Alien Fires: Won! (with Final Rating)

Wow! I get to go to a planet with a moon? No way!

     

Alien Fires: 2199 AD

Canada

Jagware (developer and original publisher); Paragon (later publisher)

Released in 1987 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2010
Date Ended: 11 April 2017

Total Hours: 11

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 23

Ranking at Time of Posting: 90/248 (36%)

Alien Fires: 2199 AD has haunted me for over 6 years. For all this time, I've secretly thought that I didn't get very far because I wasn't good enough, or patient enough, or just didn't "get" it. I let myself be lured into the idea that a game this bizarre must have hidden depths.
     

Everyone in this game learns the same jokes.

     

When it's all over, you basically have a 1-hour game that stretches into 6 hours because of all the reloading that you have to do, a slew of useless items (the game promises adventure game-style inventory puzzles that never materialize), a dialogue system that you don't even need, and a nonsensical plot. I'm partly frustrated that it took me 6 years to buckle down and win it, and partly frustrated that I even bothered to do that.

Alien Fires turns out to be organized into 6 small levels: three on Galaxy's End and three on the Octo space station where Kurtz is hiding. Once you take an elevator or ladder between levels, you cannot return to earlier ones.
    

Your goal in each level.

      
The NPCs mostly exist to tell you useless things like "take the ladder to the next level"; none of them really say anything essential to the plot except the final bosses. Most of them are just goofy. Nonetheless, the artwork for the creatures--credited to Ray Larabie and Tim Cearns--remains bizarre and interesting throughout the game. A few examples:
      

Despite his smack talk, he never actually attacks you.

A muscular guy with rabbit ears gives me some intel on Samuel Kurtz.

I thought the "snake sign" would have something to do with him. He gladly took it, but he didn't give me anything for it.

Indeed, no matter what you say to him, he responds with "Argh!"

     

Between levels, at least in the DOS version, you get threatening messages from Octo agents and Kurtz himself. Starting on the third level, each level has a gumball machine near the entrance that you can return to repeatedly to restore yourself to max health. (Some of the gumballs are poisonous and you need a high "understanding" score to distinguish them.)
    

Who knew that gumballs, which you don't even swallow, had such miraculous healing abilities?

    

Combat never gets interesting. You just mash the SPACE bar in the DOS version or click the "fight" button in the Amiga version until the enemy is dead or you are. Dodging just delays the inevitable end. Combat on the first two levels is fatal to the player about 75% of the time, and you have to be prepared for lots of reloading. Slowly, as you gain experience and levels, your max hit points increase and your abilities go up. You start finding better weapons. I found combat on Levels 3-5 to be much easier--trivial in some places. The last level returns to an extraordinarily high level of difficulty, particularly for the final battle.
    

Combat with a level 3 creature who respawns, allowing unlimited grinding if you want.

    

To win, I switched to the DOS version so didn't have to listen to the synthesized speech anymore. It would have been torture for the big speeches at the end. The DOS version comes with a little mini-map of the room you're in, showing the placement of doors, so that's a nice bonus. There's also a feature in the DOS edition by which hitting the TAB key switches you to incremental rather than continuous movement. This makes it easier to tell if you've visited each tile in each room, which you really have to do to ensure that you find all the items. Finally, saving is easier in the DOS version because you can keep playing after you save. In the Amiga version, you can only "quit and save."

As for those items: All that time wasted finding Mangle Tangle's pocketwatch so you can get his Octo knife is mostly wasted, as on Level 2 you get some significant melee weapon upgrades, starting with an "electrosword" and progressing to a "power axe." You start to find blasters on Level 2 as well, which progress to other ranged weapons like "devastator" and "ripper." The most powerful ranged weapon is simply called "rifle." These weapons require ammunition, which is in short supply.
     

This awesome-looking weapon turned out to be not that good.

    

There are a few pieces of armor to find as well, including a helmet, a set of combat armor, and a shield. These items take damage in combat and soon become useless. If I played the game again, I'd know to save them for the really difficult fights.
    

Finding a suit of body armor.

    

I found a ton of other items that I never used: a passcard, a remote device, a snake sign, a sapphire, and so forth. They seem like they're going to be necessary to solve puzzles, but then it turns out there really are no puzzles.
     

This looked awesome and had, as far as I can tell, no use.

     

Level 2 has a bar, where the bartender, named Whitey, tells you how to get to the next level for 100 credits--the only time in the game that you spend money. But like everything with NPCs, you don't need to know what he says. You can simply push past him to find the ladder to the next level (which, by the way, in the DOS version, you use with the undocumented "9" key on the keypad).
    

Notably, this is Whitey himself telling me that I ought to talk with Whitey.

    

Level 3 is supposedly the "mining level," where the ratio of NPCs to hostile enemies inverts significantly. You fight your way through a linear set of rooms, culminating in a docking bay or something, with ships that take you from Galaxy's End to the space station. At this point, the between-level messages come from "Julian Arias, the Lord Minister of Octo" who taunts you that even if you fight your way through Level 4 successfully, you'll never find the hidden ladder.
    

A space dock transitions you from Galaxy's End (the first three levels) to the space station (the last three).

           

"Julian Arias," who never actually appears, smack-talks me between levels.

     

The ladder on Level 4 isn't even hidden. It's in the middle of an octagonal room. Level 5 just has more monsters and weapon and armor upgrades; nothing special.

As you take the ladder to Level 6, Kurtz himself threatens you, claiming that he'll detonate his  "time warp" and "destroy us and all of time."
     

How are you speaking to me, exactly?

     

This last level returns to nightmarish combat difficulty, although if you're willing to save-scum a bit, you can learn routes that avoid the toughest monsters, including some tank-like robots that I hardly ever defeated.

In a weird encounter, one of the rooms has a "'97 Chevy" which can be activated with a set of keys you find on Level 2. If you do this, the game goes to the "game over" screen as if you died.

    

A weird and pointless detour.

    

You have to make your way to the east end of the level and disable Kurtz's time device, then enter an adjacent room to confront him.
     

     

Kurtz has a brief speech about the "horrors of mankind" and how his time device will erase humans from history. Combat with him begins. He's ridiculously easy to kill; I'm not sure he even damaged me in combat.

        

      

After Kurtz dies, you get a message that while you've done well, "it's not over yet." Instead, you next have to "confront your most dangerous opponent--an evil Time Lord named Death."

    

Huh?

    

"Death" is freaking impossible. He defeated me 15 times in a row before I finally squeaked out a victory. My power axe hardly ever hit him. I suspect that the best way to win is to ensure you have plenty of ammo and at least one item of armor before the battle begins. I briefly thought about starting over, but I didn't feel like doing all that early-level reloading again.

    

I believe this is what we call an "11th-hour villain."

    

After I finally defeated him, the final message (at the top of the screen) blinked in for about one second and then disappeared. Cursing and unwilling to go through another 15 fights just to get the screen again, I hex-edited Iota Tau to 9,999 hit points just so I could win again, lower the CPU speed, and capture the shot this time.

     

I promise I won for real the first time.

     

When you win, the game gives you the screen at the top of this post, then asks to save your character one final time. I guess the creators envisioned Alien Fires as the beginning of a Time Lord series.

In a GIMLET, the game earns:

• 3 points for a derivative, bizarre game world and back story.

• 3 points for character creation and development. I never quite understood how the game decided which of my attributes would increase upon leveling, but you do start to feel notably more powerful as the game progresses.

     

My character near the end of the game.

     

• 3 points for NPC interaction. The parser is mildly impressive, though it turns out that almost all NPCs say the same things in response to the same questions. NPCs on Level 5 will happily tell you how to seek Whitey on Level 2, for instance. In the end, you don't really need any of it; you can just walk from ladder to ladder.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The foes are interestingly drawn, no question, but they don't really distinguish themselves much in combat and there are no roleplaying encounters.

      

That tail looks like it would really slow you down.

      

• 1 point for combat, a mind-numbing, button-mashing affair in which luck plays too much of a role.

• 2 points for a few types of equipment, much of it useless.

     

My inventory later in the game. The "bluelight," passcard, snake sign, and remote unit never did anything.

     

• 1 point for an economy that only matters on the first two levels, and even then only to get a hint you don't actually need.

• 2 points for a main quest with no branches or choices.

• 4 points for graphics, sound and interface. The graphics are more "interesting" than "good." There's a minimum of sound in both versions. While the keyboard interface (or keyboard/mouse on the Amiga) is good, movement in the game, and having to wait for NPCs and objects to render, is a bit of a pain. The Amiga version has better environmental graphics, sound, and music, but a notably worse interface and the inability to understand what the NPCs are saying most of the time. I think they balance out.

• 2 points for gameplay, mostly for being over quickly. It's linear, non-replayable, and far too punishing.

That gives us a final score of 23.

    

The box art doesn't quite have anything to do with the game.

           

The only contemporary review I've been able to find comes from the January 1989 Questbusters newsletter. Reviewer Steven King says he was excited to play a game that promised a time travel plot, but "the excitement stops when you put down the manual" and find yourself in "a rather pedestrian maze game." He goes on to cover the difficult, boring combat and the movement difficulties before concluding that "it is just a skeletal game apparently thrown together to cover a basic concept that didn't have nearly enough thought invested in it."

Even though it didn't amount to much, I have to give it credit for breaking the mold in a few areas, particularly in the NPC dialogue and navigation. Rooms built from square tiles, and movement at square angles, will remain the norm all the way through the 1990s. This game offers weird puzzle-piece shaped rooms and the ability to turn in 45-degree increments.
     

It'll be many years before we see navigation like this again.

    

The manual suggests that this game was meant to be the beginning of a series of titles involving the Time Lords. It encourages you to save your winning character so you'll be able to use him in "new adventures." But no further titles were forthcoming, and this ended up being the only game from Jagware and the two principal developers, Jeff Simpson and Sky Matthews. Thanks to some sleuthing from commenter dzdt, we know that Simpson and Matthews were in 8th grade together at an Ottawa boarding school in 1980, so they would have been a couple of years out of high school when they wrote Alien Fires. Incidentally, I think this is the earliest RPG from a Canadian developer.

While we may never have heard from Mr. Simpson or Mr. Matthews again, graphic designer Ray Larabee went on to a long career in graphic design in the gaming industry. He's credited for artwork in several expansions of the original Grand Theft Auto (1999) and for art direction in the original Max Payne (2001), among many others. He eventually specialized in font design, and his fonts have been used in games all the way through last year (Neon Chrome, Pony Island). His co-graphic designer, Tim Cearns, continued in the discipline but not in the gaming industry. I don't know which of the two deserves the most credit for the bizarre visuals that remain a highlight of Alien Fires.
      

I'm glad to have put this one to bed after all these years, even if it didn't live up to its odd, psychedelic, cyberpunk promise. Moving on now to Alternate Reality: The Dungeon.

Revisiting: Alien Fires: 2199 AD

    
One day, probably, we'll have computers designing video games entirely on their own, combining modules from popular engines and stringing together bits and pieces of stories and NPC dialogue. At first, those games designed by computers will be completely identifiable as such, but eventually we'll start doubting, and some years after that, we'll be totally fooled.

Alien Fires: 2199 AD doesn't fool me. It was designed by robots. I don't know who "Jeff Simpson" and "Sky Matthews" are supposed to be (I truly don't; Google searches for the most promising subjects don't have anything in their histories about Jagware or game design), but I suspect they're pseudonyms for an advanced AI that combined all of these weird elements into a game.

The AI certainly had access to a lot of pop culture. You can sense it trying to create the perfect assembly of elements that young male players of the 1980s would like. For the plot, it crunched the numbers and figured out that 70% of video game-playing nerds were Dr. Who fans, so it made the main character a "Time Lord" spinning through space in a TARDIS-like vehicle. What do Time Lords look like? We'll make them look like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen! Where should the game take place? Let's search our nerd database again, and--of course! The Hitchhiker's Guide series! We'll just change the Restaurant at the End of the Universe to "Galaxy's End." The AI was on a roll.
   

The death screen makes about as much sense as anything else in this game.

    
An alarm bell went off. We're getting a bit too nerdy here. Time to spice things up, perhaps with some material from a pretentious film that young 1980s edgelords like to quote. Apocalypse Now. Perfect! The Time Lord will be on a mission to find Dr. Kurtz. Let's throw some rock and roll into the soundtrack; teenagers love that. NPCs? No problem! Let's just head to the database. Alice in Wonderland, WKRP in Cincinnati, Looney Toons--there's NPCs everywhere! Let's mash 'em together in a multi-level dungeon and we've got ourselves a game.

But where a computer AI could get the elements of a game right, it just couldn't get the tone. Join me in watching this video of the first 4.5 minutes of gameplay (courtesy of sometimes-CRPG Addict commenter Felipe Pepe) and tell me that it doesn't fail the Turing Test.

Those four and a half minutes are about as far as I got when I attempted the game in 2010, and I hope you can understand why. By the time you get to "Dr. Fever," who seems to think he's an organic being and calls you a "boob," your ability to absorb any more of this wackiness has been thoroughly crushed. (Though I do appreciate the part where the elders "see much promise" in a Time Lord who died in 4 minutes and spent most of that time saying "f@#$ you" to every NPC he met.)

Jokes about the creator of the game aside--and I really am only 50% joking--we of course see some starkly original elements in that video. It clearly capitalizes on the superior (for the era) graphic and sound capabilities of the one-year-old Amiga. It has a complex text parser that recognizes full sentences and delivers responses in fully-digitized audio. It has NPCs who get offended when you swear at them. It has continuous movement in the corridors, something we'd only seen up to this point in (I believe) Alternate Reality: The City (1985). Of course, as we'll see, "innovative" doesn't always mean "good."

Let's back up for those who didn't watch the video or who didn't see everything. The backstory casts you as an apprentice Time Lord sent on a mission to Galaxy's End to search for a scientist named Samuel Kurtz. He's created an "awesome device" that "threatens to twist the very fabric of time itself."
    

The introductory screens give the player his mission.

   

Character creation is a process of deciding a name, then allocating 99 points of experience to a group of 7 skills, all of which start at 20: fighting, marksmanship, diplomacy, dexterity, understanding, tracking, and quickness. These skills can go up and down during the game based on the assessment of the "Time Lord Elders." Since so much of the game seems to involve talking to NPCs, I made "diplomacy" my highest skill.
     

     

The next screen shows some kind of octagonal spacecraft, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the player's transport to Galaxy's End or Galaxy's End itself. It oddly says "Octo" on it, which seems to be the name of the organization your enemies work for, so I guess maybe it's the station. Whatever the case, a few presses of the arrow keys puts you in the station's corridors.
    

    
A few steps later, you meet your first NPC: Tristar the Mechanic. "Hello," he says. "I hope you have come to help us. There is not much time. You must go to the next level and talk to Angel. But beware: there are Octo agents everywhere."

The speech is fully digitized in the Amiga version, and while there's an initial "wow" factor to this, it swiftly becomes old as you have to ask the same question several times to understand the answer. The digitizer isn't very good. "Supplies" is pronounced as "su-PLEES," for instance. Since the dialogue is digitized, and not recorded, the text must exist in the game files, but there's no way to simply display it. Thus, for all the superiority in graphics and sound of the Amiga version, I'd almost rather play the DOS version where the dialogue is in text and I can actually understand it.
    

Typing a question to Tristar the mechanic.

    
The parser is pretty sophisticated. You can't just feed single keywords, except those that constitute complete sentences, such as "HELLO" or, as we saw in the video, "DIE." In the case of Tristar, "OCTO" and "AGENT" produces nothing but "I don't know." But ask "WHAT IS OCTO," and you get an answer. This was my dialogue with Tristar:

• WHO ARE YOU? I am Tristar, the chief and only mechanic of Galaxy's End, at your service.
• HOW ARE YOU? I am okay, I guess.
• WHAT IS OCTO? Octo is a scientific research company. They are very secretive. They often land here for supplies and shipments of [something] from the mine.
• WHO IS ANGEL? Angel is a reporter for Scientific Galaxian. She's here doing some research on Octo.
• WHERE IS THE ELEVATOR? The elevator is in the elevator shaft.
• WHERE IS THE ELEVATOR SHAFT? [Several unintelligible words.] You must talk to [something like "Witty"]; he will tell you how to get there.

The next room had Jessica, a starship pilot. She had most of the same responses as Tristar, except in response to "WHO ARE YOU"? Further along was Dr. Fever, and then Mango-Tango the rabbit-horse, who offered to trade his hunting knife for a pocket watch.
   

I will always remember this game for Mango-Tango, the pipe-smoking rabbit-horse.

    
The corridors of Galaxy's End are twisty and angled, with numerous alcoves, nooks, and secret doors. Impossible to map using conventional means, I ended up hand-drawing the level when I got lost, and this is what I came up with, although the proportions are all off. I know there's missing stuff because my map doesn't have a way back to Tristar or the airlock I entered in.
     

My attempts to map the first level.

     
As you come upon objects or NPCs, they often take a few seconds to render, and by then you've generally pressed one of the movement keys so that you end up moving past them. You then have to turn around and re-enter their squares.
    

Mango-Tango gives me his "octo knife." Everything is "octo" in this game.

    
Eventually, I found Mango-Tango's watch and got his hunting knife, my first weapon. It did nothing to help me in combat against the occasional random Octo agents I encountered. Combat in this version requires you to right-click, select your weapon, and then click furiously on "fight," watching as you and your opponent do damage to your various body parts. I've lost every fight so far and had to reload.
    

I don't even have time to get a screen shot before I die.

    
I had hoped to close this entry having gotten further in the game than my 2010 counterpart, but alas I can't seem to find the elevator. I've found this weird looking graffiti-covered wall that looks like it could be the elevator; compare it to the image below of the DOS version elevator.
  

Where I'm stuck.

The elevator in the DOS version.

     
Unfortunately, my interface disappears when I walk up to it, none of my keyboard commands do anything, and I can't get it to work. I've tried clicking all around the screen and off it. So, barring rescue from someone who knows what they're doing in the Amiga version, I'll probably have to switch back to the DOS version, which has the advantage of readable text.

Tera was a weird game that turned out somewhat interesting, so I do want to figure this out. But with NPCs like Mango-Tango, Speedy Gonzalez, and Dr. Fever, the groan quotient here is pretty high.

Time so far: 4 hours

Alien Fires: WTF -- and Beyond!

I don't have the graphics editing skills to make this $&*# up.

   

[Edit from the future: Don't read this. Read instead my updated look at the game from 2017: Post 1 and Post 2.]

     

Normally, I like to save Barton for the end of a game, but I had to take a break from actually trying to play Alien Fires to see what he thought about this completely WTF game. I am gratified to see the word "bizarre" in the first sentence. He mentions the free-form dialog but also a number of features that I don't have, probably because they weren't included in the DOS port: a cool soundtrack, and a beating-heart effect that tells you when you're about to die. I wonder what year we have to get into before the DOS/PC version isn't the worst version of every game.

He goes on to say, "Alien Fires is an extremely difficult game...I certainly wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I've never played another game that had the same otherworldly ambiance." See, Barton has a way with words. He says "otherworldly ambiance." I say, "WTF?"

It's going to be a long six hours.

Since yesterday, I managed to find the pocket watch--the huge pocket watch--sought by our rabbit-horse friend, Mangle Tangle.

    

I'm late, I'm late...for a very important hernia operation.

In return for the watch, I got an "octo knife." It was nice to finally have a weapon because I kept running into Octo agents in the hallways and getting killed. Let's talk about combat for a second. Barton calls it a "furious affair." He's right. Once you engage in it, you have to keep mashing the "attack" key (in my case, the spacebar), hoping to score more hits than your opponent within the roughly 2.3 seconds that combat lasts. I have yet to win.

Never bring an octo knife to a sword/pulse rifle fight.

While I was happy to get the knife, it introduced a new problem: Mangle Tangle the rabbit-horse decided he didn't like me. I might have accidentally hit the space bar (attack) while standing in front of him. Whatever the cause, he kept showing up, blocking the hallways, and killing me. I was unable to use his own knife against him to any effect.

Feel free not to.

When you get killed the Time Lords resurrect you and send you on back to the beginning. There's some more WTF stuff going on in that screen shot. Do they have my soul in a test tube or something? Unfortunately, this doesn't make Mangle Tangle any less hostile, and I kept dying over and over. If there's a way to turn a character un-hostile after he attacks you, or skirt around him, I haven't found it. Ultimately, I had to re-start with a new character.

The next time around, I realized that I'd been neglecting the "examine" key, which tells you a little about the people in front of you.

That clears up the whole "droid" thing.

I also found another clue about the evil Octo corporation from a hand on a ship that the company had confiscated.

After retrieving Mangle Tangle's pocket watch for the second time and getting his knife again, I found the elevator to the second level, where Alien Fires made a reasonably funny joke:

"The jerk gets off at Level 2 and the elevator continues on."

Ominously, the game congratulated me for this achievement and warned me that the rest of the game wouldn't be as easy as Level 1. Oh, goodie.

I'm glad I'm not supposed to be undercover.

You might note that there isn't a single screenshot that doesn't have some glaring grammar or syntax problem. I know I make my share, too, but when I see them, I do recognize them as errors. No one on Jagware's staff could do that, apparently.

Aside from the grating text, the main problem at this point is that I just can't stop dying. Even with my knife, I've yet to win a single battle. I'm not even sure I've scored a hit.

Barton, I see you lurking over there in my "Followers" list. Given that I don't get to experience the sound effects, music, and atmosphere that you described in your book, is it worth continuing with this one? I ask because I haven't really enjoyed a game--really experienced that classic "addict" sensation where you want to stay up until 03:00 to play, and you even sneak in an hour or two at work, if the afternoon is quiet--since Starflight, and part of me wants to keep pushing through these interesting-but-dated titles until I get to something I know will satisfy this jones, like Phantasie III or Pool of Radiance.

No hurry. I probably have three more hours at least to satisfy my rules.

Game 30: Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1987)

[Edit from the future: Don't read this. Read instead my updated look at the game from 2017: Post 1 and Post 2.]

Can it be a coincidence that we have two sci-fi CRPGs, released in the same year, that have an anno domini in the title? And both used wrongly, with the "A.D." coming after, not before, the year? Maybe not, but in any event Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. owes nothing to 2400 A.D. It has a very different interface and plot. Also, it doesn't make any sense.

If a "time-transportation device" threatens the universe, one wonders what the "TimeLords" actually do to earn their titles.

The game's backstory is an obvious fusion of Doctor Who and Apocalypse Now. You play a TimeLord (one of an immortal race of beings responsible for protecting the temporal balance of the universe) given a quest by your TimeLord Elders to track down the brilliant and disturbed Samuel Kurtz, who has escaped to "a small planet at the edge of known universe" with an "awesome device" that "threatens to twist the very fabric of time itself."

My character is as slow as a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor.

Character creation involves giving yourself a name and allocating 99 points among seven skills: fighting, marksmanship, diplomacy, dexterity, understanding, tracking, and quickness. The manual describes each of these skills, and they are about what you'd expect, but I love their description for "understanding," which includes: "generally, this will help your character point dangerous items like plasma rifles in the correct direction before firing them." Wow. I hope it helps with not walking into walls, too.

The game starts you off in the middle of a space station called Galaxy's End, with very little information about what to do except that you need to find an elevator to the next level. (I think the manual I've found is only a partial one, which doesn't help.) The game is in first-person view with wireframe walls (how retro) but--get this--continuously scrolling. We haven't seen this since Alternate Reality.

The other graphics in the game seem pretty decent, such as the various robots you encounter in the station.

Or maybe this guy isn't a robot. It's hard to tell.

Now, on the robots: you can talk to them, and the dialog, as far as I can tell, is completely open-ended. I don't mean just keywords here; you type entire sentences! Naturally, it must be scanning your sentences for keywords, but it still feels pretty cool. Here's a conversation I just had with what looks like a droid but might be a man. The horrible errors of grammar and syntax are the game's, not mine.

• TRISTAR: Hello. I hope you have come to help us, there is not much time - you must go to the next level and talk to angel, but beware - there are Octo agents everywhere.
• ME: Who are you?
• TRISTAR: I am Tristar, the chief and only mechanic of Galaxy's End.
• ME: What are you?
• TRISTAR: What do you mean, what am I? What are you? What is anybody? I am a sophisticated chemical composition comprised of about 76 percent water. So there.
• ME: What are Octo agents?
• TRISTAR: Octo is a scientific research company, they are very secretive. They often land here for supplies and shipments of Micalite from the mine.
• ME: Where is the elevator?
• TRISTAR: The elevator is in the elevator shaft
• ME: That was really helpful, thanks.
• TRISTAR: I don't understand what you mean.
• ME: Where is the elevator shaft?
• Tristar the mechanic leaves

It's like a combination of Starflight, when NPCs abruptly broke off conversation for no reason, presumably so you wouldn't learn everything in one sitting, and the open-ended dialog of the Origin titles.

The dialog isn't completely open-ended, unfortunately.

Alien Fires chooses to sacrifice what could be a pretty awesome dialog system with stuff like this, though:

I could have happily gone my entire CRPG career without a W.K.R.P. reference. Alas, it was not to be.

I encountered these three entities within just a couple of minutes of wandering the initial corridors (by the way, if you swear at them, they attack you and you die; I know you were all wondering). So far, I've gotten that I need to talk to Whitey in the bar on Level 2.

Now let's talk about the game's problems. Aside from the story issues (and the seeming randomness of your starting point), the interface is horrible. Commands are through the function keys, which probably made sense on some keyboard but which is fairly impossible on my laptop without looking first. (Yes, I know DOSBox has a keyboard mapper. I don't know why, but I can't get it to work. Everything I do just ends up disabling the keys.) Second, even in DOSBox cranked up to some CPU speed 100 times what was available in 1987, the corridors take a few seconds to redraw each time you move. Since people and droids draw last, you usually find yourself blazing past them, and you have to keep stopping and turning around. The continual scrolling alternates between being unresponsive and way too responsive. I hit the right or left arrows and nothing happens, so I hold them down for a couple seconds and I end up spinning in place for five or six revolutions.

It may be that none of these things are the creators' faults, and just an issue with playing the game on modern platforms, but it still reduces my enthusiasm for slogging through however many hours of this.

I do have my first quest, though. I encountered this rabbit/horse thing smoking a pipe and told him I wanted a weapon.

There you have it. The fate of the universe hangs in the balance, and I'm off to find a pocket watch for the pipe-smoking rabbit-horse so I can defend all creation with a hunting knife. I'm sure you'll wait with bated breath for my next posting.