BRIEF: Space Hulk (1993)

      

Space Hulk

United States

Electronic Arts (developer and publisher)
Released 1993 for Amiga and DOS, 1995 for PC-98

 

The title of this game reminded me of one of my experiences working in Trinidad in the late 2000s, just before I started this blog. On my first lunch, my local hosts took me to a roti place. In Indian cuisine, roti is just the flatbread, but in Trinidad and Tobago, roti refers to the entire meal, which usually sees the flatbread used as a wrap for a kind of thick, spicy meat stew (what Brits would call a "curry") made with chicken, beef, or goat.

   

Only skilled and experience Trinis can eat roti without making a huge mess, so my hosts suggested that I order it "buss up shut," which means that the roti comes shredded, and you use bits of it to scoop up the meat and sauce. (It's a bit like assuming that you're going to make such a mess with a taco that you just go ahead and order a taco salad.) I loved it. Not as much as I loved aloo pie--which I loved so much I wrote a song about it--but it was a close second. On my third or fourth trip, I finally got around to asking one of my hosts about the etymology of "buss up shut."

         

Blah, blah, blah, long anecdote. Here's a screenshot from the game's mission selection.

     

"You know, like de Hulk," he said. "He buss up shut!" The entire table of Trinis had a hearty laugh while I remained as confused as ever. Eventually, a Trini dictionary clued me in: "Buss up shut" is the uniquely Caribbean way of pronouncing "burst up shirt," which with a few more words and clarification means, "bursts out of his shirt." The idea is the shredded roti resembles the tattered remains of Bruce Banner's shirt after he gets angry and becomes the Hulk. Whoever thought that up has a unique gift for metaphors.

  

Thus, now I have a cemented connection in my mind between the term "hulk" and Trini food, which you can get approximately nowhere in Maine. Because of this game, I'm staring out my window at a frozen river thinking of eating bake and shark on Maracas Beach. I like to think that there's some Trinidadian out there, sweating under the Caribbean sun, who fondly remembers the time he visited Maine in winter, saw snow for the first time, wore a sweater, and ate lobster stew next to a fire.

      

Each mission begins with a voiced briefing.

      

That's my "Hulk" anecdote. On to the game. The box cover shows someone in a giant exosuit, like the first Iron Man or the Atlas mechs from Mass Effect, gunning down a bunch of aliens. I thought the "hulk" in the title must refer to the suits themselves, which look appropriately Hulk-sized, but instead it refers to the derelict spacecraft aboard which most of the action takes place. The alien enemies are known as "Genestealers," and I guess that they lack ships of their own, so they take over human ships, then fly them back towards human colonies and use them to attack. Space Hulk consists of a couple dozen missions where "space marines" land on those ships and exterminate the Genestealers inside.

   

The game is set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe, the sci-fi cousin of the fantasy Warhammer universe. Both campaign settings have included role-playing games, including computer role-playing games, but they are in origin focused more on wargaming than role-playing. Space Hulk is based specifically on a 1989 board game in which two players waged war across a large, modular map.

      

Aliens gotta alien.

       

The Amiga "Hall of Light" database thinks it's a "dungeon crawler," and I kind of get where it's coming from. It features tiled movement through textured terrain along with real-time combat like Dungeon Master. But its similarities end after a cursory appearance, and it meets none of my RPG criteria (as many commenters correctly offered). Not only does the squad of space marines not gain abilities or experience, they're not even consistent in number or composition between missions. Combat success is based solely on the player's reactions and strategies and not at all on any intrinsic attributes, and the characters' equipment is defined by the mission and largely unchangeable.

     

An alien explodes in blood as I shoot him.

    

Other than ruling it out as an RPG, it's hard to classify exactly what Space Hulk is. A lot of sites have it as a "tactical" game, and without question there's a tactical element to it. You have one or two squads with multiple marines, and you have to figure out how to deploy and use them to have the most success against large swarms of Genestealers. But with everything happening in real-time, it's far more of an action game than a strategy game.

I found it hard to get used to the process of squad control. This is no "blobber"--each marine occupies its own space and can move around the map independently of the others. But you can only control one marine at a time (although you can see the viewscreens of all of them). The rest operate in something called "Overwatch" mode. They'll move along paths that you set on the game map, and they'll shoot any obvious threats along the way, but they won't notice anything subtle or engage in any advanced combat tactics. For me, they basically just acted as multiple "lives," increasing the chances that I could complete the mission successfully even if I lost some marines.

        

Plotting a marine's movement on the tactical map.

      

Combat is pretty hard. Enemies frequently stage ambushes and attack in continuous waves. Some of the scenarios give you melee weapons, but in all the ones I tried, if an enemy got within melee range, I was a goner. Some of the enemies look like the aliens from Alien, and when they're not attacking you, you can hear them growling and scurrying nearby. The game doesn't have many commands--you basically just select the marine, move forward or backwards, turn, and fire--but I nonetheless kept panicking when I saw a wave of enemies coming down a corridor or appear in the view screen of one of my other marines. I often turned the wrong way, or overturned, or switched to the wrong marine, or otherwise proved once again that I'm not that good at action games. Honestly, my squad sometimes did better if I just let them shoot enemies and didn't touch the controls myself.

      

Despite not being good, I completed this mission!

       

The entire game is mission-based, which can be a fun game structure when the length, difficulty, and objectives are varied. You can choose a particular mission or play 21 of them strung together in a "campaign." There are also a large number of tutorial missions to ease you into the game even though it's not all that complicated. The missions begin with voiced dialogue explaining your objectives. (Each mission also begins with a voice that sounds just Hulkish enough to avoid violating any copyrights saying: "We bring death.") These are all features I wouldn't mind seeing in more RPGs of the era.

    

Space Hulk had a sequel called Vengeance of the Blood Angels in 1995 and a turn-based remake in 2013 that launched a host of expansions and sequels through 2018. I'm not sure if we ever get a Warhammer 40,000 RPG, but there are a few fantasy Warhammer games on my master list, starting with Shadow of the Horned Rat in 1995. That may not make it, either, as it appears to be primarily a strategy game.

   

If nothing else, this brief outing helped solidify the distinction in my mind between Warhammer and Warcraft. And it made me hungry. Maybe I'll try some curried chickpeas tonight.