Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity

I've been meaning to get back to this 21-year-old game for twenty of those years, having failed to finish it the first time. After a bit of DOSBox fiddling I was underway (DDraw with 2xsai gave me the best results; GUS audio).

A little over halfway through I hit a failstate and had to restart from the beginning, cursing my one-save mentality. I'm not sure if it was a concrete bug or I just didn't navigate to the right points in space to trigger the necessary Starfleet update, but I made sure to use up all of the save-slots on my second run. Fortunately, you can skip all dialogue (in-between selecting your responses) and cutscenes.

Anyway, the game. It came out a year or so before Broken Sword, so you might expect Monkey Island to be its natural comparison, but it's a different and somewhat unique animal. Despite only visiting a handful of worlds and combining items a couple of times, it's not a short game on your first attempt. Rather than logic puzzles it offers a learn-to-progress model, where you just scan everything with your tricorder and read its reports, working out what goes where from its scans. So the gameplay can be approached in one of two ways: bruteforcing your way through the equivalent of a 2-digit combination lock; or scanning everything to learn what it does or might do, in order to correctly pair your collected items with the interactables in each mission.

It's a nice approach, but it's frustratingly framed by an archaic pixel-hunt approach. Several interactables are mere pixels tall and wide, and since the graphics are primitive (though impressive for their time and Amiga-tier charming) it's an all-too-often case of methodical mouse-wazzing. Sometimes the boot icon for movement doesn't change to a nextscreen arrow until you're hovering over an exact area, leading you to discount navigation in that direction for a while.

(Because I no longer have its manual, I had to be reminded to hold Shift to run, and also that the same coordinates in astrogation refer to different parts of space depending on the selected star map.)

By the by, I don't know if it was directly influenced, but Mass Effect 2 has a lot in common with this game (minus space combat and engineering busywork).

[Space combat tip: don't delegate to Worf and manually lower the torpedoes' spread, waiting until its bay's reloaded to 7+ before firing again. At the start of each 1v1 battle the other ship tends to go head-to-head, so you can take advantage of their lack of movement to land most of those torpedoes. If you keep firing as soon as you've two or three they can better repair their shields in-between salvos, whereas two full bays is enough to explode 'em.]

And that leads me on to what I really, really enjoyed about it: illusion of choice and unforeseeable failstates.

Illusion of choice is nothing new today, but it was back then, and both disappointingly and surprisingly, A Final Unity outmanoeuvres most current games. The end of each mission will always be the same - the arc set in stone, but events within missions branch according to your choices. In too many modern games, AI responses to completed dialogue trees are fixed in terms of each character's actions, and the only choice is one of tone: to be hostile or friendly. But it doesn't matter a jot. Owing to the cinematic overheads, you can't create a mission featuring an AI character and then junk them because the player wound them up. Be great if you could, but that's not the direction that games have taken.

A Final Unity isn't, despite its greater ability to run against that due to its prerendered backgrounds, any more open. It just appeared several generations ago, and it totally reminds me of why I loved PC gaming in the '90s. Emergence didn't come until later, but no other platform invited the player into its worlds as an influencing component as strongly, and things have barely improved over those twenty years.

I'll finish with those failstates. They're a lost art! AFU trips up badly on occasion insofar as not indicating that you've screwed up (because you probably haven't, you've simply wandered off-course without realising and have no information to put you right). But there are many times when a wrong choice ends the game and throws you to the main menu to reload a save. And that's all you need to lend interest to your dialogue: make it matter. Albeit for half a minute when someone dies and you reload, but these Damoclean failstates are narratively impressive, as some of the dialogue's written well enough that your choices become first-try personal rather than what you think the game needs to progress. There's a brilliant moment a little past halfway when this becomes engagingly apparent.

Admitting to events via dialogue can also be a poor choice (worse than the more lexically negative tree options, even), and failing to carry out certain actions (both for and against) is a no-no at times.

It's a 'mare to actually play these days (but still better than Pagan: Ultima VIII!), and mechanically it belongs to history, but for such an old game, its glimpses into a future that hasn't materialised are as pertinent as they are sad.

Good write up there Escape, made me want to download the bugger to try it out.

trippy wrote:

Dark Soldier wrote:

Owlboy Whoever drew the clouds must have eyes in the top of their head. They're absolutely gorgeous. A great deal of the art is lovely, though it's a shame much of the game is spent underground. Unfortunately, Owlboy himself is also completely adorable. My daughter fell in love with him so I had to play through this frustrating game, where the punishing gameplay seems strongly at odds with the beautiful art and cuddly character designs. Most of the baddies and bosses were infuriating, the bits in the dark and the one hit kills were awful and I found the controls to be needlessly complex. I can see that perhaps the game simply wasn't aimed at me, nonetheless Owlboy can go take a flying, feathered fuck.

It's fantastic. You heartless bastard.

Almost certainly guilty as charged, though I did say he was adorable.  Out of interest, have you completed it?

Heh nope, I'm at the first temple, I just wanted to swear tbh. I've found the controls extremely simple, though. Unless I unlock a ton more moves and it becomes a hassle.

Firewatch
After really looking forward to this I ended up being a bit disappointed with it in the end. Maybe my expectations were too high. I did enjoy it. Engaging story and it looked great but after nicely building the mystery and atmosphere it rather ran out of steam.

The ending is an interesting one

I didn't think there was a lack of closure. The story had an end, all be it a somewhat ambiguous one. It was still a more compelling story than 99% of other games. I'm not surprised to find it's getting the movie treatment. But thinking of it from a cinematic point of view only serves to highlight my frustrations with the game itself. It was all a bit passive and lacking in threat. But it's a fantastic setting and I can see it working brilliantly on film.

From a gaming point of view I think I was expecting it to be a little less of a walking simulator.

What the fuck, Bollo?

WTAF???

Paul the sparky wrote:

Good write up there Escape, made me want to download the bugger to try it out.

Ooh, I dunno about that. I don't think I'd recommend it, but I soldiered through for old times' and it got me thinking about gaming's course thereafter.

Spoiler tag

Outmanoeuvres; engagingly; ^gaming's course... I should've put ‘energise’ in there somewhere, but never mind.

Bollo clearly hasn't woken up from the buckfast binge last night

No. They just don't work at all.

Titanfall 2

It's portal, it's cod, it's shades of 80s action movies, it's short, it's fun, it's dumb, it's clever, it's left me wanting more.

XCOM2

Since you're here, @Bollockoff, please sort out that spoiler.

I like you too even though you seem to make a point of deliberately ruining things for people.