Scavengers of the Mutant World: Still Scavenging

For a moment, I forgot what game I was playing. By the way, it turned out to be a weapon. That's so wrong.

It would be such an incredible waste of time to continue playing Scavengers of the Mutant World that, for all our sakes, I'm going to stop. But man does it grate to have this game beat me.

As I noted in previous postings, the game's primary objective is to return various scavenged goods back to the vault at the city of Lau. Well, I've done that. I've stocked the larders, armory, and tool shed:

Yeah, that's a shotgun and a .45 in the shirtless guy's possession.

But I still don't have enough parts to build a car or boat, which I think--actually, I know, since I read Scorpia's review after I decided to stop playing--is the key to "winning" the game. Apparently, just before the nuclear war, there was only one car and one boat in the immediate area, because each permutation of the game features only one battery, one motor, one exhaust system, and so on. I've collected most of these parts. For the car, I lack gasoline and an axle, and for the boat, I lack gasoline, a propellor, and patches. Meanwhile, I do have all kinds of extra parts: pedals and chain, liquid oxygen, a heater, uranium, an ivory rod, thumb tacks, handlebars, and a hubcap. Clearly, there are some blueprints for a nuclear-powered, pedal driven space shuttle that I've yet to stumble upon.


(Oh, by the way, correctly identifying the parts in the blueprint depends on the character's intelligence attribute, which is why Homer thought my car needed an anchor.)

You'd think I could just keep exploring ruins until I find the missing items, but there are a couple of reasons why I would go insane first. The primary one is that instead of a character development system, this game features a "punish-characters-for-developing" system. You see, it turns out I was wrong about no levels or experience. You don't see those things, but your characters apparently do increase in levels as you slay mutants and monsters; this is evidenced by slowly increasing maximum hit points and radiation points. As you increase levels, however, the game starts throwing harder and harder monsters at you, including some who irradiate you with every attack. You eventually get to the point where it's easier to return to base and dump your high-level characters in exchange for low-level peons just so you can go back to fighting rabid bunnies again.

Wasn't kidding.

The monsters don't just get harder in the amount of damage they do; they also get more annoying. They eat my food, leaving me to starve, steal my items, and poison me. You can't escape them; they move faster than you, and even fleeing combat just puts you five or six spaces away from them, and they promptly attack you again.

Second, the further you get from home base, the more the ruins suck. Many of them are completely dark and require lamps to navigate--lamps last about 10 moves. Some are filled with radiation zones. I've counted about 19 ruins in the game map I've already explored--you have an automap, incidentally....


...and since each part exists only once, in one square (possibly darkened), in one ruin, it'll take me many hours to explore them all, even with the occasional dungeon map that you find:

This would be the one ruin I didn't really need a map for.

I'm not sure I have hours and hours, because I only have about six scavengers left. The others have all died from monsters, radiation storms, starvation, or poison. I don't miss them. This game teaches you to not think of your characters as a real "party" but as interchangeable bags of meat that you simply send out to find loot. However, none of the remaining characters have a very high intelligence score, and I suspect this is necessary to correctly assemble the parts, should I manage to find them all before the rest of my characters die.

I have found some reasonably cool weapons, including handguns, shotguns, and spear guns. But missile weapons are hardly worth it because they burn through your minimum supply of ammo so fast. You have to keep a backup hand weapon and notice when your ammunition runs out in combat.

I've also found a lot of tools in the game, and I wish I could figure out how to get most of them to work. Jackhammers bore holes through walls--that's easy enough--and teaching machines raise your stats. Decontamination and healing kits do the obvious. I wish I knew the purpose of ladders and shovels. Late in the game, I found a couple of "flying mounts" which refuse to fly over anything.

Anyway, I'm not starting with a brand new party and map, so I'll play these characters to victory or death. But I'll give you a quick final rating now in case it's death [later edit: yep.].

In my first posting, I talked about my visceral reaction to the game world, but I can't deny that it's fairly original--this might be the first post-apocalyptic CRPG (I don't know if Wasteland from the same year is before or after). The state of the land and your quest is fairly clear (4).

For a game with such limited character creation--the game rolls their stats and picks their portraits and names when it generates the world, although you can change them--it's funny how this game gives you the option to edit the portraits pixel by pixel. Hardly any other game offers this level of visual customization, yet it's hard to imagine anyone taking the time to do it. Character development, for reasons I've said, is maddening (3).

There are no NPCs in the game (0). Encounters feature foes with different strengths and weaknesses (3), but there are far too many of them, and combat offers so few tactics that you can't really adjust well to specific enemies. The combat mechanics are quite awful, with all of the turning and advancing--one turn or step per round--that you have to do (3).

The various types of equipment--weapons, armor, food, tools, and parts--that you can find, wield, and use is probably the game's strong suit. A numbering system suggests which weapons and armor are better (4), but there is no economy in the game (0).

The game fakes you out a bit on the quests. The manual suggests that you'll be rewarded for returning food and weapons and such to the vault, but I saw no sign of this, and the only real quest seems to be the collection of parts for a vehicle. I wish I knew what happened after that--does building a car end the game?--but I doubt it offers any role-playing options. Still, it gets one point for originality (3).

The graphics, as you see, are pretty terrible. Aside from the colors, there are only four or five monster icons; one for water creatures, one for insects, one for humanoids, and so on. There is some bloopish sound that you immediately turn off, and the keyboard commands are cumbersome. There are only 29 possibilities, and I suspect through consolidation they could have mapped each one to a letter (like Ultima IV) instead of requiring me to type D-A for "date," D-F for "distribute food," D-I for "dismount," D-O for "don armor," and D-R for "drop" (1).

I suppose in the gameplay category, I should give some credit for replayability. If you really love this game (you loser), you could keep generating new maps and play all 4 million possibilities. And I allow that movement is fairly linear throughout the game world. But, man, does it drag. If they'd just put two of each part on the map--and maybe made the encounters a little harder to compensate--it would go more quickly and be more tolerable (3).

Against my better judgement, I'm going to add two bonus points to the final score to reward the game for its original use of radiation. Whether through storms, walking through radiated areas, or fighting radiated monsters, it's fun to see the various negative (stupidity, blindness, instant death at the next irradiation, attribute drains) and positive (laser eyes, attribute increases, double speed, radiation immunity) effects that radiation confers in the game:


This brings the final score to 26, the same as Questron II, which was bad for different reasons.

Word from reviews at the time suggests that Scavengers was originally designed as a board game. It feels a bit like that. Barton (p. 122) says that "it's almost worth seeking the game out just to see how badly developers can bungle a promising concept." True words. I'm glad I sought it out, wish I could have finished, but not enough to roll a new game world.

If one of you would like to download and play the game until you can assemble the vehicle, and send me a screenshot and description of the ending, I'll give you 1 million points and the right to name my next main character or party leader. In the meantime, I'll be playing Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic.

Well, I Don't Know What I Expected

Every bloody online review that I read mentions being able to use stop signs as shields. I don't think any of these people have actually played the game. As far as I can tell, this occurs only on the cover. I have yet to find any shield--stop sign or otherwise--in the game, and the manual doesn't even mention shields.

      

Fair warning: this is a light one. I'm still trying to find enough automobile or boat parts to win Scavengers of the Mutant World, and I won't have much to post until I do. If it drags on much longer, I'll start Sentinel Worlds. 

    

I thought every famous TV clip was posted to YouTube, but I guess the producers of Arrested Development have issues with that, because I couldn't find the clip I really wanted to lead this post with. In it, Michael opens up his refrigerator and finds a bag with "Dead Dove. Do not eat!" written on the outside. Curious, he opens it up, looks inside, grimaces, and says, completely deadpan: "Well, I don't know what I expected." TVTropes.org calls this trope "Exactly What It Says in the Tin." The entry leads off with a great quote from Roger Ebert:

Moviegoers who knowingly buy a ticket for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor are going to get exactly what they expect: There is a mummy, a tomb, a dragon, and an emperor. And the movie about them is all that it could be.

Other famous examples are, of course, Snakes on a Plane, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and my favorite, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. They have a few entries for video games, but the best possible example--Scavengers of the Mutant World--isn't one of them. This is an outrage, really. You don't get any more literal than that: in the game, you play a bunch of scavengers, who--and this comes as no surprise--live in a mutant world. It doesn't try to fool you like, oh, Star Command. What the hell is that about? Do you get to boss Bruce Willis around? Are you the head of a public works team on Hollywood Boulevard? Do you utter lines like, "Evacuate?! In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances"? Ultima? Isn't that a Nissan model? Phantasie--oh, that helps. You jackasses can't even spell it right. But this game: It's set in a mutant world. You scavenge. Don't like the sound of it? Don't buy the goddamned game. I could go through the list and identify games that are good examples of this trope (Rogue Clone is particularly notable), but I was actually more interested in the opposite: games that have utterly baffling or inappropriate names. Here's a sample:

• Baldur's Gate II: Sure, it's a sequel to Baldur's Gate, but it doesn't take place anywhere near the city of that name.

• The Elder Scrolls: Arena is notable for not having an arena, nor having anything to do with an arena (not to mention any scrolls). The story, apparently, is that the game was supposed to be about gladiatorial combat but it changed in the development stage. No one told the marketing department.

The cover even has a bunch of warriors in an arena. I'd like to see someone try to battle in that outfit, incidentally.

• Pool of Radiance: As I noted in my review, the eponymous pool is never well-explained and really plays no role in the game. As in Arena, one senses changes between concept and execution.

• NetHack: Doesn't it sound like a game about, I don't know, hacking? Over a network? Yes, I understand the history of the name, but that doesn't make it any more sensible.

• Neverwinter Nights: The first word has no problem--it's definitely set in the city of Neverwinter. The problem is the overall title, which sounds like it's suggesting you get to explore the seamy underbelly of Neverwinter when the sun goes down. Instead, the city is in the grip of a plague, and there's nothing special about the night

• Faery Tale Aventure: Book I. Awfully cocky, weren't you?

Yeah, so I didn't really have a lot of time tonight. What are some of your favorites in either category?

Scavengers of the Mutant World: Flying Fish and Laser Vision

Nice outfit, gimp.

Scavengers of the Mutant World is not a good game--I know this without question--but somehow it's got me in its vise. God help me, I want to win this one. It feels like it shouldn't take that long, either. It's just hard. I've restarted three new games since I last posted (and no more naming my own characters or swapping portraits--it takes too long).

My understanding of the "quest" is that I need to bring various items and parts back to Lau and to assemble the parts, using sets of blueprints, into working machines. I don't know how many items, parts, and machines I need to collect, but I've barely gotten started.

Note the wheels and the drive axle in the storeroom.

In two of the scenarios, I found some blueprints early on that listed the parts needed for a car:

An anchor?

The parts are scattered about the different ruins, and I don't know if they're randomized or fixed in the game world. I also don't know if there's just one of each or more, but I've only found one of each so far. In my last scenario, I had the shaft, oil, axle, and exhaust system, but my main party died in a radiation storm--a bolt of lightning killed them instantly--and my relief party was slaughtered by junkyard dogs while trying to retrieve their stuff. I could have continued, but I had lost 8 out of 20 scavengers, and since I was still mostly just exploring the game, I decided to start anew.

Frermynd gets her hands on a shaft.

In addition to weapons, armor, parts, and food, you find several usable items scattered about the world. One, a "teaching machine," increased attributes for my characters the two times that it worked. Another, a "decontamination unit," was helpful for restoring my radiation points.

I'm not sure how a "teaching machine" increases strength. Perhaps it's a shake-weight.

The manual had warned about radiation storms. Generally, they're dangerous and cause loss of attribute points, or death. But in one memorable storm, one of my characters mutated to shoot laser beams out of her eyes. It was useful in the next few combats. If The Day After had featured such plot points, I'm not sure I would have feared a nuclear holocaust so much.

Knowing the exact distance and direction to the nearest ruin is important for when radiation storms come along.

The monsters turned out to be the type you would expect in a post-apocalyptic nightmare: mutants, scavengers from rival tribes, giant spiders, insect abominations. They seem to start off easy and get a lot tougher as the game progresses. I'm not sure if this is because I'm getting farther from Lau, or because the game senses you're approaching the completion of a goal and ramps up the difficulty.


I took video of a brief bit of gameplay below. Despite its brevity, you see a lot of gameplay here: wandering around Lau, engaging some mutant fish, finding some food, weathering a radiation storm and getting laser vision, using a decontamination unit, and starting to explore a new ruin called Ceniste.

The game, I should also mention, automatically saves every couple of turns. There's no quitting and reloading if something unpleasant happens.

I'm determined to keep at it until I can at least put together a car. I've also noted, in my quest for original reviews and ads for the game (mentioned yesterday), that there are few sites that have any detail about Scavengers. No matter how much I write, other sites will probably always have more information about Ultima IV and Pool of Radiance, but I can still be the authoritative source on obscure games like Scavengers.

Game 59: Scavengers of the Mutant World (1988)

         

Scavengers of the Mutant World

United States

Interstel Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for DOS

Date Started: 20 June 2011

          
Post-apocalyptic films and games have always held a certain joylessness for me. I grew up in an era in which the threat of a thermonuclear war, while waning, was very real. No film has ever scared me as much as The Day After, which I saw when I was 11. I remember a teacher speaking about the TV movie afterwards, and his basic thesis was that a) having already discovered and built nuclear weapons, the world would never not have them again; and b) although the odds were low in any given year that a nuclear missile would be launched, every passing year increased the cumulative probability, making it ultimately inevitable. (My schooling in these years, if it is not immediately clear, was in Texas.) Thanks to him and the movie, I was not only convinced that a nuclear war would happen in my lifetime, I desperately hoped I would die in the initial blast. Other films like Def-Con 4, The Road Warrior, and The Terminator were equally bleak in their promises of a a grimy, radiation-poisoned, brutish aftermath.

For years, thinking about nuclear war was my personal version of The Game (sorry, everyone). I would go as long as possible, try to muster some enthusiasm about life, make plans for my future, but ultimately my brain would remind me, "Oh, hey--nuclear war!," and I would descend into a depression that might last several days or several weeks. Fortunately, when I was a sophomore in high school, I read a horribly uninformed newspaper column about why we shouldn't worry about nuclear war, and it was somehow enough to convince me to stop thinking about it long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse. I now occasionally worry about a terrorist using a nuclear bomb, but I no longer worry about dozens of ICBMs cris-crossing continents. It would be kind of you to refrain from postings explaining why I should, in fact, still worry about such things.

Anyway, this is hardly the stuff of fantasy, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was play games set in such worlds. I'm just coming to realize this now. Some remnant of the horror of The Day After must have always stuck with me, because I never bothered to play any of the Fallout games (despite liking Interplay's and Bethesda's other titles) or Wasteland, or any post-nuclear CRPGs. (I did play the strategy game Roadwar 2000 as a kid, but that occurred after a plague, not a nuclear bomb.) This is my first.

I typed much of the above while I was waiting for the game to create a "world disk." The manual says that it randomizes the world (choosing from among more than 4 million possibilities) each time you start a game.

Scavengers takes place after a nuclear war destroys most of humanity and leaves the surface world a mutant-ridden, radioactive wasteland. Descendants of survivors live in an underground city called Lau, actually the remains of a fallout shelter. Its founding documents note, mythologically, that "the First Ones, having a considerable source of wealth known as 'Government Funding,' built this shelter."

Every year, a group of colonists--winners of a contest--journeys to the surface world to scavenge for loot for the colony. Battling mutant creatures and radiation storms, they hope to return with furniture, armor, weapons, food (?), and pieces of vehicles. I am to lead such a party.

The manual is quite extensive, 60 pages long, and it meticulously describes the types of weapons, armor, terrain, medical issues, and creatures you're likely to encounter on the surface. In an amusing bit of tautology, the manual warns of ants large enough to eat oxen. Then, in the mammals section, it notes that there are few mammals left and hardly any have been seen. But, it reasons, "if there are ants that can eat oxen, there must certainly be oxen, too."

Editing and selecting characters.

The game vaguely reminded me of Dungeon Master in the opening stages. You command a party of four characters, but you don't create them yourself; rather, you choose from a list of 20 pre-generated shelter-dwellers. You can modify each character's portrait (with a pixel-editor, even!) and name, much as you can when you "reincarnate" a character in DM, but you're stuck with the attributes. These are the standard D&D list, minus constitution and plus "observation." In addition to hit points, you have "radiation points" that you want to keep above 0, else you suffer disease and mutation--although some mutations, apparently, can be helpful.

In naming my characters, I chose two commenters, a fictional reference, and one name from Karnov's random name generator.

The game starts you in the ruins of Lau and allows you to scavenge some items nearby, including weapons, armor, parts, and blueprints (I got plans for a car, for instance). Right away, it hurts its own mythology by having you find bows and armor like chainmail--where would this have come from, either pre- or post-apocalypse?

The number pad moves you around, but other commands are chosen from a list of 29 through a somewhat cumbersome means of typing the first two letters, then hitting ENTER, then specifying the character to perform it. So picking up an item requires a sequence like: G-R-[ENTER]-3 (the "GR" is for "Grab"). There are shortcuts but they work in combination with CTRL, SHIFT, and the function keys, which doesn't work so well in DOSBox.
          

Fighting "Walking Grass," which looks like a mutant dandelion.

Combat takes place on a tactical map that initially seems a little like Pool of Radiance. Each character becomes a distinct person and moves separately from the others. But the differences soon become apparent. First, there are only four options in combat: move one square, turn and face a different direction, attack, and parry. Second, you can only do one of these things each round, so getting from the starting location to actually stand face-to-face with the enemy might take five or six rounds. After combat, hit points regenerate fairly quickly.

Today, I explored Lau and a little of the environs, but almost immediately I ran into a radiation storm and one of my characters got slaughtered:

Radiation storms have both positive and negative effects.

You do have some warning of said storms, so I guess the trick is to always know where the closest shelter is.

This game could go either way, but I'm leaning on the side of not liking it much. There doesn't seem to be any character development in the game; battles don't get you experience and there are no "levels" (at least, the manual doesn't mention either). You're not limited to sticking with the original 4 party members, and there is some suggestion in the manual that you will eventually have to use all 20 for various purposes. But I am interested in finding out what all these parts and blueprints do, so I'll stick with it for a while longer.

In the meantime, I'll owe a drink to anyone who can find me either an original ad or an original review for this game. I want to start looking these up for each game that I play, but Computer Gaming World doesn't seem to have reviewed it, and the game doesn't otherwise have much of an online presence.

"Radiation storms" are just the kind of thing I used to fear. If I really "role-played" this one, I'd just have my characters opt for a blissful death in the sea.