1990 Loose End #2: Operation: Overkill (Final Rating)

And...that's a wrap.

    

Operation: Overkill
United States

Independently developed, published, and offered on bulletin board services

Released 1990 for DOS

Date Started: 25 April 2015

Date Ended: 25 May 2015

Total Hours: 10

Reload Count: No "reloads," but I died and resurrected 4 times

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 33

Ranking at Time of Posting: 149/223 (67%)

      

This post is a recognition of an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: I simply can't go on like this.

I can't force myself to finish every game, no matter how long it takes, no matter how unvarying the gameplay. Trust me, it's a tough pill to swallow. It's been since December of 2013, with Legend of Faerghail, that I had to enter a "no" in the "won" column--and that was because the game was bugged. It's been since August of 2012, with Bloodwych, that I did it deliberately--and that was the only time that year. Although I quit games quite liberally in my first 18 months of blogging, since 2011, it's been something that I've strongly resisted; in fact, after prematurely quitting them, I later went back and finished Wizardry II and III and the early version of NetHack.

But continuing on this course is just insanity, especially when I can't figure out how to cheat and shortcut myself to the end.

Somewhere, someone must have once won Operation: Overkill, but wow, it must have taken a long time. As a BBS door game, players were limited as to how much time they could play. Dialing in for an hour or less a day, fighting a few combats, making maddeningly slow progress to the next level before getting kicked out...it's hard to believe the experience was worth it. It's not a bad game, I hasten to add--just not one (to me) worth that kind of effort in a year that offered Ultima VI and...and....

Well, you know, it may have been worth that kind of effort in 1990.

Every game has a fanbase, and I found a FAQ created by Overkill's admirers back in the 1990s. The FAQ indicates that to kill the evil alien leader, Overkill, you have to first summon his ship to Earth using an "alien device." The device, in turn, must be assembled out of parts that you find on Levels 3-5 of the game. (Since the game takes place outdoors, it's never clear what the different "levels" are supposed to be.)

Progress is slowed by a need to resurrect.

      
I wasn't able to get off Level 2. Every time I started to make progress, something would set me back, usually death. You can resurrect after dying, but it costs a hard-won experience level, associated attributes, and some equipment. Oh, and you have to wait a while. I couldn't figure out how to tweak this setting. Every time I died, I had to take a couple days off from playing the game. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind if modern games implemented such a dynamic. Not days, but maybe 15 minutes or so. It would give weight to deaths and force you to take a break from playing to do a couple chores or something. On the other hand, it feels so damned undignified to have to sit out a few rounds for a game that exists only on my computer.

There were other setbacks. I'd start to save up money to permanently build a base (which costs 100,000 crystals) only to have my vaccinations expire, requiring me to spend another 10,000. Ultimately, the game puts you between a rock and a hard place. There's no way to win without grinding on each level for a while, but there's too much randomness in combat to ensure that grinding will actually pay off. I guess I could have been more judicious and fled from more creatures.

Nothing like logging in after a week to find that you're vulnerable to all diseases again!

     
The combat system, though original, is deeply flawed for anything supposing to be an RPG. Bereft of tactics, action-oriented in the weirdest possible way, every fight becomes repetitive and tedious. Yet you can't switch to the statistical combat because it's much, much deadlier.

In my last session, I was playing on an airplane after getting up at 03:30 to catch the flight. Watching the letters go by...

....AAAAA.......BBBBB......CCCCC.....AAAAA.....

....was almost hypnotic. I found myself dozing off in the middle of combat. Of course, you can't do that in this game, because you need to press the SPACE bar at just the right time to land your attack. When my character died, I knew that was a sign.

Waiting for my chance in combat. I do like the taunts offered by your enemies.

           
I'm sorry I didn't get to see the end, particularly since no one online has posted any endgame screens. If someone else wants to try to win the game and write about their experience, I'll post it here. For now, we reluctantly move on to the GIMLET:

• 4 points for the game world. It's original, occurring in the aftermath of a nuclear war and an alien attack, but it's also pretty silly, and the world's "levels" don't make a lot of contextual sense.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation and development are almost all about tweaking the balance between your three attributes. Although you do get measurably more powerful, there's not much to the process, and you have no role-playing options with characters.

Always amusing to hear someone refer to experience points in-game.

        

• 1 point for limited interaction with a couple of NPCs who help out with hints.

I happen to know from personal experience that the Oracle is wrong.

         

• 3 points for a unique slate of foes who nonetheless generally act the same. I didn't encounter any other puzzles or special encounters.

• 2 points for a highly original but bad combat system by which you have to hit a button as letters go by. There just aren't enough tactics in combat, and the whole thing gets boring fast.

• 6 points for equipment. The equipment system is quite well done, with a list of original weapons (melee and missile) and armor plus utility items that help in various situations. The relative value of items is made clear, and even better, every item is well-described in the game world by simply asking about it in shops. Few games so far in my playlist have featured detailed item descriptions.

A fun description of an originally-named item.

           

• 6 points for the economy, another very strong category. You can spend your hard-earned crystals on equipment, training, vaccinations, healing, and building your own bases in the middle of the wasteland so you can rest safely and store items. Apparently, in one of the airforce bases, there's a doctor who gives you implants to increase your statistics for crazy amounts of money. The point is, money never loses its value.

The value of crystals means that situations like this really suck.

           

• 3 points for a main quest and some "side areas" (Air Force bases) that aren't really side "quests."

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I recognize the effort that went into the text graphics and varied opening screens, even though I don't think they look very good. Neither is the sound anything special, but the keyboard-based interface works fine and is easy to master.

• 2 points for gameplay. Although not too hard, the unvarying nature of gameplay inevitably makes it too boring and too long. 

The final score of 33 isn't horrible. I won plenty of games around that level in 1990. Six months ago, I might have continued to the end, but now that we've skipped into 1991, it doesn't seem worth it.

One of about half a dozen interesting opening screens.

With a comparatively low rating, I've probably angered an oddly devoted fanbase. There's an entire domain for the game, with a series of forums (mostly inactive in the last few years). You can still play it on an active BBS. But when I read the entries in the forums and comments on the site, I feel like I've slipped into a weird alternate universe in which the people only have BBS games and aren't aware of regular CRPGs. It feels like the community that would like Operation: Overkill is not usual CRPG players but BBS enthusiasts.

I also have a slight pang about quitting because I did have a brief correspondence with creator Dustin Nuff, and he might be along to offer some comments. He did provide the answer to one key question: the name of the game. Inspired by the Mad Max films, the original name was Dark Wastelands. After he got the prototype working, Nuff renamed it to Operation: Overkill and offered it to a local community of BBS enthusiasts in Dallas, Texas. A year later, Nuff's computer crashed and wiped out the files and source code. Nuff re-created the game from scratch and added a II to the title; he says he later regretted giving it a title that made it sound like a sequel instead of "version 2.0" of the same game.
   
Ironically, given that he started with a game with almost no sound, Nulf went on to a career in audio programming, with credits on games like Vietnam: Black Ops, Mission: Impossible - Operation Surma, and Terminator 3: The Redemption. We won't be seeing (or, rather, hearing) his work, since all his later games are action or strategy titles.

From this one experience, I'm not sure I quite "get" BBS door RPGs, but it's a pretty small sub-genre, and I don't know how much I should worry about it. I'll probably try harder to pick up its most famous exemplar, Legend of the Red Dragon, when I pass through 1989 again.

For now, my week of travel is over and my "backup" posts are exhausted. Back to Eye of the Beholder!

Game 187: Operation: Overkill (1990)

This appears to be an alien hand holding...something.

Operation: Overkill is a BBS door game--a phrase that I'm writing for the first time in my entire life and still don't fully understand what it is. I mean, I looked it up on Wikipedia and everything. Here's the link. I like to consider myself a pretty smart guy, and I definitely understand the conjunctions and indefinite articles in the first two paragraphs, but I'm fuzzy on everything else. Although I was alive and young for it, I really missed the entire BBS era, much as I am doing with social media in the 2000s. Three decades from now, someone will be reminiscing about Candy Crush, and I'll have no idea what they're talking about and no frame of reference to understand it.

Without commenter HunterZ, who sent me some instructions for making the game work on my computer, I wouldn't be playing it at all. Having jury-rigged some kind of solution to mimic a BBS on my own computer (I think), I've gotten the game running, but I lack confidence that it will stay running, particularly since it's bent on kicking me out after a certain amount of time, and every time I want to play, I have to run a maintenance program that changes some things.

Operation: Overkill was created by Dustin Nulf, a programmer with a moderate game portfolio, usually as the audio programmer or music composer. This game was  his first, and his online resume suggests he might have been in high school when he created it. He kept maintaining it throughout the 1990s; the version I was able to get running is 1.20, with a copyright date of 1996-2001. His c.v. says that he sold 3,000 copies.

The title of the game is somewhat confusing. Almost every web site and database has it as Operation: Overkill II, with no word on the first game in the series. The game's main executable is called "OOII," lending credence to the II part, but its title screens generally just say Operation: Overkill. I say "generally" because the game has a variety of title screens that it chooses at random when you start up, and one of them does say "Part II" on it. None of the others do, nor does the copyright screen.

This alternate opening screen is the only one to indicate that the game is "Part II" of something.

           
The game takes place in 2060, decades after a nuclear war wiped out most of the human population. To avoid contamination of the planet's water supply, humanity somehow converted it to "water crystals," which serve as the world's currency. As if a nuclear holocaust wasn't enough, Earth was soon invaded by the forces of the planet Hydrania, ruled by a merciless commander named "Overkill." Overkill and the Hydrites stole most of the planet's water crystals. The remnants of humanity live in an underground complex, protecting the last of their precious water, sending scavengers to the surface to find food and more crystals. On the surface, they must contend with Hydrite marauders, mutants, bandits, and other assorted monsters. There is a vague main quest to find and kill Overkill, but it isn't well-elaborated.

A bit of the in-game backstory.

           
The game is all text, though with some occasional navigational graphics. It plays a lot like a roguelike, particularly since I assume death is permanent (I haven't died yet). In the base, which serves as a kind of "town level," you can buy and sell weapons, armor, and equipment, get healed, store money, practice combat, train to level-up, and interact with other players.

The main base offers some basic navigational graphics.

            
Characters begin with 18 strength, 21 dexterity, and 21 hit points, and they can enroll in a training program that makes small adjustments to the totals. At each level increase, they can raise one of the three attributes by 4 points.

The brief character creation process.

          
Outside, the wasteland occupies multiple "levels," each with coordinates extending from 0,0 to 24E, 29S. I assume the map is randomly generated for each new game, though I'm not really sure how this worked with multiple players. Not all the squares are used; the entire wasteland is ringed by impassable rock, and the interior has a variety of terrain, including mountains, water, swamps, desert, and radioactive areas. In my explorations of the first "level," I found a couple of missile silos (these just seem to serve as temporary camps where you can rest and meet other characters), an abandoned Air Force base, and a hole that goes down to the other levels; I guess the other levels are meant to be underground, but they have the same terrain as the initial one.

The outdoor navigation screen. The infrared scanner shows that I'm on flat terrain (in the center). Flat terrain surrounds me to the west, east, and north, but south of me are impassable rocks. I've just encountered an enemy.

My map of the first "level."

           
There don't seem to be any fixed encounters in the wilderness areas. Instead, you randomly bumble into enemies like scavengers, cobra-men, bandits, rabid dogs, and giant frogs. At least one non-combat encounter, with a weird gypsy named Aurora, moves randomly around the map. She tells you answers to questions for a sacrifice of your attributes.

An encounter with the only NPC so far.

           
Combat uses an interesting combination of real-time reaction and underlying attributes. Each round, a series of As, Bs, and Cs scroll along the screen in groups of 5, and the game tells you which one you're looking for. When your desired letter group appears, you hit SPACE or ENTER, and if you caught it before all 5 letters went by, you score a hit. At that point, damage is based on your weapon and strength. I think the speed at which the letters scroll by is based on your dexterity.

A bit of the action combat system. I like the descriptors.

For players that don't like the action-oriented system (or had laggy modems, I guess), there's an alternative system based on random rolls against your dexterity, but I found that I miss a lot more using the random system. Either way, for all its originality, combat offers few tactics, making it long and boring, and the game promises to offer hundreds and hundreds of them.

Fighting using the "statistical" method gives me nothing to do but watch helplessly.

Each character can carry both a melee weapon and a long-range weapon. The melee weapons range in quality and value from a steel chain up through a "TransAxe," an electric sword, and something called a "Tevix-Bahn." Ranged weapons range from a "Trialism" through a "Z-Tempest." Most of the weapon names are invented by the author, but the neat thing is that you can get a full description of each item in the base, making this one of the few games so far with item descriptions.

This looks like the thing that Worf uses.

If you have a ranged weapon, you have the option to squeeze off a shot at the beginning of combat. If your foe doesn't have a ranged weapon, that's a freebee for you. After that first round, the enemy closes with you and you have to fight with your melee weapon for the remainder of the combat. I don't know if there are any combats with multiple ranged rounds, but I haven't fought any yet. Even opponents with guns generally run into melee range after the first round.

Usually, you can loot items after combat, but occasionally something like this happens.

There are four types of armor, each with a specific number of "hits," and two types of suits: environmental suits (which protect against radiation) and combat suits. There are a large number of miscellaneous items, including ropes (for climbing up and down the levels), medpacks, "summoners" to increase the number of random combats, "Galacticoms" to enable translation, gas masks, and explosives. These things are all sold in the base, but I've found that it's easy enough to save money by waiting for enemies to drop them.

Purchasing equipment.

The annoying thing is that you can only carry 2 weapons and 5 inventory items at a time, making looting items for resale, which would otherwise be very lucrative, almost impossible. Apparently, you can build your own base to store items in--up to 100--but these cost over 100,000 water crystals, and I haven't possessed more than 15,000 at a time yet.

Like any good post-apocalyptic game, radiation and disease are problems. Your radiation level increases slowly as you explore the terrain. If it goes above 50%, you can't get back into the base, and if it goes above 75%, you start to lose attributes. I don't know if there's a way to cure radiation without returning to the medical bay at the base, but I've been doing that frequently. It's fairly expensive, and most of my money has been going to de-radiation. There's also a variety of diseases you can catch in the wasteland, including malaria, yellow fever, rabies, and polio. Fortunately, you can pay to vaccinate yourself against all of them. After a near-fatal bout with "Delyria," which causes you to move in random directions, I spent all my money on vaccinations against everything.

Getting vaccinated. How the post-apocalyptic society managed to develop vaccines for all these diseases is unexplained.

In about 2.5 hours of gameplay, I rose to Level 5. When I hit Level 5, I got a notice that future training sessions would cost 5,000 water crystals, and the experience and money rewards from creatures on Level 1 of the wasteland would be substantially reduced, making this one of the few games of the era to impose level scaling.

An unwelcome message upon reaching Level 5.

I've started to explore Level 2--though I don't know if maybe I should go to the Air Force base first--and have found more difficult monsters but better equipment. As I noted above, I haven't died yet. I don't know if the game gets a lot harder later, but so far I've found it easy to survive as long as I keep medkits with me and use them when I get below 50% health.

Operation: Overkill isn't bad, but neither is it offering anything particularly enjoyable. It's shaping up to be something like Fallthru with a smaller game world. I've had no leads on a main quest, but some of the things I was able to ask "Aurora" about, including launch codes for missile silos, the locations of keys to some kind of cells, and the location of an "Oracle," suggests a broader plot to come.

My character on leaving this session.

Naturally, I'm missing a huge part of gameplay by playing this by myself. Playing it on a BBS allowed players to talk to each other during gameplay, send each other e-mails, trade water crystals, form "squadrons," and kill and loot each other. I'm getting none of that, but then again I don't particularly want to play with other people. I guess I'm setting a standard here that as long as an online game offers a single-player experience, I'll play it if it's still possible.

I jumped into this game because I was having trouble getting back into The Savage Empire after a week's absence from it. These two in-progress titles are all that remain of 1990. Let's see if we can wrap them up this week.