Game 438: Burntime (1993)

For a game so ecologically woke, you'd think they'd realize that post-apocalyptic desertification wouldn't necessarily mean the copious growth of cacti.

      

Burntime

Austria

Max Design (developer and publisher)

Released in 1993 for DOS and Amiga

Date Started: 17 October 2021

Date Ended: 13 November 2021

Total Hours: 8 (unfinished)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 23

Ranking at Time of Posting: 180/444 (41%)   

          

We've often talked about how when we were kids, our parents would drive us to the computer store, where we'd drop $40 on a new game and excitedly read the manual on the car ride home. I'm glad I was no longer a kid by 1993, or on the way home, I probably would have wrenched the steering wheel out of my mother's hands and steered into oncoming traffic. Burntime is set in a post-apocalyptic society, and the hefty 129-page manual spends literally the first 77 pages educating the player on all the ways such a society could come about in his lifetime. There are section headings like "Computer Causes Nuclear War," "The Chernobyl Catastrophe," "When the Temperature Rises," and "Oil--the Black Death." There are diagrams quantifying the sensitivity of each human organ towards radiation. There are photographs of starving children. I mean, all this stuff is important to know, but damn, I was just looking for a game.

       

I feel like for the second part to be true, the first part has to be false.

       

It would be one thing if the content of the game itself continued the theme and tried to raise awareness of climate change and other environmental issues, but so far it hasn't. While set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it isn't even recognizably Earth. The same material would have made the same amount of sense at the beginning of Dark Sun. 

    

There will still be nice sunsets after Armageddon.

            

Burntime is the fourth game from Max Design, which published strategy and simulation games throughout the 1990s. The company was a partnership between designers Wilfried Reiter, Albert Lasser, and Martin Lasser, all credited here, and Burntime uses an updated version of an interface that the trio wrote for 1869, a sea trading simulator, the previous year.

   

As the game begins, you choose a portrait and difficulty level and then play against either another human player or a computer-controlled player. Each player's turn lasts five minutes. You enlist followers, amass supplies, and capture cities, all with the ultimate goal of taking over the wasteland. You've got to carefully monitor food and water level, scrounge for sundries, and avoid high-radiation areas. A single "experience" statistic, used in combat and improvable during the game, keeps me from rejecting it as an RPG.

This character portrait looks like he's spent too much time in the wasteland already.

      

The available character portraits. Twenty years before the character debuted on television, they managed to come up with an exact likeness of Tormund Giantsbane.

     

The player's initial heroes start outside cities on a map of cities with names like Sherwood, Acid Town, Snake Hills, and One Man's Heaven. The character icons look the same no matter what portrait you chose, only one is green and the other is red. In the CRPG Addict's new glossary entry, this is known as an "FYC" color scheme. All actions in the game are made with the mouse, which is about as welcome to me as the color scheme.

     

Starting out in the wasteland.

   

The character sheet shows experience (I started at 37%), condition, the number of days you can go without food and water, and your inventory. Characters can carry only six items, and mine started with four slots already taken, including the knife, which you equip and unequip with the right mouse button.

   

On the main map, there's not much you can do except travel from place to place, look at your inventory, and check out information for each city. The information screen tells you what sorts of people live in the city, what special items are there, and how much food and water it has available.

    

Information on the starting town.

     

Inside each city, there are a few dynamics. NPCs and enemies scurry about the city map, which so far has scrolled to about four screens per city. NPCs come in four types: doctors, technicians, fighters, and traders. Traders bring up a trading interface. With everyone else, you get some limited dialogue options. Everyone can be asked "What's up?" to hear his basic story. You can also ask NPCs to join you, but most of them want something. In the first town I explored, I met a fighter named Pete who wanted some meat, which I had. In the second town, I met a bunch of NPCs who all wanted snakes.

     

Uh...

    

Occasionally, an NPC gives you part of the recipe for some contraption. For instance, I can apparently make a rat trap (for food) with screws, wood, and some third "ingredient." I found some wire in the same city, and I'm guessing that's it. A hand pump (which I think helps with a city's water) requires a hose as one of its ingredients. You find these items with traders and just lying around cities or in buildings, randomized for each new game. This approach reminds me a bit of Scavengers of the Mutant World (1988).

   

You can travel with NPC companions or assign them to stay put in a particular city. As long as you've killed all the enemies in that city, assigning an NPC there causes you to "take it over." This has logistical implications that I haven't yet really mastered.

   

That leaves combat. I hate it so much. The only enemies that have shown up in the first few cities are wild dogs. To fight them, you have to right-click to change the cursor to a combat cursor (meaning you can no longer talk to anyone) and then click on the enemies when they're in range. The problem is first that the enemies don't stay in range; they wander all over the place while you're trying to fight them. Second, the enemies move too fast to really click "on" them, so you end up clicking furiously near them, hoping that some of your clicks manage to hit them. Meanwhile, they're also hitting you and reducing your "condition." Enemies drop goods when they die; for instance, the dogs drop meat.

     

Trying to click on a dog.

   

After a couple of trial starts, I settled into the game with a female protagonist (Irene) who began on the far west side of the map, near Sherwood. Here's here travelogue so far:

Day 1:

• Entered Sherwood.
• Killed the wild dogs.
• Enlisted Pete (mercenary) in exchange for meat, assigned him to the city (took it over).
• Enlisted Ken (mercenary)) for meat and kept him with me.
• Found wire in town.

Day 2:

• Traveled south to Acid Town (a main city, which you cannot take over).
• Enlisted Babe (medic) and Chang (technician), both for meat.
• Talked to a lot of other NPCs, mostly mercenaries, but didn't get any info.

Day 3:

• Moved south to Dogshit City.
• Killed all the dogs, collected meat.
• Searched houses.
• Found woodpile, dead rat, bones, snake.
• Left Ken to hold the town.

Combat goes faster with multiple party members, so I guess they're all participating. Enemy hits cause your condition to drop, but it regenerates slowly as long as it doesn't fall below 70%. If it does, you need a doctor in the party to regenerate. If it falls below 50%, you have to pay one of the doctors in a capital city to help.

"Experience" goes up slowly with your victories. Irene, who started at 37%, ended her second day of dog-slaughtering at around 43%. The other characters started at over 50%.

     

Taverns have interesting scenes, but I can't figure out what to do there.

     
Day 4:

• Moved south to Left End.
• Killed a couple of mutants.
• Enlisted warrior named Axle, immediately left him to hold town.
• Found iron bars, knife.

     

Visiting a "water house."

       

Some of the towns have services in their buildings, but I can't figure out how to interact with some of them, like taverns. They just show a splash screen where any click causes you to leave. Perhaps there is no way to interact with them. Other buildings have traders or restaurants. Particularly prized are houses with water, where you automatically replenish yourself with a few days' worth of water. (I can't seem to figure out how to fill up canteens there, however.) You have to keep a constant eye on your and your companions' food and water values, lest they die or leave you.

    

I'm not entirely sure what it gets me to "take over" cities except that I can somehow call upon their resources at some future event.

   

Day 5:

• Moved back north to Dogshit City.

You don't actually move across the map; you click on a destination, the screen goes dark, and then the screen comes back on with the party at the new location. At each location, you can see what paths are available to other locations. Left End, as the name suggests, was at the end of its path, so there was nothing to do but to move back to the previous location. Any movement ends the current day and starts the next one.

Day 6:

• Moved east to a monastery.
• Visited a water house.
• Killed a couple of dogs. 
• Enlisted a mercenary named Jeff in exchange for some rats, left him to hold the location.

   

The monastery had a cut scene with a priest but nothing else I could figure out what to do.

      

It's good to know that Catholicism survived the apocalypse.

     

I hate this interface. I hate it so much that after every couple of paragraphs, I'm checking my word count to see if it's high enough that I can post this entry and get a reprieve from this game for a few days. There is no excuse for an interface that forces you to use the same device (clicking on the screen) for moving as it does for action commands. The mouse should have been required for targeting specific enemies and NPCs only. That's exactly why you'd want a mouse--there's no good way to do that with a keyboard. Everything else--switching to inventory, switching from the local map to the main map, toggling between "talk" and "fight" modes--should have been a simple stroke of a key.

   

Day 7:

   

Moved east to Numea, but the "Info" box warned me that the city was full of toxic gas. Lacking any protection, I moved on.

 

A warning not to enter a town. I probably find a gas mask somewhere.

     

Day 8:

 

• Southeast to the town of Muarab.
• Killed three dogs and a mutant.
• Found an empty water bottle.
• Enlisted a mercenary named Peter and left him to hold the town.

 

The towns to my south and west are held by another faction, so now I have to decide if I want to attack them an explore that part of the game.

Day 9:

 

Southwest to the town of Sana, occupied by some faction with a blue or purple flag. Only one NPC in town didn't give me the option to say "Do you want to work for me?," so I figured that was the other faction's agent. I killed him, enlisted a doctor to join me, and was able to assign him to the town. That's all it took to take it over. Does that mean that my enemies will have an equally easy time?

         

You should bargain a bit harder.

         

NPCs all have the same message: everything sucks, everyone is on the brink of starvation. A single rat or snake carcass is enough to buy someone's loyalty. The "recipes" I'm getting are for things like rat traps and hand pumps, both of which might marginally increase a town's food and water supply. Fallout isn't a tenth as hopeless.

        

"How many maggots do you have in storage?"--a question not asked by any other game.

      

That's about all I can take, even though it will make for a short entry. It's been a while since I recorded an "N" in the "Won?" column, but I'm thinking I might do it for Burntime. I'm getting nothing from this game. If the authors wanted me to ponder their social message, they should have put it in the context of a more interesting title. 

 

****

 

Later addendum:

    

I kept playing for several more hours, but I found Burntime aggressively unpleasant in a way that goes beyond any of its individual elements. I'm having a hard time describing exactly why. Every time I started the game, I felt the energy drain from my body and mind, and more likely than not, I'd simply dither around for a few minutes and shut it off. I suspect it isn't even that difficult to win, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'm having a tough time forcing myself to even write about it. Given all of this, there was no chance I was going to jump right back into it after an unexpected hiatus of several weeks.

 

I don't even want to go over the GIMLET. I gave it a 23. It does best in its use of NPCs (4) and its tight economy (4), worst in character development (1) and in a horrible mouse-only interface that subtracts from anything good it dos in graphics and sound (1). Maybe I'll try again when I things aren't so busy.