Space 1889: Won* (with Final Rating)

We are the winners!

Space 1889

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Atari ST; 1991 for Amiga
Date Started: 22 February 2015

Date Ended: 28 February 2015

Total Hours: 22

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 59% (105/177)

Ranking at Game #458: 311/458 (68%)

 

I sacrificed most of my Saturday to barrel through to the end of Space 1889, doubling the time I spent on the first two postings in a single long session. This, in turn, is going to create a very long posting, for which I apologize, but I really wanted to just get this one finished and move on.

The "treasure hunt" nature of the game never really changed, except there were several places in which I ran out of clues and wasn't sure what to do next. In a couple of those situations, backtracking and visiting cities randomly helped me out, but in a couple of others, I confess that I gave up and sought out hints. Since the game's official clue book (housed at the always-awesome Museum of Computer Adventure Game History) is the lamest thing ever (seriously, check out the ASCII maps with hand-drawn annotations), I relied in part on Black Cat/Crooked Bee's May 2011 LP of the game on RPGCodex. This would be a good source if you really want to read the blow-by-blow, because I'm going to be summarizing a lot here.

The cut screen between planets and space.

        
The game ended up being a lot more like MegaTraveller 1 than it seemed at first glance, first in the lame combat system, second in the almost non-existent character development, and third in the way that an economic barrier forces you to spend a lot of time on side-quests. The plot is arguably a little better in Space--needlessly elaborate, but not completely pathetic as in MegaTraveller.

         
As I last posted, I was preparing to leave Earth for Mars. This involved going to the spaceport (there's one on every planet; Earth's is on the Pacific coast of Asia) and purchasing an aether ship. Suddenly, the game's approach to the economy became clear. While my starting characters had plenty of money to buy weapons and equipment--at least 10 times what they seemed to need--they were vastly underfunded when it came to buying a ship. Even choosing the lowest-level specs, I was looking at 2.4 million pence against a pot of around 500K that I was carrying. (Most of the game's transactions are in pence, which are worth 240 to a pound.) I had only about a fifth of the required funds.

        
I solved it in the short term by selling King Tut's jewels, coincidentally for exactly 2.4 million; they must exist for precisely this purpose. This got me the lowest-level flyer, but it was enough to start exploring the planets.

My first flyer didn't have much, but cost a bank.

         
Space navigation is rather annoying. The solar system is large, you move very slowly, and it's difficult to find planets by just flying around, especially since they're in constant motion. Instead, you have a character with a high science skill (and preferably navigation equipment) identify a (c)ourse to the desired planet. The game gives you the course in terms of the constellation backdrop, which you have to cross-reference with a crude map in the game manual.

A character plots a route.

Unlike the planets, the constellations don't change positions.

         
By following the star patterns, you get to the general area of the planet, and then you have to hunt for it. There's no danger during this process: there are no other ships in space (more below on planetary combat), there's no danger of colliding with anything, you have unlimited food on the ship, and the ship is solar-powered so you never run out of fuel. It's just boring.

From the Earth to Venus.

         
The solar system is ringed by an asteroid belt, through which an aether ship cannot pass, the logic being that if you go too far from the sun, the propulsion systems stop working. More on that in a bit.

Eventually, I found my way to Mars, and the rest of the game's story proceeded in four major sections:

1. The German Conspiracy. The action after my last post shifted to Mars, then to Venus, then back to Mars, as I infiltrated a series of German bases, killed their leaders, and acquired the items and intelligence needed for future exploits. The German plot to take over the solar system depended somehow on monopolizing the "liftwood" trade on Mars, using the Martians as pawns. The plot culminated when I killed Baron Hasso von Gruber, the mastermind behind the plot, and his Martian ally, King Hattabranx.

Baron von Gruber makes the mistake of revealing everything in a villain's exposition.

         
This is a good time to mention that I mostly avoided combat throughout the game. Killing random mooks offers no rewards (except occasional weapons that you sell for small cash), no experience, and no character development, so it was easiest just to run past them and head right for the bosses. I made it a policy to fight anyone with a name, as they were the ones carrying needed keys and documents.

A looted pass gets me through a door.

      
I didn't describe the combat system in detail in my other posts, so I'll talk about it briefly here. (It isn't good or complex enough to be worth explaining in detail.) When you want to fight, you hit "F" and your single character icon immediately breaks out into five individual ones, scattered somewhat randomly, which was a frustration throughout the game. Combat begins paused, giving you a chance to cycle through each character and issue orders, including attacking, moving, reloading, and changing weapons.

After you've issued the orders, you ESC and watch the characters follow your commands. Attacking characters keep firing until you tell them to stop, and they automatically reload. If you want to pause and issue new commands, you just hit "N." You have to manually control one character--it doesn't matter which one--so I developed the habit of controlling Griffin, who specialized in "fisticuffs" and carried no weapon. I found that the manually-controlled character was able to attack and move far more often than the automatic ones, and Griffin's punches generally won most battles.

Fighting space pirates. My enemy is the top one closest to the door. Griffin is just south of him, standing on the bones of his defeated comrade, attacking with fists. Right now, only the two frontmost other characters can fire at the foe.

     
Most of my reloads are from cases in which one or more characters were killed in combat. I found that just like in MegaTraveller, combat was so random that a simple reload would produce vastly different results. Other than the positioning of the characters (party members won't shoot through each other, so you have to give everyone a clear shot), I never felt that there were any tactics I could exploit to improve my chances. Since equipment and skills generally don't improve throughout the game (every weapon and armor item is available from the beginning, cheaply), combat remained at the same difficulty level from beginning to end, even with the ostensible "boss" enemies.

        
When you're not in "fight" mode, only the party leader takes damage from enemy shots. It's easy enough to pause after every bit of damage and just have someone skilled in medicine cure wounds repeatedly until the party leader is at full health again. Thus, you could walk (albeit slowly) through a room of attackers, never fire a shot, and suffer no permanent consequences.

       
2. The Ancient Alien. King Hattabranx thought I had been sent by Baron von Gruber to assassinate him. He revealed contempt for his German allies and said that the "Worm Cult" would crush the German conspiracy. After I killed Hattabranx, I found a "worm cult key."

This was one of the places where I got stuck. I had no idea what to do next. I had to consult the LP to discover that the next step was to talk to a random wandering NPC in the city of Moab (on Mars), who provided me with a map to the Worm Cult's hideout in Boreo Syrtis (also on Mars).

Directions were vague. I had to do a lot of digging.

         
The Worm Cult turned out to be a bunch of lunatics--again, I ran past most of them while exploring the caverns--who worshipped an ancient alien named Kleuht Na Vriss. When I showed him that I had the Scrolls of the Ancients, he told me his story: he was a member of a race that inhabits Europa, Jupiter's moon. His people study human civilization, and he had lived on Earth for a couple hundred years. When he left to return to Europa, he crash-landed on the moon and befriended another cast-away, Professor Tereshkova. Eventually, he was abducted by Martian pirates, leaving his friend behind.

This game is fond of long monologues.

      
Kleuht Na Vriss suggested that we journey to Europa to learn the secret of his people. He suggested I start by seeking out Tereshkova on Luna.

3. Ship Improvements. Some bartender had told me that Thomas Edison had been kidnapped by some pirates aboard a ship called the Whisperdeath, and I noticed the ship hanging around when I went to leave Mars. As I said, there are no enemy ships in space, but there are enemy ships in the atmospheres between each planet and space, and you can engage in a primitive combat with them. The bottom of the screen shows your respective armor levels, and you can reduce the enemy's by hitting ENTER to fire top or bottom guns or by ramming the enemy.

Blasting an enemy ship in the atmosphere.

       
There's also the option to (l)ink with a damaged enemy and then (b)oard the ship. Naturally, this is what I wanted to do to rescue Thomas Edison, but the problem was I couldn't catch the Whisperdeath. It flew off at high speed the moment I approached. It soon became clear that Space 1889's equivalent of the $2 million "Jump 2" drive in MegaTraveller was a set of obscenely-expensive upgrades needed to improve my ship's speed and armaments. My ship had originally cost 2.4 million, and I ended up needing to spend something like 15 million to improve the engines and speed. This, in turn, meant running around to collect treasure and solve the side-quests that I'd been ignoring for most of the game.

I don't deal in "roughly."

       
At some point, I'd discovered that using lockpicks next to a chest causes it to open and dispense cash, so my first solution was to revisit all the castles, keeps, mansions, palaces, and museums and loot them. This got me around 1.5 million, and I solved some side-quests along the way that brought in another 2 million.

This cash allowed me to upgrade the ship a little, and from there I made most of the rest of the money by shooting down pirate vessels on the planets. There's an enemy vessel on every planet every time you take off, and destroying it is good for around 1.5 million in the party account. After seven or eight of those, I was all set.

Big rewards for a quick combat.

   
With a ship able to chase down the Whisperdeath, I linked and boarded it, ran past most of the guards (I had to kill two in front of a door), and found Thomas Edison. He gave me the rest of the clues needed to get to Europa: I would need a special propeller, special fuel (he suggested ammonia), and a huge "glow crystal" from Mercury that would be capable of storing the sun's rays.

I'll bet Tesla would have just given me some special "space coil" or something.

       
The propeller came from Professor Tereshkova on Luna. When I showed him the emerald, he was overjoyed that Kleuht Na Vriss was still alive and happily gave me the propeller from Kleuht's crashed vessel.

         
The ammonia came from mines in Mercury's only city, Princess Christiana. That left the glow crystal. A bartender suggested I could find one on the banks of the "world river" on Mercury, but no matter how long I traversed the banks, I didn't see anything. Finally, after consulting the LP again, I determined that the counter-intuitive solution was to walk along the banks hitting (t)ake until the game told me that I found something.

That was lucky.

         
With the three items in my possession, the game outfitted my flyer automatically. I was now able to fly past the asteroid belt and to Europa.

Alas, you hit an artificial barrier shortly after this. You cannot fly to Pluto.

      
4. The Endgame. On Europa, I found the ruins of a saurian civilization whose inhabitants had deserted the moon when it became unstable. Evidence suggested that they had moved to Earth, which turns out to be hollow. The notes indicated that the saurians conceal the entrance to the interior of Earth via a hologram at the North Pole.

         
I returned to Earth and found the entrance to a set of caverns in Greenland. I didn't have to dig for it or anything, but later I confirmed that the entrance is not there at the beginning of the game.

Entering the "city of Inner Earth."

          
A long and pointless maze followed. Within it, a bunch of saurians congratulated me on being the first human to discover their lair:

      
After a long period of navigation, I reached a spacious chamber in which a member of Kleuht Na Vriss's species greeted me, calling himself Eoger Luirv. He's clearly different from the saurians, but the game didn't seem to explain that.

         
The endgame text was quite long, and I won't reprint it all. Basically, he congratulated me, saying that he's been waiting a long time for some humans to solve the mystery. When we asked about the power and immortality promised to us, he related that his species had been subtly (and, presumably, psychically) influencing key humans throughout history. Some of the "chosen" turned out to be Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, King Tut, Confucius, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Eroica was clearly influenced by aliens.

         
He went on to name some of the young people on Earth that they were keeping an eye on, intending to influence with knowledge and inspiration, including Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Our reward was indeed immortality, but of a special type: we would leave the caverns and forget everything we'd found out, but we'd be gifted with perpetual reincarnation, and in each life, we would be "giants of our time."

Perhaps you will be a popular sports figure whose talent and charisma encourages an entire generation of youth. Maybe you will be a small black child, born in poverty, who emerges as a leader of equality and human rights. You might be a noted writer, whose work inspires and entertains mankind for generations to come, or possibly you will become a world leader whose integrity and compassion will save mankind from power-hungry madness and aggression. Your accomplishments will live on forever. Yes, my friend, you will be rewarded with the greatest gift of all. Your spiritual essence will remain immortal, influencing and shaping the destiny of the world for ages to come. You are our chosen people... you are the winners!

         
Before we could protest that we wanted actual immortality, a little tune played and we were back at the DOS prompt. The final message was a little depressing. There are no actual heroes of human history, just a bunch of individuals influenced by aliens.

At least one day, we'll get to be Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. Space 1889 is a game in which you must earn the right to role-play a black character.

    

Thus, from King Tut's tomb to Atlantis to Mars to the Hollow Earth to spiritual immortality...Paragon didn't really leave much for the sequel, did it? Good thing there wasn't one.

The story wasn't bad, just a little overdone, but the game mechanics are poor and the limited character development means that it barely qualifies as an RPG. In a GIMLET, I give it:

• 5 points for the game world. The tabletop setting is highly original--kind of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that beat the comic by a decade. It's rendered somewhat dull and lifeless in the CRPG version, but the the game still gets points for being the first steampunk-ish CRPG, and while the main plot more often than not strays to goofiness, it has enough original and fun ideas to make it work.

   

The party rows through the sands of Mars in a special boat.

         

• 3 points for character creation and development. The creation process is a lot of fun, but there's hardly any development during the game--just an occasional one-point skill bump (for a single character) for solving a side quest. At least half the skills appear to be useless.

I think "Bargaining" only affects how much money you need to bribe people.

        

• 4 points for NPC interaction. There are quite a lot of them, and interacting with them advances the game plot and imparts information and lore, but there are no dialogue options.

     

I'm surprised Jules Verne isn't considered the god of this universe.

        

• 2 points for encounters and foes. Foes are distinguished only between humans and animals, and you don't really ever have to fight the animals. Humans all behave the same way. There's no point to fighting. A few inventory-based puzzles are easy.

• 2 points for combat. Boring, trite, tactically-bereft systems for both ground combat and space combat.

• 4 points for equipment. A small selection of weapons and armor and a large selection of adventuring equipment that you mostly use to solve puzzles. The inventory does a decent job evoking the themes of the setting, with miner's helmets, lanterns, ropes, camping gear, and so forth, but the game loses points for not ever offering upgrades after the initial purchases. It gains a point for being one of the only CRPGs so far in my chronology with detailed item descriptions.

Mid-game, Julian is carrying a medical book, mail, a water-breather, dynamite, detonite, navigation equipment, some other book, and a German uniform.

• 3 points for the economy. It's very badly-balanced. You have too much money for most of the game, except a brief period when you're trying to afford the first set of flyer upgrades.

• 4 points for quests. The multi-staged main quest is okay, and the game gets credit for its many optional side quests. If they had been more than simple fetch-and-carry missions, this category would rate higher.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The sound is really bad, consisting mostly of a constant rat-a-tat as the party moves, annoying enough that I played the game mostly with the sound off. Graphics are okay, but hampered by some bad contrasts, particularly in the game text. The interface is functional enough.

• 3 points for gameplay. The world is somewhat non-linear. After you have enough money to afford a flyer, you can visit the solar system at your leisure--it's just unclear why you'd want to do so. The plot, on the other hand, is extremely linear, non-replayable, and too long for the game's limited mechanics and content.

           
This gives us a final rating of 33, yet another 1990s game that hovers in the 30s, not quite crossing my "recommended" line. Paragon didn't create an awful game here, just a soulless one. Although you meet every major historical and literary figure of the period, the game never really evokes the spirit of Victorian science fiction or steampunk aesthetics. Moreover, with both Space and MegaTraveller, it doesn't feel like the developers bothered to do any research into the conventions of the genre. Most of their innovations create a worse gameplay experience than a boilerplate Gold Box title or Ultima clone.

            
Even in its time, ratings were mediocre. The best is an 87% from the January 1992 issue of CU Amiga. The author, Mat Regan, praised the setting but criticized the graphics and sound. "I wholeheartedly recommend it," he said, "for those searching for a game with an original concept and"--I am not making this next part up--"lashings of creamy playability and atmosphere."

The worst review came from the April 1991 German Power Play, which said that the "illogical and frantic" combat system "no longer corresponds to today's standards" and basically concludes the same way I do: the CRPG developers made a hash of a good tabletop RPG setting and system. Other reviews put it in the 50s-70s. Todd Threadgill's Computer Gaming World review criticizes the combat and wandering nature of the plot but praises the interface and setting.

I covered the history and future of Paragon in my final MegaTraveller posting. The company is going to have three chances to impress me in 1991, with MegaTraveller 2, Twilight: 2000, and X-Men II: The Fall of the Mutants (if indeed this one turns out to be an RPG), but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

For now, we'll have a brief dip into Caverns of Zoarre (1984) before breaking my nearly year-long hiatus on Tunnels & Trolls. I'm still playing Quest for the Unicorn bit by bit, but I haven't quite amassed enough material for another posting.

One step closer to 1991!

Space 1889: Roleplaying Belloq

The five-member party bravely takes on the single member of a German archaeological team.

Space 1889 is turning into a giant treasure hunt in which one clue leads to another, and that one to another, ultimately to some distant goal that's left nebulous given that the party solves the instigating adventure within the first few hours.
      
When we last left the game, my party was in New York, which had an Army office, an inn, a pawn shop, a tavern, and a weapon shop. I found Hans Ogleby at the inn and gave him the "London Report." He told me that he was the wrong person to speak to, that Nathaniel Johanssan in San Francisco was the guy funding the expedition to King Tut's tomb. He suggested I speak to Johanssan to see if he would "permit me to join the excursion," which is not what I was after at all, but whatever. Ogleby gave me a letter of introduction to give to Johanssan.

In the Army office, I found a "Doctor Vincent Buembats," who offered to train me in medicine if I brought him a new doctor's bag. Since I had just purchased one from a pawn shop a few moments earlier, I gave it to him and was rewarded with a 1-point skill increase in medicine. This type of character development is probably all I can expect from the game, as you don't get any experience from combat or otherwise employing your skills.

Time to go to San Francisco! Let's check out the journey:

I just walked across the country in 10 seconds. Even in the game's internal clock, it only took 5 days to walk from New York to San Francisco. The entire North American continent is about 15 squares wide and consists of New York, San Francisco, Teotihuacan, and some random shops. At last, folks, we have a game that's less realistic in its geography than Ultima II.

San Francisco was indistinguishable from New York or London except that there were numerous entrances to caves. There, the game simulated the famous Gold Rush (of like four decades prior) by allowing me to interact with other miners (sample dialogue: "We don't need another gold-digger around here. Why don't you beat it?") and dig at random places on the floor for a cash reward.

Ah, the famous caves of San Francisco.

       
Nathaniel Johanssan said I was too late; he'd already funded the German expedition. But he gave me a map of the excavations and told me to head to Egypt.

Blowing open a wall with dynamite--the way real archaeologists do.

         
The "City of Egypt" contained a few buildings and an expanse of desert. At the far south of the desert, I found an entry into a tomb. I couldn't get very far into the tomb--just a couple of corridors--until it occurred to me to try using my dynamite on one of the walls. Even then, I kept blowing up my own characters with the dynamite, until I realized that a character with a high "Engineering" skill needed to be the one to set it off.

On the other side of the wall, I met some unhappy Germans.

I guess he's evil because he's a "henchman."

          
I had to kill about three of them in combat. Ultimately, one of them had a note indicating that we were in a "false tomb" and the real tomb was 14 paces south from "the Eye of the Desert." (Why were the Germans still in the false tomb, then?) Returning to the desert, I found a sand formation that could reasonably be called the "eye," walked 14 paces south, dug, and found the entrance to another tomb. (Given that there were people in it, why did I have to dig for it?)

What is this supposed to be? A hatch? A manhole cover?

      
Inside, I killed maybe 5 more Germans, including the leader of the expedition. Johanssan's map led me to dig at the location of a secret stairway to King Tut's real tomb.

      
There, I was rewarded with a pile of "King Tut's jewels" plus a stone tablet with a map of the solar system. This was a bit of a mystery.

     
Anyway, my party basically just ambushed and killed a legitimate archaeological expedition, blasted through ancient walls with dynamite, and stole priceless treasures that ought to be in a museum. We also stole a priceless mask from a museum and gave it to Heinrich Schliemann for $240,000. I don't think we're the good guys of this universe.

Heinrich, if you ever get to Troy, here's some advice: dynamite!

The treasure hunt continued. In Egypt, a woman named Mary needed a "fever serum" that I finally found at a doctor's office in London. She gave me a message to bring to Alfred Hobbs in New York. He, in turn, gave me a set of lockpicks that he had crafted to open a tomb in "one of the pyramids in Mexico." Off to Teotihuacan we went, where we solved a puzzle that would take longer to describe than it's worth in order to reveal the lost location of Atlantis, behind a wall that I needed to, you guessed it, blow open with dynamite. Yes, in this game, finding Atlantis is a small step in the main quest path.

My favorite part about this process was the "map of the Latin America shore." Unless I misunderstand the term, I'm pretty sure the "Latin America shore" includes both coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America, not to mention several Caribbean islands. Of course, in this game, that's about seven tiles.

 

Preparing to blast a hole in a fairly obvious place.

It took me a while to figure out that we all needed to be equipped with "water-breathers" to reach Atlantis. Once I arrived, I was greeted in the most boring manner possible by the Atlantians.

I can't understand a German without a bunch of gibberish on the screen, but ancient Atlantians speak perfect English.

Somewhere in Atlantis, I found the tomb of Captain Alonzo Quinton, one of the "five legendary Red Captains," who must be a big deal in the tabletop game setting but aren't mentioned at all in the manual for the CRPG.

That's a lot of decomposition for two months.

The tomb wasn't ancient: the Atlantians releated that Quinton had visited them just a couple of months ago, looking for "a set of sacred manuscripts written by our remote ancestors" that "existed long before Poseidon punished [the Atlantians] for their arrogance and betrayal." Unfortunately, the captain died when he was unable to survive in the highly-pressurized oxygen atmosphere of the city, something that didn't seem to bother my characters at all. Quinton's notes said that if he could find the scrolls, "the mystery in Angkor will be solved."

The Atlantian scrolls, recovered from Quinton's tomb, translated the stone tablet I had found with King Tut. The translation refers to Tutankhamen as "God King of the Stars, sent to rule Egypt by an immortal race of supreme beings whose kinship to the Earth and its people is everlasting." It went on to say that since his job on Earth was finished, his spirit could journey to the stars and "once again drink from the Fountain of Immortality and Ultimate Wisdom" or some nonsense.

You don't suppose that the Fountain of Immortality and Ultimate Wisdom is the main quest of the game, do you?

The Atlantians turned hostile on the way out--they wanted us to stay and teach them about Earth or something. After a few pointless battles (all battles are pointless with no experience or character leveling), I just started walking past them and managed to reach the exit alive. They shot at me, but it doesn't really matter, since healing is so trivial in the game. You just enter the "Cure" screen, select a character to perform the doctoring, and select the patient. Sometimes, the action doesn't restore the character to full health, but you can immediately do it again.

Off, then, to Angkor, where the scrolls translated the carvings on a stone altar: "For the valiant in mind, body, and spirit, the secrets of life, wisdom, and immortality lie hidden in the bowels of the sacred companion of the Red Cyclops." I don't know what that means, but red is generally associated with Mars, and I've already explored everything on Earth. I guess it's time for the game to live up to its title.

Translating a stone tablet in Angkor. If you were going to pick only 6 cities to exist on Earth in 1889, one would certainly be the capital of Cambodia.

During this process, it became clear, in a kind of ex post facto way, that perhaps my merciless slaughter of the German archaeological expedition was somewhat justified. According to one NPC, the Germans "are out to conquer the universe." Look, I'm all aboard with making the Nazis villains of films and games, but I'm not sure it makes sense to demonize "the Germans," especially in a game set in 1889. Granted, the Second Reich was a bit imperialistic, but so was almost every European power of the time.

The funny thing is that the setting has some natural villains. Reader BronzeBob wrote with some additional information about the Space 1889 setting, including that the Confederacy won the Civil War after Lincoln died of an illness in 1862, so slavery was never abolished. The game's villains could have easily been CSA expansionists looking to extend the slave system off-world.

Using the water-breather lets us walk on the water.

In content, Space 1889 feels much more like an adventure game than an RPG, and not a particularly good one. Only a few puzzles have required more than a moment's thought, and almost all of them have been solved with dynamite. So far, I've seen little need for the various skills that the game assigns to the characters, but maybe that will change when I finally get to space.

Time so far:  7 hours

Reload count: 2*
     

*Only 2, but one was a whopper. I had just blown open the wall to Atlantis and didn't realize that one of my characters had been caught and killed in the explosion (I guess "detonite" is a lot more powerful than dynamite). It was several saves later before I realized I was toting around a dead guy, and the only other saves I had were from before visiting Egypt. I ended up replaying a huge part of the game. That's why I finished up in Angkor at 308 days when some of the earlier shots from Teotihuacan show me in the 400s.

Game 176: Space 1889 (1990)

          

Space 1889

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Atari ST; 1991 for Amiga
Date Started: 22 February 2015

       
I have been trying without success to find articles, testimonials--heck, even rumors--that would explain why Game Designer's Workshop gave Paragon Software the rights to make computer games out of GDW's tabletop RPGs. Did the principals of each company know each other from college? Did Paragon just make a really good pitch? It was a non-obvious choice. Where the union of Dungeons & Dragons and SSI was a match made in heaven, and Flying Buffalo's decision to go to New World for Tunnels & Trolls was perfectly understandable even if the result wasn't fantastic, Paragon should have been far down on the list of developers to turn anyone's intellectual property into a CRPG. Their achievements prior to 1990 were Alien Fires: 2199 AD (1987), perhaps the weirdest (and not in a particularly good way) RPG of the 1980s, and the unsatisfying Wizard Wars (1989). The company got a license from Marvel to do X-Men, a couple of Amazing Spider-Man games, and The Punisher, so perhaps GDW was impressed by that.

Whatever the case, in my assessment, Paragon bungled the job. Traveller and Space 1889 are both interesting RPGs with fairly large fanbases, rich histories told in numerous associated publications, and solid, skill-based role-playing systems, none of which are well adapted in the computer versions. Good computer editions of GDW's properties could have greatly increased their popularity and produced long-lasting franchises, but instead they fizzled right out of the gate, offering nonsensical stories, bad game mechanics, and bafflingly poor combat systems. (I won't see until next year whether Twilight: 2000 continues the trend, but I'm willing to bet that it does.) Contemporary reviews of the titles are best described as "lukewarm," and the games are little-remembered today. While Paragon's efforts didn't cause GDW to go out of business in 1996, they certainly didn't help.

The cover for the tabletop Space 1889 rulebook covers several themes from Victorian-era society and science fiction.

As with MegaTraveller, the 86-page manual that comes with Space 1889 is the best part of the game, outlining the unique universe of the tabletop RPG. The setting uses an alternate history in which the ideas of Victorian-era science fiction writers (and, in some cases, scientists) are a reality. The buzzkill scientific discoveries of the 20th century (there's no such thing as aether; other planets are not only lifeless, but lack water and livable atmospheres; traveling through space is really hard, long, and dangerous) haven't happened, so in this setting, we have steam-powered ships sailing through the aether to colonies throughout the inner solar system, and humans interacting with the crab-people of Mercury, the lizard-men of Venus, and pointy-eared Martians. A key element of the universe is "liftwood," a plant that grows on Mars and has anti-gravity properties, greatly facilitating space travel.

In the computer version, the player controls a party of five characters, one designated as the lead. The five characters, all with some archaeological background, meet in London at an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts. They overhear two men discussing the recent discovery of King Tut's tomb and a forthcoming German expedition to excavate it. On the spot, the party agrees to beat the Germans to the tomb and its treasures. Somehow, we're going to get from there to Mercury and Mars.

From the opening screens.

The character creation process isn't as fun as MegaTraveller, but it's still pretty interesting, and as with MegaTraveller, I suspect it's destined to be one of the more enjoyable parts of playing the game. The process begins by choosing a sex, name, and portrait for the character from an all-Caucasian selection. While the male portraits do look like characters out of a Jules Verne adaptation, the women all have distressingly-1980s hairstyles.

Space 1889 uses six attributes--strength, agility, endurance, intellect, charisma, and social standing--each ranked on a scale of 1 to 6. Each attribute has 4 associated skills; for instance, strength has fisticuffs, throwing, close combat, and "trimsman" (the ability to "maintain a liftwood vessel in proper order") and intellect has observation, engineering, science, and gunnery. For each skill, the character can achieve a rank between 0 and his level in the associated attribute (e.g., a character with a strength of 4 will never go higher than 4 in "fisticuffs"). As with MegaTraveller, I have no idea which skills are going to turn out to be vital for 1889 and which are going to be useless.

Each character has a primary career that automatically assigns a selection of skills and skill levels. I loved reading through the list of careers. There are 27 of them (some with multiple levels) organized into 7 groups: government (e.g., army, navy, foreign office); exotic (big game hunter, adventuress, reporter); service (actor, governess, groundskeeper); mercantile (inventory, mechanic, seaman); professional (detective, doctor, scientist); and criminal (poacher, smuggler, anarchist). There are attribute minimums associated with most careers (e.g., you have to have an agility of 4 and an endurance of 5 to be a big game hunter) and some careers are only available to characters with low social standing. Sex plays a minor role: only women can be "adventuresses"; the career of tutor/governess changes title based on sex; and technically women who enter military careers are assumed to be passing for men.

You can choose a primary career and secondary career, or choose just a primary career and then assign other skills from a pool of points. One career, "master criminal," can only be taken as a secondary career by a character who has a primary career based in crime. You can even create your own career and assign the appropriate restrictions and skills!
 

I was briefly tempted.

Attribute rolls are random and not dependent on each other, so with a little patience it's possible to create a character with every attribute at 4 or above. For my team, I went with:

• Griffin, highest attributes in social standing (6; making him a member of the aristocracy), strength (5), and charisma (5). He had a career as a navy officer and develped skills in eloquence, riding, piloting, leadership, observation, and fisticuffs. I used the extra skill points to bolster what he already had and give him ranks in "trimsman" and "bargaining," since no one else had those.

• Prendick, who had 5s or 6s in everything but social standing (2). I made him a big game hunter and developed his skills in stealth, marksmanship, travel, and observation.

• Perdita, the only character to whom I assigned two careers. She could have done almost everything with her 5s and 6s in the first five attributes, but her social level of 1 relegated her to the working class. She became a thief and then a master thief, developing high skills in fisticuffs, stealth, crime, travel, observation, eloquence, and theatrics.

Perdita got a pretty rad attribute roll, if you don't care about social standing.

• Dejah is Perdita's opposite: a detective with 4s and 5s in all attributes. She duplicates some of Perdita's skills but also has engineering, a little science, riding, and medicine.

• Julian is the classic Victorian gentleman inventor of the group. He has very low strength and endurance (2s) but high intellect and agility. He excels in mechanics, observation, engineering, and science, and has a little skill in gunnery.

The completed party. I'm on Perdita's statistics and attributes.

Character creation is fun, but after that everything goes to hell. The game starts at the British Museum exhibition, with a long journal entry from the main character (in my case, Griffin), where he concludes that "I became a skilled professional in the [navy] career. But, after seeing these priceless treasures, I fully realize that I cannot hide from my true identity--I am an adventurer!"

The intro goes on to say that the main character overheard a German named Claus von Schmelling talking about an upcoming expedition to the Valley of the Kings. Determined to get von Schmelling's map, Griffin rounds up the other 4 party members, all attendees at the exhibition, and with little trouble, persuades them to join him.

The opening narration.

After the intro screens, the game transitions to London--perhaps better referred to as "London," a small walled city of trees, grass, ample cobblestone walkways, about 5 buildings, and about a dozen NPCs. No need to grab a bus to Amesbury; Stonehenge is right there in the city limits. And if you head outside the gates, you can walk to Egypt in about 30 seconds. Who knew England was so conveniently-located?

The main adventuring screen. The portrait and statistics show the character currently in the lead. The bottom of the screen shows the available commands.

So far in the game, I've been to London, San Francisco, New York, and the "City of Egypt," and all of them look exactly the same. The game makes no effort to evoke the feeling or culture of these cities in the late 1800s except in the briefest of nods to contemporary stories like the Whitechapel murders. It's extraordinarily disappointing to see such bland results from what could have been the richest of settings.

London contains an archaeologist who will identify found artifacts, a cave that you can't explore until you get a light source, the British Museum, a food shop, an inn, a tavern, and several wandering NPCs. Most of them are generic folks who just say "greetings!" and whatnot, but there are a few named ones with side-quests and interesting things to say.

Outside the archaeologist's shop.

The main quest seemed to involve finding Claus von Schmelling, and it didn't take me too long to run into him, still walking around randomly two weeks later. He offered to sell the map, but I figured why bother to buy it when I had such a skilled thief in the party? I used the "rob" command to pickpocket his documents. They mentioned a Hans Ogleby in New York City.

I knew I brought a thief along for a reason.

Nearby, I found a gun shop and outfitted several of my characters with rifles, handguns, and associated ammunition. I discovered at this point that I started with a ton of money, probably enough to finance me for the entire game, thanks to the high social standing of several characters.

One of the wandering NPCs was Chief Inspector Doyle, who offered a reward for "the capture of the Ripper, dead or alive." It wasn't long before I found someone who looked like he fit the bill.

Although he warned me about the Ripper, his tune changed when I approached him with a female character in the lead. Again, we have what could have been an interesting sub-plot handled in the most ham-handed way.

This man has some issues.

This interaction triggered the game's combat system. It's quite bad, perhaps even worse than MegaTraveller. In it, you cycle through the characters and issue various orders: attack, change weapons, reload, move, block, and flee. You obviously have to move characters up to the enemy to engage in melee attacks; characters with firearms will shoot from a distance but have to have a clear shot (no other characters in between), so combat is a lot of micromanagement of movement and positioning, hampered by unintuitive keyboard commands. Jack the Ripper went down quickly, but I imagine larger combats will get annoying.

Fighting Jack the Ripper. The bottom part of the combat screen lists all characters; the letters at the bottoms of their sections annotate the 7 actions they can perform.

As I fought Jack, for some reason other NPCs in the area decided that they were part of the action and started firing on my characters. Fortunately, I was able to exit combat after killing Jack, but what the hell?

In any event, Jack's body revealed a knife and his scalpel, which I took to Chief Inspector Doyle for a $2,500 reward--barely a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands my characters already had.

That felt a little too easy.

Another side quest came along in the British Museum, where I encountered the famous proto-archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. Speaking in a kind of pig-German which might be considered a little offensive to actual Germans, he relayed that he would reward me for any artifact that proved the existence of Homer, the Greek poet. [Edit: Apparently, what's happening is the lead character failed a "linguistics" check, which causes random garbage to be interspersed with the actual letters. This was not an attempt to render German or to make fun of Germans. I apologize for the error.]

In the tavern, an NPC named James Alexander Grimes (not based on anyone historical, at least not as far as I can tell) sold me his blueprints for an "aerial flyer" called the Pride of Sussex.

At some point during my travels, I noted that the game kept telling me that the characters were hungry. The game has both a hunger and fatigue system. The former is easily addressed by buying hundreds of days' worth of food from the food shop; it barely costs anything and weighs nothing. As for fatigue, I don't really understand it. Time passes quickly and relentlessly in the game. Nothing pauses it except the "pause" command. Days blow by while you're walking down the street, buying items in a shop, or just looking at the party inventory. Given how rapidly time passes, I'm not sure what good it does to periodically rest for one night in an inn.

When I was done with London, I headed outside to go to New York City. I'm happy to say that the game doesn't let you walk there. Instead, you have to go to a harbor and rent a dirigible or boat for a fixed time period. I rented a dirigible for 30 days, sailed across the Atlantic, and returned it at the harbor on the other side, getting a refund for 17 days. The area was swarming with buffalo and Native American NPCs.

America at last! My zeppelin hovers outside the entrance to New York City. A pawn shop sits to the southeast, and a couple of American Indians wander nearby.

There was a pawn shop just outside New York City. It sold everything but weapons, so I stocked up on adventuring gear, including books (Conklin's Atlas of the Worlds and Handy Manual of Useful Information; Robb's Medical Companion and Household Physician), navigation instruments, tools, shovels, armor, lanterns, rope, and gunpowder.

Some of my new stuff.

I end the game having entered New York City, which is indistinguishable from London in its tree-lined cobblestone streets and expansive farmland. When I next write, I'll pick it up from my encounter with Mr. Ogleby.

Some random notes:

• The manual doesn't say anything about the possibility of improving characters' skills. Like MegaTraveller, Space 1889 doesn't feature any experience or leveling, but at least in the tabletop version it's possible to acquire new skills and improve existing ones. I'm not sure it's possible in the computer version, making the game technically not an RPG by my rules.

• In the 176 games I've played so far as part of this blog, I think maybe three have featured textual descriptions of inventory items. This game is one of them. I look forward to seeing more of this as the 1990s develop.

• The British Museum was full of chests, but there doesn't seem to be any command that opens them, unless I'm missing something.

• The pawn shop outside New York City sells a metal detector. The manual says it's supposed to weigh 100 pounds, but it actually weighs 1,000, meaning no one can effectively carry it. I bought one, but I sold it back when I saw the bug. Maybe I won't need it.

• My dialogue with a Native American needs no embellishment:

I'm surprised they didn't just add "me smokum peace pipe" for good measure.

My initial experience with Space 1889 makes me want to play the tabletop RPG and stop playing the computer RPG. Let's hope it gets better or, at least, doesn't last very long.

Time so far:  2 hours

Reload count: 0