Whale's Voyage: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

At least we got some closure on that damned heart. Jerome Doir is being mentioned here for the first time.

      

Whale's Voyage

Austria

Neo Software Produktions (developer); Flair Software Ltd. (European publisher); Pro One Software (U.S. publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Amiga CD32

Re-released in 1994 on same platforms on CD with extra cinematics/dialogue
Date Started: 2 June 2024

Date Ended: 29 June 2024

Total Hours: 22

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)    

     

Summary:

      

Whale's Voyage is an odd adventure/RPG/space trading hybrid in the MegaTraveller tradition, though with a bizarre, minimalist, cyberpunk aesthetic. It is not good at any of the subgenres that it tries to combine--excessively generous as a trading game, excessively linear as an RPG, and full of the types of illogical puzzles that adventure gamers hate. Promising elements like a unique character creation system and tactical ship-to-ship combat are ruined by issues of pacing and balance. Worst of all is the interface, which requires a joystick or keyboard emulation of a joystick.

       

*****

      

There wasn't much left to the game after the last session, but it still took me a while because I had to keep replaying so much of it. That's the theme for this game in general. The final number of hours for my particular Whale's Voyage was 22, but at least half that was spent re-doing things I'd already done because I screwed up something unforeseeable or because the next plot point didn't trigger.

     

The next stage on the quest was to get a member of the resistance out of the federation jail in the city of Dymy on Arboris. The jail is in the southern part of the city, and consists of multiple rooms and cells guarded by a variable number of federation soldiers. The main door is shut and locked when you first approach, so you have to wait for one of the soldiers to open it and start attacking you, then fight your way through them.

      

The piece of intel that brought us here.

      

Except there are far too many guards to fight your way through (at least, unless you do something unintuitive that I'll cover in a minute). Even with frequent retreating to the healing center on the planet, I got destroyed badly. They seem to never stop coming. If you wipe them all out, a new pack of about 10 respawns, and a third pack respawns when those 10 are dead.

    

I had my soldier using the plasma caster that I'd purchased on the pirate asteroid, and at some point--probably when I shot it by accident at a blank wall--I realized that you can kill enemies with it through walls. I don't know if this is true of other guns or not. I should have checked but I didn't. That went a long way to ending the difficulty of the battle. I just parked outside a corridor where they spawned and blasted them through the wall. Sometimes, my shot would kill not only the enemy immediately on the other side of the wall but the one beyond that.

      

Blasting a line of foes through a wall.

    

Once you get past the enemies, you find a row of locked cells. A keycard in a nearby room opens the cells. The problem was, they were all empty the first time I wiped out the enemies. I had apparently killed the resistance prisoner by accident. I reloaded and tried again, but again I accidentally killed him. I reloaded and kept my fighting far away from his cell. This time, he survived, but when I opened the cell, he was hostile and started blasting at me (apparently, they let him have a gun in his cell). I couldn't calm him down, and I had to reload again.

   

After I got it all sorted out, I figured out what was happening, but I didn't understand it at the time. I'll take most of the blame on this one. The description for the plasma caster does warn you that it affects enemies "in the area." I think it affects a 3-square radius from where you actually fire it. So you're not really shooting enemies through the wall so much as shooting the wall, and the enemies nearby get a "splash" effect. I kept killing the prisoner because he was in that radius. When I turned him hostile, it was because it caught him at the fringes of the radius at least once without killing him, but even a small amount of damage turned him hostile.

         

Our supposed ally attacks as we open his cell door.

        

Thus, I may have been able to solve the problem by just switching to another weapon. But I didn't understand the "area effect" issue at this point, so I looked at YouTube user Kikoskia's LP of the series, and I saw that he activated a Sonic Absorber before approaching the prison. I bought that ages ago and had never used it, figuring it was the solution to a puzzle that would make itself known. I guess it prevents the guards from hearing your assault, thus vastly limiting the number of them that you face. When I tried it myself, I only had to kill four or five of them instead of 30. It would be nice if the game had clued its use by explicitly telling me that the guards were shouting for reinforcements or something.

   

When I was done, the prisoner was alive and not hostile, although I think that's more of a coincidence than anything to do with the Absorber. Because there were fewer guards, I fought them further down the hallway and thus didn't catch the prisoner in the "splash."

     

Finally speaking to the prisoner.

      

The prisoner, named Ems Krull, told me that the federation was beginning an attack on the rebel's secret base on Lapis. He asked me to travel there and destroy the "cloaking device" that was concealing the federation's fleet. I'd find it, he said, in a "secret mine."

   

We traveled to Lapis and to the coordinates that he gave. The mine was pitch black, so we needed to turn on the Infrared Device to navigate. The mine was full of federation soldiers---at least as many as in the prison cells--and the wall pattern wasn't configured to allow shooting through the walls. I had to just stand and fight. 

       

For a few minutes, we just shot down this corridor.

     

After numerous reloads, I reached the end of the mines with two characters dead. The solution to destroy the cloaking device was to destroy three computers--for which I had to use the "Manipulate Computers" skill. This caused cracks to appear on the computer screens and outer casings. I got a chuckle out of the fact that a character needs a special computer-based skill to destroy computers, and in doing so, he seems to believe that damaging the monitor somehow kills the program or erases the data.

       

This seems like it would be a scene in a bad action movie. "Move aside! I know how to manipulate computers!" SMASH. "What did you do!?" "I manipulated it."

    

But I guess it did. The head of the secret service, General Noth, beamed in and said: "You cannot stop me! Har har har!!" Then, just as quickly, he beamed away.

    

We got out of there and healed our dead characters in the city. Until we resurrected them, I couldn't turn the Infrared Device off, as it had been activated from a dead character's inventory, and you can't get into that inventory--even to trade or drop items--if the character is dead.

          

We gladly pay to make the world look right again.

     

After that, I was lost. We had no more leads, no numbers to call. I decided to go somewhere, I can't remember. It doesn't really matter, because when you try to leave Lapis after this event, you get attacked by the federation fleet.

       

Note that you can barely see my ship (left-center).

       

The battle consists of two waves, each with six ships. They are deadly. If you end a round within firing range of a single one of them, they will blast through your shields and destroy the Whale with shots to spare. I was counting squares, trying to figure out how to pick them off one by one, ending each turn in precisely the right place to avoid damage but still set myself up for the next turn. Then I realized I hadn't tried my new Cloaking Device. It completely trivialized the battle. Enemies couldn't see me with the device activated, so they just fired randomly. As long as I turned it on at the beginning of each turn, I could sit within full range of all of the enemies and pick them off at my leisure.

    

I never really figured out what the Hologram device accomplished, and like I reported last time, the Instant Bomb never seemed to do anything at all.

        

I won anyway.

            

Again, with the fleet destroyed, I still had no clues or leads. No one called to give me anything new to do. It's possible, likely even, that if I had done a circuit of the planets and talked to all the NPCs again, someone would have given me the final mission. But by now I was sick of the game, and I had looked at walkthroughs so often that I figured it didn't hurt to look at one more. I learned that the final stage was to take a bomb back to the computer room on Sky Boulevard and set it off.

    

We'd already bought a bomb and left it sitting on the shop counter on the asteroid, so we returned there to pick it up, then flew to Sky Boulevard. The computer room was still open and unguarded from our last visit. Mr. Wellsgolf took a few shots at us as we walked past.

   

We planted the bomb by one of the computers, and the game started a countdown timer from 500--moving fast. We tried to beam out, but something was blocking the transmission. We had to flee back to the center of the station and beam out from there. That produced the endgame message at the top of this entry. The closing credits have lyrics from "Money for Nothing." I honestly would have thought that "Money for Nothing" came out after 1993, if only just a couple of years after, but it turns out that it was released in 1985. Bloody hell.

          

In a world of teleporters, who needs to waste time shooting thermal exhaust ports?

       

Whale's Voyage is a game of horrendous missed opportunities. With a little more creativity and effort, the authors could have created a series of puzzles that called upon the creativity of the player and the chosen skills of the characters. With a less deterministic and favorable trading system, they could have created a robust economy that had the player analyzing trades before almost every voyage. They had all the ingredients necessary for a tactical ship combat system, but it needed more options and better balance.

        

They could have made a much more interesting game out of this.

     

The game has the mechanics of an RPG but not the reality of it. There are only a handful of battles in the game, and they're all scripted. Only one character can fight at a time, and his only asset is his weapon; there are no pieces of armor or other inventory items that make any sort of difference. Traps and mines can only be used in precise locations as puzzle-solvers. I admit I didn't try grenades.

    

Finally, the interface is such a crime against nature that it beggars belief that it wasn't fixed for the CD version. And yet it's infuriating because it has so much promise. I particularly like the ability to set party roles, and making certain interface elements dependent on those roles, or on using certain inventory items. But I don't understand how even joystick players enjoyed moving a barely-visible cursor around to more than 20 buttons clustered into one-third of the screen. And those stupid temperature and oxygen content gauges sat there on the screen for the entire game and were never used for anything.

   

Aaaargh.

   

GIMLET:

     

• 4 points for the game world. There's some promise here, but it needed more of a backstory, particularly to make the player feel good about blowing up an entire space station at the end. I did appreciate the detailed planetary descriptions, but what you actually find on the planets is underwhelming.

        

The story is good with geography, not so good with politics.

       

• 2 points for character creation and development. An interesting character creation system is mostly ruined by having none of the classes, races, or skills matter much during the game itself. Development was sporadic and sudden, and it never felt like it was making us stronger or more capable (probably because of the game's linearity). Most of the skills are unused or used once.

• 3 points for very frustrating NPC interaction. The dialogue on both sides rarely makes any sense. Why have separate options for "Hi" and "Hey you!" but not separate responses? Why act as if the player has options and then force them to go through everything. Why so many NPCs who just yell at you? Why have bartenders who never want to serve you a drink? Why is everybody so weird?

       

Good talk.

       

• 2 points for encounters and foes. "Foes" are just people who blast at you. There are no tactics but to blast back. The non-combat puzzles are illogical and forced.

• 2 points for combat. I've already explained how that was ruined.

• 4 points for equipment. One of the game's strengths is the ability to look at any piece of equipment and get a full description, including statistics if you have the "Identify Weapon" skill. The game has a dearth of standard wearable/usable RPG equipment, but I like "equipment" that enhances the UI, particularly the varieties of RoomScanners. Amberstar and Ambermoon have a similar approach to making you earn your GUI.

    

The best part of the game.

       

• 2 points for an economy with promising elements but ruined by lack of balance. Did the authors really imagine people were going to spend time mining with trade so favorable?

• 2 points for a main quest line that gives you no options. I saw exactly two side quests, both of them kind of stupid in one way or another, and I'm not inclined to give an extra point for those.

      

The end to one of those side quests.

      

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I give no points for the interface. Every image of the Whale looked nice, but regular exploration graphics didn't do much for me. They try to achieve more than the resolution supports. There were a few nice sound effects, but not only can you not turn them on or off independently of the music, you can't even turn the music off.

• 2 points for gameplay. It gets that for having a modest length. But most of the verdict here is negative: too linear, not replayable, and alternately moronically easy and absolutely exasperating.

   

That brings us to a final score of 25. 

           

The Whale looks a bit like Moya from Farscape here.

          

Whale's Voyage was extensively reviewed in European magazines of the period, with a low of 35% in the Swedish Datormagazin (August 1993) and a high of 85% in the French Joystick (March 1994). In general, magazines that rated the CD32 version tended to rate it higher than the regular Amiga version, which tended to get higher ratings than the DOS version. CD32 reviewers seemed to be happy to have something to review other than simple action games (this was the first game with RPG elements for the platform; there would only be a handful of others). A number of reviewers were encouraging of an Austrian developer entering the market.

      

The lowest review for which I could find full text online, is from the August 1993 CU Amiga. Reviewer Paul Presley gave it 45%. The review starts:

     

Let's see, how do you best describe Whale's Voyage? Hmm . . . take Elite. Now take all the bits that made Elite good . . . and throw them out. Next reduce the hundreds of visitable planets to six and add a sub-standard Eye of the Beholder routine to simulate planet exploring. Hey presto. Whale's Voyage. And boy does it flounder.

    

The rest of the review finds some praise for the character creation process and some of the graphics but basically just mocks the game. 

   

On the other end of the scale, the Joystick review came in at 85%, but I don't get the impression that the reviewer got very far. He seemed to regard it more as a trading game than anything else. Like me, he contrasted the nice space-based graphics with less than pleasant planetary graphics. Not a word about the interface unless I mistranslated something.

         

I didn't translate all the reviews, but I couldn't find any that had anything to say about the control scheme. How did no one else note how awful it was? Am I the only one who thinks it's awful? 

     

A shot from Whale's Voyage II.There's a mouse cursor, everyone has a weapon, and the dialogue options actually make sense. So far, so good.

         

Though not publishing many more RPG or RPG hybrids, Neo would be around for a while, with a variety of action, simulation, and strategy games throughout the 1990s. Other than Whale's Voyage II, it doesn't appear that any of them are RPGs. The company was acquired by Take Two Interactive in 2001. Take Two owns Rockstar Games, and they rebranded Neo as Rockstar Vienna. The studio handled German conversions of series like Max Payne and Grand Theft Auto before they were abruptly closed in 2006. Lead developer Hannes Seifert continued in the gaming industry with credits on the Hitman series by IO Interactive through 2018. His LinkedIn profile shows him currently working for Riot Games.

      

1995 saw the sequel to Whale's Voyage, subtitled Die Übermacht ("The Superiority"). It was released only in German, although there have been fan translations. I watched some YouTube videos of the game, and it seems to have promise. I don't know if it has any better keyboard controls, but it at least supports a mouse. The graphics are clearer even with a switch to continuous movement instead of tiled movement. The exploration window is more interactive. All characters can attack in combat. Dialogue seems less bizarre. I won't say I'm "looking forward" to it, but at least it's possible that I shouldn't dread it.