Whale's Voyage: For Hate's Sake, I Spit My Last Breath at Thee

 

The most difficult quest in this game is finding a bartender who will actually give you a drink.

       

The crew of SS Whale has unwittingly become involved in a plot to overthrow the interplanetary federation. During my last entry, the rebellion had decided to ally with a league of pirates, and the crew was supposed to introduce the pirate leader, Sam van Varn, to resistance contact Jenns Nippel. Unfortunately, van Varn got to the meeting first, thought Nippel was a federation spy, and killed him. Van Varn's solution is to implicate the federation in Nippel's death, which apparently can only be accomplished by dumping some broken federation arms and armor at the scene. I neglected to pick up these broken items when I killed federation agents on Nedax, or they never dropped it, or the one who would have dropped it didn't turn hostile. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but something did.

   

Thus, I started this session by replaying the Nedax encounter. This time, I collected the broken items and took them to the meeting on Lapis.

      

Let's grab this broken stuff for no reason!

       

I had no sooner dropped them on the ground than Nippel's boss, Wostoc, beamed in. In my last entry, some commenters alerted me that I had spelled the name both "Wostoc" and "Wostock." Well, so does the game. We'll go with the former. Wostoc bought the ruse and blamed Nippel's death on the federation secret service and their leader, General Noth. He and van Varn beamed away.

 

. . . and put it here, even though without a body, it's awfully suspicious!

       

Not sure what to do next, we returned to the ship and immediately got a phone call from "headquarter." They just recently learned that before we killed him, the federation spy, Greg Morgan, managed to steal information about the location of rebel bases. The rebellion wanted us to go to Sky Boulevard, infiltrate the federation, and delete the data from their main computer. I frankly don't see how this is going to help. Surely, dozens of federation agents have read this intelligence. They're not all going to forget that the secret base is on Dantooine just because it's no longer in the mainframe. Doesn't anyone have local backups? Printouts?

   

Nonetheless, we did as we were told and went to Sky Boulevard. My last visit, I had just found a bunch of unhelpful bureaucrats sitting behind desks, and that's what I found this time. I must have looped around the station six times before I finally found the NPC I needed, hiding in the corner of a building. In the meantime, while searching, I happened to pick up a random potted plant. This becomes important later.

         

The game's insistence on differentiating "Hi" and "Hey you!" continues until the end.

      

The NPC we needed was named Ergerson, but he wouldn't tell us how to get into the computer room until we gave him an automatic gun. Fortunately, the shop on the station sold them. He said the computer was in the suite of rooms behind Mr. Wellsgolf. This is a perfect example of how the game gates progress in silly ways. I had already met Wellsgolf and already intuited that the computer rooms were behind him, but the game wouldn't let me ask him how to pass until I talked to Ergerson first.

   

Wellsgoff said I could pass if I brought him a filled blue form. Thus began an "evils of bureaucracy" quest in which I had to ask the two other bureaucrats sitting behind desks about forms. "Sure you can get the blue form here," one said, "but bring me first the yellow form." The bureaucrat with the yellow form wanted the green form first, which was in the hands of the other bureaucrat, who would only hand it over in exchange for the red form. Et cetera. It took maybe six or eight swaps, running back and forth between the men, before I had the blue form. I guess this is the game's way of demonstrating that the federation government really needs to be destroyed, as if it's unreasonable to require a lot of paperwork before you're allowed to access the central government's mainframe.

     

Ah, the height of evil.

      

Even after I gave the blue form to Wellsgolf, he wanted 10,000 credits to let me through. Civil servants open to such bribery are a black mark on the federation, I admit.

    

Wellsgolf opened the door to a suite of rooms, one of which was guarded by a soldier. I tried talking to him, intimidating him, and hypnotizing him to no avail. I tried just killing him, but that summoned the usual trio of deadly guards. I tried a bunch of other things. After an hour, I looked at a spoiler.

        

It always fails.

      

The infuriating solution to this conundrum is a) to plant a trap at a particular point a few steps away from the guard, and then b) go to the room in the station that has the fuse box and cut the power to the station. This apparently causes the guard to leave his post to see what's going on, at which point he steps on the trap and dies. This does not summon the trio of guards. How anyone ever figured this out, I'll never know. First, setting the trap only works in one exact point, even though the guard would have to walk down an entire corridor after leaving his post. Second, the door to the room with the fuse box doesn't even open until you've set the trap. 

This only works in this one location.

      

This puzzle is a perfect example of the lost opportunities and horrible plot design represented by Whale's Voyage. What do you imagine that a good game, like Wasteland, would have done here? It would have offered a lot of potential solutions drawing from the skills of the characters, right? You'd have an option to demolish a nearby wall with an explosive (which I tried), to charm or deceive the guard (which I tried), to sneak past the guard (not possible with this engine), or simply to defeat him in combat (which I tried). There are ways that the solution could call into play skills that are otherwise useless, like "Identify Opponents," "Hypnotize," "Paralyze," "Brainblast," or "Intimidate." Instead, you get one stupid option.

          

It's an odd-looking fuse box.

            

Let me mention at this point that every time I've been successful at something in this game, one or more of my characters has leveled up and been given a selection of skills. By the end, they all had almost all of their available skills. This is my assessment of the skills:

    

Actually useful: "Identify Weapons" (gives you exact statistics), "Automatic Reload," "Heal Wounds," "Resurrect Member" (although you don't have enough psi power to use it until very late in the game), "Set Traps," "Manipulate Computer" (several times, though I think you can use a toolkit instead).

Questionable: "Identify Opponents" gives you statistics on opponents you don't have time to stand around scanning for statistics, plus who cares what their numbers are, since you have no choice but to fight them anyway? "Scan Dungeon" doesn't do anything the scanner doesn't do. I never got "Hypnotize," "Paralyze," or "Disarm" to work.

Useless: I never found a place in the game to use "Search for Traps," "Detoxicate Member," "Identify Essence," "Use Essence," or "Search Tracks." "Check Honesty" gives you a numeric score for the person you use it on, but what does that mean? "Value Item" doesn't do anything a trip to the store doesn't do.

     

On what scale? What possible value is this?

     

I have no idea why there are no skills relating to things like combat and flying the ship.

 

While we're talking about the characters, their attributes have been increasing with every level up, so that's good.  For instance, Ishmael started with a strength of 23 and a speed of 15, but by the end of the game those values were up to 119 and 118, respectively. But each character also has an "Honesty" statistic that increases with leveling. How does that make any sense?

       

Anyway, we got the guard to walk into the trap, then cut the fuses. The station went dark. I guess I was supposed to use my "Infrared Device" to make my way around, but I did it just fine in the darkness. We got through the door the guard had been guarding, and I used my bounty hunter's "Manipulate Computer" skill at the computer to delete the data--no login or password required. We beamed off the station just as the lights came back on.

       

What does that mean? What kind of trap was it? Are we seeing a body? A guy in a cage?

       

The rebellion had given us a number to call when the job was done, so we did. Our contact was in the middle of inviting us to a meeting on Inoid when the line went dead with a scream. Meanwhile, we received an S.O.S. from another ship asking us to help rescue him from federation attackers.

       

Of course, that's what I do when I want someone to think I've died so they never call me again.

     

Battles have been rare for the past few hours. With all the upgrades that I bought for the ship, they've also been relatively easy. I didn't realize until this battle that you need to raise shields every round, not just once at the beginning of combat, for them to have an effect. I suppose that's a measure of how easy the combats have been that it didn't hurt me to figure that out so late.

   

The War Computer also lets you do a "quick combat" with most enemies, with the game just telling you the outcome. I always win, but I always take a little damage, which costs money to repair. When I fight the battles myself, I rarely take any damage. Of course, since you get no experience or money or anything for random space battles, there's no point in fighting most of them at all. You can just flee during the first round.

       

The federation fields a ship called a "big dounut."

      

There was no fleeing this one, however. It wasn't very hard. I think I had to defeat 5 ships. When it was over, the federation's would-be victim called to thank me. He introduced himself as Max Schimmel, and he told me about a secret pirate base called Louis 17, on an asteroid between Nedax and Inoid.

   

I traveled to Louis 17 and found even more ship upgrades, including a cloaking device, a holograph, and something called an "instant bomb" that I paid nearly $1 million for and never showed up as an option in any future combat.

      

It took me nearly 5 minutes of trading to make that money.

      

We took the glider to the surface of the asteroid, which had craters and skulls and bestial faces carved into the ground. The "Neo" logo was also there. The main city was called Shame, and we beamed directly there. There were only three people to talk to in the city: a bartender, a shopkeeper, and Max Schimmel. The bartender had again run out of drinks--there literally is no place in this game to get a goddamned drink. I'd certainly be in favor of rebelling against whoever was responsible for that. The bartender blamed the vacant city on the fact that "everybody is gone to the great discussion about the revolution." Glad they invited us.

       

I love that someone took the time to carve that skull out of the landscape.

       

The shopkeeper claimed to have the best weapon money could buy, which turned out to be a "plasma thrower." I bought one for my soldier along with a bunch of clips. He also had for sale a "Roomscanner Pro," which I nearly overlooked because it looks like a regular Roomscanner. This one shows a dot where there's a person, however, which is perhaps the most useful thing you can buy in the entire game. I would have killed to have one of these for the last 12 hours.

     

I also bought a bomb, but it was too heavy to carry, so I left it sitting on his counter for most of the rest of the game.

      

When dots started appearing on the screen showing both the party and NPCs (as well as, later, enemies), I had a sense of déjà vu that, after some thinking, brought me back to Sentinel Worlds: Future Magic (1988), and I began to wonder if there might be some influence there. The games are mechanically very different, but there are a lot of thematic similarities, and the automaps look very similar even if they work very differently.

        

From the next session: the scanner shows a bunch of enemies waiting to kill me on the other side of this wall.

       

At this point, I got stuck. I got stuck for so long that I nearly threw in the towel and wrote a "Summary and Rating" based on YouTube videos. I had no leads on what to do next, and after trying to find one for over an hour (and solving the alien quest, incidentally), I looked at walkthroughs and LPs on YouTube and still couldn't solve it. Everyone said that Max Schimmel should have more dialogue options than he had with me. I couldn't get him to cough up the next hint.

    

While I was trying to figure it out, I visited the alien ship to remind myself what they were looking for. Some kind of "essence," they had said. I didn't expect that I had anything that would help them, but I decided to do that thing you sometimes do in adventure games where you just try everything. In this case, I got it on the third thing: the random flower pot I had picked up on Sky Boulevard. "We can use that flower to produce the needed X-109-E essence," the aliens said. "Thank you very much!" All of the characters leveled up, so that was helpful.

       

I don't know what he meant about this "wares" line, so I probably missed an additional reward.

      

I visited a bunch of other locations. I found the second city on Louis 17, Wocony, before I was supposed to, but I got nothing out of the visit except an odd request from a woman (the game had us hail her with the dialogue option, "Hi! Pretty woman!") to find her a vibrator. I chuckled at this, assuming that the unfortunate Austrian developers had made an embarrassing fehltritt in translating some common word like, I don't know, "screwdriver." But later when I found one for sale on Lapis, it was pretty clear from the visual that it was, in fact, a vibrator. I brought it back to her and she complained that it didn't have any batteries. So that was a waste of time.

          

The sense of humor of adolescent male game developers always makes an appearance.

         

Anyway, something that I did in all my bumbling about loosened Max's lips, because when I returned to check on him one more time, he had new dialogue options related to my "kidnapped" contact. (I guess that's how we were supposed to interpret the "Aaaargh!" over the phone.) He said to check with his contact Erasmus, a guy with red hair and sunglasses, in Wocony. This only got me another five minutes into the plot, as Erasmus refused to talk with me, shouting "Get out of my way!" every time I approached.

   

Back I had to go to walkthroughs and videos. Here's the solution (again, how did anyone ever come up with it?): You have to proactively, for no reason whatsoever, give a random object from your inventory to Max. I gave him a bottle of wine. This prompts him to say, "If you want to talk to him [Erasmus], bring him a red sardine!" Irene got me a punching bag for my birthday this year, and I promise you it got a good workout that night.

         

Notice that I'm in the inventory menu, not the dialogue menu.

     

Now where was I supposed to get a red sardine? Well, apparently I was supposed to remember that hours and hours ago, on Lapis, an NPC named Krueger had promised he could get "anything we need." I had to look that up in a walkthrough, too. I returned to him and paid him 100 for the red sardine.

       

Why didn't we just use this guy for everything in the game?

       

Back to Wocony. We found Erasmus and gave him the red sardine. He told us that the secret service has a hidden prison in the city of Dymy on Arboris. I'll save the rest for next time, but suffice to say that in trying to rescue our contact there, we accidentally killed him, and the only alternate save I had was from before we got Max to cough up the information about Erasmus. Since I didn't know what actually triggered those dialogue options, I was in for another session of screwing around the solar system for a while until Max decided to talk.

   

When I started playing this game, I thought that the interface would be my biggest issue. That is clearly no longer the case. After 14 years and 500 games, we've seen some bad games. I don't mind a bad game. I can forgive a bad game. I cannot forgive Whale's Voyage. It is not just bad; it is actively contemptuous of the player's time and effort. I do not say this lightly, but if I were rich enough to have money to waste, I would find a way to get revenge. No lie. Nothing violent and nothing cruel--we're talking about a video game, after all--but I would pay someone to track down all of the developers and find clever ways to waste enough hours of their lives to equal at least a full work week. An American one.

Time so far: 17 hours