Whale's Voyage: Money in My Purse

 

I switched to a new version during this session, which replaces the image of the titular ship with an image of a CD-ROM.

       

This session started with trying to re-do everything I'd accomplished since arriving on Lapis: beaming down, visiting Jack Nock, giving him the heart and CD, killing Greg Morgan, waiting around until I found Jack Nock dead, and looting his body for the piece of paper with a phone number. Doing this took almost two hours and about seven reloads. Complications included:

     

• Getting away from Morgan (after he was de-digitized from the disk) before he killed everyone, then managing to make my way back and kill him, which is hard enough without . . .

• The game kept freezing after I successfully killed Morgan.

        

I still got a kick out of this. Poor Jack Nock.

      

• My credits kept disappearing again. It seemed to happen reliably every time I read the note on his body, so eventually I just wrote down the number, reloaded, and refused to read it again.

• The game kept deciding that something was blocking from beaming back to the ship, thus preventing me from leaving the planet or saving what I had accomplished.

      

Eventually, by beaming up and saving after every tiny success, I was able to get through the process. Back on the ship, I called the number on the piece of paper. This was the conversation:

YOU: "Jack Nock gave us this number. He is dead. The heart has been stolen."

VOICE: "Damned! The only place the heart can be is Inoid! You have to fetch it and then call again."

          

I don't have to do anything but pay taxes and die.

      

Inoid is the furthest planet in the system--so cold, the game says, that people live in special domed cities. It requires more fuel to get there than the Whale is capable of carrying, so I realized I'd have to stop somewhere on the way. After noting the value of trade goods on Lapis, I set course for some intermediate planet in the system.

   

I was attacked by pirates on the way. This time, I tried moving right and was instantly destroyed.

         

All they have to do is look at me.

     

After reloading, my priorities changed. I decided I needed to equip the Whale with arms and armor. But the cheapest items cost hundreds of thousands of credits, way more than I had at the time. Clearly, the solution is to trade. With data from only two planets, that was still enough to identify some lucrative possibilities. Some experimentation showed that planets buy items for between 87% and 88% of what they sell them for. Taking that into consideration, I determined that I could make 3,770 credits for every ton of "opticals" bought on Castra and sold on Lapis and $3,270 on every ton of bauxite bought on Lapis and solid on Castra. With my starting dollar value of around $140,000, I could make a profit of over $60,000 on my first trip, accounting for fuel, a number that would increase as I made more money. As we'll see, I should have spent less time calculating trade profits and more time worrying about other things.

     

I bought as much bauxite as I could afford, saved, and then blasted off for Castra. Naturally, I was attacked by pirates. This time, I tried going forward and was instantly killed. I reloaded and tried again. I was attacked and destroyed again. A third time. A fourth time. A fifth. I tried other planets to no avail--I got attacked every time.

Surrendering does nothing for us.

         

Pretty soon, it became clear that the game had decided that I was going to be attacked by pirates on my next trip, and nothing I could do would stop it. I tried surrendering and they stole all my cargo. Since you can't really "grind" for money in this game, I figured that was an irrecoverable situation. I tried selling all my cargo on Lapis (at a loss), and the pirates just stole all my credits. I sold all my cargo, beamed down to Lapis, bought a bunch of random stuff at the stores (personal items, not cargo), beamed back up, and tried again. This time, since I had no cargo and no money, the pirates stole nothing. I made it to Castra, beamed down, and sold the items at a $40,000 loss. But if it broke the cycle, I knew I'd be able to make it up again in trade goods. I loaded up the cargo hold with opticals, blasted off for Castra--and got attacked by pirates again. For whatever reason, the game had decided that I was going to get pirated on every single trip.

       

That's just cruel for cruelty's sake.

       

Instead of quitting the whole thing and doing something more sensible with my life, I installed the CD version of the game. I figured I'd see if it would accept the save game from the floppy version and, if so, whether it would make any difference. The answer to both questions was yes. I reloaded from Lapis and tried to go to Castra again, and I was predictably attacked by pirates again. But this time, the game indicated that the Whale had 8 hit points instead of the 0 that it had before. Apparently, the floppy version of the game had started the ship with no hit points, and thus it was deciding that I was dead every time I moved.

       

8 hits make all the difference.

       

With 8 hits available, I was able to reach the edge of the map and escape before the enemy ship got me. I made it to Castra, sold my trade goods, and began to amass my fortune.

   

The manual, incidentally, has nothing to say about ship's hit points or how they are restored. There is no obvious selection or place to do it in the ship menu, no way to pay for repairs in port to the ship as a whole (just individual pieces of equipment).

           

Let's talk a little more about the CD version of the game versus the floppy version. Most of the difference is with sound, and a lot of that is with music, which as my regular readers know, I don't prize as much as most players. I have to say, though, they put some serious effort to this soundtrack. As the game begins, a slight spoken prologue (a guy in a German accent counting down) precedes the main techno theme which features both original lyrics ("Get wave / for a voyage / get a wave for the trip to the stars") as well as a lot of dialogue and sound effect mixing; I particularly enjoyed the two voices doing a call-and-response of "You'd better cut out the sonic absorber for docking" (or something like that) and "shut up." You can listen to it here. The soundtrack was apparently released separately as a regular CD.

    

The title sequence also has a quick recap of the backstory showing two people who look like Dolph Lundgren and Rachel Ticotin (and nothing like any of the characters in the game) deciding to buy their own spaceship, taking a look at a board titled "Ships for Sale," and seeing that the SS Whale is a real bargain.

       

Surely, we could come up with a better name than "cybor-brick-board."

         

In-game, there are a couple of new features. Most welcome is the ability to save among eight save slots instead of just one. Less necessary are voice clips that say things like "Have a look at my wares" and "What can we do for you?" when you select the various planetary menu options. The authors astonishingly did absolutely nothing about the horrid interface, which must have been the subject of numerous complaints in the intervening year. 

     

Now that I could reliably get away from pirate attacks--which continued to happen every time I traveled--I focused on making money at trading. Because I'm basically just insane at this point, I took the time to make a grid of the entire solar system and the costs of goods on every planet, which required me to take goods to the planets that didn't sell them just to find out what they'd pay for them. I also had to buy a refrigerated compartment because some of the goods spoil in transit if you don't have one.

         

My complete waste-of-time trading matrix.

       

It turns out that the most lucrative gig is buying gold on Inoid (1,078,210) and selling it on Nedax (1,373,456), I didn't have enough money at this point for even a single load of that. Plus, Inoid is way out there and requires a lot of fuel. The second most lucrative was buying heavy weapons on Sky Boulevard (168,753) and selling them on Lapis (256,485). In both cases, the profit was so high that the amount of fuel consumed wasn't a factor. With every successful trade, I could buy more for the next trade, never coming close to filling the 5,000 tons that the Whale could hold.

         

This planet has more of the game's 30 commodities for sale than most.

     

After I made about $8 million this way, I splurged on items for the Whale. From the various planets, I got a flexibility (adds more movement), a front shield, a back shield, something that identifies enemies, a planet glider, a glider locator, a mining device, a top gun, a bottom gun, extra firepower, a war calculator (no idea), a fuel optimizer, an extra engine, an extra tank, a cargo bay, a mineral scanner. I still had over $5 million when I finished. I may have overdone the trading. I was listening to a Dennis Lehane novel while I was doing it, and the plot was getting interesting.

    

Something I bought--I'm not entirely sure what--shows me the buying and selling price of every commodity on every planet. I could have saved myself a lot of travel.

This would have been useful a few hours ago, but then I wouldn't know how Prayers for Rain ended.

       

As you might imagine, all the guns and shields did wonders for my odds in combat. Space combat takes place on a 13 x 27 tactical grid. The Whale always starts in the center, while the enemy might be anywhere (but usually at one of the edges). Moons and planets and stars are in the background but are only decorations.

   

Scanning the enemy ship.

     

The ship has a certain number of movement points, determined by equipment, and every action takes a certain number: move forward (2), turn left or right (1), fire guns (2), and activate shields (3). Identifying an enemy or surrendering doesn't take any. Obviously, some of these options weren't available until I bought the necessary equipment. After you finish your movement, you hit the "end turn" button and the enemy goes. 

   

With my top and bottom guns, enemies pretty much died in a single blast. As far as I can tell, you get absolutely nothing from a successful combat--no experience, no money, no equipment. You just get to continue to your destination, the same as if you hadn't spent three hours trading to buy a bunch of fancy equipment and had just fled every battle instead.

       

Shields active, preparing to fire.

      

Once you've purchased the "glider," every time you choose the option to "use glider or beam down," the game assumes you want to do the former. You appear over the surface of the planet in your glider. If you really just wanted to beam to the city, you then have to choose that option from the glider menu. The glider otherwise offers the ability to scan and mine for metals, which is a waste of time given the trading system, which itself is a waste of time.   

       

The glider interface. I'm sure this will become important later.

        

I went down to the surface of Inoid to try to find the next stage of the quest. The frosted city was small enough that I didn't bother to map it. None of the NPCs had anything interesting to say. Aside from a store, the only place of interest that the city had was a hospital. Of the dialogue options available, the only one that got us anywhere was to say that "We are infected with the Hypo-Coco disease!," whatever that is. 

         

The city has dead snowmen. Cute.

       

The receptionist freaked out and called "Dr. Steinhag," who appeared and escorted us to an adjacent room, where he said we'd be scanned for the disease. "Please wait here until I am back," he said, then left. The 2 x 2 room had two locked doors, a couple of cosmetic trays with scalpels and such, and nothing that I could find to do. Steinhag didn't return. It took me a long time, messing around, before I discovered that I could use my toolkit to open the northern door (but not the southern one). 

         

This is the first time that dialogue has been delivered outside the dialogue interface.

       

A table in the northern room had the heart we were seeking. Everyone leveled up when I grabbed it. (They had leveled up earlier, too, but I forgot to mention it.) I gave my doctor "Resurrect Member" and everyone else "Automatic Reload."

     

In a world where "resurrection" is a skill, why do we need heart transplants?

     

The game wouldn't let us beam up from the hospital, but after we had the heart, Dr. Steinhag returned to tell us that none of us had Hypo-Coco disease and that we could leave. Once outside the hospital, we were able to beam away.

    

Back on the ship, we called the phone number again. The voice told us to fly to Lapis and search for a mine using our glider, at coordinates 33/18. We'll pick up from there next time. 

         

Why are we still working for this guy? We're already rich.

        

Switching to the CD version has at least made the game a bit more stable, but it's still uncomfortably weird and poorly balanced. I'm hoping that the relatively small solar system is a sign of a short plot.

      

Time so far: 10 hours