Mission: Mainframe: Won!*

This screen--and this screen only--is what awaits you at the end of hundreds of hours of gameplay

     

Mission: Mainframe

United States

Independently developed and released as shareware

Released in 1987 for DOS

Date Started: 31 December 2010
Date Ended: 2 January 2011

Total Hours: 10
Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 25
Ranking at Game #404: 179/404 (44%)

 

So, Mission: Mainframe wasn't all that hard, it turns out. Anyone who struggles with it is, quite frankly, a roguelike noob. It just requires a little bit of persistence, a lot of skill, and maybe some...yeah, okay, I cheated. Cheated big-time.

     

I had pretty much decided after the last M:M posting that I wasn't going to play any more, but it bugged me a bit, and I figured I'd at least like to see what the game offered at higher levels. So I committed what I thought was a mild sort of cheat: I backed up my save game file so that permanent death wouldn't be permanent. With this done, I was free to take greater risks, starting with descending directly to Level 10 and picking up the security key that would allow me to access Levels 11-20. Then, after a couple hours of that, I went right down to Level 20 and got the security clearance that would get me to Levels 21-30. Thinking that I could just end things once and for all, I sneaked around Level 30 until I found the "Executive Meeting" consisting of a bunch of high-level office workers (executives, directors, attorneys, and the like), culminating in The Operator--the big boss. I could trick and evade the others, but there was no getting around The Operator, and he thoroughly thrashed me.

     

Still--not a big deal. I knew where the big boss was; I just needed to build up my character enough to defeat him. I ran around collecting gold and valuable office supplies (scissors were the best I found, offering 100 each to offense and defense), finding potions that raised my stats, spending money on "strategies" (which turned out to be mostly useless) and health club sessions to boost my stats further, getting experience and rising levels, and so on.

     

And this, my friends, is when I started to remember why we don't allow save game backups in roguelikes. Sure, you start out by saying, "I'll just use it when my character dies." But these being roguelikes, your character dies a lot, and suddenly that backup file seems a little too handy. Accidentally swap out a good weapon with a so-so weapon? Restore the backup! Attorney destroys one of your supplies (which they do, the bastards)? Restore the backup! Manger or supervisor knocks down some of your stats? Restore the backup! Don't like the attribute score increase that you got on your last visit to the gym? Restore the backup! Etc. etc. etc. And of course, the backups change the entire dynamic. Suddenly, shooting directly to Floor 30 isn't a risk--hell, that's where the best stuff is! There's no point in avoiding risk when you have a fail-safe! Backing up your save game file doesn't just save you from permanent death--it breaks the entire purpose of roguelike games.

     

And yet, not even this amount of cheating was enough. I did it for about maybe six hours of gameplay time (although, to be fair, I was multitasking), and I still couldn't improve my character enough to defeat The Operator. So I resulted to way worse cheating:

    

If you don't know what this is, I'm proud of you.

    

That's right: I downloaded a hex editor and modified my save game file. But I even screwed that up, since I don't really understand hexidecimal code. I meant to change all my attributes to 999, but somehow I ended up changing three to 14,649 and three to 57. Since the 14,649s included my strength and dexterity, though, it didn't matter: The Operator couldn't hit me as I devastated him with scissors, coffee, and a rubber band.

     

I defeated the controller of an evil computer with a hex editor. That's called "fire with fire," my friends.

      

Let's be clear: there is no way I would have ever won this game playing it "straight." Not in four months, like I did with Rogue; not in four years. Even cheating, I died constantly--from alcohol, darkness, traps, and enemies. I probably would have won, eventually, without the hex editor, but never without making backups. I would love to hear from a single person who has ever won this game without making backups of the save games. Tell me how you did it (you have to be convincing), and I'll send you $100 [Note: someone got it much quicker than I would have imagined; see comments].

    

But it doesn't really count as a "win"; hence, the asterisk in the title. And I won't list it as such in my ranking spreadsheet.

   

Speaking of rankings, here we go. Does it make sense to rank roguelikes on the GIMLET scale? Probably not. But I'll bet it reflects my actual enjoyment of the game.

    

1. Game World. Roguelikes are not known for their attention to the back story and game world. This one is no exception. It offers a paper-thin plot as an excuse to transform Wizard's Castle to an office building, but all of the adaptations--a gym instead of a training hall, a supply cabinet instead of a weapons shop, "strategies" instead of spells--seem goofy and forced. Score: 2.

    

2. Character Creation and Development. The character creation system has you pick from four classes--commando, detective, secret agent, and private eye--but these don't even do what they say they'll do (adjust your ability scores), let alone anything else. Development in terms of increasing attributes is quasi-satisfying since it happens so rarely. I have no idea what leveling does for you--it doesn't increase your hit points or anything. Score: 2.

    

3. NPC Interaction: There are no NPCs. Score: 0.

      

4. Encounters and Foes. Some of these are cute, I'll give it that. Instead of the standard menagerie of orcs, hobgoblins, trolls, and such, you fight secretaries, consultants, analysts, and vice presidents. Most of them do something unique--steal your money, destroy your food, destroy your equipment, damage your ability scores, teleport you, and so on--and you need to learn these things to determine which to fight and which to trick or flee. There's no way to "role play" any of this of course, but all levels respawn when you leave them, so there's no shortage of experience. Score: 4.

     

If my secretary could teleport people out of the office, I'd be a happy man.

     

5. Magic and Combat. "Magic" consists of "strategies" that you have to buy--analyze, bluff, confuse, decoy, flatter, and hypnotize. They increase in price in that order, and "hypnotize" is so expensive I never got it. The strategies seem to work about as often as "trick," which you pay nothing for. Combat is very basic--just hit the "B" key--and since you can't flee or avoid encounters, there's really no strategy to it. Score: 2.

      

6. Equipment. Like the game world, the use of rulers, erasers, bookends, and such as offensive and defensive items is mildly amusing at first, but ultimately seems stupid and forced. Plus, the thought of killing secretaries with paperclips doesn't encourage you to suspend disbelief and immerse yourself in the game world. There is a shop, and it's easy to tell which pieces of equipment are best. Score: 3.

     

Did I mention that you kill people with stamps, file folders, and credit cards?

     

7. Economy. You collect money throughout the game, and since you can use it to increase your attributes, there's never any reason to stop. That's about the best I can say for it. I wish the office supply cabinet got better things as I rose in levels; instead, it only ever offered the selection of starting equipment. Score: 4.

     

8. Quests. Only one main quest, and pretty lame at that, and no side quests. I know that almost all roguelikes just feature one thin main quest, but I like quests in CRPGs. If that means I rank all roguelikes slightly low, so be it. Score: 1.

    

9. Graphics, Sound, Inputs. The graphics aren't going to fool you into thinking that you're really in an office building, but they're good enough for a roguelike, which after all doesn't depend on graphics. There is some decent sound, sparingly used, and the controls are fairly easy to master. Score: 5.

     

10. Gameplay. I suppose this is the most subjective category. I like games that are challenging but not impossible; Mission: Mainframe strikes me as impossible. Unlike some roguelikes, it's really not replayable--the "classes" offer the same experience--there's no real opportunity for role playing (especially since the game world is so goofy). At least things move along pretty fast. Score: 2.

     

Final Score: 25. That puts it lower than everything except Ultima II and the original Rogue, and frankly I think I gave Rogue a raw deal (the GIMLET scale was new back then). It ranks higher than Rogue only because it has an economy and the encounters are a little more interesting. If you like traditional roguelikes, you'll likely disagree with this assessment, but I wouldn't be upset if this was the last one I played.

     

With those words, I ought to return to Le Maitre des Ames, but NetHack is next, and I'd like to be able to compare the latter to Mission: Mainframe while it's still fresh in my mind. I've just downloaded version 2.3e, and I think I'll check it out for a few minutes before I go to bed.

Mission: Mainframe: Megacorp Madness

I actually am! HOW DOES THE GAME KNOW?!

I ascend in the elevator to Floor 2. I walk three rooms north and find 41 bytes (gold). I meet a janitor and trick him into leaving the room, allowing me access to the file cabinet. I break it open and find 188 bytes and a beverage. I sip the beverage and am informed that it "tastes delicious" so I drink the whole thing. It turns out to be a double martini, and suddenly my character is drunk, meaning that none of the directional keys work and I stumble from room to room. I run into a secretary. I try to trick her but it fails and she attacks me. I fight, but suddenly she teleports me to a different level (I don't know why secretaries can do this). I stumble across two rooms, picking up some bytes. Suddenly the power goes out, so I'm both drunk and in the dark. I mash keys randomly, hoping to find my way to the elevator. I'm sucked up an air shaft and deposited on Floor 8. I run into someone in the dark. I try to trick him. It fails and he attacks. I try to evade but I slip and fall. He steals all the bytes I have accumulated, then kills me. The game tells me I have been slain by an accountant.

This is a pretty typical game. I've cycled through probably 30 characters in Mission: Mainframe. I tried to get clever at the beginning. I was Bond the Spy and Matrix the Commando and whatnot, but it got old fast so I've just stuck with Marlowe the Private Eye. Over and over. I warned you that there wouldn't be many new things I could say about the game after the first posting, but here are a few that I've discovered.

• The vending machine, where you can buy food, can "eat your money." Nice touch of realism.
• You can carry up to six office supplies at once, including stamps, newspapers, pens, pencils, out baskets, in baskets, credit cards, and rulers. Each gives a different bonus to offense, defense, or both. But there are also some "cursed" items, like red ink and leaky pens, that damage your stats. You have to pay big bucks to "sell" them to the office supply cabinet and get rid of them.

I am killing secretaries and file clerks with pencils and stamps. This is the most disgusting game I've ever played.

• Your character ages. My current character, who I've gotten all the way up to Level 4, is now 21. I started at 18. Putting aside the absurdity of the idea that I've been exploring this office building for three years, I wonder if this means the game has a time limit: do I eventually get too old and die?
• Floors reset when you leave them, and each time it's a random combination of encounters and treasures. I've yet to complete an entire floor because I always get sucked up an air vent or teleported by a secretary, or I nearly die and have to limp back to the elevator and return to the lobby. Somewhere I need to find a key that will get me past Floor 10, but that's not likely to be a pressing problem any time soon.
• If the power goes out, you can light a match (if you've found any) or find the fuse box (there's one on each level) or just stumble around until you find the elevator.
• When you find new items, the game gives you the opportunity to test them out before committing. You can "analyze" items, "sip" beverages, and "inspect" file cabinets. The game is remarkably straightforward with its clues from these actions, and I find it difficult to drink the wrong thing or pick up any more red ink.

Level 1 character: Killer the Commando. Descends to Floor 2, immediately finding some stamps (TK). Encounters a secretary but evades her. Finds 90 bytes in the next room. Finds the level's fuse box. Meets an accountant who steals 61 of the bytes and does 50 damage before Killer successfully evades. Sucked up a shaft to Floor 4. Breaks open a file cabinet for 634 bytes. Runs into a room that automatically heals all his hit points. Another file cabinet. Meets an ANALYST. Tries to trick him, unsuccessfully. Killed in two rounds.

Technically, I should point out that when you die in the game, you have the option to hit ESC and try to get resurrected. If it works, you lose all your items, food, strategies, and money, but you get to keep your experience and statistics. It still doesn't sound so bad, but the option only works about 25% of the time, and I've never had it work on the same character twice. Usually, I get this:

It's like losing twice.

Unlike Rogue, your constant need for food doesn't impel you to go further and further down into the dungeon whether you're ready or not. As I've been wary about going too far too fast, I've been lurking around Floors 1-3, trying to build up my character. I am worried about the age aspect, though, so I suppose I'd better get moving.

In general, roguelikes do not reward risk. Compare this with a game like Dungeon Master. In that game, even though I stuck to rules about saving and re-loading, and dying wasn't a walk in the park, I still took occasional risks. When I first encountered Chaos, I threw myself at him. Why not? He slaughtered me mercilessly, but I might have won the game right there. It's happened before.

In Mission: Mainframe, on the other hand--just as in Rogue--losing that gamble doesn't just mean you have to reload; it means you have to start over at Level 1 with a brand new character. That's a sobering risk. Thus, the only way to progress is to play it very safe, to keep wandering early levels to build up your character. Even then, you're not guaranteed anything. The longer you play, the greater your odds of getting drunk, or getting lost in the dark, or teleported to a level you can't handle.

I know this all sounds negative, just like my review of Rogue, but despite how frustrating the game is, it's also insufferably addicting. I keep dying, and I keep creating new characters. Long past the point at which it would have made more sense to be doing something else.

I'm back home now, though, with my second monitor and a stable Internet connection, so I think it's rather time to throw myself back into Le Maitre des Ames. I don't know if I'll have another posting on Mission: Mainframe or not. I certainly don't expect a "Won!" posting--honestly, has anyone ever won this game without cheating? Although I did with Rogue, it took me four months, and this game is harder than Rogue.

On another note, I finally got around to doing what some of you had been encouraging for almost a year, since Ultima II: see Time Bandits. The film is quite possibly--and I say this with great affection--the dumbest movie I've ever seen. But its influence on Ultima II in terms of the cloth map, time travel, and the dimension doors is quite obvious, and I'm glad I saw it for that reason. More important, David Warner did a fantastic job in an early example of what ought to forever be called "the David Warner role." Between Time Bandits, Tron, Time After Time, Gargoyles, Star Trek: TNG, and of course Baldur's Gate II, he really has mastered the part of the pontificating, pseudo-intellectual, vaguely absurd arch villain.

Game 37: Mission: Mainframe (1987)

     

Mission: Mainframe

United States

Independently developed and released as shareware

Released in 1987 for DOS
Date Started: 31 December 2010

      

Okay, first off: I'm still not done with Le Maitre des Ames, especially now that I have a translated manual. But this hotel has the worst Internet connection I've experienced in a long time, and I keep losing my access to Google translate (which I still need for the in-game text). I'm writing this blog entry in Notepad on Thursday, but I can't imagine I'll be able to post it until I get home Friday night. Second, I really need my second monitor to effectively play Maitre, what with the need to have the game, my notepad, the manual, my map, and the translation screen all open at the same time.

So I'm moving on temporarily to Mission: Mainframe, a roguelike that MobyGames lists as a 1987 offering, but whose own title screen shows that the first version was from 1983. I had heard that it was a roguelike, so I was basically expecting Rogue in a futuristic setting, so I wasn't prepared for all of the variations that this game includes.

      

Was just a wrecking ball out of the question?

The backstory is that a malevolent computer mainframe has taken over an office building, corrupting employees and causing all kinds of havoc. You must ascend up to 30 floors of the office building (i.e., dungeon levels) to find the computer (i.e., Amulet of Yendor) and return with knowledge of its location to the lobby. On the way, you must deal with hostile employees (monsters), keep up a supply of junk food, increase your levels and statistics, find office supplies (weapons), learn different strategies for dealing with different employees, and collect chips and bytes (gold).

You would think the programmers of this game would know that bytes are not actual objects.

The game offers a very long, detailed tutorial instead of a physical manual, which is unusual for the era (you also have the option to print out the tutorial). Character creation is a process of choosing a name and class (commando, secret agent, detective, or private eye) and then rolling some random stats until you get the ones you like. Supposedly the classes offer stat bonuses (e.g., commandos get extra strength and stamina), but the values seemed random to me, no matter what class I chose.

I don't think any state licenses private investigators as young as 18.

You start off in the building's lobby (i.e., town), where you can purchase from a variety of odd weapons (pencil, pen, paperclips, file folder), fill up your food supplies, go to the gym to increase your stats, visit the library to purchase strategies for dealing with employees, and get healed. Of course, all of these things cost money. The lobby is also the only place to save your character. In the tradition of Rogue, you can only save for later play; death is permanent and your save game is deleted when you die.

Trapped file cabinets? There ought to be a "call OSHA" option.

Moving around the game world is reminiscent of Wizard's Castle, which I reviewed back in July. Each floor contains 64 rooms (8 x 8) in which you might find employees, file cabinets with money, potions (the game doesn't even try to come up with a modern analog for that), and other objects. You might also get sucked up a computer-controlled air vent and delivered to another floor. The lights might abruptly go out. And so on. The level of detail that you see ahead of time depends on the difficulty level that you choose at the start of the game.

When you encounter employees, you have a number of options for dealing with them: you can try to (d)eal or trade, (b)attle them, employ a (s)trategy that you've learned from the library, (t)rick them, (e)vade them, or make a prank (p)hone call to distract them. These various moves have a chance of success or failure based on the type of employee (accountant, janitor, secretary, file clerk, etc.) and your statistics. If it comes to battle, the employees are mercilessly lethal. (The first time I read, "You have been done in by a SECRETARY!" was a bit of a downer.) No matter what you do, success rewards you with experience points towards another level.

I imagine it goes without saying that you die lots and lots in Mission: Mainframe, just like any other roguelike. I haven't been able to keep a character alive more than about 15 minutes. Death wipes out your character and your saved game and forces you to start completely over. Lots of people find this fun, apparently.

The video above shows a few minutes of gameplay, so you can get a sense of the different types of encounters and such (it's hard to read on the size of this screen, though; you might want to go directly to the YouTube site). I managed to make it without dying, but just barely.

             

I was curious about the developers, Brian J. Shankman and Jerry M. Plemons, who want me to send them $15 if I enjoy it. Shankman has a LinkedIn profile; he apparently used to work for Sabre, the company that owns Travelocity. He mentions the game in his profile. Plemons now owns a photography studio. LinkedIn wants me to upgrade my account to contact Shankman, and I otherwise can't find an address for him, but I have Plemons's studio address, so I'm going to send him the $15. I wrote a book about 15 years ago and it's always a thrill when I get a tiny royalty check; I hope Plemons feels the same way.

Now, here's the difficultly. To paraphrase a quote from Roger Ebert: this posting is like a piece of cheese. Now that you've read it, you know everything there is to know about that cheese except what it would be like to eat an entire block. If I play this game all the way to the end, what am I going to blog about that I haven't already told you? Roguelikes don't reveal new bits of story as you play. They don't offer NPCs. They don't do anything different than you see in that brief video except get harder. And the last (only) one that I won, Rogue, took me four months. These are important questions, because Nethack is coming up right after this (well, after Le Maitre des Ames anyway). I figure my options are:

1. Don't blog for weeks until I win
2. Blog what I'm doing, no matter how repetitive or boring
3. Come up with a lot of special topics postings as I play
4. Play roguelikes side-by-side with non-roguelikes, only blog about the latter until something interesting happens or I win
5. Just do one or two postings on the roguelikes and move on

Since I still have Le Maitre des Ames on the burner anyway, I think I'll try #4 and see how it goes.