One of the many advantages of now being a Mac user is that games are much harder to come by. Now, so the theory goes, I have much less chance of wasting away the evening on some mindless compulsive activity. But old habits die hard, and the other night, a mere two months into my Mac ownership, I found myself search-engining for "Mac games". And when I saw the blurb for Escape Velocity: Nova, a "space trading game with realistic physics", I downloaded it like a shot.
You see, when I read "space trading game with realistic physics" I think Frontier: Elite 2; and I regard Frontier: Elite 2 as one of the greatest games of all time. What it did with a single 720k floppy has still, as far as I can tell, never been surpassed, or even equalled, or even attempted. But EV:Nova, as it turns out, is not a 3D Frontier-style attempt to implement the galaxy, but instead a top-down 2D game in the Star Control mould. Its physics are "realistic" in the sense that ships have inertia, but not Frontier-realistic. Frontier had proper solar systems; its planets had gravity, they were huge. The Earth in Frontier really was 93 million miles from the sun, and you could travel the whole way in real time if you wanted. EV:Nova makes no attempt to do anything like it. Instead, it concentrates on the gameplay essentials of Elite and its descendants: trading, combat, spaceships, and toys for spaceships. And it looks pretty. I found that this was more than enough to satisfy my Frontier yearnings, and within a few minutes I found myself playing EV:Nova compulsively.
There's a big, detailed universe in EV:Nova; nothing close to Frontier's seeded autogenerated galaxy, but still big enough to explore for hours on end. There are pretty pictures of each planet. The setting is very cliched: there's a cold war in space, with a Federation and an Empire, of course, and space pirates, and mysterious aliens. There are some intrepid rebels straight from Star Wars, and a technically advanced quasi-alien empire with Klingonitis of the vocabulary; there are a few potboiler intrigues thrown in. It's all terribly uninspiring stuff, but who cares? Graphical games can breathe life into such stale settings. There's a certain concreteness about graphical game worlds -- you can see what you're doing, you can move fluidly in your environment, the environment responds continuously to your actions -- which often overcomes the vague dullness of the imagination behind them.
The problem with EV:Nova is that it isn't all graphical. In some senses, it's a text adventure game, and when the universe-building becomes textual, I can only wince. Along with the pictures, the planets are described by big wodges of badly-written text. Most of the universe is distressingly generic-Anglo-Saxon, with a few planets here and there being homelands for various stereotyped ethnic groups. There's an English planet, a French planet, a Japanese planet, and most cringe-inducingly of all, an Irish planet ("New Ireland" in the system of "Tuatha"), full of doughty red-haired warriors ("The Wild Geese") with names like "Michealeen" and "Eamon Flannigan", who knock back pints of hearty ale in spaceport bars, and always speak in rich and lyrical voices. In short, a complete load of Hibernobollocks, the like of which can only be produced by distant and deluded Celtophiles (the developers come from Tasmania) who have never set foot in the place.
The "stories" that eventually ensnare the player are even worse. The writing should have had at least one extra pass to purge away all the unnecessary adverbs and adjectives; but even then it would have a severe case of "tell, don't show":
"At the mention of her name, a nameless dread rises up in your stomach, and once again you realize the hopelessness of your situation. As they have done so many times already in your short time of enslavement, the dark bands that enclose your mind twist you into thoughtlessly obeying the commands given to you."Some unwelcome stranger's thoughts keep being put into my head, and not just in the story with telepaths. In one track, I'm forced to infiltrate the Rebels by the evil Federation, and the writing keeps reminding me how horrible I feel, when in fact I don't feel anything at all:
"With despair in your heart, you nod your acceptance."
"In despair you stand up, leaving the rest of your drink unfinished, and the both of you head towards your ship."I tell a lie: after reading dozens of paragraphs ending like this, a cloud of despair did indeed fall over me, though not for the reasons intended. I was in despair that a professional game could have writing so incompetent and amateurish. There's really no excuse for the crap they served up -- even a mediocre amateur IF writer, of whom there are several, would do better. The writing in EV:N would get a straight 1 from me in the IF Comp. The developers should have hired someone who could write.
They should also have hired someone who can design a game -- or better yet, the publishers should have hired someone who can design a game. This appears to have been ATMOS's only effort at game design, and they made a mess of it. Sure, there are enjoyable things in the game -- the missions, the ship upgrades and what have you -- but all the enjoyable things come from the genre, for which the developers can't take any credit.
What's wrong with the design? Well, after a few hours, you find yourself locked into one of six storylines, from which there is no escape. Which is fair enough. The trouble is, by far the easiest storyline to find yourself locked into -- the Vell-os storyline -- is one which blocks you from using any of the standard game features. For the duration of the story, you can't buy any new ships, any new stuff for your ship, or do any missions outside the story. You basically can't do any of the enjoyable things in the game. What's more, you have no idea that you're going to enter this story -- its first mission is presented like any other random one-off mission. Worse still, you have no idea that when you enter the story, you will lose access to most of the game.
These problems are compounded by another flaw in the game design -- the storylines are padded out by minor and arbitrary delays, during which you can find yourself hopping from planet to planet waiting for the next story event to pop up at random. The point of this is to allow the player to do things other than the main storyline -- but in the Vell-os story, there is nothing to do outside the main storyline, and the delays just bring the game to a halt.
It really takes conscious effort not to get sucked into the Vell-os story. Almost every first-time player will find himself taken in unawares. This is because all the other storylines require combat experience to enter, which the new player on day one is unlikely to have. This is an awful design decision. The Vell-os story, if it must be kept, should be an optional curio for advanced players. As it is, most new players will find themselves trapped in a story that denies them the best parts of the gameplay.
Since EV:Nova is semi-crippled shareware, there comes a point in the game where you can't advance further without registration. If you'd asked me after an hour of play, I'd have paid the registration fee without hesitation; but after having played the most part of two poorly-written and and poorly-designed storylines (the Vell-os and Federation threads) I found myself asking: "Do I really want to pay $35 to read any more of this?" And the answer, I'm relieved to say, was "No."