Game 201: Martian Dreams (1991)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women cannot get enough of Jane Austen. My wife, Irene, is no exception. A number of years ago, she made me sit through an A&E miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, which to the best of my recollection was 176 hours. It consisted primarily of wealthy people sitting around drawing rooms trading quotable barbs. Occasionally, to really liven things up, one or two of them would get up and walk around the perimeter of the room and sit back down again. High drama and scandal came when a man whose estates brought in £10,000 a year considered marrying a woman whose father's estate only brought in £9,500 per year. I remember remarking to Irene at the time that there was no time or place in world history more in need of an alien invasion.

I was thus delighted to see, some years later, that a writer named Seth Grahame-Smith had taken advantage of the novel's public domain status to produce Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I bought a copy for Irene for Christmas in 2009 or 2010. I didn't expect her to love it, but I also didn't expect her to be offended by it. She flipped through a couple of pages and then threw it away, right in front of me. I learned an important lesson: when you're really invested in a setting and story, you don't want to see it treated frivolously.

I shouldn't have needed to learn this lesson because I had already experienced it myself with the Ultima series. As I've wrote about before, Ultima IV was literally a life-changing game for me. It infused my impressionable and agnostic 12-year-old mind with the equivalent of a secular religion. Moreover, its approach to storytelling made me feel, more than any other game, that it was literally my avatar wandering the fields and caverns of Britannia. When Ultima V opened with a screenshot of "my" desk, complete with computer and soda can, I didn't mind because I realized it was abstract and it pretty much looked like my actual desk anyway. When Ultima VI put a picture of a pole-dancing centaur on "my" wall and decided that "I" was a white male with long hair, it was harder to swallow. At 15, I was already sporting a bald spot. Yet aside from the opening screens, the game still allowed "me" to adventure in the game's fictional world and practice the principles of virtue.

This game's Avatar has an Ultima VI poster on his wall. How does that make any sense?

But when I first encountered the Worlds of Ultima* titles, my reaction was "oh, hell no." Not only did the games codify a particular appearance for the Avatar, they gave him a set backstory and acquaintances. The Avatar was no longer traveling from my living room to Britannia; he was traveling from his house on his peculiar version of Earth--a version of Earth in which reporters still look and talk like 1930s caricatures and--to quote from the current game--"scientists have long suspected that Mars was capable of supporting intelligent life." By Ultima VII, in which the character remains in Britannia at the end of the adventure instead of returning home, the deconstruction is complete. The Avatar is no longer my avatar but just a character of that title.

The game gives me no choice but to play as this guy.

(*This little series can't seem to make up its mind as to whether its title is Worlds of Ultima or Ultima: Worlds of Adventure. It's also unclear whether the series title is supposed to be part of the game's title. My convention is usually to favor the game's title screen but also consult the manual title and the box cover title. In this case, they all conflict, with Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams appearing on the box and Martian Dreams appearing by itself on the manuals and game title screen. Since Martian Dreams by itself is more common than the alternatives, that's what I've used for the official game name.)

Otherwise known as the "only" Ultima: Worlds of Adventure game.

To be clear, I don't object to Origin re-using the Ultima VI engine to tell stories in alternate universes based on early-20th-century pulp magazines (as in the case of The Savage Empire) or on 19th-century science fiction (as in the case of Martian Dreams). I just object to them trying to shoe-horn them into the Ultima universe and making the Avatar the main character. (Could they truly conceive of no other protagonist?) I object to the weird plot developments, retconning, and conflicts that accompany these titles, including moonstones that explode and allow time travel, ancient saurian civilizations on Earth, and a habitable atmosphere on Mars. But like I did with The Savage Empire, having written all the above as a kind of catharsis, I'm going to try to ignore everything I've just said and see if I can enjoy the game on its own merits, particularly because I like the engine and everyone keeps saying that the game is good.

The introductory screens are well-composed.

Like most Origin titles, Martian Dreams benefits from solid production values in the supporting material and in-game introduction. These come together to tell a story that is absurd but sometimes clever. The summary is that the Avatar and his friend from The Savage Empire, Dr. Johann Spector, are contacted by an "odd-looking woman" (there's a hint that she's an alien) who gives them information necessary to travel through time with the Orb of Moons that the Avatar has been carrying since Ultima VI. Following the woman's instructions, they find an abandoned lab in the mountains of Colorado. There, they step through a timegate and find themselves in the same lab in 1895.

Now that we know time travel is possible by moongates, future problems that arise in Britannia ought to be easy to fix. I'm sure the series doesn't simply never reference this again.

The lab is owned by Nikola Tesla. (It's funny to see him appear in this game, 20 years before a poorly-researched and hyperbolic Internet comic would make him the patron saint of geeks everywhere.) Tesla is organizing a mission to rescue a group of people stranded on Mars. Two years earlier, the astronomer Percival Lowell created a "space cannon" which can shoot a bullet-shaped vehicle to another planet via a mysterious explosive substance called "Phlogistonite." He demonstrated the contraption at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, but somehow it went off while a group of dignitaries was on board, rocketing them to Mars. (Good thing it was pointed at just the right place, and there was enough food, oxygen, and resources on board.) The list of accidental astronauts includes Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane, Andrew Carnegie, Marie Curie, Wyatt Earp, Thomas Edison, Emma Goldman, William Randolph Hearst, George Washington Carver, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, and Theodore Roosevelt. The idea of Emma Goldman and William Randolph Hearst stuck in the same tiny capsule for months is, admittedly, interesting to contemplate.

Yeah, this was destined to end well.

Spector naturally realizes the effects on history should this group of luminaries remain on Mars, and he and the Avatar eagerly join the rescue mission. The rest of the party includes Tesla, the investigative journalist Nellie Bly, Sigmund Freud, a mysterious doctor named "C. L. Blood," who I suspect is going to turn out to have something to do with Dracula, and a cowboy named Garrett who I at first took for Pat Garrett, but who says his first name is actually "Dallas."

Dr. Blood has a point.

During character creation, Freud fills in for the gypsy of Ultima IV, asking a series of leading questions and providing questionable interpretations to the answers. Somehow, your answers determine your starting strength, dexterity, and intelligence.

It took me longer to get the symbolism than it should have.

The game begins at the landing site of the space capsule. The Avatar, Spector, and Bly are in the party. Bly keeps a notebook that serves the same "quest log" purpose as Jimmy the reporter in The Savage Empire. 

Dr. Blood won't join the party; he just hangs out in the capsule and waits for you to return with injured party members. Similarly, Tesla says he has to stay behind and run the communications, Garrett is going to guard the others, and Freud is too busy working on The Interpretation of Dreams--I'm not sure why we even brought him.

You're stocking a small pod to take 6 people to Mars. Clearly, a large pipe organ is a priority.

The interface is more or less identical to Ultima VI and The Savage Empire, although the number of commands has been slightly reduced. As with its predecessors, it allows both mouse and keyboard inputs. I think this is the last Ultima game to feature the keyword-based conversation style introduced in Ultima IV, so I'll try to treasure it this final time. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have any fun by giving the characters keyword responses to obvious prompts. Tesla has nothing to say about COIL or EDISON; Freud nothing about CIGARS.

Garrett has nothing about "BILLY THE KID," but I guess if he's Dallas Garrett, he wouldn't.

  
A hold in the rear of the craft is full of mostly-useless items like plates and mugs, but also a lot of other supplies like guns, ammunition, knives, lamps and oil, a sextant, a spyglass, and clothing--which is nice because the Avatar starts the game naked. Soon, I had everyone equipped with guns, machetes, and various utility items.

Looting the ship's stores.

The first major task, clearly meant to introduce the player to the interface, is to get the stuck door open. You have to first talk to Garrett, get a prybar from him by asking the appropriate keywords, and then (U)se the prybar on the door. At this point, Tesla interrupts you with a copy protection question, but after that, it's off to explore the Red Planet!

As you step outside, there's a notice to the effect that you're stepping into a low-oxygen atmosphere, and everyone's attributes decrease by 3 points. I'm not sure what consequences this will have throughout the game or if there's a way to reverse it. Dr. Blood said something about giving me oxygen canisters, but nothing showed up in my inventory.

The game's most notable nod to reality is that on Mars, human beings can breathe slightly worse than on Earth.

The game's depiction of the Martian landscape is mostly desolate, but with occasional flowers, trees, and living creatures. The game manual gives a description of the varied flora and fauna that we might expect to encounter, including "canal worms," "creeping cacti," and "oxy-leeches." The first ones I encountered were "plantelopes," which I attacked before realizing that they were probably non-hostile.

"We come in peace!"

The game acknowledges that its depiction of Mars is a little contrary to the twentieth-century scientific consensus. "What could have changed the planet so in just 100 years?" Spector asks in the manual. "How could the Mariner and Viking spacecraft have missed such clear evidence of Martian life?"

Tesla had given me the coordinates of the 1893 expedition's landing site as 28S 153W. The sextant showed that we were currently at 27S 153E. So I headed off for a long journey to the west. It wasn't long before I ran into a large, walled compound with strange architecture and a large gong in the center. We were attacked by "jumping beans" and "creepers" on the inside. There was some machinery that needed power, but I decided to leave the area and save it for later exploration when I had a better sense of the landscape. Unfortunately, I soon ran into a large canal that seems to inhibit progress past 68E, so apparently walking to the previous expedition site isn't going to be that easy. A map comes with the game, but it's not a lot of help yet, since it doesn't seem to have any man-made features on it. And if I'm interpreting the map correctly, canals seem to surround entire large areas. I'm not sure how you're supposed to cross them.

Exploring an area that seems suitably alien.

Miscellaneous notes:

• Freud was 39 in 1895. The game depicts him as like 70 already.

• Nellie Bly is cute. I wonder if she's going to turn out to be a love interest. Of course, she was 31 in 1895 but looks 10 years younger.

Thankfully, America's approach to mental health is entirely different 120 years later.

• I don't know if food is going to be a thing yet. There's no sign of it so far.

• As for an economy, so far I've found a single "piece of dirt money."

• There's some clue to Dr. Blood in this dialogue here. I'm not getting it. The address seems to belong to a succession of publishing companies.

     
So far, Martian Dreams hasn't opened in a way that's any more promising than The Savage Empire. The plot is just as goofy, and I have less of a clue how to proceed about the game's main quest. I'll keep exploring and see if it improves. In the meantime, Irene and I are going to see The Martian later on. That should be an interesting contrast.