Mines of Titan: Won. (With Final Rating)

What is it that I'm watching set? I'm pretty sure the sun doesn't look that big from Titan.

Mines of Titan

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Infocom (publisher)

Released as Mars Saga for the Commodore 64 in 1988; re-released for DOS and Apple II in 1989

Date Started: 29 June 2013
Date Ended: 01 July 2013

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 40
Ranking at Time of Posting: 79/105 (75%)
Ranking at Game #404: 339/404 (84%)

Goddamned Westwood Associates did it to me again. You remember how I raged at the ending of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception? Well, the ending of Mines of Titan was only barely better. In broad strokes, the developers screwed up both games in the same way: by ruining a promising skill system, by overloading the player with combats that ultimately mean nothing, by making all plot-developments verbosely-scripted text encounters with no choices or role-playing opportunities, and by featuring a final third that's just a long, boring slog through a maze, culminating in an abrupt, unsatisfying ending.

I was just beginning the final area when I was last posted, and I was stuck at a point where the way down was surrounded by trap vents. The "solution" turned out to be just bumbling around the trap vents until they nudged one of my characters onto the passage vent. It then asked me if I wanted to go downward, and I said yes. I can't believe this was actually the solution to the puzzle, but I couldn't find anything else.

The items I was finding in certain areas turned out to be weapons, and I ultimately sorted out what types of weapons they were so my characters could take advantage of them. They rendered combat a little easier. I was reluctant to avail myself of the items labeled "Armor?," though. They didn't seem to perform better than my existing battle armor, and I was wary of the question mark.

Is it armor or isn't it? Do my characters not know?

For the next several hours, I navigated the five or six levels of the caverns, fighting a ton of random and pointless combats, and repeatedly getting the same three psychic messages from the balloon-sack aliens. In a sequence, they showed the aliens psychically carving the corridors, a control panel at the end of the corridors, and a combination necessary to open the panel.

This is perhaps the 12th time I got the same message. I get it already.

Navigation in this area was frustrating and annoying, with little protrusions and bumps constantly tripping up my party. The inability to move diagonally made maneuvering through the tight corridors especially irksome.

It was only late in the process that I discovered I could change my party formation. This is labeled "combat formation," so I had overlooked it before. I only figured it out when I reached an area that was impassable in the default formation.

Here.

I had been assuming that when I reached the city of Proscenium, I would be able to explore it, talk to NPCs, and unfold the plot. But instead, I just got a series of scripted narrations. Upon reaching the city, the game told me I saw a "smoldering hole" where Proscenium had been, and a pile of human corpses before a "grotesque mutation": a giant spidery thing eating the corpses and ejecting eggs.

My party continued on the only path given to them, through some old mines and another set of caverns. The mines held boxes of dynamite that I expected would later become important. At last, I came to the control panel of my visions, where I automatically entered the code and progressed. Too much stuff happens automatically in this game. It's not that I particularly want to manually enter a code, but I don't want a game to take over and "play itself" at all the important moments, either.

The control panel turned off an "ancient machine" in a "lab" that the sentient Titanians had used to play god and create new life forms. The Proscenium miners had accidentally broken into the lab and released the monstrosities (which had been what? Living in there for centuries without food?), which proceeded to destroy the city. This contradicts the information given earlier in the game, including the information that the Titanians had no tools and did everything telepathically, but whatever.

As I was absorbing this, I got attacked by four of the "abominations": four slimes capable of significant melee damage and able to heal themselves. In my first attempt, I tried throwing all the dynamite I'd picked up at them, but it just engulfed my entire party in shrapnel and killed all of us.

In retrospect, I guess you can't throw dynamite less than 10 feet away from your own party and expect to escape the shrapnel.

In the second attack, I tried more conventional firepower, with regular healing, and I won with three characters alive. Gideon died, alas. In the sense that the game had a final, fixed battle, it's better than BattleTech, but not by much.

The winning version.

The end-game message read as follows. The game presents it solely in multiple blocks of text--no images. My commentary appears with it.

After a heated battle, you defeat the grotesque masses! The Titanian machinery can no longer create any genetic abominations. You have saved the remaining human colonies from the horrors which destroyed Proscenium! [What happened to Proscenium having been destroyed because humans killed and dissected the sentient aliens?]

You survey the damage done to the laboratory and guess that the Titanians would still be capable of repairing their machine. Its existence is too dangerous to allow any human settlements nearby, for some people would want to reactivate it for evil purposes. You decide that this chapter of your adventure is too dangerous to tell.

The long journey to the surface is interrupted occasionally by groups of monsters still lurking in the tunnels. [Thankfully, the game didn't make me slog back through them.] The long-range effects of this disaster start to flood your thoughts, but you force them out of your mind to concentrate on the here and now. When you pass the spot where the Proscenium miners broke into the Titanian tunnels, you decide to seal the tunnel with a few well-placed shots and some explosives. You move on toward the lift.

At the lift, you connect your remote terminal and instruct the lift to carry you to the surface [I guess that's what it was for]. While the lift rises, you prepare yourself for a fight with the creatures you saw earlier. Upon reaching the top, you discover that the strange arachnid and its minions have departed. [Seriously? What was the point of all that, then? Why set up an epic final battle with some spider-creature and then make the real final battle with four random slimes?]

With no distractions, you plug your terminal into what remains of Proscenium's computer complex and discover that the controllers knew exactly what caused the destruction of Proscenium all along. [Is this where I was supposed to open the secret packet? It's not very clear.] They delayed telling the public to ensure their unopposed escape from Titan. To give the remaining humans a chance for survival, they hired individuals like yourself to discover, in time, what they already knew. Their passage to Earth was purchased with the lives of many innocent people.

When you get to Progeny, you will inform the people in each city of your great adventure and the terrible coverup. You imagine they will make you a hero and leader of sorts. It will be nice to get recognition for your efforts. [My characters are starting to get a bit deluded here.]

During the trip, you formulate a plan to unite all life on Titan. Without formal government, the human colonies are currently in anarchy. With the knowledge of another race, you will unite the human colonies with a new goal. Perhaps even an agreement with the Nomads could be reached. [It was obnoxious how the game introduced them as an interesting faction and then just abandoned any plot having anything to do with them.] Eventually, you hope to communicate with the Titanians and make peace with their race.

Coming over a rise, you sight the Progeny elevator and can almost taste the fresh air inside the city, hear the cheers of joy and shouts of anger when you tell of your epic adventure. [Do we have to imagine all of this? Wouldn't a good game actually show such an ending?] The people of Titan will depend on you to lead them to peace and you won't let them down. [Extremely deluded. We're a bunch of mercenaries and ex-military. What qualifies us to be political leaders? And why wouldn't the controllers return the moment they hear the threat is over?] You feel a wave of triumph! You have saved Titan!

Show, game, don't tell.

Well, great. Never mind that the elements in the final third contradict everything else in the game, or that the game abruptly turned into a book at the end.

Let me cover three more complaints:

1) The graphics are decent throughout the game, but it's notable that you never actually see the sentient balloon aliens or any of the cool-sounding aliens described in the text.

2) There's some documentation that comes with the game in a "sealed envelope" with instructions not to open it until instructed in the game. I never got such instructions. The documents seem to be what the characters would have seen in the paragraph starting with "With no distractions" above, I guess it tries to fuse the plot conflicts I describe. The destruction of Proscenium is presented as a different problem than the attacks on other cities, caused by killing and dissecting the intelligent aliens. The package includes a letter from the president of Paramount Mining condemning the scientists as "idiots" and ordering the abandonment of Titan and the destruction of all evidence. The president acknowledges that the civilians will all be slaughtered but says there's no way to evacuate them all.

This was a lot of build-up for nothing.

Again, I don't know where I was supposed to get instructions to open this. It contains some maps of the tunnels, but those would have only been useful before reaching the endgame, so I look forward to someone telling me what I missed.

3) What the heck was the dynamite for? I ran around picking it up and never got to do anything with it! 

Let's GIMLET this thing and get out of here.

• 4 points for game world. The game gains points for an interesting premise and loses them for epically bungling any promising gameplay and story evolution with that premise. It's painfully obvious that something got hosed up the development phase, especially in the way the game just abandons the Nomad plot.

• 4 points for character creation and development. Again, it's very original, with the party interviewing and recruiting party members in bars, and the ability to directly spend experience on skill and attribute upgrades. But you hit a ceiling on upgrades extremely quickly, and there's literally no point to the experience you amass fighting the cavern denizens in the final third of the game.

You reach this point just a little too fast.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. They exist, and you have to talk with them to advance the plot and solve quests. But there are no dialogue options or role-playing choices.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The only real role-playing choices you have in the game are whether to attack innocent people, beggars, and police officers, and scanning a walkthrough at the end of the game, I see that killing weak (but innocent) "enemies" is an easy way for new characters to gain experience, and killing police officers is the only way to get the powerful "golum armor" that I won the game without. The alien enemies are unique and bizarre, and if you play with tactical combat, you have to spend some time plotting your attacks against them to deal with their special abilities. Other "encounters" are scripted with no role-playing opportunities.

• 3 points for combat. There's an interesting tactical combat screen, but there aren't actually many tactics to use on the screen: basically just use your most powerful weapon, throw a grenade or some other area-effect item, or heal yourself or someone else. The option to allow the game to fight the combats was welcome; there were far too many to fight them all myself without going crazy. But I don't like that the computer almost always did a better job than I did.

They were reasonably fun to watch even when the computer was in charge.

• 3 points for equipment. There's a pretty solid variety of weapons and armor in the game, and when it's not clear which is "best" by sale value or skill rating, you can just watch which one the computer chooses in auto-combat. But there's not much beyond weapons and armor.

• 6 points for economy. Money is precious throughout the game, to the point that I was picking up and selling ever last bit of looted equipment until the moment I left for the caves. You need the funds to buy equipment and to train characters, and since character turnover is so common in the game, that need never runs out. The gambling system might be a little broken; I didn't keep trying it, so it's not affecting the rating.

• 5 points for quests. There is a main quest, obviously, but with no choices. I have to give some credit to the limited number of side quests, which are useful primarily for getting funds. I think the only things you have to do to win the game are do the interface card quest and visit Cain in the university, but I could be wrong; all the bounty hunts and other quests are just interesting gameplay. But none of the quests have choices or allow role-playing.

Solving a side-quest. Too much is dependent upon text scenes and not player choice or actual dialogue.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are decent, and it's fun how all the stores have their own little animations going on in the upper-left corner. Sound is nothing special but nothing offensive, either. I did have some interface issues. Transferring items and navigating other sub-menus was needlessly complex and easily led to the wrong choice. Maneuvering in party formation was a bit of a nightmare. I did appreciate the automap.

• 3 points for gameplay. The game is mildly non-linear, allowing you to develop in any order, go back and forth among the cities until you accomplish everything, and even explore around the surface on your own (though to little purpose). It is also mildly replayable, in the sense that you might not solve all the side quests the first time (I didn't, but I wouldn't replay it). But the pacing of the game is just bad. You have to do all your character development in the first two-thirds, and the last third is just a boring trek through featureless hallways. Too much is done through (textual) cut-scenes instead of player action.

This gives a final score of 40, which is frankly higher than I want to rate it, but I can't think of any reasons to lower the score that I haven't already used in one of the categories. I rated BattleTech at 37, and I did like this game marginally more than that one, so in that sense it works. In fact, if you look at he entire range from about 35 to 45 in my list, you'll see a host of games with intriguing elements but, ultimately, significant flaws that keep me from fully recommending them.

My feelings about the game are generally not echoed among other players and reviewers, but I also find some of them a bit mysterious. In 1990, Dragon magazine, rating it 5 out of 5 stars (really?) noted that it was "a great Infocom game, an example of how a company's tried and true text adventures have expanded to include well-conceived graphic and animation elements." Dragon doesn't seem to understand the difference between a developer and a publisher, and the idea that Mines of Titan somehow "grew" from Infocom's text adventures is just absurd. It has an utterly different lineage.

Current MobyGames reviews are also mysteriously positive. "gametrader" couldn't find a single bad thing to say about it. "dave c" sees some kind of thematic connection to the Grand Theft Auto games, and the only "bad" element he could mention was that people haven't heard of it; in fact, he explicitly claims that "it won't get boring once." Right.

To be fair, the first two-thirds of the game are pretty good, when you're exploring the cities, building up skills, making money, trying to establish a stable party, and getting hints on the main quests. But it falls apart in the third act, and the third act is what audiences remember when they leave the theater. BattleTech had the exact same problem.
 

So far, Westwood has managed to produce a BattleTech game in which you don't actually have to fight any combats, a Dungeons & Dragons game in which you can't fight any combats, and a science fiction RPG that abruptly abandons the story and gameplay it spent a while to build up. The company is going to get plenty of chances to either redeem themselves or continue to disappoint me. We've got Circuit's Edge coming up in 1990, the first two Eye of the Beholder games in 1991, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun and Order of the Griffon in 1992, the Lands of Lore series later in the 1990s, and the Nox series in 2000. I can only hope their approach to both role-playing and story-telling improves at some point.

As for the next game, well, I've already played and won Rance, and I'm debating whether to a) post nothing; b) offer a post explaining why I'm going to post nothing; or c) try to discuss why it's a horrible game and no one should ever want to play it. I'm going to see what Irene thinks and make a decision.