr. Vela.

      

From Steeven [sic] Vela, I learn that one night in July, he saw a "gross bleeding green skinned monster" go past his window, but the rest of the paragraph is weird, and I don't know if I'm supposed to take him seriously. His explanation for what might have happened at the Black farm is equally fanciful:

    

The large green glowing stinking fish monsters may have wondered [sic] in during a blood hunting trip to steal the life from the helpless pet kitten the Black's [sic] loved dearly. The fish beast may have burped so volumously [sic] after consuming Mr [sic] Black and the kitten that the house fire started soon after from a spark triggered by Mrs. Black's latent telekinetic powers awakened under stress.

     

Despite all the sics, you almost have to admire a paragraph that long that, correctly, does not use a single comma.

   

In further conversation, he offers that the "slimy wet fishmen" are disguising themselves as clowns, and they have a "devil dog" with them. Adjectives show up bizarrely in his conversation ("wet slimy" appears several times), and I wonder if there isn't some procedural generation going on.

    

I push my way into Steeven's house and find a book called The Fish Beast in his kitchen. He appears to be writing it. Some of its language echoes what he's just said. It describes two men named Joe and Frank walking home from a party when they get lost and Joe believes a slimy fish beast dressed as a clown is attacking them. Running from the beast, he ends up on the beach, where a giant octopus asks him where to find the "ongo poungo." Frank then walks up, but Joe is convinced that it isn't Frank but rather a disguised fish-beast.

   

Unfriendly wild dogs attack me as I head up the road, so I duck into another house. This one has no one home. I find a 20-gauge shotgun in the bedroom, but apparently with no shells. When I head back outside, all I can do is fight with my fists. 

          

I find my first weapon, but no ammo. Note the new options in the right panel.

         

I'll cover combat more later. For now, I run from the wild dogs to the next structure down the road. It's a post office, but no one answers my knocks and the door is locked. The next one is a general store, where the proprietor invites me to "take anything [I] need"; she'll put it on my tab. That's pretty generous considering I just arrived. My options are cigarettes, a bottle of bleach, a bottle of gas, a bag of sugar, and a mess kit. I note them but leave them all in place for now, since I'm apparently going to have to spend a decent part of the game running from wild dogs. The store clerk is named Karen Bradshaw, and she says she saw a strange green man walk into the ocean recently. She also tells me that a family recently disappeared from a house where a bunch of men in black suits moved in.

    

Wild dogs continue to nip my heels as I head down the road, ruining my chance to talk to some NPCs. I need to find a weapon fast. Moving down the road, I check another building. It is identified as the "Rogars Farm," and the person who answers the door is named as "Micheal Rogars" despite being a woman. I browbeat him or her into conversation. 

        

I figure out what approach works on "Micheal Rogars."

       

He or she reports that he or she saw Fred Black the night of 18 July. Black was holding a strange-looking box ("it was really heavy and had 4 squares of glass on the surface with odd writing") and was troubled by something he had seen and the appearance of a man in black. After we're done talking, I toss the house. The living room has a dead cat in the aquarium and another shotgun, again with no ammunition.

           

I feel like this should have been a dialogue option.

         

Further down the road is the sheriff's office. He isn't there. The game says that there's a painting of Calvin Coolidge on the wall. I was going to make fun of the game, but I remember that although Coolidge wasn't president until 1923, he was governor of Massachusetts before that. Then again, the game does say "President Coolidge," so it's still wrong. I hope to find some ammunition, but the only thing useful I find is a handgun--a 7mm handgun, which I guess would be useful against the dogs. But no ammo. I should have taken more levels in ninjutsu. 

   

As I leave the sheriff's office, the pack of dogs pursuing me is joined by a wasp and, briefly, a chicken. I run a distance down the road before finding a rustic cabin inhabited by one Andrew "Dice" Kennedy. He claims to have heard a "pitched whining sound" on 13 July that made the animals a bit crazy. He also tells me about a strange pack of bird-watchers who appeared in July, just before all the birds on the island except owls disappeared. I leave just as he starts to make misogynistic comments about Marilyn Monroe.

        

This island seriously needs an animal control officer.

         

I make it next to a library. The game notes that the floor and bookshelves are strewn with cigarette butts. It was a different time. A search of the room reveals a box of matches and something called a "diary of dice." This latter item is a diary of the man I've just met, Andrew capital-"D" "Dice" Kennedy. The diary suggests that he only recently arrived on the island, that his purpose there is to broadcast something. Someone named "Mr. Concrite" sent him some books, including something titled The Way the World Is and something called a "Pisro scroll."

    

Kennedy does not like Steven (spelled differently here) Vela, who apparently stopped by to read some of his writing. Kennedy calls him a terrible writer and a "maroon." "Ever [sic] other word is green or slimy," he notes, so I guess that was just a quirk of the character. Later, he recounts an explosion that knocked out his broadcasting equipment, followed by a military presence on the island (they say a plane went down), followed by a disappearance of birds. Fred Black came by to show Kennedy his artifact ("it plays tricks on your mind"). Kennedy heard gunshots the night that Fred Black disappeared. When I'm done, my only question is why the diary is in the library.

   

I have a real-life interruption that takes me from the game while the book is still open. When I return, hours, perhaps days, have passed, and my character is dying of hunger and thirst. I reload, but I'm back at Kennedy's cabin. I think I take the same path, but I can't find the library again. Instead, I find an oak tree. Nothing about it looks special to me, but the game assures me that "it is the only one of it [sic] type on the island . . . maybe the only one of its kind in the world." While I'm trying to figure out what's special about it, I get attacked by a "bushpig." We don't really have those in the U.S., unless it just means "wild pig," in which case we don't really have them much in Massachusetts.

   

I decide to fight this one. I activate my melee attack options, which are "pommel" (I assume it means "pummel"), "throw weapon," and "kick." I rely on kick. Combat is accomplished by clicking on the target, which brings up a little portrait with its health bar. The pig won't stand still--it keeps running back and forth across my path--so I have to time my attacks for when it's close by. Attacking depletes the "physical" meter, but that restores quite quickly. It's like the "cool down" effect used in other games with action-oriented combat.

         

I showed that pig who's boss.

        

My desire to kill the bush pig becomes more acute when the game informs me that an approaching NPC is named "Frank." I momentarily forget, see, that I'm looking for Fred Black, not Frank Black. Frank Black was the main character in Millennium. After I kill the pig and talk to Frank, I remember this. He thinks the mob killed Fred Black. He says there's a criminal loose on the island and "Bob" might be hiding him. On the subject of interesting landmarks, he has a surprisingly verbose message about conservation.

         

Noted.

          

Late in the game, I check out the "crafting" menu, and I see that it has all kinds of recipes for healing potions, antidotes, and the like. They require various miscellaneous items, like cow dung, bottled water, and ears of corn--all the things that you find roaming the island with "search" active. I need to do a more thorough job picking that stuff up.

    

If cow dung, jelly fish, and hemlock are the cure, I'm not sure I want to know what the disease is.

    

I was tempted to make this a BRIEF and reject the game for lack of character development, but a) I'm not 100% sure the skills don't improve through use; and b) this game is just too wacky to abandon. I have to know where it's going.

    

Defender of Boston was written by Tim Wisseman of North Fork, California, with artwork by his brother, Kenneth. Wisseman would have been in his mid-20s when he released the game. North Fork is one of the more interesting places from which a computer game developer might hail, way up in the Sierra Nevadas, northeast of Fresno. Wisseman still lives there, running a business in which he makes and sells "magic props." In addition to Defender, he also released a strategy game the same year called VGA Planets; in 1994, it was a finalist for Computer Gaming World's "Online Game of the Year." I have written to Mr. Wisseman to see if he'd like to comment on my entries.

     

I think I need to start over. If I'm going to be kicking dogs and pigs for a while, I'd better invest in some of that ninjutsu. Also, it's clear that I'm going to need to make a map and take more careful notes. Still, this was a useful exploratory session. I can't wait to see what happens next.

    

Time so far: 2 hours