~3 minute readReviews
BattleTech
Infocom's BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception is a cross between a land-craft driving simulation, an Empire Strikes Back-style arcade challenge, and an Ultima-like role-playing game.
As Jason Youngblood, a thirty-first-century Lyran officer, your first chore is to learn the intricacies of piloting one of several BattleMech war machines. At the Pacifica Training School, you'll encounter simulated hostile craft that must be destroyed before you can advance to the next phase of your education. Completing this segment can be quite a chore, particularly in iater stages when you are facing three enemy Mechs to your one.
Between practice missions, you'll spend your time visiting a variety of locations within the training area. You may chat with friends in the lounge, enroll in specialized combat classes at the citadel, buy and sell stocks at the Corn-Star station with the hope of making money to purchase items at the various shops, or go to your barracks to catch up on your sleep.
Before you get too comfortable, you are catapulted into the real world as the result of an enemy raid on your base. If you are skillful and lucky, you'll escape in the Chameleon, the sturdiest and deadliest Mech available. Although not as maneuverable as its lighter cousins and prone to overheating, the Chameleon is equipped with heavy armor and a multitude of weapons, including lasers, missiles, and machine guns. Additional conventional and high-tech armaments may be purchased in towns along your route, providing you have the funds. Parking and repair facilities are also at your disposal.
Traveling cross-country, you visit numerous locations (even video stores), enlist allies, discover hidden valuables, battle foes, and hopefully save the planet from the scourge of the loathsome Kurita warriors. At times, you'll engage enemy infantry. Without benefit of a Mech, these infantry groups can be dispatched quickly. Similarly, should your Mech be destroyed and you are ejected from it, you'll be a sitting duck until you can commandeer another vehicle.
Easing your chore somewhat is a user-friendly control system that consists of a series of menus, all accessible via a joystick or the keyboard. From the main menu, you may adjust a variety of game settings: You can set combat speed, inspect or heal your character, load or save a game, or view an overhead map. Later menus allow you to select types of movement and weapons, scan friendly and hostile units, decide whether to let the computer hold up your end of the battle or to do the fighting yourself, engage in combat, and choose among a host of other options.
The game screen consists of three areas. Depending on the situation, the upper left window features movement directions, battle reports, or animated sequences. Characters' attributes, represented by bar graphs, are presented in the lower left comer of the screen. During battle, this box contains combat commands. The right window, the largest of the three, displays attractive, 3-D overhead views of the figures and the scrolling countryside.
BattleTech is a unique cross between a simulation, an arcade challenge, and a roleplaying game.
Occasionally, this scenery is replaced by text, recounting meetings and other events in Jason's life. As good as the descriptions of Jason's nightmare or the break-in at the mayor's house are, there is no way for the player to enter into the story.
The absence of this interaction makes BattleTech a far cry from Infocom's classic text adventures or even the company's newer graphics-oriented line of narrative/puzzle-solving entertainment.
The program comes without copy protection. However, to enter the training mode, all candidates must pass a test, which consists of correctly labeling the parts of a WSP-1A WASP reconnaissance Mech. A correctly labeled diagram appears only in the 20-page instruction booklet.
Six games may be saved on a backup copy of the flip side of the program disk. Duplicating the original is a timeconsuming process, as are the many disk loads required during play. Drawbacks aside, BattleTech's designers have blended a number of genres and, by doing so, have created something unique. Players searching for new worlds to explore, futuristic vehicles to pilot, and battles to fight need look no further.
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception
*Infocom
Distributed by Mediagenic
3885 Bohannon Dr.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
$39.95
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
