Game 43: Star Saga: One - Beyond the Boundary (1988)

Take a look: It's Andrew ("Werdna") Greenberg.

I debated for a while about whether to do a standard entry for this game because I don't really know if I'm going to get to "play" it. Star Saga: One - Beyond the Boundary (yes, that is the appropriate punctuation) is the damnedest game I've encountered so far in this blog. For the last couple of weeks--in relation to Pirates!, mostly--we've been talking about what constitutes a CRPG. Well, here's another one that challenges the definition--but not because of the "role-playing" part. Rather, Star Saga: One might not be a CRPG because it doesn't really satisfy the "computer" part.

Let's deal with the backstory first: the game is set in the year 2815, almost 600 years after the invention of a "dual-axis hyperdrive" made it possible to travel between stars. As a result, humanity colonized eight other planets in an area known as the "Galactic Fringe." In 2490, however, more than half the population of the colonies was killed by an alien virus called the Space Plague. As a result, the governments of Earth and the colonies defined a border around the colonies called the Boundary. Anyone traveling beyond the Boundary would never be able to return. The Space Patrol was established to enforce this law.

Each of the nine colonies is named and has a unique characteristic. Atlantis is a "lush green world protected by strict environmental laws"; Endaur is the seat of the government; Frontier is rugged and sparsely populated, but popular with tourists; Harvard is the colonies' center of learning; Heaven is the most densely populated planet; Leucothea is the religious headquarters (the major religion is The Final Church of Man, which sounds vaguely sinister); Monument is primarily a memorial to the Space Plague; and Norstar is a "grimy, industrial world." While peace and unity reign, and the Space Patrol keeps bad things out of the colonies, humanity "has become a bit stagnant--no new discoveries, no new challenges, and countless opportunities lost."

The game is a weird, possibly unique, hybrid of computer and board game. It originally came in a three-pound box with several floppy disks and a dense package of character booklets, instructions, tokens, a game map, and 888 passages of text. Players--of whom there can be up to six--choose one of six characters to play, each of which has a full biography and set of goals, which you're supposed to keep secret from the other players. (They say a full game takes up to 60 hours, so I guess you're not expected to start a new game every family get-together.) All six characters have recently crossed the boundary, in their own ships, for their own purposes (for instance, Professor Lee Dambroke wants to learn about alien civilizations and Jean G. Clerc is looking for alien technology to build the ultimate spaceship). The characters do not play as a party but instead take turns and, I guess, occasionally encounter each other.

For my introductory game, I chose Professor Dambroke, the xenobiologist from Harvard, and was pleased to see that the picture of my laboratory contains the alien from Aliens plus Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

"The Boundary" suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Gameplay progresses something like this. You take off in your ship from your home world, study the game map, and decide where you want to go. You get 7 "phases" per turn, and moving between map sectors takes up one of them. The map sectors are all triangular, and you can travel to adjacent sectors across lines, but not across points.


 
Thus, in the map above, I could travel from sector 116 (the center yellow one) to either 117 or 115, but not to 93 or 94; I'd have to go through 117 or 115 first.

You enter your travel commands into the computer application, and it tells you the results:


 
The game directs me to read two book entries: 348 and 382. Here's a snippet of 348:

Approaching the planet in this system, you instruct your computer to run a geophysical survey as well as scan to see if it has any information in its computer banks on the world known as Moiran.

"I've got some data for you, boss," it says. "The physical characteristics are as follows: climate, warmer than Earth; polar regions, habitable due to minimal axial tilt."

While the computer is busy scanning its memory for any historical data it might have, you take the opportunity to view the planet first hand. From space, Moiran seems somewhat smaller than Earth and not nearly as pretty. The clouds look grey and the oceans have a brownish tint to them. All in all, a dirty-looking planet.

The book goes on to tell me that there are cities, including a busy spaceport, on the planet. It turns out it was an Earth colony, cut off because of the Boundary. I head out of the spaceship and am assailed by the noxious odor of sulphur, meet with the spaceport officials "(who speak a slightly accented Earth Standard)," and head out to explore. At this point, the game gives me five possibilities for further action:

• Visit a dirty and disgusting part of the city
• Go to the north pole and investigate the planet's primary industry, Phase Steel
• Check out the Moiran Interstellar Shipyard for weapons systems
• Check out rumors about "Tony the Shark," who runs an illegal arms and armor business
• Visit "Dee's Pleasure Palace," of which the game says, "the less said about the place, the better."

In the next turn, I can choose the action. I go to the commodities market, and the game enters into an exchange screen, in which I can exchange crystals for goods.


 
I should mention at this point that the game is essentially walking me through the first seven turns--it forces you to go a predetermined route, with the book explaining how you play along the way. After this, it has me take off and go to another planet, Wellmeet, where I visit a tavern and talk with the locals.

Just out of curiosity, I started a game with two players and then had them meet on the same planet. I wanted to see if the gamebook had any specific text about the encounter. But all it really does is allows them to trade items to each other.


 
The role of the computer in the game is somewhat minimal. It keeps track of your inventory and status, and lets you know the outcomes of your actions (including those based on probability like, I assume, combat). But the real "gameplay" is in the form of the book and map. The book is highly reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure series in which you read a passage, make a choice, and jump to another passage. The game is thus much more reading than "playing."

Although you can play with up to five other people, it strikes me as a somewhat lonely game for a group. Everyone has his own character, the interactions between them are minimal, and you're not supposed to let them see your character book or storyline. How does it end? One of the players suddenly announces, "Well, I'm done"? (Since I don't have any friends who know about my hobby, I guess the issue is moot.) I'd love to hear from someone who played this in person when it was new.

I should mention that my own playing session so far would not have been possible without the work of one "JJ Sonick," who not only scanned all of the game entries and put them into a searchable browser-based index but also created a brilliant little application that uses the game map and allows you to maneuver your little tokens around the screen. That's some real love there. [Edit: see this comment for more information about the creation of this set.]

I did have some interest in exploring the mysteries of the galaxy and solving Professor Dambroke's quest of returning to Harvard with three alien abilities so cool the rest of humanity will regard them as "magical," so I restarted with him and kept playing for a while. My travels took me to:

• Wellmet, a frontier planet that used to be the center of exploration for the human colonies before the Boundary. Now a "Ghost World"--one of those abandoned by the nine colonies when they established the Boundary, it comes across as a cross between Australia and Sicily; its rough-but-friendly frontier spirit is an artifact of the convicts that were shipped there by the colonies, but its politics and trade are dominated by the quasi-Mafia Families. It becomes clear here that smuggling across the Boundary is very active (despite the official word from Space Patrol) and is, in fact, a major part of the Wellmet economy. A mysterious man in Wellmet gives me data crystals that greatly expand my star map (the game comes with two maps, one that you open up after getting this information) and warns me about aliens, pirates, and "space walls" where hyperspace doesn't work.

A portion of the larger game map.

• Crater, a strange planet completely enclosed by space walls. When I get there, I am captured by a tractor beam and interrogated by the locals--more colony expatriates--who are paranoid about alien invasion and have erected essentially a fortress in space. They decide I'm okay and allow me to attend a lecture on combat, after which I am forced to take a test that I fail because the instructions are in old English instead of Earth Standard.

• Medsun, an agrarian, low-technology planet populated by both humans and strange yellow aliens with three necks (understand this is all described in the book; there are no graphics of this). The low-key attitude of the population seems mysterious until I find that the Medsunians have a natural capability, called Phrmm, to pacify aggression, but it also works to subdue any sense of ambition or adventure. When I am taught the techniques of Phrmm, the Medsunians assume I'm going to stay and start looting my ship, but I stop them and blast off, not sure whether to regard the human populace as unwilling slaves or just stoned and happy. In any event, Phrmm turns out to be one of the "alien abilities" I'm looking for, so my quest is 1/3 done.

I'm just showing this for the heck of it. There aren't a lot of interesting screen shots here.

All of the planets featured robust bartering systems by which I could trade various units of food, medicine, "liquids," munitions, armaments, cultural items, and so forth back and forth. But my inventory was so low to begin with that I hesitated to trade anything. I did hand over one of my medicine units for some munitions, then the munitions for a hand blaster.

Throughout this, the computer on my ship keeps conversing with me directly (in the text, not in the computer part of the game), and I am surprised at its advanced technology, which apparently incorporates a "three-sigma intelligence package" and allows it to understand and answer questions in normal language, and also to volunteer information. Yes, I would like to be shocked at this level of artificial intelligence, but come on, this game is set 800 years in the future.

About this point, I ran out of steam. This is fundamentally not a computer game. I mean, I could take the inventory sheet from the Lone Wolf gamebook series and put it into Microsoft Excel, but that doesn't mean I'll have created a CRPG. The long text entries are very well-written and interesting, but I don't have any sense that I'm really playing anything.

I tried to jump through the entries and see if I could suss out what the ending looked like, but there are just too many of them. Here are some choice quotes that I'd love to know the scenario behind. All of them sound like candidates for the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

• "You are embarrassed to admit that a four foot tall squirrel is your equal in battle."
• "You figure the alien ships couldn't be having an easy time tracking your ship, not with the Gironde scattering starlight and glowing infrared behind you."
• "From up close you can see even better how the serpent's tail segments move together despite the five-meter gaps between them."
• "Your band of adventurers regroups in the outer orbit of Outpost and confers about the best method for storming the planet."
• "You plunge right in, narrowly avoiding a marshmallow, and soon find yourself floating serenely in the depths of a liquid that is both warm and supportive."
• "A familiar sight appears as you shut down the hyperdrive. Yes, sirree, the same asteroid-satellite that blocked your path and shot you up before. It's still right where you left it, broadcasting its cacophonous message."
• "Focused ever so intently, you prepare for the attack run. Your computer has already laid a course which will take you right over the power generator." (Uh...)
• "You experience a rather painful eternity of the most extreme torment, as the monster slowly dismembers you and eats the pieces. Fortunately enough, this being a dream, you do eventually wake up. Unfortunately, you are still on Tretiak."

Again, great stuff, but it's a book. I play CRPGs.

****

Update: 11 years later, I went back and finished the game. Read the updated coverage.