Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: warda@vax.ox.ac.uk (Bill Bennett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Hired Guns Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 22 Oct 1993 21:53:10 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 319 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2a9ko6$5te@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: warda@vax.ox.ac.uk (Bill Bennett) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, role-playing, adventure, multi-player, commercial PRODUCT NAME Hired Guns (Version 39.25) BRIEF DESCRIPTION A "Dungeon Master" style science-fiction role-playing game, with a strong element of armed combat strategy. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: DMA Design (distributed by Psygnosis) Address: 29 Saint Mary's Court Brookline, MA 02146 USA LIST PRICE 29.99 UK pounds. Usual reductions for mail-order, I paid 22.49. Price in US will be roughly equivalent, perhaps slightly higher. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Requires 1MB RAM. Requires 1MB Chip RAM to run from a hard disk. If you have 1.5MB memory or greater, and at least 1MB is Chip RAM, the game will feature greatly enhanced sound effects. If you have 1.5MB memory or greater you can save and load the game from RAM - recommended, as you will die a lot! Works with an A1200 - no restrictions on Amiga type are listed on the box, although the memory requirements are clearly marked, so I assume it works with a 68030 as well. The demo said the game would work with ANY Amiga. Perhaps someone can confirm this. Can work with a Sega Megadrive joypad (requires slight internal modification to joypad - detailed in manual). A second floppy drive is recommended if running from floppy, but not essential. SOFTWARE Runs under Kickstart 1.3 or higher. COPY PROTECTION The game comes on 5 AmigaDOS floppies with no on-disk copy protection. Uses manual protection: numerical entry from a printed table is occasionally required during load/save position in the game. I find it acceptable -- I played the game for two days before I had to use the table. Game saves are written to a non-game floppy. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING PAL A1000, 7MHz 68000 Kickstart 2.04 in ROM - also tested under 1.3 512KB Chip RAM 4MB Fast RAM 1 external floppy drive 72MB SCSI hard disk (but see below, as this is not relevant!) INSTALLATION It uses a custom hard disk installation program, which worked well and installed about 3.5MB of files. Unfortunately, as noted above, the game will not run from hard disk on a machine with only 512KB Chip RAM. REVIEW "Hired Guns" is basically a Dungeon-Master clone: first-person perspective, moving a party of four heavily-armed mercenaries through a series of "dungeons". The main difference from a classical fantasy RPG such as "Eye Of The Beholder" is that the setting is science-fictional, and the characters use high-tech weaponry and psionic devices rather than swords and spells. The other major difference is that each of the four characters can be controlled independently, and there are many problems in the game which require the cooperation of multiple characters at different locations. This also makes the game particularly well-suited for more than one player; and although the game plays very well with just one controller, it gets better with more. Some of the more intense fire-fights with multiple attacks from different directions can be difficult for a single person to handle. The story is, as usual, irrelevant, but the scene-setting novella is, speaking as a dedicated SF fan, actually not bad. The scenario is that your team of mercenaries are landed by drop-ship on the planet "Graveyard". A rather beautiful fractally-rendered map gives the location of 19 target sites, and by moving a cursor to a site, you can read off some useful information - particularly the "Threat Level". The sites have been overrun by genetically engineered bioweapons, and four of them contain a fusion core. Your mission is to explore and clear the sites, retrieve the four cores and take them to the spaceport (Threat Level 15 -arrggghhhh!), where you set them to explode and "waste half the planet". To quote from the manual: "Team extraction impossible after mission time expires. Ground Support: NONE; Air Support: NONE; Orbital Support: NONE". Prior to taking on this full campaign, you can enjoy a series of short, sharp training missions. The weapon familiarisation missions are easy, but the combat scenarios tend to be lethal. These missions are optimised for one, two, three or four players - four missions for each category - but if you're a schizoid ambidextrous genius with catlike reflexes you can play a four-player mission on your own. The campaign sites are quite varied in character - each has a different style of graphics, which are detailed and stunning. My main criticism is that, as with Dungeon Master, it can be quite difficult to figure out where you are if you lose track, since the walls all look similar. However, auto-mapping usually solves this problem, assuming you can spare the time to call up the Digital Terrain Scanner screen. This is not always convenient when running frantically in the general direction of "away" from a large, slavering bio-engineered creature. I've only been through the first six sites, but they were all quite varied in appearance, layout, opponents and "feel". The "feel" of the game is what makes it stand out - even on a humble 512KB Chip RAM machine, the atmosphere is electric. The wind moans through the rocks at the labyrinthine cave system, power lines hum balefully at the fusion reactor, vast machines chug in the background at the mining depot. On top of this, doors whine, bushes rustle, and a squelchy cracking sound means that somewhere nearby a giant egg has hatched another bioweapon.... The fusion reactor site was stocked with deadly combat robots and humming machinery, the abandoned test-lab site was crawling with lethal worm creatures, and the decor was an odd combination of chequered floors and rough-hewn rock walls with coloured veins of minerals running through. And so on and so forth.... (My) gameplay tends to be in "short, controlled bursts" - you arrive at a site, send a character out to explore rapidly and get a feel for the layout of the site (movement is the standard Dungeon Master flick-forward in squares, but faster), and then die. Horribly. Send out the next character and start sussing out the puzzles and items. Primary consideration is to find where the exit teleport is for the site. This is often locked, and the secondary consideration then becomes finding the key. Tertiary objective is to locate all the useful items, and having done all this, you can then start to assemble a strategy for getting through the area without being terminated. This is where the RAMsave comes in extremely useful - a game position reload from floppy takes perhaps 40 seconds, so if you only have 1MB of RAM, I'd strongly advise you try this game before you buy, and decide whether you can live with the added aggravation. It's annoying that the monsters are totally silent, but this is due to lack of Chip RAM on my machine. If you have 1MB or 2MB Chip RAM, an extra 410KB of sound effects are heard, including (according to the manual), monster noises, thunder in the distance and a much wider variety of weapon noises. Even on my machine, the weapons sound good, but, for example, a mini-gun sounds exactly the same as a light assault rifle. More bizarrely, a huge metallic cyborg makes exactly the same, rather effeminate, grunt of pain when hit as a female character does. Even more annoying is the fact that this game absolutely will not run from the hard disk on a 512K Chip RAM machine - even with buckets of Fast RAM. Counterbalancing that is the knowledge that this game is pushing my Amiga to the limits, graphically and sonically, so I shouldn't complain. Running from floppy is surprisingly good - DMA have put a lot of work into making this as painless as possible, and there are no disk accesses during a site mission. With 1.5MB of RAM, it is also possible to save and restore the game position to and from RAM, and this works extremely quickly and well. Overall, I would say that the game works quickly enough from floppy to satisfy most users. The sites take several hours each to complete, and if you can RAMsave, you won't have any disk accesses during this time. Another nice touch is that the loading screens tell you which disk the game will require next, and since it takes several seconds to decompress loaded data, there's usually plenty of time to change disks, without hitting the dreaded "Cannot find Disk number X" syndrome. This game has had a long gestation period since the release of the remarkable playable demo (still available from Aminet ftp sites) many, many months ago. At least part of the delay has to be due to the fact that Scott Johnston, the main Hired Guns author for DMA, specifically asked for feedback from people who played the demo disk. Would that more games writers would do the same. As I recall from discussions on Usenet, people that played the demo wanted: Step sideways while facing forwards, as in Dungeon Master (IMPLEMENTED) Move using cursor keys as well as mouse (NOT IMPLEMENTED) Serial link for multi-player games (NOT IMPLEMENTED) Although having no cursor key movement is disappointing (except for 3rd and 4th players during 3/4-player games), the mouse movement system is intuitive and good, although the difference between side-stepping and turning left or right is rather fine, and has caused me a few problems in the heat of battle. I haven't tried it, but the game does support a Sega Megadrive joypad. This needs slight modifications (swap two wires over), but the three extra buttons are assigned specific functions, which sounds as if it might be a good way to play the game. The gameplay itself has a strong strategic element to it - rather like a cross between Dungeon Master and Laser Squad, with the atmosphere of "Aliens". Although exploration and puzzle-solving are featured heavily, the puzzles are not as tough as those in Dungeon Master, and the combat side of the game is very much to the fore. With a vast array of weapons and psionic devices to counter the speed and ferocity of the monsters, careful planning and tactics can save the day. The monsters are MUCH tougher than you may be used to from fantasy RPGs, and in many cases, if they're close enough to melee, you're probably dead! Judicious use of RAMsave is the order of the day, and if you find yourself getting ripped to pieces within seconds of engagement, back off and think carefully. There is probably a tactical way of killing the enemy that you haven't thought of. The monsters are well-drawn and animated, and range from cute little puppies (yes, really!) through enormous regenerating worms, up to devastating walking battle-robots, similar to ED-209 in "RoboCop". The weapons, fortunately, range up to the suitably devastating as well. DOCUMENTATION Four rather thin, A5-sized manuals: o Amiga installation and game controls. o Hired Guns game manual - listing the various short missions, details of the campaign, and details of equipment and weapons. o Luyten System manual - some rather irrelevant details on the solar system, details on some of the bio-weapons and a weapons and vehicles glossary. o Countdown To Graveyard - introductory novella and details of the twelve characters, from which you choose a team of four. LIKES AND DISLIKES Good - atmosphere, graphics, sound, gameplay, copy protection. Bad - no HD install on my machine, control system not perfect. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS As an RPG, it lacks the strong puzzle element of something as difficult as "Chaos Strikes Back", but more than compensates for this by adding a brutal mix of armed combat and strategy. The graphics are better than any I have ever seen in an RPG - including "Black Crypt". The sound is without compare. BUGS The look-up table didn't give me the correct number on one occasion: I had to reset and reload the entire game to load a game position. Luckily, it wasn't a save after a major triumph. A game-save refused to restore correctly - it led the software to prompt me for "Gamedisk #0". Since this doesn't actually exist, I reckon that the save/restore mechanism isn't entirely debugged yet. I've not yet had a problem with RAMsaves, however, so perhaps the safest thing to do is to make two separate floppy saves for crucial positions. If you die underwater, complete with swirling "underwater" noises, when you reload the game, the water noises continue aboveground! This sound bug is probably related to the one which occasionally switches on the "door opening" sound for long periods of time. Annoying but not serious. Sending objects down unaccompanied on lifts can lead to interesting effects - attempts to pick them up on the delivered lift platform can lead to either the object disappearing, being transformed into another item, or, as reported on the Net, spectacular visual crashes, swiftly followed by Gurus. Psi-Amps, in particular, can often transform into another type - this can actually be quite fun. VENDOR SUPPORT There is a Psygnosis "Hired Guns Competition and Helpline" - the game comes with a card (in the UK) giving the phone numbers and cost (exorbitant) per minute. WARRANTY Comes with a standard Psygnosis registration card - no warranty detailed, but I assume normal conditions apply: i.e., send back faulty master disks for replacement at a small cost. CONCLUSIONS Overall, I find "Hired Guns" compulsive and atmospheric. The short missions are ideal for a quick blast with a friend or two, and the full campaign will keep you going for a long time. The graphics and sound are fabulous, and it almost makes me rush out and buy an A1200 to hear what the full sound effects are like. I'd give the game a solid 8 out of 10, and it would probably get a 9 if I was running it from hard disk on a machine with more Chip RAM. I highly recommend that if you're not sure, and you have ftp access, you download the demo and give it a try, and if you can't ftp, that you get the demo from a PD library. Bill Bennett CRC Growth Factors Group warda@vax.oxford.ac.uk --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews