Game 526: Psionics (1993)

If I were a software developer, I would never release "V1.0" of anything. Even if it was 1.0, I'd call it 1.2 or 1.3 so my audience wouldn't think they were getting the first draft.

       

Psionics

United States

Nachos Software (developer)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 20 July 2024

Date Ended: 20 July 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)    

       

Psionics is a very quick, simple RPG written in QuickBASIC. It was written by an Adam Stanchos, who apparently decided to lean in to the obvious mangling of his name and call his label Nachos Software. It was 21:00 when I typed that last sentence. I stared at it for a second, left my computer, drove 30 minutes to a supermarket that stays open until 22:00, bought the ingredients to make nachos, came home, cooked them, and returned to the computer with a generous plate, which I am now eating. Irene thinks I'm a lunatic, but I bet at least one of you is off making your own nachos right now.

      

You bastard.

     

Stanchos lived in El Paso, Texas, and distributed his games as freeware. For $10, you could get a printed manual and--ha!--a cluebook. I've been able to find two other titles credited to Stanchos: a space shooter called Red Baron (1998) and an RPG sequel to Psionics (using an update of the same interface) called Gene Splicing (1998).

    

Psionics isn't a great game--it's too short and simple--but it tells a competent story with decent graphics and a perfectly usable interface. At some unknown point in the future, humans have started developing psionic abilities. The PC is one of them. He has agreed to travel to a starbase called Nexus to be studied by a group of curious scientists. A couple of days of tests proceed uneventfully. Then the PC is awakened one night by sounds of screams and a power outage. He discovers that monsters have escaped their laboratory cages and are attacking the station personnel. He must fight his way through the monsters and escape the station.

         

From the opening narration.

     

Character creation consists of rolling for values between 1 and 10 for strength, intelligence, agility, and endurance; choosing a gender; selecting a portrait; and giving the character a name. The game also randomly generates your maximum hit points and PSI points. I never got more than 3 PSI.

      

I meant to go with the bald guy, but I messed up.

     

You start the game in your sleeping chambers, a 2 x 2 room. The interface uses a tiled, first-person view with a few buttons. The game supports a mouse, but all its commands can also be called by simply hitting their first letter. (This is how to design an interface. Why is it so hard for some developers?) You can save anywhere and have one save slot.

        

The game begins.

      

You open the door and head out into the hallway. You immediately come upon your sponsor, Dr. Gilliand, being eaten by mutated lab rats. You can choose to help him or leave him. He dies either way, but if you help him, you have to fight the rats. If you do help, he tells you to get off Nexus, but it's not like you couldn't figure that out for yourself.

        

The only role-playing choice in the game.

      

Enemies attack with regularity throughout the game. There are only seven or eight types, including jumbo-sized tarantulas, Vordoxian serpents, mad dogs, deranged baboons, and Zandorian dragons. Some of these come in "mutated" varieties, which are harder. They attack in packs of one to four. In battle, you have only three options: fight with a weapon (or, at the beginning, with your hands), make a psionic attack, or run away. Psionic attacks never miss and do the most damage--almost always killing enemies in one shot--but you can only make as many psionic attacks as you have PSI points. 

           

Most of the game's enemies.

        

And combat options.

      

You get experience for each enemy that you kill, and you level up at reasonably tight intervals. Leveling up gives you an extra point to a random attribute and more maximum health. Your maximum PSI points only increase if your intelligence increases, which mine never did. PSI points do recharge fairly quickly as you move about the station, but you still need to resort to regular weapons in a lot of battles.

        

My final level-up.

    

The game starts on Level 5 of a five-level space station, and the hardest part is surviving long enough to find a weapon. The first weapon you find, on Level 5, is a dart gun. Later, on lower levels, you find a laser pistol, a laser rifle, and an automatic laser rifle in that order. You only find two types of armor: a shield belt and a suit of Kevlar. There are also assorted healing packs, but they're curiously underpowered. Fortunately, you regain health at a rate of 1 point per 10 moves, which is generally enough to stay ahead of enemies as long as you judiciously run from battles with four enemies.

    

I only mapped Level 3, which occupies 22 x 10 coordinates but doesn't use nearly all that space. I don't know for sure that all the levels are the same size, but none of them felt much larger or smaller. I never found any secret doors. If they exist, finding them isn't necessary to progress.

     

Level 3 of the Nexus starbase.

      

That's really all there is to the mechanics. The story unfolds as you explore the levels. On Level 5, you find a trashed laboratory with cage doors torn off their hinges. You find an elevator, which will take you to Levels 4 and 3.

   

On Level 4, you find a security card necessary for some of the doors on the lower levels, including the door to the exit. On Level 3, you see a member of the station personnel run to a particular door, swipe his security card, and disappear inside. If you follow him, you discover that you're in a shuttle hangar where you can make your escape--but only if you have a shuttle key.

   

More elevators go down to Levels 2 and 1. In a back room on Level 1, you find a woman looting an office for a shuttle key. When confronted, she says that she's another psychic, but for some reason bitter about being treated like a "guinea pig." After reading the minds of the scientists and discovering that they intended to dismiss her because she was "unstable," she deliberately melted the locks on the doors to the animal cages and caused the whole crisis. 

         

Better for who?

      

You have to defeat the "screwed up gal" in combat--she uses psionic attacks, of course--to get the shuttle key.

      

The author is at least on-the-nose with his naming.

      

After that, it's a simple matter to make your way up to Level 3 and into the shuttle bay. There, you meet a grotesque creature with the generic name of "genetically-engineered being." Ironically (given the name of the game) he is immune to psionic attacks, so you have to defeat him with your rifle, which takes at least six rounds. The only real difficulty I had in the game was restoring my hit points to their maximum before taking on the creature. I kept spinning in place outside his door, but I got attacked by other creatures and kept losing the points I'd regained.

      

Should have called the game Laser Guns, then.

     

Once the creature is dead, the game narrates the ending: You climb into the shuttle, activate it with the key, and fly away. "Leaving behind the horrors of Nexus, you are finally safe. The danger over." Then the words "THE END" come up on the screen, and you're back at the DOS prompt. 

      

The somewhat morose winning screen.

     

The whole thing took me less than 2 hours. I give it a 21 on the GIMLET. It does best (4) in the "game world" category for telling a story that I hadn't encountered before with a beginning, middle, and end. I like the interface and the monster portraits, though none of the other graphics are anything special, and the piercing sound effects are actively hostile (3). Character development and overall gameplay (modest difficulty, certainly doesn't drag) are worth 3s. There's no economy (0), and everything else gets a 1 or 2.

    

Psionics frankly feels a bit like a demo for a more extensive game, and perhaps that's what we get with Gene Splicing (1999).  I can't get it to run--it freezes on the "Nachos" screen--but MobyGames has some screenshots, and I paged through the game manual. It seems to take place in the same universe. There, the PC is an agent for the Space Security Administration. Combat is a bit more complex, as is inventory, and you have multiple characters in the party. If I ever get to 1999, I'll figure out how to emulate it then.

     

*****

     

If anyone has the hardware, time, and willingness to extract files from an original Apple II 5 1/4-inch floppy disk and render them as a .dsk file, please email me (crpgaddict@gmail.com). Thanks!