Twilight: 2000: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

But what did Paragon do if two people got the same winning number?

    

Twilight: 2000

United States

Paragon Software (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 26 October 2017

Date Ended: 19 November 2017

Total Hours: 42

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 35

Ranking at Time of Posting: 191/271 (70%)

  
I had around another 8 hours and maybe 20 missions to go after the last entry. After a few missions, my intelligence officer told me that "Czarny's regime is crumbling" and "General Andrekov has been called back to Checiny for emergency strategy meetings with Baron Czarny."

I couldn't remember if Czarny's home city had been named before. I decided to ignore the next mission and see what happened if I just assaulted Checiny. I took a tank to the city and didn't see any enemy vehicles. The moment I got out of the tank, the game told me that I was ambushed and captured by Czarny's forces, and that he subsequently captured Krakow. A graphic seen showed my 20 characters being marched somewhere and then shot on a firing line.
  

This ending, unlike the "good" one, has graphics.

      
Returning to doing it the hard way, I had about 10 more missions before my intelligence officer said that "General Andrekov is out of the picture . . . apparently, there's been some kind of fallout [with] Czarny."

The missions towards the end of the game almost all involved combat. I think among the last dozen, I had one supply mission but everything else was ground or tank battles.

Finally, I finished a mission, checked in with the intel officer, and got a message that Czarny was attacking Krakow itself with a force of 2 vehicles and 27 troops. I went to bed at this point without saving. Reloading the next day, I got the same mission but with 2 vehicles and 11 troops. That was much easier.
      

The final mission begins.

     
I drove my M1A1 Abrams outside the garage, blasted the two tanks, got out, and took out the 11 soldiers in a regular ground combat. It was perhaps a little harder than normal; more of the enemies had grenade launchers and rocket launchers.
      

My last kill of the game.

      
The endgame text tells of the execution of Baron Czarny and a bright future for free Poland--but under the cloud of General Andrekov's escape. Despite rumors that he had been executed or fled to the U.S., my party wonders if he was the true source of the trouble and Czarny was just his puppet. The game ends with the question unresolved. In the final line, you're encouraged to send a 30-character alphanumeric to Paragon.
    

Part of the endgame text.

    

In my first entry for Twilight: 2000, I noted that about 20% of the manual consisted of errata. The game then shipped with a readme file that had errata on the errata. To excuse this sorry state of affairs, the developers noted in the errata that the manuals "are always written and printed long before the project is actually completed." I don't know if this is really true; even if it is true, I suspect that Paragon perhaps still printed its manuals a bit too early.
       

This is not the kind of note that instills a lot of confidence in the game you're about to play.

     

In their final paragraph, the developers say: "We believe the changes have improved the playability of the game and we've tried to create a game that is fun, challenging, and convenient to learn and use." I might be reading too deeply between the lines, but these sentences suggest to me a certain desperation. "We tried," it says, almost plaintively. This is the desperation of a company that got the license to make computer versions of several popular tabletop games but, lacking any real RPG experience, managed not to get any of them right. It's the desperation of a company that had similarly bungled a series of action games based on Marvel characters, a company that would be out of business within a year. I haven't been able to find a solid history of Paragon, but my impression is that they had some good fortune in getting the Marvel and GDW licenses, but ultimately bit off more than they could chew.

Twilight: 2000 is much like MegaTraveller 2 in its essential failure despite promising elements. Both have some of the best character-creation processes that we've seen in RPG history. Both offer relatively open worlds. Both attempt to use at least some of the skills offered by their tabletop parents. Both offer a variety of different quest types. But in the end, both are fundamentally boring. They had to cut too many corners in adapting the game from tabletop to computer.

I'll discuss some of the other things I like about Twilight: 2000 as we go through the GIMLET:

• 6 points for the game world. Liberating post-apocalyptic Poland may not be an original plot if you're familiar with the tabletop modules, but it is highly original among CRPGs. The plot and backstory are well-told and the party's place is clear. The world even responds slightly to the party's actions.

• 4 points for character creation and development, all of this going to an excellent creation process that allows you to develop a variety of skills via education, civilian careers, and numerous types of military careers. It also gets some credit for its "find-the-right-person-for-the-job" approach to quests.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. These interactions are minimal and offer no role-playing options. NPCs are rarely named and do not contribute to the game's lore.

• 1 point for encounters and foes. There are two types of enemies: tanks and soldiers. Soldiers are differentiated somewhat by the types of weapons they wield.

      

Until he fires, I don't know what he has for a weapon.

     

• 4 points for combat, which includes the action tank combat and the tactical ground combat. It's a little weird how separated these are, and it makes little sense that you can avoid a tank blast by diving out of your own vehicle, or avoid damage from ground troops by diving back in. Aside from distance and a few terrain considerations, ground combat doesn't have enough tactics, but I suppose it benefits from some gritty realism.

       

Sneaking up behind enemy tanks and blasting them to smithereens was the best part of the game.

       

• 6 points for equipment. This game is a military fetishist's dream, offering numerous types of handguns, rifles, heavy weapons, and explosives, all carefully detailed and described for various factors, including damage and weight. The ability to modify weapons with scopes is a plus, and the game does some original things with rarely-seen (in RPGs) equipment like goggles, snow shoes, medicines, binoculars, tools, and radios. That you have to purchase most of your equipment during character creation is kind of stupid. I was also disappointed at how many items were never used, including flashlights and Geiger counters.

• 1 point for the economy. There is no in-game economy, just during character creation, and it's generous enough that you don't really need to worry about it at all.

• 3 points for the quest. There is only one main quest and no side-quests, but the variability of the main quest missions are a slight bonus.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics and sound effects both get the job done. I was not fond of the interface, and I will never rate a game high that refuses to use the keyboard in the most obvious of ways. There were too many times that the interface was inconsistent or required too much time to accomplish a common task (opening and closing the map being the prime exhibit).

       

The interiors of the buildings were well-designed and almost entirely wasted.

      

• 2 points for gameplay. This is where it really suffers. The open world is wasted in a linear set of missions. There are far too many of them, and they get too repetitive. Since you can't reject missions or choose a path that you want to specialize in (e.g., combat or non-combat), there's no reason to replay the game.

             
This gives us a subtotal of 33. I'm going to give a couple of extra points for the vehicle-driving mechanic, which is reasonably well-done and fairly unusual to RPGs of the period. The final score of 35 is still quite a bit below the 41 I gave to MegaTraveller 2. Both games offer somewhat bipolar GIMLETs: several high scores balanced by several abysmal ones. That's the Paragon experience in a nutshell.
       

Here's another cool image where I've just blown up two tanks in a row.

       
J. D. Lambright reviewed the game in the June 1992 Computer Gaming World. I believe I'm encountering this reviewer for the first time, and I have to say I'm impressed with how well he understood the game. He covers considerations for skills, equipment, vehicles, and overall mission success, and he clearly put a Scorpia-level of effort into it.

He agrees that the character creation system was "possibly the most outstanding system ever introduced in a computer game." If nothing else, Paragon made a great character-generator for tabletop players. Alas, he got sucked in by the fantasy that even if "all the available skills are needed in this game, they may be used in subsequent games." There's only one game--Wizard's Crown--in which that kind of investment has ever paid off. He notes many of the gameplay frustrations that I did, including finding the right NPCs to talk with and dealing with the whole language issue, and like me he found the missions "repetitious." Overall, however, he concludes much more positively than I did. His penultimate sentence is one that I absolutely cannot sanction: "Paragon Software is listening to their customers and learning what role-playing is all about." I don't think the company ever understood what role-playing was all about.
      

This got old fast.

     
For justification for that opinion, I turn to the tabletop Twilight: 2000 materials, provided to me by two awesome readers, Antti and Dariel. Between them, they sent the play manual and several modules. From the play manual, I was primarily interested in whether the tabletop RPG allowed for continual character development or whether a character's skills were presumed to be fixed after creation. As I suspected, the idea of no character development lies solely with the CRPG and its developers. The manual has this to say:
       

As a person grows older and more experienced, it is natural that he will polish his existing skills and learn new ones. In a sense, Twilight: 2000 picks up the threads of the lives of the characters in mid-course. Thus, they already have considerable knowledge of the world, but as time passes they will learn more.

         
The manual gives several ways by which a character can increase a skill, including successful use, observing another character, training, and literature. The rules behind these increases are not strict, however, and a lot is left to the discretion of the "referee." I suspect the lack of hard rules has something to do with Paragon's failure to include any kind of development.
     

The play manual cover.

     
The tabletop materials also make it clear that the party's assemblage of skills is supposed to provide various alternatives to completing the missions. The CRPG's primary problem is that the player has no choices. If the next mission is a spy mission, he needs "Interrogate." If it's a vehicle retrieval mission, he needs "Mechanics." He can't use "Stealth" as an alternative, following potential spies and observing their behavior, or "Persuasion" to convince someone else to fix the vehicle. Twilight: 2000 should have been a bit more like Wasteland, where different combinations of skills can all lead to a successful outcome.

The modules, all from 1985, show the game's sources, beginning with The Free City of Krakow, which establishes the home base of the party. Pirates of the Vistula introduces Baron Czarny as one of several regional warlords, and The Ruins of Warsaw deals primarily with Czarny. (The CRPG doesn't go as far north as Warsaw, instead relocating Czarny's headquarters to Checiny.) Reading these, I can't help but be a little heartbroken at what could have been. A full CRPG based on these modules would have offered air and river travel (and combat) options, dozens of interesting NPCs with backstories and even romance options, a much more subtle and complex plot, half a dozen intriguing factions to role-play, more detailed maps, and cities and towns with shops and bars and individual character.

The game's one addition to the plot seems to have been General Andrekov, who appears nowhere in the modules. I guess they were setting him up for a possible sequel.

Of course, there was no sequel. In finishing this game, we are done with adaptations of Game Designers' Workshop properties, done with Paragon Software, and mostly done with the lead developers who worked on this or MegaTraveller. After the company was bought by MicroProse in July 1992, some of the Paragon principals founded Take-Two Interactive, but I guess by then they had learned that RPGs weren't their strong suit, as Take-Two has never made one.
           
[Edit: Long after originally posting this entry, I found the ad below for both Twilight: 2001 and MegaTraveller 3: The Unknown Worlds. The games are promised by Microplay, a division of MicroProse, suggesting that MicroProse got the rights to the GDW licenses. But despite this full-page ad in the August 1992 Computer Gaming World, nothing was ever heard of these games again.]
          

Two games that never were.

           
I said "mostly done" with the developers. The major exception is going to be Challenge of the Five Realms (1992), a MicroProse title conceived by Marc Miller, the GDW co-founder who contributed the scenarios to the computer versions of MegaTraveller 2 and Twilight: 2000. Paragon programmers F. J. Lennon (design) and Paul M. Conklin (sound) also appear in the credits. Summaries of the game suggest that it heavily involves the use of skills and includes the "PAL" system that was featured in both MegaTraveller 2 and Twilight: 2000, in which characters with an appropriate skill will pipe up at the right moment. In short, it sounds like Challenge of the Five Realms is a Paragon title developed without the constraints of a GDW tabletop rulebook. Will that make it a better or worse game? I guess we'll soon see.

Lennon has one other RPG in his future: MicroProse's BloodNet (1993). Finally, another Twilight: 2000 programmer, Don Wuenschell, found post-Paragon work at DreamForge, and we'll see his work on Veil of Darkness (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995).

It's been a strange ride, Paragon. Whether I was trying to map the crazy corridors of Alien Fires, looking for the right artifact in Wizard Wars, or going through the detailed character creation processes in Space 1889, MegaTraveller, and Twilight: 2000, I always thought you had some intriguing ideas. I don't know if you never bothered to check out titles like Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, or the Gold Box series, or if you did check them out and just didn't understand them. Either way, you never did really figure out what CRPGs were about. I'm not sorry to see you go, but part of me will always be sorry that you never reached your potential.

*****

The bizarre French Oméga: Planète Invisible was supposed to be next, but I found plenty of evidence that its release was not in 1987, as most sites report, but in late 1985 or early 1986. I'm using this flimsy excuse to kick it backwards on the list and relegate it to a final "sweep up" that I'll have to do when I get to the end of 1989.

Twilight: 2000: Stalemate

Read the second sentence. Is that some kind of Polish metaphor?

      

"Mission: Interminable" wasn't a bad idea for a Twilight: 2000 post subtitle, but I used it too soon. I was less than 20 missions in, and figured I was at least half done with the game. Since then, I've been on about 100 more missions. That can't be right; that sounds insane. Maybe it hasn't been 100 missions, but it's been at least 50. It's been enough that if I ever visit Poland, I could probably drive from city to city without a map, although there's a decent chance I might accidentally visit Wojnicz when I mean to visit Wosniki.

The mission types haven't changed from the last entry. They're still a mixture of hostage rescues, tank combats, ground combats, spy hunting, healing, vehicle retrieval, and supply delivery. The only one I haven't received again is what I titled "restore the deposed"; that must have been a unique mission. The missions are at least somewhat randomized. Several times, I've had to quit and reload, and I've gotten different missions.

Unexpectedly, I find myself liking the tank missions best. It took me a while to get used to the controls, and to realize that you switch from driving view to turret view by toggling the F1/F2 keys. It takes some skill to get the tank heading one direction but the turret aimed sideways or backwards.

     

I catch a enemy tank by surprise.

    

Once I got the hang of it, I have a great time careening through the city streets, blasting enemy tanks, dodging their fire. You can even destroy houses, although such destruction only appears in tank view and doesn't seem to have any consequences when you switch to top-down view (I've even destroyed my own base from tank view). It doesn't have anything to do with RPGs, but it's a reasonably fun action game.

      

I level a random house for fun.

     

There are never more than three or four tanks per mission, and a lot of missions only have one. Half the time, it's already destroyed when I get to the city because of the "spawning in the middle of the sky" bug. Thus, the tank missions are generally my favorite.

Spy missions and retrieve-the-damaged-vehicle missions aren't so bad, either. They're very short. The spy is almost always the first NPC I talk to. For the vehicle retrievals, you just have to keep using tools until it's repaired. 

      

Supply runs are also pretty quick.

     

In contrast, I've grown to loathe the ground combats. Each one involves like 20 guys and takes an hour. To survive, I typically have to start hundreds of yards away from them, fire as they advance (wasting a ton of ammo) and hope that a lot of them get hung up on buildings. The various exploits that my commenters discussed really don't work with my party because they largely depend on the party members going first, which rarely happens because in character creation I didn't understand the importance of initiative.

It's too bad because the game almost has a good tactical combat system. It's the best Paragon effort so far. The primary problem is that your enemies are almost always off-screen, and overall the limited screen view doesn't give you a good sense of terrain, obstacles and positioning. There's a "tactical map," but it goes too far in the other direction, with the enemy dots barely perceptible. And if there's a difference between the colors of living enemies and dead enemies on that map, I can't tell.

     

The tactical map shows either enemies around me or flecks on my computer screen.

      

Another problem is that you can't tell what weapons the enemies carry until after they've fired them at you. "Ah, Enemy 11 has a grenade launcher! I need to target him!" is useless intelligence when it comes after a grenade has just landed at your feet. Enemy grenades and rockets will instantly kill your characters and destroy your vehicles, which is of course realistic, but no one is looking for a realistic battlefield simulation in an RPG. In any event, "realism" is hardly a virtue of the game in other areas. My characters are capable of holding M-60s in one hand and grenade launchers in the other, for instance.

    

I've let a few tanks go because I didn't feel like reloading at points like this.

     

You have the issue of characters not developing after creation. By the time the combats get really hard, if your characters can't hack it, it's too late. I realize now that back in creation, I tried to even out the skills too much. I didn't make anyone a "jack of all trades," but I tried to make each character good for at least a few things. That was a mistake. With 20 characters, you want 20 specialists. Better to have a character who's insanely good with heavy weapons, with a skill at 10 or above, than one who has 5s in heavy weapons, rifles, and thrown weapons. That way, you'd get far fewer infuriating misses in combat.

     

Rambo chooses between weapons in combat.

     

Finally, it would be nice if the enemy forces didn't insist on fighting to the last man. There's no mechanism for retreat or surrender. The last man always ends up stuck on a building's corner in some far-flung location. There's nothing like killing 19 enemies over the course of an hour, walking across the game map for 10 minutes to find the last one, finally coming into each other's mutual view, and then having him whump a grenade at the feet of your lead character.

I spent far too long trying to win the game for this entry, but the missions just wouldn't stop. Again, I'd suspect that they never stop except that every once in a while, the intelligence officer gives an extra message that suggests you're moving into a new phase. For a while, it was resource-acquisition: each mission resulted in a new vehicle or some supplies.

     

Town leaders start rewarding me with "loyalty."

      

After that, I started to get missions in which my team "captured" a city by securing the loyalty of its leader. In between these missions, the intelligence officer would tell me that Baron Czarny had also captured a random city. This would almost always be followed by the exhortation that, "For each territory Czarny conquers, we must gain two!," except that the game doesn't really have a mechanism for taking over two territories per mission.

      

How come I can't use intimidating force or propaganda?

    

As Czarny and my team conquered various cities, a symbol would appear on top of them on the campaign map: some kind of green or brown for Czarny's cities, and some kind of green or brown for my cities. Incidentally, I don't think a lot of the cities in the game are real places, such as Szczekoiny and Loruszno. You'd think those were obvious misspellings for Szczekociny and Lopuszno, except those cities also exist in the game.

    

The cities that I and/or Czarny control.

     

This seemed to be a kind of progress, except there are 56 labeled cities on the game map, plus two unlabeled cities, so even if every mission resulted in my team taking one city and Czarny's taking one, this phase alone would have involved 29 missions. And they didn't all have that result. A lot of the missions involved defending cities I already held. In a couple of cases, I completed the mission but lost the city to Czarny anyway. As I write this, there are still eight cities that neither side controls.

     

This is just what you want to hear after a one-hour battle.

     

There seemed to be some kind of plot developing when my intel officer relayed a threat from Czarny: that if we didn't surrender, he was going to gather every child in Lopuszno and execute them. The intel officer thought it was just a bluff. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to head for the city anyway, except that I figured it was a plot point rather than an actual mission. Several missions later, the enraged officer told me that Czarny had in fact killed the children.

      

Notice he doesn't apologize for misinterpreting the previous intelligence.

      

I braced for a series of endgame missions, but it didn't come. Instead, I got a few missions in a row that involved defending cities I already controlled.

Miscellaneous notes:

• It is possible to run out of fuel. I don't know how to avoid this if the mission takes you far from your base. You can't take extra fuel with you, and there's no way to refuel while on the road.

     

I love that my character seems to be reading this message.

     

• A church had an ankh cross instead of an actual cross. 

    

In post-apocalyptic Europe, the Cult of the Avatar rises in popularity.

     

• Characters keep suggesting I put "combat webbing" on my tank. Finally, I broke down and did it. I have no idea what it does, and it disappears every time I enter and exit anyway.

    

Now my tank just looks stupid.

    

At this point, I would appreciate explicit spoilers on how many missions I have to go. My worst fear is that I'm going to have to conquer every city that Czarny controls one-by-one, which would mean another 30 missions at least. I'm not sure the game is worth that kind of extra time.

A couple of awesome commenters sent me sourcebooks and modules for the tabletop RPG, so I could compare them to the CRPG. I'm reviewing them now. Even if I don't play any further, we'll have plenty to discuss in the final entry.

    

Time so far: 34 hours

Twilight 2000: Mission: Interminable

Only a tank could kill Rambo.

     

I'm into the thick of the game now, having solved about 18 missions. Once you know what you're doing, missions can take as few as 5 minutes. For instance, you drive from Krakow to the city, talk to an NPC, grab an item, drive back to Krakow, and take R&R for the rest of the week.

The missions have different objectives, but they all proceed about the same. First, you get the mission from your intelligence officer by calling him on the radio.

Then you select the right personnel, based on the skills the mission is likely to call for (you can always swap them out mid-mission if you have a hand-held radio). You may have to stop by the store room to re-supply with ammo, medicine, or other items the mission might need.

Loading up on antibiotics ahead of a medical mission.

    
You then choose a vehicle and drive to the mission's start point. You may have to ultimately drive back and forth between several towns, and you might get interrupted with a tank combat along the way; I still lose most of these and have to reload often.

Once the mission is complete, you return to your base and drive your vehicle into the garage. Then you can rest and heal or just do whatever you want for the rest of the week, when the next mission begins.
    

An animation takes over as you enter or leave the base.

    

I lost track of the specific sequence and number of missions, but it's clear from reloading that many of them are randomized. So far, they've come in seven types:

1. Hostage rescue. You go to the town where the hostage was taken from, talk to the town's leader, and find out where he was taken to. Then you go to that town, clear out half a dozen hostiles, and speak to the hostage. He never comes with you, but he gives you papers to bring back to the leader in the first town. You return the papers to him, then return to base.
      

The town leader congratulates us at the end of a hostage rescue mission.

    

2. Clear out hostiles. You get a report that Baron Czarny's forces have taken over a town. You go there and kill them all, which might consist of vehicle combat, ground combat, or both. You speak to the town's leader, get your reward, and return to base.
    

The party gets a mission to clear out "soldiers and assassins."

    

3. Find the spy. You learn that Baron Czarny has a spy operating in one of the towns that you control. You go there and start interrogating NPCs. Eventually, you find the right one, kill him, report to the town leader, and return to base.
     

"Interrogate" works successfully.

     

4. Doctors without borders. You learn that a group of people in some town are injured or sick. You load up your doctor with medical supplies and drive to the town. You may have to clear out some hostile forces. Then you run around using the doctor's medical kit or antibiotics on the afflicted NPCs until they're all cured. Visit the town's leader, get the reward, return to base.
      

      

5. Vehicle retrieval. You learn that one of Baron Czarny's vehicles was disabled somewhere. You drive there, have your mechanic repair it, and drive it back to your base and add it to your fleet.
       

Cooter repairs a deuce-and-a-half.

     
6. Supplies. One town needs supplies. Another town has them. Drive to the second town, pick them up, take them to the first town. Reward, return, etc.
     

This type of mission is almost insulting.

   
7. Restore the deposed.  A town leader has been ousted by Czarny's forces. Visit him in exile, then go to the town that he used to lead, kill all of Czarny's men, and return to the leader to let him know he can resume office.
     

Talking to an exiled leader.

     

Each successful mission comes with a reward. For the first eight, that reward was a new vehicle. One-by-one, I acquired a HMMWV, two 2.5-ton trucks, an M1A1 tank, an M1A2 tank, an M2 Bradley, a T-72 tank, a T-80 tank, and a T-90 tank. These are all American vehicles except the last three tanks, which are Russian.
    

One of my tank rewards.

     
I began to wonder if my fleet was just going to keep growing until it burst out of the garage, but then the rewards started to change to supplies--things like food, fuel, and ammunition, which improve the meters that I can see on my office terminal.
      

"Population" never seems to go anywhere.

     
Ground combat has gotten a little easier. Once I learned how to use the hand-held radio to call characters with different skills and languages from my base, I stopped dragging my doctor and mechanic on every mission. I replaced them with two fighters with much higher initiative scores. Until the comments on my last entry, I didn't realize "initiative" was a separate attribute that develops during character creation. My medic and mechanic had initiative so low that the slightest wound left them completely incapacitated.

As we've seen from the comments, there are a lot of ways to cheese combat. The vehicle trick takes advantage of the fact that vehicle combat and ground combat don't mix. They're completely separate programs. Thus, hopping into a vehicle makes you immune from ground-based attacks, and you can use vehicles to drive all over the battlefield or to (temporary) safety. Another trick is to have the high-initiative characters act first, then "flee" combat (which ends it) and immediately enter again, which starts a new round with your high-initiative characters going first again. The enemy never gets a chance to act. In any event, with the right party members and weapons, combat isn't difficult enough to bother with these exploits. Occasionally, some enemy manages to one-shot me with a rocket, otherwise I do pretty well.

Vehicle combat is a different story. I can't figure it out for the life of me. On a basic level, I guess you're supposed to watch the radar and fire in the direction of enemies, but I never hit anything and I can never seem to close in on the vehicles shown on the radar. The only way I've won vehicle combats is by letting the computer do the fighting. It loses about 75% of the time, but when vehicle combat has been unavoidable, I've just reloaded a few times until the computer wins.
      

The computer strikes a hit against an enemy tank in auto-combat.

    
There have been a few memorable moments among the missions. Solving both the spy and vehicle missions depends upon having a character with a high enough skill ("interrogate" and "mechanic," respectively). The vehicle missions also require having the right set of tools. When you try to interrogate a suspect or fix a vehicle, the computer makes a roll against the character's skill and reports the outcome.

Apparently, the 4s that my characters have in those skills isn't particularly high. A couple of times when Cooter tried to fix a vehicle, he suggested we radio for Fiona, who has a "mechanic" skill of 5, instead. Upon interrogating suspects, Lacey sometimes lamented that she isn't very good at it, which is too bad, as she's the "best we've got." In both cases, I just had to try repeatedly until I got more favorable rolls and the skills worked. But this is a reminder that if you don't develop certain key skills, or acquire certain items, during the character creation process, you're screwed for the rest of the game.
     

Maybe you could avoid expressing self-doubt in front of the suspect?

     
I had difficulty with one early combat. My party was able to kill 5 out of 6 enemies, but 3 of my 4 characters were disabled in the process, leaving only Lacey, the party leader, to kill the last enemy. She was able to disable him with a grenade, but he was only inert, not dead, and she was out of grenades. Her only remaining weapon was a 9mm pistol. I had her close the distance to the enemy until she was mere feet away, but her skill with the pistol isn't very high. The enemy was incapable of acting, even moving, but round after round, Lacey couldn't kill him. She pumped bullet after bullet into his arms, legs, chest, abdomen, and head, doing progressively more damage, but not finishing him off. She finally killed him with a shot to the head when she had about 3 bullets left. By then, I felt like a war criminal.
     

Lacey is going to need therapy for years.

      
Finally, upon arrival to one of the vehicle-retrieval missions, this is what I saw from the window of my tank:

I guess that vehicle truly is disabled. I just don't know how my intel officer predicted it.

Some miscellaneous notes:
     

• I'm not sure if fuel plays a role in the game or not. Frequently, after succeeding in missions, the town's leader tells me that he's re-fueled my vehicle, but the gauge never actually seems to go anywhere. The manual warns about running out of fuel if you're not careful, but I wonder if that's just one of many things that the developers wanted to implement and didn't.

      

Town leaders are always "taking the liberty" of topping off my fuel.

     

• Similarly, I've not once had to forage or fish to eat, drink, or rest, even though the manual promises that these all play a role.

• If the designated party leader dies, the game ends.

• Both the manual and the in-game intelligence officer suggest that between missions, I could just drive around looking for supply caches in random towns. I've explored a few towns in between journeys to other places, but not once have I found a cache of supplies just sitting around. Again, I'm not sure if this was implemented or not.

   
As the mission types started to repeat, I began to wonder if the game ever actually ends. I'd been assuming all along that they'd ultimately culminate in some offensive against Baron Czarny, but so much is unfinished in the game, maybe the plot is unfinished, too. Maybe the characters just fight randomly-generated missions forever. But towards the end of this session, my intelligence officer had some comments that suggested another "phase" is coming in the game.
    

My intel officer suggests a new direction to our campaign.

    
All of the missions so far have involved cities in the south of Poland, but now I'm starting to get some in the middle of the map. Presumably, we'll progress from there to the north, where Czarny hides.
  
As I keep saying, there's a germ of a good game here: a mission-based RPG that calls a variety of skills and tools into play. But too much of it feels unfinished, too many skills unused. Gameplay is repetitive and boring, and there's still no sign of character development. It's as if I'm playing a light action game with an RPG character-creation process. I can force myself to finish, but I won't lament if there aren't many more missions.
     

Time so far: 17 hours

Twilight: 2000: Another Wreck

Good . . . bad . . . I'm the guy with the tank.

        

Well, it looks like Paragon is 0 for 4 on its adaptations of Game Designers' Workshop adaptations. Or perhaps GDW is 0 for 4 on decent RPG systems. Either way, Twilight: 2000 repeats the mistakes of the MegaTraveller titles (and, to a lesser extent, Space: 1889). It starts off with a great character creation system, then falls apart with no character development and a horrid combat system.
     

The next mission.

    

My second mission to liberate Poland from Baron Czarny had me heading to Miechow, where there was supposedly some kind of hostage crisis. When I got there, it turned out that the NPC I needed to speak with spoke French, and none of my current party members did. Rather than return to Krakow and pick up a French-speaking character, I decided it was simpler to just reload.
   

We couldn't just use hand signals?

     

It turns out, however, that the second mission randomizes the location you have to visit and the language of the NPC you have to speak with. This time, he spoke Romany. None of my 20 party members had taken that language, so I reloaded again, wondering if there were any non-randomized encounters that would require me to speak a language I hadn't specialized in.

The third try, I had to go to Proszowice. On the way, the game told me that my journey was interrupted by "trouble to the south." The "trouble" turned out to be a tank, or at least something capable of firing artillery. As I hesitated wondering how to proceed, the enemy managed to blow up my HMMWV and kill all my characters, ending the game with the laughing face of (presumably) the Black Baron.
     

The Baron wins again.

     

I read in the book that while vehicle combat is a thing, it can't be done in the HMMWV (despite something that looks like a gun on the roof), so the next time I got interrupted mid-journey, I had the characters bail from the vehicle and engage in combat on foot. They lasted about as long as you'd expect four characters on foot to last against a tank.

The next try, there was no interruption and random combat, for which I was grateful. Many more such random encounters would come, and not once have I managed to successfully engage or even flee the enemy. He pursues relentlessly, and while I might be able to avoid some of his salvos by zigging and zagging, he always gets me in the end.

Anyway, I finally reached the next city, Bochina, with a character who spoke the NPCs language. He told me that Czarny's soldiers had taken the hostage to the city of Pilca, so I headed there.
     

      

The tactical map of Pilca showed me an NPC in a house with enemies scattered about the area. As I got out of the HMMWV, the game told me my party was taking fire. I hustled into the house and spoke to the hostage, but he refused to leave until I dealt with Czarny's men. Thus, I returned outside and entered combat.

The game offers three "modes" of combat, and they all suck. The longest is "interactive" combat, and by choosing that method, you specify actions for each character each round. You and the enemy fighters trade rounds based on order of initiative, and each round a character can fire his weapon (with sub-options for automatic or semi-automatic), simultaneously advance and fire (with small arms), reload, aim (to get a better chance of hitting next time), change equipment, move, or flee.
     

Choosing from among various enemies to target.

     

In "descriptive" combat, the computer decides what actions your characters should take, and you just watch them (and the enemies) run around and perform them. You still get a detailed account of what's happening and how much damage everyone is taking. It takes only slightly less long than interactive combat, as in both cases it takes much longer to watch the enemy's actions than to perform your own.
     

The computer chose the action and tells me the result.

     

"Quick" combat is the same as "descriptive" except you don't get any descriptions of what's happening. You still have to sit there and watch the characters run around the battlefield, shoot, and whatnot, but when someone drops, it's a complete surprise. I was never able to successfully finish a combat on "quick" mode because it inevitably froze at some point. It would have been nice of the game had offered a true quick combat option where the computer simply fights behind the scenes and you see the results, like Wizard's Crown or Roadwar 2000, but alas.

In between rounds, you can "break off" combat and re-enter with a different mode if you want.

I thus fought most of my combats "interactive" style. These are the many problems I had with the system:

• Characters who mysteriously started combat with an initiative of 0 and never got a turn. I don't know what causes this. I'm not even sure what affects initiative. It doesn't seem to be correlated to attributes, weight, or health.

• Enemy pathfinding is awful. They routinely get hung up on houses. Other times, they run madly back and forth right in front of a character (which admittedly makes killing them easier).

    

Can I . . . uh . . . help you?

     

• My lead character, though skilled with small arms, almost never manages to hit anyone.

You were a cop?

            

• The enemies love targeting the party's HMMWV and destroying it even though they're nowhere near it.

                 

That was just spiteful.

   

• Enemies take an incredible amount of small arms damage before dying.

• Toss a grenade within 10 feet of them, however, and it's all over. The same is true of your own party members. That's realism, of course, but I'm not looking for that level of realism in an RPG, especially a turn-based RPG where the game doesn't give you any tactics to defend or avoid the grenades.

       

And that's a reload.

    

• Enemies seem to get twice the action that my characters do.

• Despite offering a relatively complex tactical map, there are hardly any actual tactics in combat. There are no defensive options and no stealth, for instance.

• Although you can view a tactical map at any time, I find it very difficult to judge distance and direction on the main screen. I guess that's something that will become easier over time.

• Some enemies aren't visible by some characters despite other characters able to see them from an equal distance.

• The manual offers inadequate descriptions of combat and its options. It appears that anything besides "quick" combat was a late addition to the game, covered only (briefly) in the errata, and the errata suggests options not actually in the game.

• As I'll cover below, enemies seem to scale in difficulty and equipment with the characters.

         

Nonetheless, after a few false starts, I managed to defeat the four enemies in a combat that lasted about 30-40 minutes. I picked up a few weapons and items of equipment from their bodies. The hostage said he was going to stay put for a while, but he gave me some papers to return to the NPC in Bochina.
    

It turned out staying here was safer than going with us.

     

I neglected to save at this point, and when I headed back to Bochina, I got stopped by one of those tank encounters and my party was destroyed.

By this time, I had received a message from a commenter who recommended equipping all of my characters with grenade launchers, saying it made combat much faster and easier. I was also concerned about my language deficiencies. So I started the game completely over with a new party and took care to give them all some heavy weapons skills, plus the weapons themselves, and also to ensure that among my 20 characters, every language was covered. I then went about solving the first two quests again, the first of which was that easy transfer of medical supplies.
      

During the second round of creations, I got this fantastic set of statistics.

     

I was in for a surprise, however, when I got into my first combat during the hostage rescue mission. As I marched into the field with my grenade launchers, I discovered that the enemies had also leveled up their destructive capabilities. They came at me with LAW rockets, RPG launchers of their own, and handheld grenades. They particularly enjoyed blowing up my HMMWV, a situation I only rectified (eventually) by hiding it behind some houses
      

The new party.

      

My characters sucked at aiming their grenade launchers at distance. If I got close, the party members got caught in their own grenade blasts. All in all, it was a terrible decision, rendered worse when two of my characters simply refused to act, round after round.

But I wasn't going to going to start over again, so I persevered and won the combat after a few reloads. The commenter was right that the grenade launchers made combat ultimately faster. If I could land a grenade near the enemy's feet, he died instantly.
     

A lucky shot.

     

My reward for solving the quest turned out to be a new 2.5-ton truck back at the base. This game is giving me flashbacks, as I drove both an HMMWV and a "deuce and a half" back when I was a reservist. I crashed a deuce into an HMMWV at one point, if I'm being honest, from which point my battalion commander called me "Beetle Bailey" until he retired. But I digress.
    

I wonder if any mission requires me to carry 2.5 tons of cargo.

     

For Mission 3, headquarters wanted me to clear out a Czarny squad from the city of Skawina. It was basically the same story as the previous mission, minus the hostage. Again, I had to reload a couple of times to reverse character deaths as I tried to figure out the combat system. Yes, by having you create 20 characters the game tries to make it so that one character's death isn't a huge deal. Except that 20 characters is way too many, and I only really put any effort into about 6 of them.
     

Completing Mission #3.

    

My reward for Mission #3 was an M1A1 tank, delivered conveniently to the garage at headquarters. (I never got to drive a tank in the Reserves; that's a special MOS.) I figured that maybe now I can take out that bastard who keeps interrupting my travels, but my first few experiences with "vehicle combat" have not gone well and I'm struggling to master the interface.
      

Getting destroyed in a version of quick combat, but for vehicles.

     
Mission 4 asked me to go Pilica again, where Czarny's forces have inflicted casualties. Arriving in the city, I find that there are five Czarny soldiers running around and a bunch of wounded peasants standing in fixed spots. I keep accidentally injuring the peasants during the ensuing firefight, which affords me no reward from the city's leader even if I run around healing them afterwards.
     

Hey, man, those people were almost dead when I got here.

     
I leave you still trying to figure out this mission, hoping there aren't that many total missions in the game. Part of me likes that this recent one involves a medical skill. Just as with MegaTraveller 2 and it's open-world approach with lots of side quests, there's a nucleus of a good game here. A good approach to Twilight: 2000 would offer a variety of missions that could be completed different ways, using different skills and different vehicles. A hostage-rescue mission might give you the ability to bluff your way into the building with "Persuasion" or "Disguise" skills, sneak in with "Stealth," assault it with standard combat skills, or perhaps even breach the walls or tunnel under it with "Civil Engineering." I suspect that's the way the tabletop game works. Unfortunately, the developers weren't that creative or were incapable of programming a game that creative.
     

Does he refer to him as a "peasant" to his face?

     
Meanwhile, it appears that they've completely given up on any character development. Neither of the MegaTraveller games had good character development, but they at least pretended it was there. You could occasionally pay to level-up a skill, and sometimes you'd get a level spontaneously just by using a particular weapon. There was no consistency or logic to it, but at least they didn't ignore it completely. Space: 1889 offered skill and attribute increases as quest rewards, or a consequence of finding particular items. Twilight: 2000 doesn't even go through the pretense. Your characters are fixed from the moment they finish the character creation process. You suddenly need a skill you didn't take during creation? Too bad; start over.

I get far more annoyed with games that had potential but failed than with games that were always destined to be dreck. I guess that's a good segue for moving from the former to the latter.

Time so far: 9 hours