The Games of my Life

Remember Laser Squad, already mentioned here? Still one of the best turn-based tactical games, and, at the time, completely unique. Later, the author, Julian Gollop, created the X-Com: UFO Defense series, also known as UFO: Enemy Unknown (the first game will have its own entry here, in the future), which is still popular these days.

But in 2002, 14 years after Laser Squad, Julian created one of the best play-by-email games ever, Laser Squad Nemesis.

If you try out this game, it’ll seem overly complicated at first - so many options, so many buttons, and, truth be said, the game could really use some decent tutorials, and a help system. Not to mention better graphics and sound. Those weren’t the priority, obviously, but one thing doesn’t prevent the other.

Oh well… what remains is still a fascinating game, especially because you’re playing against other, living people (unless they’re dead, but then again, zombies can’t play games). Basically, each player has several points to “buy” the members of a team, choosing from 4 different races: the Marines (standard humans, mobile but fragile, need a lot of teamwork to survive), the Machina (slower but tougher, with a lot of ranged firepower), the Spawn (think the Zerg from Starcraft) and the Grey (Roswell-style aliens, with mind control, shields, etc., but very fragile). Then, each player must defeat the other one - either by killing the other entire team, by having more kills than the other if they reach the previously set turn limit, or by destroying some special Headquarters units in HQ games.

As I said, the game is turn-based and played by email (though there’s an optional web interface which allows playing without an email account) - you download a small file, open it (which fires up the game), see what happened in the previous turn, then set new orders, and send a newly created file to the server (which is an option in the game client, no need to do it by hand). When the other player does the same, both receive new turn files. Rinse and repeat.

A very interesting feature of the game is that, unlike in the original Laser Squad, or most similar games, in LSN every turn happens simultaneously. That is, you send your orders, the other player does the same, and then both happen at the same time - each turn consists of 10 seconds, and everything happens as the players ordered - though, of course, they don’t control what the other player does.

Try it. The game is subscription-based (very cheap, too), but you can try out some missions before paying. Here’s the link: Laser Squad Nemesis official site.

In the 80s, adventure games - where you take the role of a fictional character, solve puzzles and live a story - were quite popular - never a “mainstream” genre, but one of the most successful “niche” ones. Most games then were text adventures, where descriptions were text-based (possible with a static picture at the top of the screen), and the game had a parser which was able (up to a point) to understand what you want. I’ve talked about one of them, The Hobbit, before.

In the early 90s, as more powerful computers became available, the genre shifted a bit, to graphical adventures. Many of them were from Sierra (Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) and from LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Monkey Island, etc.). These were much more successful, as players no longer had to do that scary thing called “reading”, or that even scarier thing called “imagining”. One of the best ones, which I’ve mentioned here before, is Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.

But in the late 90s, adventure games mostly vanished off the face of the earth. People, it seemed, wanted only first person shooters, and endless revisions of sports games. Thinking, solving puzzles and interacting with other characters were, apparently, out of fashion.

Then, in 1999, there came two amazing adventure games which, while not making adventure games highly successful, at least were a blast to play, and sold very well for adventure games. One of them is Gabriel Knight 3, which I’ll talk about in the future (hint: “The Da Vinci Code” is but a watered-down version of it). The other is Funcom’s The Longest Journey.

And what a magical game it was.

Continue reading ‘The Longest Journey (PC, 1999)’