Oméga: Planète Invisible: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

        

Oméga: Planète Invisible

("Omega: Invisible Planet")

France

Infogrames (developer and publisher)

Released in 1985 for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and Thomson computers

Date Started: 27 October 2020

Date Finished: 1 November 2020
Total Hours: 7
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 20
Ranking at Time of Posting: 117/392 (30%)

    

Summary:

A bizarre French game that uses the same engine as the previous Mandragore (1985), Oméga sends a party on a quest to find an invisible planet and stop its tyrannical leader, Naxorg. This involves visiting six planets, solving their local problems, and collecting a series of hints, as well as saving 3,000 credits to purchase a "detector" that gets the player's ship through an asteroid belt. Nothing about the controls, the theme, and the planetary encounters is quite the same as any other RPG or adventure game of the period. Either it's making a lot of references that only French players of the 1980s would get, or it's just weird. Either way, it's relatively easy and lasts a short time.

    

**********

     

This was the order in which I solved the planets:

 

1. Altair II. I covered this last time. I retrieved a totem stolen by a bunch of road warriors and returned it to the natives for the first clue.

2. Unknown. I never saw a name for the second planet, which wasn't so much a planet as a ship. It was full of creepy children, and there were what looked like children, and people, and dogs in display cases on the wall. I learned on this planet that sometimes you have to kill everyone, whether they're hostile or not, just to find the passage out of a room. Our adventures culminated in a final room, in which the devil was surrounded by flames. We dropped the crucifix and got the sixth clue. 

       

How tough is Naxorg if the devil is one of his underbosses?

         

3. Capella II. This planet was swarming with zombies, ghouls, imps, bats, spiders, and even Dracula himself. We eventually found our way to a palace, where various royals complained about the situation: "The country is transforming into a real nightmare!"; "I don't dare go out"; and, oddly, "the king is nothing more than a poor junkie." We eventually found the king hooked up to some kind of machine, saying, "It's good to dream!" Based on some advice from the queen, we literally took the king from the machine and dropped him off with the queen, getting us the fifth clue.

          

Undead have taken over the land by hooking the king up to a dream machine?

       

4. Hydra IX. This watery planet had the party sailing around on a raft. Various mutant creatures demanded various types of radioactives, including uranium, which we were supposed to bring from one of the other planets, but I sold it all. We fought and killed a "loch beast," but nothing we could do actually solved the puzzle, so we missed the third clue.

         

Once you kill him, his head disappears but his body remains.

        

5. Arcturus X. On this weird planet (even by this game's standards), a bunch of creatures with names beginning with "VER" (I think they were green) encouraged us to stay. Each delivered part of a line that went: "If you desire to live forever and well, stay with us, stranger, and you will know the benefits of freezing!" This last bit seemed to refer to the ice floes in the southern part of the map, one of which ended the game (with no way to return) if you wander too far. The aliens seemed to have captured and turned into (frozen?) displays a bunch of creatures like cats, rabbits, horses, and bulls, as well as a man and woman and, as if the area needed to get weirder, a biplane. We found a grenade on one of the floes and, for no reason that I could see, dropped it on a screen in which the word FREE was written on the wall. This got us the fourth clue.

        

What is going on in this place?

        

6. Deneb VIII. This planet was full of robots holding various aliens in prison. We slaughtered a couple of dozen robots and spoke to the prisoners, who begged to be freed. They told us of an old walkie-talkie that has a powerful explosive in it. We found it and dropped it in an area that seemed to house a shield generator. This rewarded us with the second clue.

       

Prisoners give us a clue, even if it makes no sense.

       

During these explorations, we kept stealing whatever we could for resale. It was a bit weird that as we were hearing the desperate pleas of, say, the residents of the castle on Capella II, we were also stealing their tables and armchairs out from under them. When I was done with the six planets, I had about 3,300 credits, so it's a good thing I didn't waste a lot of money on weapons. These credits were spread over all four characters, and I couldn't find any way to pool them, so I had to have three characters buy items, then transfer the items to the fourth character, then have him sell the items, to ultimately get 3,000 in the hands of the character who needed it. This allowed us to buy the detector.

        

Wow, that's too bad . . . I'll just be taking those chairs.

       

Another thing I can report is that leveling definitely does make the characters stronger. Enemies that took four or five hits to kill on Level 1 took only one or two hits on Level 4. But I never needed anything other than physical attacks; all of those telepathic options were wasted. Later, I found that some sites (including commenter Abacos's StrategyWiki article) recommend that you just kill off three characters so you can give all the food, healing, and experience to a single character.

     

It was time to find Oméga. I took a look at my assembled hints and had this:

1. On the great map of the empire . . .
2. You will have to steer your beautiful ship to the northeast, always further.
3. ?????
4. You will only cross the asteroid belt if you hold the key, the only key capable of opening the way to your ship [this is the detector]
5. Are you a base? You just need to machine forward three times, then starboard four times.
6. Bravo!

 

Clue 3, I later learned, said something about the shape of the asteroid field that I would find to the northeast. Other than the sixth, it was probably the least necessary of the bunch, since once I found the asteroid field and flew through it, it's "eye" (a circular area in the center) was pretty obvious. There was a starbase in there, too, and I figured from the instructions that I needed to start on the base, then move forward three times and "east" four.

       

Finding the invisible planet.

       

I did this, but no planet appeared, and hitting "P" didn't help. I had to write to Abacos for help, and the solution he gave me--type Naxorg's name backwards (GROXAN)--seems ridiculous to me. I don't know how you could possibly expect players of the era to know to do that. In particular, there's nowhere else in the game in which you communicate by typing random words at the cursor.

          

Somehow, the planet has a crown.

       

But in any event, the word got the planet to appear and allowed us to land. Naxorg's fortress was a long, linear series of rooms with white-suited guards that we had to kill. Various commoners would only say "our lips are sealed" if I tried to speak to them.

          

A couple of guards block our way.

           

At the top of the fortress we found Naxorg's bedroom to the west and himself to the east, surrounded by women, one potentially topless (you really can't tell anything with these graphics). Naxorg was a short man with shocks of white hair sticking out from both sides of his head. "The resistance has found me," he moaned as we approached.

           

Naxorg is surrounded by Mata Hari, Marilyn (Monroe?), and Antinea from the novel Atlantida (1919) by Pierre Benoit.

       

He died in two hits, at which point we got the endgame text:

     

The bloodthirsty despot has joined, in the silence of the void, all the monsters that preceded him through the ages. In the name of freedom, you have defeated Naxorg, and persecuted peoples will now be able to rebuild together a more just world, while respecting differences. Let us wish for the imperium a new era of peace and tolerance and that never again the specters of war and tyranny loom over the trail of stars.

No one can predict the future. . . but it is reassuring to think that, if by misfortune a new threat clouds our universe, adventurers of your caliber would stand ready to defend, again and always, law and life.

On the GIMLET, Oméga earns:    

      

• 3 points for the truly bizarre game world.

• 3 point for character creation and development. There are some interesting choices, but they don't seem to affect anything about how the game plays. Races, classes, and even abilities are mostly meaningless. Character development helps a little, and I like how you get experience for successful non-combat actions.

• 2 points for some limited NPC interaction.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. Enemies are all about the same difficulty, none hard, and the puzzles just involve picking up an item in one place and dropping it in another.

• 2 points for very basic combat and magic options, the latter of which barely matter.

       

My lead character goes to attack a robot.

        

• 1 point for equipment. It exists, but you don't need it.

• 2 points for the economy, only in the sense that it exists, and I guess you could always keep buying medicine.

• 2 points for a main quest.

• 0 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are awful, the sound non-existent, and the interface is built as if the developers wanted you to make constant mistakes and then have no way to back out of them.

• 3 points for gameplay. It gets 1 for nonlinearity and 2 for being over quick. But it's too easy and not replayable. 

    

That gives us a final score of 20, several points lower than the 25 I gave Mandragore. The former game was just a bizarre, but the puzzles made a bit more sense, the encounters were more consequential, and there was greater need for the game's many commands.

       

French kids must be smart. In 1985, I would have been saying, "Mom! Please buy me this horseshoe game!"

       

I reach the end of the game still not knowing what the authors were going for, not understanding if its many oddities were references to other media or just deliberately designed to be weird. There's a note on one site that the game originally shipped with a novel or novella by Christian Ballandras. I couldn't find anything about this book, and I'm not sure if it's a novelization of the game (man, that's a task I wouldn't wish on any author) or a novel on which the game was based, which would make a lot more sense.

   

This seems to be the last title attributed to author Marc Cecchi, so we won't see quite this approach again. But we still have plenty of games from the French "golden age" to look at, including Phalsberg (1986), Sapiens (1986), so I'm sure I haven't written outré for the last time.