BRIEF: Liberation: Captive II (1993)

        

Liberation: Captive II

United Kingdom

Byte Engineers (developer); Mindscape (publisher)

Released in 1993 for Amiga CD32, 1994 for Amiga

        

There was a period of my childhood, probably around ages 8 or 10, when I was obsessed with "treasure hunts"--the kind where you find a clue that leads to another clue, and so on, ultimately to some kind of treasure. I think I was inspired by Gertrude Chandler Warner's The Yellow House Mystery, one of the Boxcar Children books. I liked both creating and playing treasure hunts. My mother made really good ones, full of anagrams and acrostics and other types of wordplay. In contrast, I once tried to get a babysitter to make one, but either she didn't get the concept or didn't care. Her clues would say, "Go look in the kitchen." In the kitchen, I'd find a clue that said, "Go look in the upstairs bathroom."

    

These two approaches illustrate the problem with procedural generation in Captive. I had an interesting experience with the original game. I admired it more than I liked it. Antony Crowther built his reputation on rapid and efficient code, and he used those skills in Captive to produce a game with Dungeon Master-style mechanics, but with levels that could be infinitely generated. (That's not quite true because of some bugs, but most versions will generate more levels than any player would possibly have time to play.) The levels aren't randomly generated--they're the same for every player--but they are procedurally generated, spinning out large levels from a fixed sequence of seeds. The size of the levels isn't quite as impressive as the number of items and interactions he included within them; the code had to include considerations of stores, enemies, weapons, power sockets, up and down ladders, moving walls (but not anywhere that would trap the player), traps, and a variety of approaches to doors--always ensuring that the passcode or key could be found before the doors they opened.

      

Liberation's city is huge, bizarre-looking, and procedurally-generated.

     

In the sequel, he takes it even further, using the seeds to create not only an enormous city but also the NPCs and enemies that populate it, the names of its streets and businesses, the name of the sub-titular captive you're trying to rescue, and the trail of clues that leads you to his location. It's an impressive effort in terms of coding, but for me it results in unsatisfying gameplay. With procedural generation, there's no room for unique NPC personalities, particularly complex or creative puzzles or clues, or areas that feel like real places. It's rather like playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 and doing only the "radiant" quests, only worse because in those games at least the locations are hand-designed. Some of the advertisements for Captive II suggest that it would take a lifetime to complete the thousands of missions that the game offers, but I don't know why you'd want to. I'd much rather have a hand-designed game with only a single mission.

       

Before I get to the game, I would note that I'm playing a new machine. The Amiga CD32 wasn't just another Amiga model, as I originally assumed, but a short-lived console that never had an American release. Its "life" was less than a year, from September 1993 to Commodore's bankruptcy the following April, but it supported nearly 150 games, including seven RPGs: Liberation, Whale's Voyage (1993), DragonStone (1994), HeroQuest II (1994), Heimdall 2 (1994), Magic Island: The Secret of Stones (1995), and The Speris Legacy (1995). I believe all of these games also had regular Amiga releases, but the CD32 version often has features that the computer version doesn't, like cinematics and voiced dialogue. Thus, although it gave me all kinds of grief, I took the time to figure out how to emulate the console in WinUAE, only later realizing that I was essentially breaking my blog's rules (or at least normal SOP) by favoring the console version in the first place.

     

Trill seems to belong to some military service.

    

Captive's framing story was often confusing. The opening told of an innocent man named Trill being convicted in 2542 of "all counts" of an unspecified crime. Hoping for "community service," he instead received 250 years in suspended animation. Only a couple years before the date of his release, an attack on the prison space station woke him up. A laptop computer in his cell somehow allowed him to connect to a group of four droids on a distant ship, and over the course of 10 levels, the droids slowly pieced together Trill's location. The scenario ended when the droids invaded Trill's station and found him, but at the press of a button, the player could have some security bots whisk Trill away to another station and start the cycle over again.

   

You may recall that the game ended with a bit of a mystery. If the player chooses to end the game after freeing Trill, the game says that they have just liberated "the Creator of Evil." I don't know what that was supposed to mean, but Liberation opens as if the words had never been spoken. Instead, the droids are seen carrying the exhausted Trill to freedom. "At long last, Trill is a free man," a narrator intones, as the cinematic shows fireworks exploding in celebration and Trill receiving some kind of medal. I guess he got a sinecure, as the next screen shows him making paper airplanes while watching monitors in some facility. On the news, an anchor reports on unrest at the Alpha Detention Centre, where protestors are rallying against the imprisonment of a Mark Antony Jadva. Jadva has been convicted for the murder of a Councillor Dran. Trill searches his company's database and finds that Dran was actually killed by a malfunctioning Securi-Droid manufactured by BioCorp, and the company covered it up and pinned it on Jadva. Trill also finds 264 similar cases of innocent people rotting in jail to cover for BioCorp's mistakes. I'm not sure why Trill's company computer has confidential files on another company's misconduct. It's possible that Trill works for BioCorp--I'm a little unclear on that--but either way, such damning information seems awfully easy for him to retrieve.

      

You'd think it would be easier to say that Councillor Dran had attacked the police droid.

      

(The video is amusing in the way it depicts computers a millennium into the future. They look like 1980s PCs except that the keyboard and other interface devices sort-of materialize on the desk in front of the user, as if they were holograms. Trill summons them and switches between them by banging on the desk with his fist.)

   

Trill does a video call with a friend named Doltana and asks him to check out the case. Securi-Droids for BioCorp are monitoring the call. Doltana confirms that the droids are malfunctioning because of "magnetic storms." Trill wakes up his own four droid companions and apparently sends them on a quest to rescue the imprisoned innocents, with the ultimate goal of convincing the Empire to shut down BioCorp.

      

Various parts of the game conflict significantly on the subject of the current year.

      

The manual offers a couple of memos that support the story, including a report by an Office Gene Runciter who says that Councillor Dran was being investigated for "possible funding violations related to the Fraud Act of 2893." The security droid murdered him while he was in an interrogation room. Also killed was a police officer named Luba Luft. Securi-Corp removed the bodies and placed them in new locations, framing Mark Leonard Jadva and some local gang members for the two murders. Officer Runciter seems bent on pursuing the cover-up, but the memos indicate that he was "taken care of."

        

There are two settings before you begin. The first is "easy" or "hard," indicating the complexity of the route leading to the captive on each level. The other is "strategy" or "action," and it determines whether you want a puzzle/action combination or all action. I set the game to "hard" and "strategy."

   

The first mission begins.

     

The game begins in "Mission 1" with the four droids dropped in front of the City Records Office. There's no character creation, unlike Captive. The droids are named Brian, Charlie, Dave, and Axel. The interface, which is supposed to represent Trill looking at the screen of his "briefcase computer," is easily the most complicated we've seen in an RPG. I was still discovering buttons hours into the game. Small panels might have 10 or 12 options. It takes a long time to get used to it.

   

I think the interface would have been a nightmare for a contemporary CD32 player. To play solely with the controller means pressing a button to indicate that you want to use an interface option, then moving around the screen until the right button is highlighted (among a couple dozen possibilities), and then hitting another button. It's far easier with a mouse, which was apparently an option with the CD32, although I'm not sure how that doesn't ruin the purpose of a console in the first place. There's obviously no native keyboard support, but the WinUAE defaults for the CD32 map so nicely that I suspect controlling the game is far easier for me on a keyboard, emulating the controller, than for someone with an actual controller. For instance, the colored button group on the controller is automatically emulated with the corner buttons (7913) on the numberpad. Moving is done with the other numberpad buttons (8462). So with a single hand, I can both move and fight. I wish this were possible in all games of the Dungeon Master line.

       

An alternate interface arrangement.

     

There are a few cool interface elements. You can look up, down, right, and left at 45-degree angles. Droids can be split from the group into multiple smaller parties. The upper-left panel lets you change the configuration of the main screen into several different templates, which is necessary once the droids get various enhancements that have their own panels. There's not only an automap but also a method for loading destinations into your map and automatically traveling there by taxi.

   

I find the graphics a bit odd, almost disconcerting. They're designed abstractly, with a lot of sharp angles. They look like vector graphics, although that just might be the aesthetic. The buildings have a variety of wall textures along with bits of furniture that at first confused me because they weren't interactive. It's interesting to me how two recent games--Liberation and Perihelion--have both managed to evoke a cyberpunk aesthetic with two starkly different graphical approaches, Liberation more abstract and Perihelion more impressionistic.  

   

An NPC demands a bribe for a hint.

    

NPC dialogue is all-voiced on the CD32 version, which is easier than it sounds because there are only a few voices (at least, so far) and their assignment is randomized. The NPCs themselves look abstract and androgynistic. I can't even tell if they're supposed to represent people or robots. When you speak to them, you either get a female voice with a New York accent, male voice with a southern U.S. accent, and a male voice with a working-class English accent. In the cinematic, Trill speaks with a neutral American accent, the newscaster with BBC English, and Doltana with a heavy Scots. It's nice to know the future is so multi-cultural.

   

The Records Office had three small levels with a number of locked doors, keycards always found outside the doors that they opened. But there wasn't necessarily anything interesting on the other side. Sometimes there were objects and credits (the game's money comes on individual credit cards) but usually just uninteractive pieces of furniture. A couple of rooms had computers on which I could look up any city street and a variety of business locations.

   

There were also a couple of inexplicably hostile droids (or perhaps people) that I had to shoot. Combat is much like the first game except the droids come armed with pistols and one magazine, so there's no melee phase. The cool-down period after each action is all relatively short--short enough that one character can shoot repeatedly almost as fast as four characters can shoot together. Enemies sink into the floor and disappear when they die, sometimes leaving stuff behind. 

    

Shooting an inexplicably-hostile droid or person or something.

      

The droids take damage to individual body parts, which may be removed for healing or swapped with upgrades. Every action the droids take causes a small power drain. You have to recharge by finding an electrical outlet, which I did by kicking in random doors. This is the sort of game where you can burst into random houses, kill their occupants, and loot their stuff with no penalty, which is an odd feature given the supposedly altruistic nature of the quest.

   

As for finding the subtitular captive, I got a couple of generic hints. I was confused for a bit because I thought I was going to have to find my way to the Alpha Detention Center to rescue Jadva, but I soon realized that the cinematic can only be trusted for its general theme, not its specific facts. The captive in Mission 1 turns out to be named Toyogon, and his location is just a random building. Eventually, one droid told me that a woman in a bar might know something. Later, in a bar, I got a few more potential clues, but the place was so packed with people I had to kill some of them just to get back outside.

      

The first hint I got that the captive's name wasn't the same as in the backstory.

        

The city outside is enormous, nine sectors that are each (I think) 64 x 64. They sectors are organized into named streets with a few buildings, including shops, bars, city offices, police stations, and a lot of private houses. There are oddly two "layers" to the streets--an upper level and a lower level--and the entrances to buildings can be on either. There are occasional ladders connecting them, but I haven't figured out how to go down a ladder without taking damage. The streets that you walk on are the same ones that cars drive on, and if you're not careful, the party can get hit by a car and knocked off the upper layer.

   

Somewhere in the middle of exploration, I realized something that I had not seen in the manual or any of the interfaces: any indication of character development or leveling. Captive had a system in which you could spend experience on upgrades to your skills and attributes, but the sequel doesn't have anything like that. There are four attributes--strength, agility, dexterity, and intelligence--but they attach to the droid's individual parts rather than his overall "character." They increase by finding or buying better parts.

     

The droid's parts have attributes, but the droid does not.

       

This revelation vastly changed how I saw the game. As I've often said, without character development, I'm no longer an hourly employee; I'm a volunteer. This feeling is strengthened by the procedural generation, which, though impressive in concept, makes everything feel detached and soulless. I decided to look up how long the first mission takes. From online discussions and videos, it sounds like it's a minimum of around 6-8 hours, but I also discovered that there are apparently several versions of the game, some with a variety of bugs, and the one I had been playing for a few hours has a bug that makes the first mission unwinnable. Already feeling blah about the game and its lack of RPG status, and facing the prospect of starting over if I was going to cover it, I decided to convert this to a BRIEF and reject it.

   

I did watch some video to see how the first mission ends. After following a trail of clues of somewhat arbitrary length, the player eventually encounters an NPC in a police station with a data crystal that tells of the captive's specific location. Once you find him, he gives you evidence to give to the emperor.

        

Finding the captive. I hope the droids untied him after taking his evidence.

     

The final cinematic shows the droids and Trill docking with the imperial space station and demanding an audience with the emperor. After a few tense moments in which it looks like the station's droids are going to turn on Trill, the emperor appears and thanks Trill for bringing the evidence to his attention. The cinematic ends and the droids find themselves in "Mission 2." The city is reconfigured, so I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a different one entirely, maybe on a different planet. The droids have the equipment they found in the first mission. As a commenter recently pointed out, that includes the data crystal, so unless you drop it and play things straight, you can use it to go immediately to the second mission's captive.

     

That thing around his neck looks like it weighs 20 pounds.

       

I hope no one is too disappointed, but if I'm going to move through the 1990s, I need to be relentless about my definitions. I see Liberation: Captive II as a procedurally-generated action-adventure game rather than an RPG. We're certainly seeing some evolution in game cinematics, though.