Sentinel Worlds: Final Rating

Hey, EA: the only things I must do are pay taxes and die.

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic

Electronic Arts (1988)

Date Started: 3 July 2011

Date Ended: 15 May 2012

Total Hours: 22

Final Rating: 36

Difficulty: Moderate

Look, I respect all of you and I really value your presence on my blog. Your opinions, views, philosophies, suggestions, and tactics have greatly enhanced my experience playing these games. I hope you all stick around forever. So I hope you don't take it personally when I say that Sentinel Worlds was the dumbest @#$%ing game.
 

I sensed it the first time I played, and indeed I said something in the first paragraph of my first posting. It has a dumb plot, a dumb interface, a dumb approach to combat, dumb dialogue, dumb exposition, and a final "battle" so dumb it beggars description.

I grant you that on the stupidity scale, Ultima II still beats Sentinel Worlds. But Sentinel Worlds has far less of an excuse: It came six years later, and it had great examples, like Starflight--which Electronic Arts freaking made!--to use for inspiration.

Let's break it down and see if we can figure out why it's so bad, but I feel like Sentinel Worlds might be a rare game that's actually worse than the sum of its parts.

1. Game World. I do give it some credit here. There aren't many science fiction CRPGs, and this one starts with a reasonably good backstory as your crew comes out of cryogenic sleep, far from Earth, to deal with mysterious raiders attacking shipping lanes. You have a clear mission and a mystery to unravel. But the story that is revealed during the course of the game is nonsensical and poorly written. The Sentinels, the spell book, the Key of Thor, the aliens, and Malcolm Trandle seem like plot points tossed in randomly, and none of their stories are fleshed out enough--which is particularly unforgivable, since the game manifestly had a way to offer exposition through the paragraphs book. The world is also quite small, featuring only three planets. Score: 5.

The world was disappointingly small after Starflight's entire galaxy of planets.

 

2. Character Creation and Development. Flawed, but not bad. You allocate points to your attributes during the creation process. There are 20 levels in the game, and only the most serious grinders would make it through all of them. Leveling comes at a good pace, and for the first 10 or 12 levels, it brings solid rewards as you allocate skill points. It collapses towards the end when you run out of useful skills to give points to; the cap of 7 for each skill seems arbitrary. Attributes play a solid role in the game: my medic ended up with the most experience because I gave him 20 dexterity, which allowed him to reload nearly instantaneously. Only charisma seemed to be a useless statistic. The combat skills were vital, but there were a host of other skills of dubious use, including ATV repair, bribery (I only found two characters to bribe in the game), and observation (never figured out what it did). Score: 4.

By the end, I was just channeling skill points into random skills.

3. NPC Interaction. This could have been a lot better than it was. At first glance, it seems to anticipate the detailed dialogue screens that Bioware made famous starting in Baldur's Gate, except using the paragraphs book for longer bits of dialogue and exposition. In practice, it didn't work out that way. Each NPC has extremely limited dialogue, and they have an annoying way of cutting you off in the middle of your conversation, requiring you to wander around until enough time has passed that they'll talk to you again. There are no real "choices" in the dialogue, just topics. Finally, there are only about a dozen key NPCs in the game. The game could have been better with a lot more NPCs offering bits of lore and context, perhaps fleshing out the ridiculous Sentinel/Key storyline in more detail. As it is, I'd call it a missed opportunity--although still better than the one-liners offered in many CRPGs of the era. Score: 5.

No. I returned the book to the sentinels.

4.  Encounters and Foes. Here are where things begin to go downhill. There are two moments in the game where you have to cripple a raider vessel and board it, the first time to interrogate a raider and the second time to mind-probe him to find out the location of his secret base. These moments were a comparative joy, because they offered the only chance to do something interesting. The entire rest of the game was SPACE to target, ENTER to attack, no matter what the enemy. The monsters were interchangeable dots, some shooting and some attacking with melee weapons, but hardly even worth looking in the lower-right corner to see their names. There are no scripted encounters and no role-playing in the game. My bullet points in this category include "areas respawn at some point after they are cleared." Well, enemies do respawn in this game, constantly, but since areas are never "cleared" it doesn't quite match what I had in mind. Score: 3.

If I don't move, little red dots will keep coming down the corridor indefinitely.

5. Magic and Combat. The game lives up to its name by offering "magic" of a sort, as late in the game your characters get the ability to use their "light" to cast a variety of spells, along with a reserve of "energy." I only used this ability once, to solve the mind-probing quest. The key problem is that in the time it would take to open up the spell list and choose one, your targeted enemy has inevitably been gunned down by one of your other party members.

Even the toughest enemies in this game don't last more than a few hits. With one exception, they're only really dangerous in volume. The times I died, it was because enemies overwhelmed me before my medic could keep up, and I'm not sure the spells would have helped.

This was a nice idea, but as far as I could tell, it did nothing.

Neither ship combat or melee combat are tactical in this game. For the most part, the computer does the fighting for you as soon as you see enemies, and the control you have over a single character in melee combat is annoying rather than meaningful. I suppose there are some tactics in how you position yourself in various rooms and hallways, but it's the dullest sort of tactic, and difficult to implement because you don't really know when a new pack of enemies is suddenly going to respawn from behind or to the side of you. All in all, combat in this game was a real chore.

But worse than the slog of regular combat were the couple of times that the game decided to do something original. After slaughtering thousands of interchangeable mooks in the raider base, I'm suddenly faced with a unconquerable former NPC at the end of a corridor, forcing me to result to save-scumming to defeat her. And there is absolutely no excuse for the idiocy of the final "battle" against Malcolm. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. Very basic. The game offers weapons of five types: contact (bludgeoning), edged, projectile, and blaster. Each takes its own kind of ammunition, and you have to watch your ammo stores carefully lest you run out. Early on, it's best to channel each character's skills into one of the weapon types and specialize. You don't find blasters until late in the game, but almost every new map otherwise brings an equipment upgrade, so that wasn't so bad.

There are seven different types of armor. For both weapons and armor, the game makes it clear in the manual which does the most damage and which offers the best protection. You also find a host of other miscellaneous objects for which there seems to be no purpose but to sell them. Since they were the best way to make money late in the game, though, I didn't complain. None of the items are very well-described, there are no special items or "useable" items. Score: 3.

Those $900 crysprisms really set me back towards the end. I probably should have stuck with projectile weapons.

7. Economy. This is probably the category that I liked best in the game. You know from my previous postings that I like a) different ways to  make money, and b) plenty of things to spend it on. One of my biggest pet peeves is getting to the end of a game and having millions of gold pieces (or dollars) unspent. Sentinel Worlds works well on both of these major criteria. You can make money by running science foundation missions, mining minerals, killing raider ships, and raiding storerooms and armories. You spend it on equipment and ammunition (ammunition for blasters is particularly expensive), ship repairs, and attribute boosts in the Towers of Caldorre. You can only raise your attributes a certain number of times, and you can only carry 8 units of ammunition at a time, so it's theoretically possible that you could run out of reasons to make more money, but I never came anywhere near this point. Score: 7.

Until the end, I took an odd pleasure in mining, even though it was the least lucrative of the money-making options.

8. Quests. The main quest presents a paradox. I praise it for offering something different than "kill the evil wizard" and yet I condemn it for offering something worse. The galling thing is that the elements are there for a fairly decent plot. I enjoyed it at the beginning. You've arrived in a distant system with a mission to track down the source of some mysterious, violent raids. Early on, you're taken about the yacht of the region's trade magnate, who offers some advice. The game then takes a turn towards the mystical by introducing the god-like Sentinels and one of their renegade brethren. This is not a quest that, on the surface, sounds bad, and yet the game manages to bollix it up at every point with horrible writing, weird names and allusions, and inexplicable plot developments. To name a few:

• What was going on with that Shadar guy? Was he just supposed to be a typical sub-boss? If so, why give him this weird back story about really being named Paul? Why did that other NPC have to be his brother?
• About midway through the game, my crew suddenly encounters aliens. Did we know there were aliens? The manual doesn't say anything about them. Shouldn't that be a huge discovery for mankind?
• Why does Taylor, the NPC from Norjaenn, show up in the raider base trying to kill me? And why is she the toughest foe in the entire game?
• Why is the Key of Thor called that? What is it, really? Why is it even necessary to the plot?
• Why does the spell book talk?
• What are the Sentinels and Malcolm even doing out here?
• What is Malcolm's relationship to the Towers of Caldorre? Are the services there really just illusions? Is the dexterity I gained in the tennis club also an illusion?
• What were the aliens digging for on Caldorre? How did that relate to Malcolm?
• What is Malcolm's issue with Grager? Was the whole probably-an-enemy-of-Grager thing just supposed to be a red herring?
• Should we read anything into the leader of the Sentinels looking like a Native American?
• Why is the Sentinels' place being guarded by aliens?
• How does a godlike alien being come by the name "Malcolm"?

Now, if some of these things were supposed to be mysteries, that's fine. Nothing wrong with a little mystery to create a sense of wonder. But it doesn't feel like they're mysteries; it just feels like bad plotting. There's a serious lesson to be learned in analyzing this game.

Aside from that, the main quest has only one outcome, there are no role-playing opportunities, and there are no side-quests. Score: 2.

9.  Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics were more than tolerable. The sound didn't impress me. Lots of things that felt like they should have sound (e.g., going into hyperspace) didn't, and lots of the things that did have sound (e.g., running the ATV) got on my nerves. I should note that each class of weapon makes a different sound, which did help combat a bit because I could tell what I was getting attacked by. It wasn't high-quality sound, but very little in the era is.

If you don't pay attention to what he's saying, the graphics aren't too bad.

I felt the interface was pretty awful, though. The main game screen is far too small, making both ship and melee combat difficult, as either you or your enemy has a good chance of leaving the screen. The character screens were unnaturally cumbersome when it came to viewing and swapping gear. Here's a tip for developers: use a letter like (T)rade to trade equipment rather than a random number like 3. The hybrid top-down/first-person interface in dungeons made me seasick. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. The game starts off feeling non-linear as you try to find the threads of the main quest, but it turns linear very quickly. As I covered recently, much of the second half of the game consists of extremely tiresome slogs through enormous dungeons, with enemies constantly respawning around you. Even worse, you have to visit the same huge dungeon--the raider base--twice, navigating your way both in and out. I really wanted to strangle the developers during this section. I can't see any reason to replay the game because there would be no variance in plot or order of events. The only things I can really give it credit for are 1) it doesn't take too long, and 2) there are (rare) parts that offer a satisfying challenge. Score: 3.

The sum of the individual scores is 38, but we have to talk about some adjustments before we go. First, we're going to deduct a point for the final "battle." That and BattleTech vie for the stupidest endgames I've ever experienced, and I docked BattleTech a point for it, so it would only be fair to do it here. Second, there's the writing. I've rarely encountered such distractingly bad writing in a game. It couldn't have been any worse if Malcolm Trandle had sent a message to the federation that "all your base are belong to us."

Let's take a look at the paragraph in which the Key of Thor offers his exposition on Malcolm and his plots:

At the mention of Malcolm's name, the light from the Key seems to dim, and his response is almost a whisper: "He used to be a Sentinel. No, more than that: he was one of the greatest of them. He led them across the universe, finding and nurturing beings of light on a thousand different worlds. I was one of those beings."

The Key takes a long pause before continuing. "The light within him was once so brilliant that he could have lit up the galaxy. I never knew what happened to him. None of us did. Perhaps power corrupts, or perhaps it is the destiny of every being, given enough aeons, to stray from its path. All I know is that when the Sentinels came to a planet called Earth, Malcolm began to change. Instead of nurturing the people of Earth, he commanded them. Instead of gathering them for meditation and reflection, he gathered them as an army. Before long, he stormed the temple of the Sentinels, stole me, stole the sacred book of magic, and fled to this forsaken corner of the universe, leaving ruin behind him."

Now, if you're thinking that this doesn't sound too bad, thanks! I re-wrote it. Here's what the book actually says:

Why, he is one in whom the light shines with a fierce dark intensity that I have never before seen. He is called Malcolm Trandle and he was once a Sentinel. Surely you must not judge the Sentinels harshly by comparing them to Malcolm, for he left their ways for the ways of evil. The Sentinels are the keepers of the light. They find those in whom the Light shines brightly and they nurture it. Why, they found me many, many aeons ago, on a far distant world where all have my appearance, but where I was the only one in whom the light shone brightly. There was another in whom it shine darkly and he they destroyed.

In Malcolm Trandle the light once shone brightly. Once it shone with a radiance that would illuminate a galaxy. But when the Sentinels took up residence on a planet called Earth by its people. Malcolm began to change. A darkness crept into him and he began to treat the poor primitives who lived on that world as cattle and playthings. Before any of the other Sentinels knew what had transpired, Malcolm had gathered a small army of these pitiful savages and decided that he should be the ruler of the Sentinels. He stole me from the dwelling of Kedro, and he stole the book of spells as well. You see, although the light shines brightly in me, I wield it but slightly. Those around me, however, can wield it far beyond their normal capacity. Malcolm feared Kedro as long as Kedro had me with him. And Malcolm feared the book even more. Ahh, how he feared the book! So he stole us and brought us to this light forsaken corner of the cosmos.

Do I have to explain why this paragraph is horrible? It jumps all over the place. The Key sounds like Rain Main. We have the bit about light shining with a "dark intensity." Oh, and I'm not sure I appreciate the Key's patronizing tone. If the "poor primitives" called the planet "Earth," they must have lived fairly close to the modern era, and yet the Key calls them "pitiful savages." The Key also needs to learn proper comma and hyphen usage and to standardize his capitalization of "light." Now, it might be forgivable if all of these things were just characterizations of the Key, but all of the language in the game is like this. Couldn't EA have just contracted an English major?

In any event, I'm lowering the final score of the game to 36 based on these two factors.

I forgive you if you think I've been a little hard on the game. It does have its charm, as a rare science-fiction CRPG and one that at least attempts something original. One of my frequent commenters, Amy Lunitari, liked it enough to make an astonishing 53-video "let's play" of the game, and I had fun (in some cases, morbid fun) watching some of the videos after I won. She spends a huge chunk of them going through the raider base, and my understanding is that she only recorded them after she had already been through once.

My favorite moment comes at 05:38 in Part 39, when she's wandering down a corridor. There's a red dot just ahead, but she must figure it's one of the standard goons she's been killing for hours. Suddenly, Taylor blasts her lead character to ribbons. You can actually picture Amy sitting there stunned as she says, "What?...Whoa...That's insane." She then spends the rest of the video and much of the next one simply trying to get past Taylor. Watching it is a riot to me because we had the exact same reactions, and we tried the exact same things to get past Taylor before settling upon the exact same solution. Amy's characters are much higher levels than mine, though (how did you get their hit points so high?!), which means I think I had a lot more reloads.

Ah, it's in these moments that I bask in our collective CRPG experiences, even if we do have different conclusions about the game.

The next game--Star Command--ought to offer an interesting contrast to Sentinel Worlds. Let's get to it.

Sentinel Worlds: Won!

Apparently, my crew perished in cryogenic sleep, as there was no Sentinel Worlds 2.

If I'd known how close I was to winning when I made my last entry, I would have kept playing. After getting out of the Sentinels' caverns, I returned to the raiders' base and spent about 90 minutes finding my way back to Malcolm's throne room (I hadn't taken good notes in my previous exploration).

By the time I arrived, I was almost out of ammunition and not looking forward to a melee battle with Malcolm.

I needn't have worried. Instead of using the same combat protocols the game had used up to this point, the moment the "battle" with Malcolm started, I was taken to a screen similar to when I faced Shadar, showing our respective energy levels. Mine was about half of his. He blasted away at me while I tried to figure out the controls. It turns out I had to wait for the letters "DEF" (defend) and "ATT" (attack) to appear on the sides of the screen. When DEF was there, I hit the right arrow to defend; when ATT was there, I hit the left arrow to attack. That was it. Once I had the hang of it, it was easy, and I bled away Malcolm's energy advantage.

Slowly bled it away, I should say. ATT and DEF only appeared a few times a minute. It took over half an hour to win this tedious, pointless battle. I'm trying to save my invective for the GIMLET, but this is easily the worst final boss battle that I've experienced in a CRPG, and that includes chasing Minax all around her castle. Final battles should use the tactics and items and experience you've gained up to that point, not introduce an entirely new interface! I never even used those extra spells that the Sentinels gave me.

Anyway, eventually Malcolm died and expressed incredulity, in language as stilted and awkward as everything else in the game:

At this point, the game could have been nice and given me the final screen at the top of this posting, but no, it made me hike all the way back out of Malcolm's fortress to my ship first. That was another 30 minutes. After showing me the final screen and prompting me to save the game, it commanded me to wait for the sequel that never came.

Lots of items were unaddressed, including the history of the Sentinels and why Malcolm turned dark. We never found out what the aliens were digging for on Caldorre. There was also some suggestion that the shops in the towers of Caldorre were just illusions created by Malcolm, but like most things, the game didn't bother to explore this beyond some awkward dialogue.

Looking at the manual, I realized the game hadn't used even a third of the available paragraphs, so I read through the "extra" ones. There were a bunch offering false leads at fake coordinates, a few chastising the reader for reading paragraphs you're not supposed to read, and a host with contrary plot points. Perhaps my favorite "fake" entry is:

The globe rises slowly, pulsating with a raw energy that completely illuminates your surroundings. "I am the Key of Thor. Tremble before me vermin! I shall use you and your pitiful mechanical conveyances to fulfill my destiny. We shall go to Norajaenn 1875,1060 where the Sentinels, reside and crush them. Let us go!

There was a related one that, if it had come true, would have been an awesome plot twist:

"You fools!" Malcolm screams, "can't you see what you've done? You've freed the most horrible power the cosmos has ever seen. The Sentinels have been held in check by the Gates of Truth since before your race clawed it's way out of the primal ooze. Your ancestors called them 'daemons' and feared them above all else. And rightly so for they delight in slaughter and mayhem! There is but one hope now. Use the Key of Thor, for it has the power to bind them. That's how we managed to lock them into the stronghold of Truth. Unveil the Key in their presence and then take them across the Gates. Once there you will be able to walk back across the threshold  while they must remain. Go now and undo the damage you have wrought!"

 

Generally, these bogus paragraphs actually offer a more exciting gameplay experience than the real game.

Short posting, GIMLET tomorrow.

Sentinel Worlds: Slogging

My enhanced "RECON" skills allow me to see armories and elevators on the map, but it still didn't help  much with this interminable battle station.

Games, like life, ought to make you work for your rewards. But there are different kinds of work. There's the kind where you work all day to build a shed, and then you get cleaned up and go out for a nice dinner, but while the dinner is the technical "reward," having a completed shed is the real reward. And then there's the kind where you have the same dinner after spending a day digging holes only to fill them in again. This isn't a metaphor; I've experienced them both lately. The holes were a result of my futile attempts to find my septic tank. I spent an entire day digging in root- and rock-filled clay and couldn't find it. I had dinner at the same place after both projects, but it sure tasted better after the shed.

Going through the dungeons of Sentinel Worlds feels like digging holes, mostly because, like my hole-digging project, I wasn't sure there was anything to find where I was digging. The dungeons in the game are unnaturally large and unconscionably empty. I spent most of the last two days trying to figure out the raiders' battle station, which has a succession of dozens of maps that repeat the same design, so you're never sure whether you're on a new map or revisiting an old one. I kept thinking the maps were doubling back on themselves, but suddenly I'd find a new exit or an elevator (in the same position as the elevator on an identical map) that went to a different spot.

This would have been only boring if I hadn't been constantly assailed by raider troops in every hallway. Games that do what Sentinel Worlds does--constantly re-spawn monsters at the periphery of the map, so you never "clear" an area or even set them back enough to take a breath--are mercifully rare. Ultima II is the first example I can think of, where every map seems to have a fixed number of monsters at any given time, and if you kill one in one area, a new one spawns off-screen. But Times of Lore is the earliest game I can recall that was truly obscene about it. You'd kill six enemies ahead of you, backtrack for a few steps to get your bearing, turn around, and find six new enemies on the same path. Sentinel Worlds is like that.

Tigers line up to be slaughtered.

Now you might recall that I normally like re-spawning for the purposes of grinding, and indeed I might find some value here except that character development has effectively ceased. My characters are lieutenant commanders and commanders--13 and 14 out of 20 possible levels--but leveling no longer provides the same rewards. The skill system that I liked when I started the game turns out to have a maximum skill level of 7. Having achieved that a long time ago in every character's primary weapon class and major secondary skills (recon, observation, bribery, gunnery, etc.), I'm now just assigning random skills like blunt weapons and ATV repair.

Let me back up and explain how I came to the raiders' base. In my last entry, I had just found the Key of Thor, who filled me in one some of the back story related to the Sentinels. Armed with this knowledge, I began revisiting NPCs in the game and asking about the Sentinels. One of them, a guy in a bar on Caldorre named Ruawl, told me (after two bribes) that there were some folks on Norjaenn who used that name, and that I could get more information from a Jason Depard.

It took me a while to find Jason Depard; he was in a third bar that I had missed on my first visit. He agreed to help if I could settle the feud between ranchers and farmers. When I returned to the ranchers' and farmers' bars, all the previous NPCs were gone. A random farmer told me that their leader, Grayper, had formed a posse and taken it to Striker Rift to retrieve a kidnapped boy. It transpired that the ranchers had also lost a boy and were blaming the farmers.

Amidst a cave full of "dark gorillas" and "fire cats," the two posses were camped. I convinced them to stay put, explored the cave, and ran into someone named "Shadar the Cruel" after killing a bunch of his thugs. Shadar claimed that the kidnapping of the children was part of a "master plan" and confessed he was behind the crop-burnings and cattle-slayings that had the two factions at each others' throats. At this point, a weird "energy battle" ensued, and I have no idea what was happening or what I was supposed to do...

I can't even bring myself to make fun of this dialogue.

...but in any event, it was interrupted by Jason Depard. Seeing him, Shadar took off, and Jason explained that Shadar was actually his brother, Paul, and that Paul's "evil master" had given him the name "Shadar." Friends, if this is all sounding kind of stupid, it is. The game is starting to feel like a science fiction story relayed spontaneously by seven-year-olds. This is an honest-to-god quote from Depard:

Our paths will cross again someday. It is our destiny. When it does, I hope to be ready for him. For now, he fears me greatly although with his knowledge of the dark arts his evil master has taught him he could surely kill me. Yet he fears me. He tried to get me to go with him, to talk to this 'Master' of his, but I didn't. He said I had the Light or some such mumbo jumbo, but I told him I wasn't interested in hearing about it. All I know is that someday he's going to have to face up to the mischief he's created or face up to me, his brother.

When HBO options this, you all be sure to let me know.

Isn't this heartwarming?

In any event, the boys were returned, the ranchers and farmers made up, and Depard gave me the location of the Sentinels, who once healed him when he broke his leg.  I went to their caves and found them guarded by Koshols, the same Alien aliens I had previously met digging a tunnel on Caldorre. Their caves were a long maze, and I was infuriated after I got to the end and spoke to the Sentinels that I would have to turn around and walk the same path back out. I guess I got spoiled by Skyrim.

Says Apsae, as if it's something that we should have heard of before.

The Sentinels, who appear to be Native American, didn't have a lot to say. Being in the presence of the Key of Thor healed their minds, but they still needed their book of spells, which was in the possession of Malcolm Trandle.

"All new vigor."

The leader of the Sentinels, Kedro, gave me access to some powers--spells, basically--including healing, the ability to find other "energy users," mind-probing, and "erase attacker skill." The latter of which might come in handy if combat wasn't usually over before I could get the menu launched.

This is, I assume, the "magic" of the subtitle.

Kedro told me that the book of spells is on Earth(!), but I can get there through a teleporter in Malcolm's raider base. He recommended that I board a raider ship and use my new telepathic abilities to find the coordinates of the base. That part wasn't too hard, except that I had to disarm all of my crew members because they kept killing the raiders before I could read their minds. I found that I had to first fly my ship to one pair of coordinates and then hyperspace to another pair. Soon enough, I found myself on the raider base.

How handy that the raiders think in coordinates.

Now, all of the above took only about one-quarter of the game time since my last posting. The other three-quarters was spent wandering around the infuriating raider base. The maps were so confusing and enemy-filled that I had to leave several times to restock on ammo. The one good thing is that I found several armories and loaded up on the best weapons and armor in the game, as well as several random items that sold for a lot of cash and helped pay for further stat boosts.

It took me five visits and almost twice as many hours to finally find the spell book. Before that, I found Malcolm's throne room and looted his treasury. It was much deeper in the raider base than the eventual location that I found the spell book, and it was at the end of a large level that otherwise seemed to have no purpose. This should have been ominous at the time.

Apsae momentarily forgets that she's a public servant.

The book turned out to be hidden in a level that I had originally declined to continue through because one of the corridors was blocked by Taylor, one of the NPCs from Norjaeen, apparently a spy or traitor. She was standing at the end of a long hallway with a thermocaster--a very high-end weapon. She slaughtered my entire party before I could get close to her. Nothing I could think of (and frankly there aren't that many tactics in the game) would get me past her. I spent about 30 minutes trying, but I couldn't get any character to survive combat with her, let alone all five. Ultimately, I figured she must be guarding something unnecessary, or perhaps some place I had to visit later in the game.

What's her problem,  anyway?

After exploring the rest of the base, gaining several levels and better guns, I took another run at her but suffered the same fate. The ultimate solution would put the worst save-scummer to shame: I saved, moved forward just enough to engage her for one shot, turned tail and ran, and--if none of my characters died--saved again. If anyone died, I reloaded. About 18 rounds of this, and she was finally dead. I have no idea what the game was trying to prove by putting such an impossible boss there. I'm looking forward to reading some walkthroughs and watching Amy's "let's play" after I finish, so I can find out if there was another way to deal with her.

At last, I reached the book and, oddly enough, like the Key of Thor, it was sentient. It promised me new abilities if I could get it back to the Sentinels.

Yes, he's a congenial fellow, he is.

Fine. A long slog out of the raider's base. A long slog back to the Sentinels (not to mention the same slog back from the Sentinels). And what do I get?

That's right: I have to go back to the raiders' base, go through the billion screens again, and find Malcolm. At least I have a pretty good idea of where he is. And I've got some new "spells," including confuse, charm, and "count nearby lifeforms," which works exactly as advertised, to no possible purpose that I can see.

Feels like the end is near.

Sentinel Worlds: Careful What You Wish For

Even in a science fiction CRPG, I end up fighting rats.

In my last entry, I suggested I was looking forward to a possible fusion of science-fiction and fantasy. Well, the game certainly took a turn that way, although I'm going to reserve judgment on how good it is until the end.

When I last blogged, I was starting to explore the three towers on Caldorre. They were a bit of a disappointment. They were quite large, but mostly empty, and each held essentially the same things: a weapons store, a general store, a bar, places you can train your statistics, and an exclusive club. Except for the clubs, they were all fairly redundant. I was looking forward to some quality conversations with NPCs, but in three towers, I only found two NPCs (not counting the generic ones). Neither of them gave me any clues about the main quest. I did pick up one bit of intelligence that humans hadn't build the towers; they'd "been there forever." There was also a suggestion that the native Caldorrians used to be technologically advanced but had regressed, which is why I guess I found them living in grass huts.

Wow. You are just an enormous font of helpfulness.

As I said, there were "clubs" on the bottom floors of each tower, and entry required me to have 20 of a favored attribute: charisma, dexterity, and strength. Fortunately, at least one of my characters had 20 in each of these, so I was able to get in. But near as I could tell, there was nothing to do in these clubs except raid their armories.

Don't I look charming, dammit?

The good news is that training costs $1,000 and increases attributes by 1, so it doesn't look like I'm going to run out of reasons to make money.

I had about $9,000 to blow when I arrived, so I trained a few stats and stocked up on new weapons and ammunition. I found a fairly good melee weapon called an energy blade, so I kept my lead character armed with it and gave everyone else firearms. Oh, and I wasted $2,000 bribing one of the NPCs to tell me that the raiders must be sent by "one of Grager's enemies!" I'm not sure it was worth $2,000.

"Duh," the crew replied, before killing Kann and retrieving their two grand.

Without much sense of what to do next, I returned to space and continued destroying raiders. About this time, I noticed that in addition to giving me locations of convoys under attack, the "federation" message center also suggested quests. One scrolling message said that the "federation recommends boarding of raider ships to interrogate raider crews." This sounded sensible, so I started focusing my efforts on boarding. I found that the reason I got slaughtered the first time was because doors kept closing between my lead character and the medic, so I learned to order the crew members in such a way, and approach the enemies in such a way, that the medic was always within reach of the person at the head of the line.

While I haven't gotten anything out of a raider yet, exploring their ships suggests that they only have short-range capacity and there's alien technology on board.

I stopped dying, but I still had trouble getting any raiders to surrender. My crew just killed them. Finally, one of them surrendered long enough for me to ask one question before he chewed up a cyanide capsule.

Why did he even bother to surrender?

 
After a few more futile boardings, I gave up and went to Ceyjavik on a report that there was a distress beacon. Exploring the area, I found a science research station with a dead man named Eckirrt Kann outside; it seems like nearly every NPC in the game is named Kann. Anyway, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a quick quest like the one on Caldorre last time, but I ended up taking a six-hour slog through several science station buildings, the science station headquarters, an undersea lab, a submarine, and an endless series of volcanic tunnels.

References to films continue.

Throughout all of them, I was assailed by the fauna of the underground: ice tigers, giant rats, fire lizards, and things called "green dragons" that were fairly tough. By the end, I was thoroughly sick of the game's melee combat. Enemies spawn and re-spawn continually even when you're sitting still, and moving through the corridors became a real chore. Particularly annoying is that combat is automated for all but the lead character. If four out of my five characters are going to blast away under the computer's control, what extra good does it do to force me to watch one weapon's readiness status and hit ENTER continually?

"You can drink your fancy ale. You can drink it by the flagon..."

Even against tough creatures, combat isn't terribly deadly--that is, unless you get out of range of your medic. Then, it's nearly instantly deadly. When he was in range, he kept up with healing the damage of even the toughest monsters. This makes combat primarily an exercise in positioning. As long as he could reach anyone under attack, I wasn't in much danger of dying, even when most of my characters ran out of ammunition and the battles were entirely up to those party members in hand-to-hand range.

I almost felt bad killing this one. He's so cute!

There might have been around 20 different featureless, repetitive dungeon screens in this quest. Among them, I found only one NPC: a woman named Virginia, hiding in a closet, who imparted a little bit of information about the submarine. The game didn't give my heroes any choice but to just leave her there, surrounded by prowling tigers.

She sounds so broken up about it.

At one point, I wandered into a goofy "Electronic Arts FunMap!" (helpfully marked as "not part of the game") that might have been a facsimile of the EA offices. The enemies were marked as "EA Roudies," which is either an embarrassing spelling error or some kind of in-joke. One of these days I'll do a posting on games that break the fourth wall, like Ultima II's inclusion of Richard Garriott. I can't think of too many games that have entire dungeon levels based on the developers' offices. Might & Magic VI comes to mind.

There's nothing so tiresome as people who think they're being clever.

So here's where it got weird. At the end of the volcanic tunnels was a room containing some kind of object called the "Key of Thor." When I spoke to it, it claimed to be a "creature of light" and went on for several paragraphs about what I'm guessing is the main quest. It sounds like it may be kind of stupid, but at least it explains the game's title.

The dialogue could frankly have been written a little better.

The summary--and I think I have this right--is that there was a race of beings called Sentinels (hence, Sentinel Worlds) who were "keepers of the light." The Sentinels "found" the Key of Thor on some distant world, "many aeons ago." Wherever the Key came from, there was another being like him in whom the light "shined darkly" (yeah, figure that one out), so the Sentinels destroyed it.

The Sentinels, led by someone named Kedro, later took up residence on Earth. One of them, named Malcolm Trandle, turned evil and "began to treat the poor primitives who lived on that world as cattle and playthings." Malcolm made an army of those Earthfolk and overthrew the rest of the Sentinels. He stole Kedro's book of spells and the Key of Thor and brought them to the far ends of the galaxy, hiding the Key deep in the planet where I found it. Malcolm then took up residence on Caldorre because he sensed an ancient power on the planet, manifested in the three towers, which are powered by a generator of "dark light."

Kedro and some of the Sentinels came looking for the Key, but Malcolm "dealt them a blow that left them helpless, their minds confused forever." The Key bade me to find them so he can restore their minds. Then he offered this:

The Sentinels have the power to wield the light just as you do. On Earth, the name the people gave to it was 'magic.' Have you heard of it? You have it in you, but you clearly do not have the knowledge to wield it. Kedro does. The Sentinels do. The light can let you mend people, it can let you change their nature, it can let you confuse them or strip them of their knowledge. It is the only way Malcolm can be defeated.

I can't quite figure out if the story is supposed to be referencing some event on Earth's history or mythology. Are the Sentinels supposed to be the Greek or Roman gods? (The "Key of Thor" would suggest a connection to the Norse pantheon, but I don't see anything in "Kedro" or "Malcolm Trandle.") Is Malcolm Trandle Satan? Is the Key supposed to be some artifact from history and I'm just not making the connection? Either way, this little twist has the potential to be interesting or staggeringly silly. We'll see.

Sentinel Worlds: Magic?

This is what happens when no one gives me the advice I seek.

I've been mulling over the subtitle of Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic, trying to figure what it is intended to  mean. I have three hypotheses:

1. It's going to somehow play a role in the game; as in, the game will take a turn towards fantasy the way that Might & Magic takes a turn towards science fiction.
2. It's a play on Arthur C. Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
3. It's essentially meaningless and I'm an idiot to spend any serious time thinking about it.

#2 seems like the most obvious answer, but #1 became more plausible during gameplay today. I'll cover that in a minute.

I've written before about how I have less of an affinity for science fiction than fantasy. In a comment on BattleTech, I wrote:

It probably goes back to the whole probable impossibility vs. improbable possibility thing. Sci-fi is often manifestly set in the "real" world, but in the future, so that you're supposed to accept the technology as probable. To me, things like teleporters and food replicators and giant robots create too many problems for me to accept them. Fantasy, on the other hand, is explicitly set in worlds where "magic" exists, and you just go with it as part of the world.

But this doesn't quite explain my ability to accept fantasy RPGs on the surface. Even in worlds full of magic, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief that your characters are able to navigate an unlit dungeon; that the monsters sealed in there are somehow able to survive in plentiful bands despite the lack of any kind of ecosystem; that indeed a 10-story dungeon built into the earth exists in the first place. And yet I happily ignore these problems and descend into the Proving Grounds. When playing Sentinel Worlds, on the other hand, I'm constantly thinking thinks like: Why don't my characters have to stockpile food? Is it really that easy to drop an ATV from orbit and get it back up there again? Would a society so advanced that it's capable of interstellar space travel still be raising cattle on ranches? I've killed almost 30 of these raiders--do they just have an unlimited number of ships?

In the midst of all of this, I visit a planet where I find an alien race intent on discovering a source of "evil" in the planet, and suddenly my mind does a 180. "Ah!" I say. "It's not hard sci-fi! It's space fantasy, like Star Wars or Babylon 5." Then, suddenly, based on this very scant evidence, I'm suddenly cool with the game. I don't claim to get it.

As you can see from the screen shot at the top of this entry, my attempts to board a raider didn't go so well. They slaughtered three of my characters in melee combat, and just as my surviving two party members were contemplating the recruitment of a new pilot, communications officer, and navigator, the raider ship self-destructed. Upon reload, I decided I'd spend a little more time making sure I'd mastered ship-to-ship combat, and raising my levels first.

Neither hand-to-hand nor ship-to-ship combat (there's no hand-to-ship combat, but I'd love to see it) is particularly good in Sentinel Worlds. I'm a relatively new player, and I've managed to take on packs of 6 raiders at a time (messing around with the DOSBox CPU speed and game frame rate were key, by the way; thanks to everyone who contributed there) with hardly any damage to my ship. The raiders don't really coordinate their attacks, so it's easy to pick them off on the fringes of the pack. The combat is not at all tactical: You wait for the ship to get into view, hit SPACE to target it, hit ENTER to arm your lasers, and then just keep close to the ship while the computer fires for you. You even have the option to "(S)hadow" the enemy automatically, so you barely have to do anything. You do have the option to program your lasers to target only specific parts of the enemy (shields, lasers, hull), but as far as I can tell this is only necessary when you're trying to board.

My lead character fights a bear with a mace. It's like I'm still playing Skyrim.

Melee combat similarly suffers from a lack of tactics. As you move down hallways in caves and buildings, red-dotted enemies come charging at you. You only control the lead party member; everyone else starts attacking automatically. Your control of the lead is limited  to movement, targeting (again with the SPACE bar), and hitting ENTER to fire or swing when the weapon is "ready."
 

Both types of combat are affected by the skills that you've assigned to your characters: the pilot's gunnery skill for ship combat and the various characters' skills in contact weapons, edged weapons, projectile weapons, blasters, and "tactics," the latter of which affects all weapons. I find the process of leveling up (you get fixed experience for ship and melee opponents) satisfying, although I'm not sure whether I'm choosing the right ones. I've yet to see any obvious effects of observation, bribery, or recon, among other things.

I've put a lot into "edged" weapons for Romom, but the best melee weapon I've been able to find is a sonic mace.

Some developments occurred on the plot and perhaps side quests (like some other games, I'm not sure if some of the things I've done are side-quests or steps on the main quest). First, I re-read the game manual and noted that William Grager, the yacht owner I mentioned last time, is prominent in the backstory. The manual notes that he's a shipping magnate who has been given trade rights in the Caldorre System and has suffered significantly at the hands of the raiders. It was on his urging, in fact, that this fleet of interceptors (including mine) was dispatched to the system. So it makes sense that he upgraded my weapons.

Is this a side-quest? Or my first sign that something deeper is at work in the Caldorre System?

I went to the planet Caldorre, which gives its name to the system, and saw a beacon from orbit that I hadn't noticed before. This took me to a small village where some technologically-stunted natives asked for help dealing with some "monsters" who had taken over some of their land and were uprooting trees. I went to the coordinates provided and found a bunch of non-hostile gorillas. I nearly slaughtered them, assuming that they were the "monsters," but I explored a bit and found the entrance to a network of caves. Battling my way past bears, I found aliens--not  just aliens, but Aliens aliens...

...involved in a big excavation project. The leader told me that he'd had a "vision" that there was evil in the planet, and they were trying to get to it. He promised they wouldn't encroach on any more surface territory, which satisfied the leader of the natives. I didn't really get anything for all of this, but it made me wonder if this "evil" is going to have something to do with the main quest.

"Sensed" how, exactly? Are we talking...magic?

As I write this posting, I'm in the midst of exploring the three towers of Caldorre to see what clues I can pick up. There are some places here where I can boost my attributes, which might make melee combat against the raiders a bit simpler.
 

Some other miscellaneous notes:

• My ATV occasionally breaks down on the planet. As far as I can tell, this serves no purpose except to make me wait a few rounds while my character with the "ATV repair" skill fixes it. I haven't been investing a lot into this skill because even at the current level, he fixes it within a few seconds.

• I finally found minerals! I don't know if this is because I raised my "mining" skill to a certain level or because I just started visiting the right planets. Anyway, I've discovered belatedly that this game isn't Starflight: you gain much more money from killing raiders than from mining metals, making mining a dubious use of time.

And yet still addicting.

 

• Related, I was wondering why my income kept going up until I realized that I get paid for every raider I kill.

• The engineer repairs damage taken to the ship automatically. Although the spaceport on Caldorre offers a "dry dock" where you can pay for repairs, they happen so swiftly in the background that I can't imagine needing it.

It is cheap, though.

 

• I've been "hacking" my ship's systems to try to improve them. Generally, it's been successful, but I did have one failure that made my navigation system worse.

 

• The trick to navigation is not to look at the wireframe part of the map but just the top-down part. Even then, it's still a bit annoying. Rather than just being able to move east and west, north and south, the map rotates when you turn; you always move "forward." It adds unnecessary seconds to each step.

• In the alien caves, I found a "hyperuzi." It sounds pretty cool, although I don't think regular uzis are exactly lethargic.

To help you get a sense of the gameplay elements, I recorded a video. Unlike my previous recordings, this is a proper narrated video, something I've only done once before, with Ultima III. I don't know if this going to be a regular thing on my blog; I don't find it easy to narrate a sensible audio track while simultaneously playing the game.

I feel like I've turned a corner with the game, and I'm starting to enjoy the plot a bit. I don't know how long it normally takes to win, but I hope to do it this week.