Mines of Titan: Won. (With Final Rating)

What is it that I'm watching set? I'm pretty sure the sun doesn't look that big from Titan.

Mines of Titan

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Infocom (publisher)

Released as Mars Saga for the Commodore 64 in 1988; re-released for DOS and Apple II in 1989

Date Started: 29 June 2013
Date Ended: 01 July 2013

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 40
Ranking at Time of Posting: 79/105 (75%)
Ranking at Game #404: 339/404 (84%)

Goddamned Westwood Associates did it to me again. You remember how I raged at the ending of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception? Well, the ending of Mines of Titan was only barely better. In broad strokes, the developers screwed up both games in the same way: by ruining a promising skill system, by overloading the player with combats that ultimately mean nothing, by making all plot-developments verbosely-scripted text encounters with no choices or role-playing opportunities, and by featuring a final third that's just a long, boring slog through a maze, culminating in an abrupt, unsatisfying ending.

I was just beginning the final area when I was last posted, and I was stuck at a point where the way down was surrounded by trap vents. The "solution" turned out to be just bumbling around the trap vents until they nudged one of my characters onto the passage vent. It then asked me if I wanted to go downward, and I said yes. I can't believe this was actually the solution to the puzzle, but I couldn't find anything else.

The items I was finding in certain areas turned out to be weapons, and I ultimately sorted out what types of weapons they were so my characters could take advantage of them. They rendered combat a little easier. I was reluctant to avail myself of the items labeled "Armor?," though. They didn't seem to perform better than my existing battle armor, and I was wary of the question mark.

Is it armor or isn't it? Do my characters not know?

For the next several hours, I navigated the five or six levels of the caverns, fighting a ton of random and pointless combats, and repeatedly getting the same three psychic messages from the balloon-sack aliens. In a sequence, they showed the aliens psychically carving the corridors, a control panel at the end of the corridors, and a combination necessary to open the panel.

This is perhaps the 12th time I got the same message. I get it already.

Navigation in this area was frustrating and annoying, with little protrusions and bumps constantly tripping up my party. The inability to move diagonally made maneuvering through the tight corridors especially irksome.

It was only late in the process that I discovered I could change my party formation. This is labeled "combat formation," so I had overlooked it before. I only figured it out when I reached an area that was impassable in the default formation.

Here.

I had been assuming that when I reached the city of Proscenium, I would be able to explore it, talk to NPCs, and unfold the plot. But instead, I just got a series of scripted narrations. Upon reaching the city, the game told me I saw a "smoldering hole" where Proscenium had been, and a pile of human corpses before a "grotesque mutation": a giant spidery thing eating the corpses and ejecting eggs.

My party continued on the only path given to them, through some old mines and another set of caverns. The mines held boxes of dynamite that I expected would later become important. At last, I came to the control panel of my visions, where I automatically entered the code and progressed. Too much stuff happens automatically in this game. It's not that I particularly want to manually enter a code, but I don't want a game to take over and "play itself" at all the important moments, either.

The control panel turned off an "ancient machine" in a "lab" that the sentient Titanians had used to play god and create new life forms. The Proscenium miners had accidentally broken into the lab and released the monstrosities (which had been what? Living in there for centuries without food?), which proceeded to destroy the city. This contradicts the information given earlier in the game, including the information that the Titanians had no tools and did everything telepathically, but whatever.

As I was absorbing this, I got attacked by four of the "abominations": four slimes capable of significant melee damage and able to heal themselves. In my first attempt, I tried throwing all the dynamite I'd picked up at them, but it just engulfed my entire party in shrapnel and killed all of us.

In retrospect, I guess you can't throw dynamite less than 10 feet away from your own party and expect to escape the shrapnel.

In the second attack, I tried more conventional firepower, with regular healing, and I won with three characters alive. Gideon died, alas. In the sense that the game had a final, fixed battle, it's better than BattleTech, but not by much.

The winning version.

The end-game message read as follows. The game presents it solely in multiple blocks of text--no images. My commentary appears with it.

After a heated battle, you defeat the grotesque masses! The Titanian machinery can no longer create any genetic abominations. You have saved the remaining human colonies from the horrors which destroyed Proscenium! [What happened to Proscenium having been destroyed because humans killed and dissected the sentient aliens?]

You survey the damage done to the laboratory and guess that the Titanians would still be capable of repairing their machine. Its existence is too dangerous to allow any human settlements nearby, for some people would want to reactivate it for evil purposes. You decide that this chapter of your adventure is too dangerous to tell.

The long journey to the surface is interrupted occasionally by groups of monsters still lurking in the tunnels. [Thankfully, the game didn't make me slog back through them.] The long-range effects of this disaster start to flood your thoughts, but you force them out of your mind to concentrate on the here and now. When you pass the spot where the Proscenium miners broke into the Titanian tunnels, you decide to seal the tunnel with a few well-placed shots and some explosives. You move on toward the lift.

At the lift, you connect your remote terminal and instruct the lift to carry you to the surface [I guess that's what it was for]. While the lift rises, you prepare yourself for a fight with the creatures you saw earlier. Upon reaching the top, you discover that the strange arachnid and its minions have departed. [Seriously? What was the point of all that, then? Why set up an epic final battle with some spider-creature and then make the real final battle with four random slimes?]

With no distractions, you plug your terminal into what remains of Proscenium's computer complex and discover that the controllers knew exactly what caused the destruction of Proscenium all along. [Is this where I was supposed to open the secret packet? It's not very clear.] They delayed telling the public to ensure their unopposed escape from Titan. To give the remaining humans a chance for survival, they hired individuals like yourself to discover, in time, what they already knew. Their passage to Earth was purchased with the lives of many innocent people.

When you get to Progeny, you will inform the people in each city of your great adventure and the terrible coverup. You imagine they will make you a hero and leader of sorts. It will be nice to get recognition for your efforts. [My characters are starting to get a bit deluded here.]

During the trip, you formulate a plan to unite all life on Titan. Without formal government, the human colonies are currently in anarchy. With the knowledge of another race, you will unite the human colonies with a new goal. Perhaps even an agreement with the Nomads could be reached. [It was obnoxious how the game introduced them as an interesting faction and then just abandoned any plot having anything to do with them.] Eventually, you hope to communicate with the Titanians and make peace with their race.

Coming over a rise, you sight the Progeny elevator and can almost taste the fresh air inside the city, hear the cheers of joy and shouts of anger when you tell of your epic adventure. [Do we have to imagine all of this? Wouldn't a good game actually show such an ending?] The people of Titan will depend on you to lead them to peace and you won't let them down. [Extremely deluded. We're a bunch of mercenaries and ex-military. What qualifies us to be political leaders? And why wouldn't the controllers return the moment they hear the threat is over?] You feel a wave of triumph! You have saved Titan!

Show, game, don't tell.

Well, great. Never mind that the elements in the final third contradict everything else in the game, or that the game abruptly turned into a book at the end.

Let me cover three more complaints:

1) The graphics are decent throughout the game, but it's notable that you never actually see the sentient balloon aliens or any of the cool-sounding aliens described in the text.

2) There's some documentation that comes with the game in a "sealed envelope" with instructions not to open it until instructed in the game. I never got such instructions. The documents seem to be what the characters would have seen in the paragraph starting with "With no distractions" above, I guess it tries to fuse the plot conflicts I describe. The destruction of Proscenium is presented as a different problem than the attacks on other cities, caused by killing and dissecting the intelligent aliens. The package includes a letter from the president of Paramount Mining condemning the scientists as "idiots" and ordering the abandonment of Titan and the destruction of all evidence. The president acknowledges that the civilians will all be slaughtered but says there's no way to evacuate them all.

This was a lot of build-up for nothing.

Again, I don't know where I was supposed to get instructions to open this. It contains some maps of the tunnels, but those would have only been useful before reaching the endgame, so I look forward to someone telling me what I missed.

3) What the heck was the dynamite for? I ran around picking it up and never got to do anything with it! 

Let's GIMLET this thing and get out of here.

• 4 points for game world. The game gains points for an interesting premise and loses them for epically bungling any promising gameplay and story evolution with that premise. It's painfully obvious that something got hosed up the development phase, especially in the way the game just abandons the Nomad plot.

• 4 points for character creation and development. Again, it's very original, with the party interviewing and recruiting party members in bars, and the ability to directly spend experience on skill and attribute upgrades. But you hit a ceiling on upgrades extremely quickly, and there's literally no point to the experience you amass fighting the cavern denizens in the final third of the game.

You reach this point just a little too fast.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. They exist, and you have to talk with them to advance the plot and solve quests. But there are no dialogue options or role-playing choices.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The only real role-playing choices you have in the game are whether to attack innocent people, beggars, and police officers, and scanning a walkthrough at the end of the game, I see that killing weak (but innocent) "enemies" is an easy way for new characters to gain experience, and killing police officers is the only way to get the powerful "golum armor" that I won the game without. The alien enemies are unique and bizarre, and if you play with tactical combat, you have to spend some time plotting your attacks against them to deal with their special abilities. Other "encounters" are scripted with no role-playing opportunities.

• 3 points for combat. There's an interesting tactical combat screen, but there aren't actually many tactics to use on the screen: basically just use your most powerful weapon, throw a grenade or some other area-effect item, or heal yourself or someone else. The option to allow the game to fight the combats was welcome; there were far too many to fight them all myself without going crazy. But I don't like that the computer almost always did a better job than I did.

They were reasonably fun to watch even when the computer was in charge.

• 3 points for equipment. There's a pretty solid variety of weapons and armor in the game, and when it's not clear which is "best" by sale value or skill rating, you can just watch which one the computer chooses in auto-combat. But there's not much beyond weapons and armor.

• 6 points for economy. Money is precious throughout the game, to the point that I was picking up and selling ever last bit of looted equipment until the moment I left for the caves. You need the funds to buy equipment and to train characters, and since character turnover is so common in the game, that need never runs out. The gambling system might be a little broken; I didn't keep trying it, so it's not affecting the rating.

• 5 points for quests. There is a main quest, obviously, but with no choices. I have to give some credit to the limited number of side quests, which are useful primarily for getting funds. I think the only things you have to do to win the game are do the interface card quest and visit Cain in the university, but I could be wrong; all the bounty hunts and other quests are just interesting gameplay. But none of the quests have choices or allow role-playing.

Solving a side-quest. Too much is dependent upon text scenes and not player choice or actual dialogue.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are decent, and it's fun how all the stores have their own little animations going on in the upper-left corner. Sound is nothing special but nothing offensive, either. I did have some interface issues. Transferring items and navigating other sub-menus was needlessly complex and easily led to the wrong choice. Maneuvering in party formation was a bit of a nightmare. I did appreciate the automap.

• 3 points for gameplay. The game is mildly non-linear, allowing you to develop in any order, go back and forth among the cities until you accomplish everything, and even explore around the surface on your own (though to little purpose). It is also mildly replayable, in the sense that you might not solve all the side quests the first time (I didn't, but I wouldn't replay it). But the pacing of the game is just bad. You have to do all your character development in the first two-thirds, and the last third is just a boring trek through featureless hallways. Too much is done through (textual) cut-scenes instead of player action.

This gives a final score of 40, which is frankly higher than I want to rate it, but I can't think of any reasons to lower the score that I haven't already used in one of the categories. I rated BattleTech at 37, and I did like this game marginally more than that one, so in that sense it works. In fact, if you look at he entire range from about 35 to 45 in my list, you'll see a host of games with intriguing elements but, ultimately, significant flaws that keep me from fully recommending them.

My feelings about the game are generally not echoed among other players and reviewers, but I also find some of them a bit mysterious. In 1990, Dragon magazine, rating it 5 out of 5 stars (really?) noted that it was "a great Infocom game, an example of how a company's tried and true text adventures have expanded to include well-conceived graphic and animation elements." Dragon doesn't seem to understand the difference between a developer and a publisher, and the idea that Mines of Titan somehow "grew" from Infocom's text adventures is just absurd. It has an utterly different lineage.

Current MobyGames reviews are also mysteriously positive. "gametrader" couldn't find a single bad thing to say about it. "dave c" sees some kind of thematic connection to the Grand Theft Auto games, and the only "bad" element he could mention was that people haven't heard of it; in fact, he explicitly claims that "it won't get boring once." Right.

To be fair, the first two-thirds of the game are pretty good, when you're exploring the cities, building up skills, making money, trying to establish a stable party, and getting hints on the main quests. But it falls apart in the third act, and the third act is what audiences remember when they leave the theater. BattleTech had the exact same problem.
 

So far, Westwood has managed to produce a BattleTech game in which you don't actually have to fight any combats, a Dungeons & Dragons game in which you can't fight any combats, and a science fiction RPG that abruptly abandons the story and gameplay it spent a while to build up. The company is going to get plenty of chances to either redeem themselves or continue to disappoint me. We've got Circuit's Edge coming up in 1990, the first two Eye of the Beholder games in 1991, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun and Order of the Griffon in 1992, the Lands of Lore series later in the 1990s, and the Nox series in 2000. I can only hope their approach to both role-playing and story-telling improves at some point.

As for the next game, well, I've already played and won Rance, and I'm debating whether to a) post nothing; b) offer a post explaining why I'm going to post nothing; or c) try to discuss why it's a horrible game and no one should ever want to play it. I'm going to see what Irene thinks and make a decision.

Mines of Titan, Ship of Theseus

Dumping off a dead body in a nightclub.

Mines of Titan has a perhaps unique approach to the idea of a "party" and associated character development, though I don't necessarily mean in a good way. You get so much experience from combat, and combat is so plentiful, that it's relatively easy to train each character to the max in skills and attributes in short order. At the same time, combat is so lethal that you're bound to lose even the most experienced characters occasionally, requiring you to recruit and train another if you want to avoid too much reloading. The game seems specifically designed for this dynamic, as without it, your characters spend most of the game not undergoing any development.

Quaid is eager to learn; there's just not much I need him to learn.

Oddly, the existence of the "party" seems to continue despite the replacement of the original members. If a previous character broke into a computer terminal and saved $5,000 by hacking the transport reservations system, the party will still have the reservations even if none of the same party members are with you when you arrive at the speeder terminal. The same goes for access to the "war room" (the only place to train on automatic weapons, arc weapons, and battle armor). Quest points that you've already experienced remain experienced. It's very odd.

Sneaking into the war room.

I've rotated through about 9 characters since the first posting. Gideon is still going strong, and is trained to the max in everything I would possibly want to train him in. Everyone else has been replaced a couple of times. I've found it impossible to keep all six characters alive at any given time. Eventually, I settled on four as the optimal number; there's less distribution of experience that way, and it cuts down on the length of combat (I'm 95% certain that the number of enemies that appear is based on the number of members in the party).
 

Increasing stamina at a "personal development institute."

Even from the beginning, I allowed myself to reload if my entire party was slaughtered--you lose all your money if that happens, and money is a precious resource for training and equipment. Also, towards the end of this session, I started playing a part of the game that takes place far away from the cities, and I decided to allow myself to reload during character deaths in this area; it would simply take too long to walk back to a city every time I want to replace a character.

Plot-wise, a lot has happened since my first posting. I've been to three of the four cities on the moon and I've solved (I think) most of the quests. Here are the higlights:

1. Computer hacking. I got Gideon's "Programming" skill up high enough that I was able to hack into a computer terminal and accomplish a bunch of things, including:

• Access to the "war room" for training.

• A bunch of classified documents that suggest intelligent alien life forms have attacked the city of Procenium and have infiltrated the mines; hence, the loss of contact with the city and the announced shut-down of the mines. This attack might have been provoked by an agent's killing of one of the creatures. The creature itself is reported to be a "small reddish-brown sack that resembles a partially-filled rubber balloon."

• Information about how to reprogram "golum armor," which is normally customized for each individual. I haven't found any golum armor yet, though.

• The ability to modify police records to remove fines and warrants.

• A back door into the "speeder reservation system" where I can make reservations without having to pay the $5,000 it normally costs.

• E-mail exchanges between systems operators at different cities, arguing about one's hoarding of an "interface card."

2. The missing specimen. I traced some pink footprints in one part of Primus and found a group of dirty cops who had stolen the specimen from the library.

They fail to kill the witnesses.

In a long combat that left Benny dead, I defeated them and recovered the specimen, which had fallen from its bottle during the fight. The specimen--clearly one of the sentient creatures, or at least a part of it--absorbed itself into my hand and gave me a vision of what had befallen it, with a group of "incompetent scientists" vivisecting it. I recognized the leader as the Surgeon General of Primus.

3. Cybil Graves. The owner of the munitions shop, Cybil Graves, had asked me to go to the surface and find a group of Nomads who were supposed to give her a box. The Nomads, you may recall, are ex-convicts from the cities who have somehow found a way to survive on the surface. I found them with only a few minutes of wandering around.

The Nomads gave me a device that directed me to Cybil's box, as well as the entrance to some underground caves. I explored them a little but found the monsters fairly tough, so I returned to Cybil and got my $4,000 reward.

That seems ominous.

She soon appeared among the police bounties, "wanted dead or alive," for having "aided the outlaw nomads by running guns and ammunition" and "attempting to release a toxic gas into the Parallax air ducts."

Much later, I found Cybil in an armor shop in Parallax, trying to buy armor for her Nomad friends. I got annoyed with the game in this section. There was a scripted set of screens in which Cybil offered me $4,000 to let her go and I weighed the offer in comparison to her $3,000 bounty. See what the screen says:

Would it have been that hard for the developers to allow me to decide whether to accept her offer, turn her in, or "do both"?  This seems like a role-playing choice that shouldn't have been taken away from me. In any event, I shot her, turned her in, and got $7,000 from the whole deal.

4. Warring SysAdmins. Okay, the game calls them "SysOps," but that was before it knew any better. In accordance with the e-mail exchanges I hacked, I got a quest from the Progeny SysOp to steal a prototype interface card "devised to crack any computer system" from the Primus SysOp.

A rare role-playing choice in the game.

I went to the Primus office, and I had three choices: try to buy the plans, take them forcefully, or talk him into giving it to me. I suspect the first option would have worked with more administration skill and the third with more charisma, but I didn't have either, so I just robbed the guy. It got me wanted by the police, but I hacked a computer terminal and removed the bounty. When I returned the card to the SysOp in Progeny, he gave me a "prototype terminal," but I'm not sure what that did for me. Perhaps it would have allowed me to hack stuff if my hacking skill wasn't already so high.

5. Miscellaneous Progeny Quests. There were two quests on Progeny: helping an armor shop owner named Herb figure out who'd been breaking into his shop, and finding a wanted criminal who was hiding in the mines. Neither required any role-playing choices; I just wandered into the right places and watched as a series of narration and cut scenes left me victorious. I did get some good money and a couple nice sets of battle armor for my troubles, though.

6. The Alien Conspiracy. A few events came together to depict what I assume is the main quest. When I visited a hospital, a grotesquely burned man somehow divined that I knew of the aliens' existence and shouted at me to "stop these fools before it's too late!" He said that someone named Clinton Cain knew how to find the entrance to their home.

I found Cain by accident in the university in Progeny. He related that while collecting specimens on the surface, he came across a creature that had been wounded by laser fire. The creature "touched his mind" and revealed itself as a "member of an ancient race that does not have any written language or tools," using mental powers for everything. He further said that humanity's actions had "caused them to think of our race as a hostile force that must be eliminated."

Getting the main quest.

He suggested that if I find out what happened to Proscenium, I might be able to stop it at the other colonies and "save Titan." He set my "finder" (I guess the box I got from the Nomads) to direct me to the relevant caves and bade me good luck. I suspect it's pretty obvious what happened at Proscenium, so I don't know how going there is going to help, but whatever wins the game.

Solving these various quests involved visiting all three primary cities: Primus, Progeny, and Parallax. They were relatively indistinguishable from each other, all having the same look, services, and enemies.

I have no idea why the game felt it was necessary to put so many computer terminals near each other. You have to use them basically once in the game to get the hacking information, plus maybe a few other times to get speeder reservations. One per city would have been fine.

I moved between them on speeders, which normally cost $5,000 per trip but are free with my hacking abilities. When you go from one city to another, you have the option to take a "window seat" and see the terrain fly by as you zoom along.

All cities delivered up plenty of opportunities for combat, though later as I developed my "administration" skill, I was able to avoid a lot of them. Choosing between tactical combat and computer-controlled combat is tough. 95% of the time, the computer does fine and all my characters survive, but that means 1 in 20 times, someone dies. To ensure survival, I viscerally want to be in control of the battle, but to be honest, I lose characters at a greater frequency than the computer does. Thus, I either have to watch my guys die with no control over it, or I have to take control and more thoroughly ensure their deaths.

Here, I'm trying to use the terrain to bring them to me one by one, but it never really works. I keep getting into situations where they can shoot me from around the corner, but I can't hit them.

More random notes:

• It appears that your skill level with weapons and medical equipment defines what you're allowed to buy. As my skill with handguns, rifles, and automatic weapons rose, so did the available choices in the stores. More important, as my skill in medicine rose, so did the medical devices I could buy. Characters with a high enough skill can by "Medkits" and automatically heal the entire party after each combat. Very handy.

• The game has an infrequent "copy protect" mechanism. When you try to train in advanced weapons in the war room, it occasionally asks you a question that you can only answer by looking at diagrams in the manual.

I like to imagine my party members frantically paging through their notes at times like this.

• I couldn't role-play any of the quest-related stuff, as above, but this is apparently the game's idea of a "role-playing choice."

What kind of deviant says "yes" here?

• The caves are full of steam and lava traps, but it's mostly just a waste of time, since my characters with medical skill immediately and automatically heal everyone anyway.

Basically, this does nothing but slow my progress through the caves as I have to pause and read the message.

• The screens in which your party moves as a unit are essentially identical to BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, the previous Westwood/Infocom offering. In fact, many of the interface elements of this game are identical to BattleTech.

As I close this posting, I'm stuck in the caves. Every few steps, I have a tough combat with a series of alien creatures capable of inflicting mass damage.

My party bathes in a sea of chemicals shot by the creatures in the lower left.

Throughout the caves, I've encountered those red balloon creatures. Some of them have granted me a vision of unlocking a door. Others grant me a "mental ability" but these manifest themselves in items that I can pick up, including a "Render," a "Synapse Beam," a "Mind Melt," and a "Reaver Rifle." I assume some of these are weapons, but other than the rifle, I'm not sure what classes. I'll have to experiment.

I was playing part of this game in an airport. You don't want to know what "small, reddish brown, partially inflated rubber balloon" made me think about.

But I'm stuck. The only way out of the caves, other than the way I came in, is a passage surrounded by four chemical vents that he game won't let me pass. I've tried all of my items here to see if any of them will work, but none of them do.

It's possible that I missed something in the cities or I need to be wearing some special kind of armor to pass. Either way, it's a long trek back to the cities, and I'm not looking forward to it. I wouldn't mind a little hint here if there's some way to move forward without returning to civilization first.

As you may have noticed, there are plot elements here that are similar to Total Recall (the REAL Total Recall), especially given that the original game, Mars Saga, was set on Mars. We have a shadowy, profit-motivated corporation running things through corrupt "agents"; an outcast class (mutants in the film, Nomads here); a hostile exterior environment; and rumors of ancient civilizations. But the game precedes the film by a couple of years. It's possible that the developers were influenced by Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, on which Total Recall was based, but the story doesn't really have all of these elements. It's much more focused on the "hidden memory" aspect. It may all just be a coincidence.

I'm looking forward to seeing what I find in Proscenium, if I ever get there.

Game 102: Mines of Titan (1989)

The game takes place in 2261. I'd like to hear from my science-oriented readers on the chances that humanity will be able to colonize Titan in 250 years.

    

Mines of Titan

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Infocom (publisher)

Released as Mars Saga for the Commodore 64 in 1988; re-released for DOS and Apple II in 1989
Date Started: 29 June 2013

   
Here's one thing about playing certain games that might be peculiar to my own personality: I don't like being told who I am. Not defining your own character seems contrary to the whole idea of a role-playing game. Paradoxically contrary, I suppose, as the ultimate test of "playing a role" is to take a character over whom you have no control and successfully internalize his or her background, motivations, and approaches. But most role-playing games are as much about role-creating as role-playing, and I'd prefer to at least have the illusion of creation conferred by the ability to name my character. If I did, I wouldn't name  him "Tom Jetland."

Jetland is a down-on-his luck cargo ship captain, stuck on Titan after a disastrous mission forced him to jettison his cargo. His company made him sell his ship to cover the cost of the goods, and he's left waiting for his insurance adjuster to arrive in a couple of years.

Rejecting the offer of the Controller of Primus (one of Titan's cities) to work in the mines, Jetland is given a mission to find out what happened to the city of Proscenium, with whom the Controllers have lost contact. But the job doesn't come with any advance funds, so Jetland is cast into Primus to look for work to buy weapons, supplies, and passage to Proscenium.

The odd thing is that after all this setup, you're perfectly free to dump Jetland. He starts in a bar where you recruit and dismiss other characters. Once you have at least one other character, you can send Jetland packing. I didn't do that, but I did decline to reload the game when my party was killed by muggers, and "I" was sent back to the bar to find new characters. Adding characters to the party is a matter of "interviewing" them in the bars, at which point you can hear about their histories and view their attributes. It feels a little like recruiting party members who have already gone through Space.

Interviewing potential party members.

Characters have six attributes--might, agility, stamina, wisdom, education, and charisma--that do about what you'd expect. Health is an average of might, agility, and stamina, and once it's depleted, you lose points in those categories. If they all go to 0, you die. Characters also have a selection of skills: administration, arc gun, automatic weapon, battle armor, blade, cudgel, gambling, golum armor, handgun, medical, melee, mining, programming, rifle, street (wisdom), and throwing. As with most games, I suspect that some of these skills will turn out to be useless. So far, I can't see any advantage to specializing in melee combat skills when you have guns, but perhaps there's a place later where they become important.

You can't control anything about the beginning statistics and skills of the characters you recruit, though you can just keep searching for recruits until you find one who has the stats you want. And you can assign their names. My new party leader is a 42-year-old ex cop named Gideon with skills in handguns, rifles, melee fighting, cudgels, and battle armor. He's strong in agility and stamina, though a little weak in might. In due course, I supplemented him with Richter, an ex-marine with skills in automatic weapons, melee combat, and rifles; Melina, a woman with skills in administration and "street knowledge"; and Cohaagen, an ex-miner with skills in gambling and mining. I wanted to start with someone with medical or programming skills, but I wasn't able to find someone at the outset.

As you adventure, you learn and improve skills at training academies, universities, and hospitals. I haven't found a way to improve weapons skills yet, but I suspect that's done in the "war room" once I find a way to get access.

To train, you have to spend both money and accumulated experience points, but the game hides the specific experience point figure. It just tells you that a character is "eager to learn" whenever he can train. Other than this occasional training, there doesn't seem to be any "leveling up." I suspect this makes it less painful to replace slain party members later.

Gideon's statistics and gear after a few hours of play. Nice dot-matrix printers they have in the 23rd century.

It soon became clear that characters get individual experience for combat, and since Gideon and Richter had weapons and Melina and Cohaagen had no skills to use weapons, they were never leveling up (which means I could never train them in weapons skills). I eventually dumped them and replaced them with two characters--Benny and Lori--with existing weapons skills, figuring it would be easier to train them in non-combat skills than for non-combat characters to get enough experience to train in weapons skills.

In fact, mining costs hardly anything to learn.

Titan is presented as a "frontier" world being developed by an oppressive corporation called Paramount Mining, Inc. The manual, presented as a Visitor's Guide to Titan, reveals that when humans first visited in 2042, they were overjoyed to find a diverse variety of life forms--joy that turned to horror when they were slaughtered by some of them. Paramount Mining established a colony on Titan to mine SOL-R-GARD, a hydrocarbon that absorbs radiation, and populated it largely with ex-convicts. Some of these have escaped to the surface, found some way to survive, and are known as Nomads.

So far, I've explored the surface only briefly.

In general, it's a good setup, and one that doesn't hand-wave the difficulties associated with living on a moon two years from earth, with an average temperature of -180 degrees and a nitrogen/methane atmosphere. There are hints of conspiracies and secrets to discover, and I look forward to seeing how the game's plot unfolds.

Several quests become available immediately in Primus. Someone has broken into the university and stolen  a "specimen" and the police are willing to pay 20,000 credits for anyone who can identify the culprits. An escaped convict named Phelos Fletcher has fled Primus to the surface. Cybil Graves, the owner of a munitions shop, is willing to pay 5,000 credits for me to deliver a "micro disk" to the leader of the Nomads and bring back a package. She gave me 1,000 up front, which helped me stock up on weapons. Computer terminals have other "classifieds" from other cities, but it costs at least 5,000 to get out of Primus.

My first quest.

Not that I'll have much trouble getting that 5,000.  Either we have another game with a broken gambling system, or I just got really lucky. There are gambling establishments in the city that offer "Cosmic Keno" and "Laser Slots." I haven't had a chance to experiment with keno yet, but when I walked into laser slots and dropped $17, I got three stars and won $8,500 on my first spin. I tried to work out the odds but the symbols seem randomly generated each spin, and in any event the player's "gambling" skill is supposed to come into play. Rather than keep testing things and risk ruining the game again, I decided to be thankful for my good fortune and spend the money on some decent armor. I bought vacuum suits so my characters could survive outside.

I wish I had the luck in real life that I have in CRPG casinos.

Navigation is through a 3D view. The city is abundant with shops, bars, gambling halls, computer terminals, hospitals, and other places to visit, though your options in each place of each type are limited to same selections, so there might as well have only been one of each.

Buying weapons in the munitions store.

As you wander around, there are random encounters with thugs, muggers, and hitmen, as well as police officers and regular citizens,  and for all of them you have the option to fight or decline. If you decline and the enemy is hostile, he might attack anyway.

Battle takes place on a top-down tactical map, and it's extremely similar to BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, another Westwood/Infocom collaboration (more on that in a bit). You line up your attacks or item uses, execute, and watch as your party members duke it out with the enemies. You have the option to let the computer fight the battle, and if you do that, you can either watch or just find out the result. Weapons seem to have unlimited ammunition.

Watching the computer fight for me. My characters are on the right.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• The game has a pretty good automap, both on the main screen and in a larger view that you can access from the main menu.

• Characters with medical skills can heal themselves and each other in combat. In between combats, hospitals will heal for a charge.

• The game avoids one of the ways that players often cheat by preventing you from distributing credits until party members have been with the party for a while. You can't just recruit party members, steal their credits, and dump them.

I found this out while legitimately trying to distribute credits among party members, incidentally.

• Dead characters remain with the party until dropped off at a police station, bar, barracks, lounge, or restaurant. There is no resurrection, and combat is deadly enough that I suspect I'll go through a whole battalion of characters unless I relax my reloading standards.

Mines of Titan was originally published as Mars Saga for the Commodore 64 in 1988. Online documentation says that when it was released the following year for the Apple II and DOS, not only was the action moved to Titan, but it has more quests and creatures and slightly different details.

The game was developed by Westwood Associates and published by Infocom. Westwood has shown a spotty history with me so far. I thought Questron II and Hillsfar were mediocre, and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception still makes me angry, especially having to type that misplaced apostrophe. Right now, Mines could go either way. By the next time I write, I expect I'll have solved some of the initial quests and I'll have a better sense of the game's quality.