The Legend of Kage is one of my earliest video game memories. Specifically, the NES conversion, which, along with City Connection, was among the first non-Mario Nintendo games that I ever played. There weren't a lot of options back then, and the majority of third-party support was from arcade developers like Taito testing the waters with coin-op conversions rather than making original titles. I am certain that this port is responsible for Kage's modestly enduring fame, but I won't be replaying it.
If nothing else, Taito's developers knew the look and feel they were going for, and did well with the technology available. It's by no means cutting edge - by 1985 Sega had that sector cornered (leaving a few table scraps for a struggling Atari), but it's a noticeable upgrade from the crude sprites and backgrounds of Elevator Action and Front Line. You're a spry ninja in a cute little romper battling endless waves of the demon clan in the spooky woods and castles of feudal Japan, and the animation, colors, and FM soundtrack evoke this setting well.
Speaking of which, there exists a prototype version, available through Hamster Corporation's Arcade Archives but not yet emulated in MAME, featuring a PSG-based soundtrack, and I think I like it a little better than the final FM synth soundtrack. Or maybe I'm just sick of it.
In my best attempt before getting bored, I completed a single loop - a phrase that already feels archaic to type out - but ran out of lives halfway through the second.
Legend of Kage really wants
you to soar through the forest, leaping over the treetops in a single
bound as you duel with flying demon clan ninjas and monks in the highest branches like a scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Do not do this! Kage can indeed jump higher than Bomb Jack, but once you go up, you're not coming down for quite awhile,
and while Bomb Jack let you control your jumps with a graceful precision, Kage gives absolutely no control over your altitude or airborne trajectory, so if a stray shuriken comes flying in your
direction, there's no avoiding it! You can block with your swords, but
that won't help much if they hit you in the feet, or come in multiple
directions, or later on when the ninjas start throwing smoke bombs.
My strategy to survive this part - keep moving left, throw shurikens constantly, and if you see an enemy, get him off the screen ASAP. Whether that means killing him or just moving enough to scroll the screen away and deref the sprite, you just do whatever is quicker, because it only takes a second for a ninja to wander onscreen and kill you with a shuriken because you were distracted by another ninja. Be especially careful around the red ninja; he attacks more aggressively, loves to jump and throw shurikens downward at tricky angles, and can parry your strikes and catch you in a riposte if you're foolish enough to run right back into his sword after you bounce away like a pinball. Firebreathing monks will eventually start spawning, and after killing three, a fourth, red one will spawn. Killing him finishes this stage.
Next stage is the secret passage.
Not much to say here. You can hide in the moat, and Kage will breathe through a reed when you do, but you shouldn't; this just makes you a smaller, immobile, and defenseless target. Don't even go into the moat; you can't throw your shurikens, and you can't get out without jumping. Easiest way to kill the ninjas is by nailing them as they jump out.
Kill ten and you move onto the battlements.
You knew you'd have to use your super ninja jumping skills eventually. Good luck! Hope you're decent at parrying.
The castle is at the top.
Getting some real Kung-Fu Master vibes here.
Stairs are the worst - you're effectively in a dead-end against flying shurikens and you can't even jump, which is one of the few times you'd want to. And nasty things tend to wait for you at the top of them.
You can climb the pillars, but you shouldn't. Noticing a pattern?
Princess Kiri and a cinematic cutscene await at the top.
Fight the boss - he's an anticlimax who goes down in one hit - and you do it all over again with changing seasons and more difficult ninjas who now throw unblockable smoke bombs.
The all-important repo-tech bot freezes up on the final rift
One gets the impression that Koronis Rift was rushed to meet a deadline (I empathize!). The engine itself is cool stuff, featuring rolling terrain with multiple levels of elevation, multiple levels of parallax depth with dynamic shading to indicate distance, and a 3D perspective that convincingly bumps up and down as you drive through the rifts' endless peaks and valleys, but everything after that is a technical mess.
The most obvious clue are the bugs. Dear lord, the bugs. I've seen:
Modules disappear from my inventory
The rover unable to move from its landing zone
Shields not recharging, despite having ample energy
The RT Robot get stuck on terrain
Modules that don't do anything
The screen become half-filled with corrupt graphic data
Most of these bugs can put the game in an unwinnable state, but they can be prevented with a bit of care to avoid their trigger conditions, or if worse comes to worse, using the ingame save/load system.
What can't be avoided is the askew difficulty curve which is completely at odds with the game's premise.
The apparent intended gameplay loop of Koronis Rift seems to be one where you explore the rifts, fight drones, and collect upgrades for your craft so that you can move on to harder rifts and get even greater rewards, but this just doesn't work out. Drones become deadly within a few minutes of playtime, and get deadlier the longer you play. You do not even have time to clear out the first and easiest rift; the upgrade modules you find there are pretty weak, and the drones will overwhelm you before you have time to find them all.
To get anywhere, you've got to figure out which modules are worth having, you've got to know where to find them, and you've got to have a plan to extract them efficiently, because this is a perpetual arms race between you and Koronis' planetary defense system.
To that end, there are four module upgrades which you absolutely must have. In order of priority:
A shield module, so that you don't immediately die when shot at. You start with an utterly worthless one.
A generator, to recharge your shields and weapon energy. Once you have a decent shield and generator, your life expectancy improves dramatically.
A battery, for more weapon energy.
A better laser gun. The one you start with is crap but it's better than nothing. But you'll need more firepower to do any real damage against the drones once they start showing up with shields of their own. Any upgrade requires a battery, and the bigger the gun, the bigger the necessary battery.
You do okay with the basics.
That's four modules, and there's only six slots for modules, so you've only got two more to play with. The modules also come in a variety of colors which enhance or reduce effectiveness against drones of matching/opposing colors, and the manual recommends keeping a variety of colors, but I can't see how that is feasible when you're already using four out of six available modules just for the essentials!
Some other modules you might find:
Radar - Waste of a slot. Your normal radar always points toward the closest hulk, but radar modules override this by pointing toward the closest hulk containing a module with the same alien insignia as the radar. Pointless unless you already know exactly what you're looking for.
ECM - The manual claims that it makes you harder to detect, but I don't think it actually does anything.
Drive - Improves propulsion speed. I never bothered using it.
Crosshairs - Locks onto drones of certain colors. Has some usefulness but not all that great; it doesn't lock onto everything, it won't "lead" (and therefore won't let you hit) fast-moving drones, and it has a tendency to hijack your rover controls making you drive or turn when you didn't intend to.
Inertial dampener - This one's a game changer, but you definitely don't want it activated all the time. Turn it on, and enemy drones slow down, making them sitting ducks as long as they're close enough to shoot. But it's an energy hog, and using it slows down your shield and laser recharge rates. It also doesn't stop the drones from shooting back; in fact, they'll be able to concentrate fire on you until you destroy them (or they move out of range). A powerful weapon, but it can get you killed if you're not careful.
Detonator - You need to find one to win the game. You can just keep it on the scoutship until you reach the final rift, because it has no other purpose.
Map module - Displays a minimap. Very rare, very useful, because some of the later maps are quite maze-like and the Fractalus engine isn't terrific for first-person navigation.
As a side note, when you are using all six module slots, it's possible to collect and carry a seventh one
back to the ship for analysis/equipping, but this is a pretty tedious process that
requires multiple trips back and forth to shuffle your inventory around between your rover, scoutship, and RT bot. It's worth it, but it's annoying and could have been avoided with better UI design.
Through days of failed attempts and note taking on what can be found where, I eventually discovered a solution. You can't afford to waste a lot of time exploring the early rifts, but you can't just jump to the end and survive on your basic starting kit either. But you can skip a lot more of Koronis than you probably think.
Rift 1
Even in this early rift, there's not enough time to fully explore and loot its meager powerups, but the things you actually want are fairly close by.
Loot the hulk immediately in front of you for a 15% power shield (better than nothing) and keep going for a 12% power generator. Ahead of you is a radar - do not collect it yet! Keep moving, going around the crest, and you'll discover a battery.
Turn back, grab and ignore the radar, and your compass will now point to the last thing on the rift worth taking - a 6% power laser.
Lift off and fly to Rift 16. Yes, that's right, rift 16.
Rift 16
Shields are indicated in the upper-right; each bar absorbs the corresponding laser color
I said it before - your upgrade priorities are shields, generators, batteries, and lasers, in that order, and you find all of them on Rift 1, they're just weak.
You'll find all of these on Rift 16 too, only here, they're far more powerful. And you'll find them in almost the same order. The tricky part is surviving long enough.
The shield, rated at 62% power, is right behind you, and if you're fast you can grab and equip it before Koronis scrambles its first drone.
The generator, at 81% power, is the next closest, but you'll need to go around a ridge to get it. Try not to get distracted by the other hulks who may take priority on your radar - you really need this generator to survive long here, but with a bit of luck you can locate it and fight off the drones before your shields run out of juice.
Once you get it, you're safe for awhile, even with an underpowered gun. Fights will take longer, but it will be some time before the drones can penetrate your shields. Still, you don't want to dawdle. There's a crosshair module by the inner ridge too, which I don't bother with, but the rift also has a 70% power battery, and 79% power laser, both of which which you absolutely want, and an inertial dampener which I find more useful than the crosshairs.
The inertial dampener should always be turned off when you are not engaging drones. Turn it off whenever you make planetfall, prepare to turn it on when you need to fight, and turn it on when one flies onscreen. Don't be afraid to turn if off in the middle of a fight, especially if your shields start to run low.
Leave once you have it all. The only other things found here are two out-of-the-way radars which are incapable of finding anything in subsequent rifts.
Rift 17
Turn right here, not left.
You start tucked in a crevasse, but if you can find your way out of it, you'll soon locate the critical detonator module. Stash this on the ship for sure.
Other good things here include a 70% power shield, 91% power generator, 85% power battery, and mapper. It's a pretty open map, so it's not that hard to find them.
Rift 18
The mapper comes in real handy here, thanks to the maze-like ridges. But there are only a few things worth keeping; a 95% power generator, 77% power laser (the efficiency is much higher than the 79% power laser found earlier), and 95% power battery. Everything else can be dismantled.
Rift 19
The most maze-like rift, but it's not worth exploring.
This one's a quick snatch-and-grab. The only worthwhile thing here is a 67% power shield (also rated much more efficient than then 70% power shield found earlier; I'm guessing that means faster recharge). And it's directly ahead of where you start.
Rift 20
Sell the inertial dampener - by now it's a liability. Equip the detonator. In retrospect, you don't really need the mapper here; the rift layout is pretty open, but I brought it anyway. A drive module might have been better here, but oh well.
There are no upgrade modules to be found here, only drones and bases that shoot back, but if you got here quickly enough and equipped properly, your shields should protect you. Bases can be destroyed with your own laser, or by the RT bot, but it has a tendency to get stuck after destroying them - you can fix this by blowing away your own bot and returning to the scoutship for a replacement.
Eventually your radar will lead you to the main defense base. Once the skies are clear, send the RT bot in with the detonator, and Koronis is yours.
GAB rating: Bad
Funnily enough, Koronis Rift's biggest issue is poor difficulty balance, just like in Sinistar, only this time it's seemingly thanks to being rushed rather than executive-level demands for greater coin returns. More time spent playtesting would have improved this game immensely.
The technology here is impressive, the concept is novel, there are some interesting ideas on display, and I had a modicum of fun once I figured out an optimal path to Koronis Rift's conclusion, but the vast majority of my playtime was tedious trial and error, frustrated further by bugs and UI hiccups, and that part of it wasn't fun at all.
I'll give LucasFilm credit for one thing - their original wave of Atari games might not have all been fantastic, but they've all been original. Even as the third and final game to use the Fractalus engine, Koronis Rift is wildly different from either of the games that came before it; a flight sim, a dungeon crawler, and finally, well, this one's a little hard to pin down.
The manual, once again placing more emphasis on backstory than gameplay instructions, explains a familiar scenario. You are a space scavenger, you've been searching the galaxy for scraps of valuable precursor technology, and you've hit the motherlode - the legendary Koronis planetoid, the dumping grounds of the Ancients, whose garbage makes your state-of-the-art science computer look like a ZX80.
With 20 rifts to explore and loot, you land your surface rover into the nearest one and start searching for caches of their strange technology, all of which is compatible with your rover, and some of which enhances it.
And in about five minutes, the planet's drone defense system blows you and your underpowered rover into space dust.
What the manual doesn't tell you is that you're on a time limit. The game starts seeming like a tank sim, with some pretty convincing movement and acceptable visuals, with a looter shooter element as you need to explore the rift for upgrade modules like better shields and better lasers, but you absolutely do not have time to wander. The drones get powerful fast, and you need to keep up.
The modules and their locations are not randomized, but their purposes are obscure. Each module comes with two symbols and colors with some cryptic meaning to puzzle out - the manual gives some explanation, but it's badly explained, and deliberately incomplete. For instance, it will tell you that the eye icon represents shields, and that power and efficiency are both important stats, but do you want the pink Terran shield with 12% power and 12% efficiency, or the green growthform shield with 11% power and 15% efficiency?
Then, to actually analyze and equip these modules, you've got to wrestle with a horrendously over-engineered interface.
PSYTEK, your onboard science droid officer, is cute, but makes the simple act of comparing two modules a laggy, frustrating experience. You've got to move stuff from the rover to the conveyor belt. You've got to activate the belt to bring the thing in front of him. Selecting "Analysis" begins an overlong animation of PSYTEK punching numbers into the computer before he eventually comes up with the power:efficiency ratio of the selected module, but it also might do nothing, because this screen tends to drop inputs and lags when it doesn't, giving you no immediate feedback to indicate your command was accepted.
Worst of all, when you move a module back into the rover, it's incredibly easy to move it onto an occupied slot by accident, which deletes the module already in it. Forever. This will almost certainly happen if you touch the joystick during the conveying animation before it finishes. If that happens to a module you wanted to keep, then you might as well restart the game, and this has happened to me a lot.
One thing is clear by now - this isn't merely a tank sim looter shooter, but a metapuzzle to be solved through trial and error. You've got to learn where the good stuff is stashed, you've got to learn what it does, and you've got to be efficient about it, and you've got to accept that you're going to die a lot in the process.
Of the four original releases by LucasFilm, Koronis Rift is the only one whose lead designer, Noah Falstein, has a Wikipedia page and a pre-LucasFilm career described there. Notably, his juvenilia includes the unfinished simulation Koronis Strike: A Simulation of Mining and Combat in the Asteroid Belt, from which Koronis Rift borrows the left side of the title, and his first game as a lead designer at Williams Electronics borrows the rest of it.
Sinistar's prototype logo looked more... sinister
Two pieces of advice for anyone who wants to play Sinistar. One, use an analog stick - it's unconventional for the genre of multidirectional shooters, but Sinistar had a joystick with three levels of pressure sensitivity, and being a Williams game, expected an accordingly precise level of finesse from you. Second, play the easier AMOA-82 prototype version - it's a little buggier, has some missing animations, and Sinistar will call you a coward for doing it, but you might actually last five minutes. And don't worry - it's just as deadly as any other Williams classic, only much stingier with bonus lives.
Not good!
With its radar view reminiscent of Defender, Sinistar continues the house design of moderately complex, high-intensity shooting action, though there's less going on here overall, with only three types of objects to encounter, plus yourself and Sinistar.
Workers are harmless robots attempting to construct Sinistar; a spooky biomechanical construct. Destroying them delays this somewhat, but you can't possibly destroy them all.
Warriors are bots with pivoting turrets. They initially harass you, but the longer you tarry on in a sector, the more numerous, aggressive, and accurate they become, to the point where they can be more threatening than Sinistar himself.
Planetoids are resource-rich astronomical objects which the workers mine for the materials needed to build Sinistar, or that you need in order to destroy him.
Shooting planetoids releases crystals which you can collect to obtain sinibombs; a homing weapon which destroys Sinistar (sinibombs also destroy my wife, so she tells me). But the workers can steal them to accelerate the construction, and it's tempting to chase them down but this is probably a waste of time. Ultimately, it's a race against the workers to obtain enough sinibombs before they finish building him - it takes 13, but you'll want more than that in case some don't land.
Herein lies the most significant difference between the prototype and commercial versions. In the prototype, the planetoids are far more generous with their crystal output. Time after time in my initial attempts with the final revision, I just couldn't shake off enough crystals to take on Sinistar by the time he announced himself (Beware, I live!). And this is effectively a game over; you can't survive long once he starts hounding you, much less mine crystals under that pressure, and even if you have more lives, Sinistar does not reset his state when you respawn, nor do you replenish sinibombs, and he'll just eat you again within seconds.
I did have a bit more luck by camping close to Sinistar's construction site - workers tend to accumulate en masse there where they present as targets of opportunity, but I still couldn't beat the first zone reliably until I switched to the prototype version. And then in that version, I could never beat the third sector dubbed "Warrior Zone," which features increased spawn rates of, you guessed it, Warriors.
Reportedly, Williams' executives demanded a higher difficulty to increase quarter collections. Somewhere out there, there must be an idealized ROM set that has the feature completeness of the final version but the original difficulty curve intact.
Here's a video of my best attempt on the prototype version, where I score almost 124,000 points.
GAB rating: Average
Sadly, this one ends Williams' perfect run of ivory deck entries. Points for a novel gameplay concept and a very cool-looking and sounding villain, but Sinistar is hard for the wrong reasons. Defender, like its successors, was ruthless but kind of fair about it, and I enjoyed the process of mastering its controls and mechanics until I could get a respectable score. Sinistar is too fast, too fiddly, too zoomed-in to get a sense of what's going on, and too unforgiving. The radar is little use; the way it is positioned, if you're looking at it, you're not looking at the main screen, and something on it will kill you while your attention is diverted. And if you are looking at the main screen, something will zip onto it from offscreen and blast you quicker than anyone can react.
It occurred to me while complaining about Sinistar's tight-fisted approach to bonus lives that it is lacking a certain quality that some of the best arcade games of the golden era had, and earlier Williams games did quite well. There's not very much in the way of secondary, bonus point-scoring objectives! Defender, Stargate, and Robotron had humans to rescue, which was always secondary to destroying your enemies and totally optional in Robotron, but awarded the bulk of your points and was well worth pursuing for the bonus lives it would accrue. Joust had its eggs and bonus rounds with special objectives. But in Sinistar, by far the largest point-award is for destroying Sinistar which is what you're trying to do anyway. And sure, you can farm some extra points by sabotaging the construction zone with some early sinibombs, but it's not worth that much, and probably not worth it past the first zone. I had thought about the possibility of improving Sinistar with easier bonus lives, but with fairly one-dimensional goals (destroy Sinistar for points and progress), what would really be the point? Your main source of points is playing the game to beat the levels, and either you play well enough to gain them faster than you lose them, or more likely, you don't.
Next post we'll be back on the LucasFilm chronology with Falstein's first product for the newly founded team, and their last on the Atari platform.
LucasArts might be best known for their classic adventure games, or perhaps for their numerous Star Wars games, but the first wave of releases under the LucasFilm Games label was a series of four pseudo-3D action games for the Atari and other computers. I already played two of them, as they had been created in 1984, though they went unreleased for over a year until LucasFilm secured a publishing deal with Epyx.
The Eidolon, one of the two developed for Epyx in 1985, reuses the Fractalus engine for a very strange first person dungeon crawl. The manual takes the form of a Vernean inventor's journal, chronicling his subterranean travels under the surface of the earth's crust in the titular Eidolon, a powered tunneling vehicle armed with a fireball cannon.
Exploring a strange world, to seek out new life forms, and destroy them!
The journal explains some of the game concepts in-universe, but purposefully leaves a lot of key details out. For instance, there are monsters lurking about these caves which can be destroyed with your cannon, but what the manual doesn't tell you is that the monsters are invulnerable until you get quite close, and you can waste a lot of energy and time shooting at them from outside the kill range before you realize this. And it explains that there are four types of colored fireballs you can fire (destructive red, energizing yellow, freezing blue, and transmogrifying green), but gives me no reason why I'd ever want to bother using anything but red. And indeed, I never discovered any reason to, except for at the end of levels, where you are forced to. More on that later.
Despite using a more advanced iteration of the Fractalus engine, I found Eidolon to be ugly and unpleasant to look at. There's no equivalent of the former game's show-stopping re-entry sequence, and there's not much to look at except monochromatic walls - essentially an inversion of Fractalus' craggy landscape. Fractalus can get away with a bit of abstractness, given you're flying over the landscape and rarely need to be all that spatially aware, but in Eidolon you're navigating a maze, and the spatial demands are much higher than what can be visually communicated.
It took some tries before I quite figured out what The Eidolon is all about, but eventually I got good enough to consistently reach the eighth and final level, but I can't beat it.
Some basics about how the game works - very little of this is explained in the manual:
Each level is a maze, with three regular monsters hiding somewhere in it, plus a dragon.
Find and destroy the dragon to win the level. The C-H gauge helps you find it.
Each regular monster has a colored key card that you can collect after destroying it. A barrage of red fireballs is all you need (once you move in close enough) but easy does it - fireballs drain your batteries quickly and you have little power to spare for overkill.
There are also a number of fireballs just bouncing around the corridors.
Yellow and green fireballs can be scooped up with the space bar for more energy.
Blue fireballs can be collected to freeze time for a few seconds, but you can't hurt enemies during this time.
Red fireballs hurt you, but can be neutralized by shooting them with your own reds. Easier said than done - imprecise graphics and abysmal framerate make it hard to tell if you were successful, and if you fire a second red by accident, well, now you just have a new red fireball to deal with.
The dragon is shielded by an invisible force-field which will be opened by a specifically-colored key card. Later levels require two or three of them.
The dragon fights are chaotic and visually incoherent, but there's a logic to them. Each level's dragon is vulnerable to a specifically colored fireball, and only trial and error can help you find it. The trick is that when you inflict damage, you see sparks fly, but when you don't, it's damn near impossible to tell if it's because you flung the wrong color, or you missed, or it was neutralized by the dragon's own ordinance. But it's not randomized, so you're good once you learn. And if you get low on energy, you can recharge by hanging back and mashing the space bar to absorb the dragon's attacks - only red ones can't be absorbed, and most of the time you'll heal faster than you get hurt.
Here's a video of my best attempt:
There's another aspect to The Eidolon which isn't obvious, and isn't necessary to begin playing, but absolutely crucial to understand if you want any chance of finishing the game. You don't need every key-card to beat most levels. However, unused key-cards carry over level to level, and if you kill every monster on the first four levels, you will have exactly enough key-cards to finish the rest of the game. So do it! Then you may ignore the rest of the non-dragon monsters completely. You're on a tough time limit, and the deeper you delve, the more complicated the mazes, and the nastier the monsters. The less time spent fighting them later on, the better.
The eighth level is dark and confusing to navigate. Floating fireballs do help get your bearing.
And then there's a seven headed dragon at the end. I have no idea how you're supposed to deal with this. I can't manage to destroy a single one of the heads, not even with save states.
What's even going on?
There isfootage on Youtube of someone beating the game, and the last fight is roughly three minutes of visual chaos, concluding with a sprite of Nicola Tesla holding a dragon egg.
GAB rating: Bad
Rescue on Fractalus was visually striking but a bit too simplistic. Low difficulty helped make its slow performance bearable, and the look and feel made the experience enjoyable. But The Eidolon is ugly, punishingly sluggish, awkward to control, and needlessly obtuse. Or as "D" put it, "this is lame."
Updates could continue to be slow between now and November, unfortunately. My place of employment tends to go through cycles of idleness, buildup, and crunch, and we're hitting crunch hard thanks to upper management making some wildly optimistic assumptions about the efficiency of vibe coding. You can churn out 75,000 lines of code in a few months without any SME's this way, but the product will be a buggy piece of crap that does maybe 10% of what it's supposed to do, and it turns out the client doesn't want that.
Miss Vickers' combination opens Siegel's wall safe, but no antidote is found there. Just a file marked "Ace's bad checks" and a key to his trunk, where Mrs. Sternwood is indisposed.
I noted, this time, that the cabs are parked on Peoria Street, and you don't need to give the drivers a specific address in order to return. The street name alone will do.
I still needed an antidote, and there was only one other place that it made any sense to find one - Dr. Brody's office. I went back there and realized that it was there the whole time, on an unlocked medicine cabinet. I had seen several vials of drugs on it, but because some vials were on an open stand, and others appeared to be behind a display case, I assumed the case was locked, but it turns out you can just take them. But I need a syringe. And the only syringe I've seen is in Joe Siegel's trash.
I reloaded again. We're on a tight time limit and a budget. I raided the office, grabbing the evidence, the various keys, and the dirty syringe. It's a sequence break, since I shouldn't have the office safe combination yet, but I'm okay with a slightly dirty run.
I also grabbed the map from Siegel's car. I don't want the cops to find that!
Next, I take a cab to Vickers', skipping Siegel's apartment, and take the earring, the key, and diary.
Then to the office complex, where I immediately give myself a bisodiumitis injection. And more time.
I also take the sodium pentothal orders as evidence, and a few samples for myself. If anything else is going to be useful, this is.
Then I enter my office, taking care of the hitman first, and grab the ammo. And the job offer letter.
I revisited some of the deja vu spots to trigger better memories; Joe Siegel ruined Ace's boxing career by fixing fights, and Ace failed to land on his feet as a private eye, accruing a gambling debt and a bounty on his head. He has no memory of kidnapping Mrs. Sternwood, but rather, of being approached by Mr. Sternwood and asked to be the bagman for her ransom. A setup, obviously, which Siegel would have had to be in on, and his hitman must have planted a phony job offer into my abandoned office, and left phony instructions in his car.
It seems there's not much more for me to do, but Ace is still in a very bad spot, even though he has his memory back.
You can end the game by going to the police, but this is a bad move.
Ditching the gun is no good. They'll find it and fry you all the same... unless you lose it in the sewers.
There's some damning evidence on my person, but the game doesn't mention it, or resolve differently if I drown it.
Gotta find more evidence. And Mrs. Sternwood is the key. It seems cruel, but I give her a dose of the truth serum.
A ransom note is found in the mailbox, and I force my way in.
I explore, but the only things I find here of note are an incriminating letter,
And a "blank" notepad.
That old chestnut. Joe's pencil fills in the blanks.
This is enough.
The MacVenture universe's legal system operates on Phoenix Wright rules.
GAB rating: Good
This is easily the most enjoyable adventure I've played in quite a long time, and I chalk much of it up to the quality of its writing, which, free of its 8-bit contemporaries' capacity constraints, is by far the best I've seen this side of Infocom. I can only imagine that Kemco's NES conversion loses a lot in the translation. It invites comparisons to Deadline, which boasts the stronger mystery and character interactions, but Deja Vu is the better adventure overall, with a fairer solution, stronger worldbuilding, and crisp, monochrome graphics that don't just complement the prose and fit the noir-like atmosphere, but are integral to the interface and gameplay.
"D" tried this one too, and enjoyed the writing and humor, though she wished the mystery itself had been stronger. She was particularly impressed by some of its technical sophistication given its age, such as the window-based interface, the clear visuals, and tricks like awareness of the system clock for time-of-day and day-of-the-week.
There are some issues. It's not a long game, nor difficult, and the puzzles mainly amount to following leads until you find the exonerating evidence, which are all convenient records written and/or kept by the perpetrators themselves. The time limit, the backtracking, and the various ways you can get screwed over by bad luck are irritating, and yet because the game is a bit short and easy, I can forgive it, and even appreciate the sense of urgency and danger that it forces on you. The relative lack of conventional puzzles is a merit too; everything you do fits the game's theme and setting, with no silly adventure logic to distract from it. Condor wouldn't build a human dummy out of produce to throw the CIA off his track or wear a cat hair mustache to fool the police, and neither would Ace.
Overall, Deja Vu is a solid, well realized, and well balanced adventure game, with a clear vision, good design chops, and a unique style that owes much more to interactive fiction than King's Quest while still being graphical in a meaningful way. I award it a place in the ivory deck, and a harpoon; a rarity for this genre.
I've finished mapping out the immediately accessible areas, which are partly interconnected by the sewers, the building fire escape, and Joe's secret elevator, and noted a few dangers.
As I learned last time, an alligator patrols the sewers. A bullet takes care of it, but if you don't already have your inventory open and your gun ready when you see the gator, it's too late to do anything.
An unarmed, tattooed mugger appears randomly on the streets. Punching him does nothing, and shooting him in broad daylight seems like a bad idea. I gave him a quarter - he dumped me in the alley behind Joe's bar and took every cent I had.
Another mugger also appears randomly on the streets, and this one has a gun. With no money to offer, punching him, rather amazingly, works, but he shows up again with a black eye (so I gave him another).
The east end of the main street has a police station. Unsurprisingly, you are busted if you go inside, and given a nonstandard game over - they pin the murder of Joe Siegel on you, but your brain turns to mush in jail, you're judged unfit to stand trial, and die in a mental asylum.
Going east from the police station kills you immediately, as pictured above.
I restarted and did a quick run-around of Joe's bar and office, mainly to trigger some memories and grab some valuable items, but I also played the slots in the secret casino - a good investment as $0.75 earned me a $7.50 payout.
Lucky thing you can multi-select all those quarters before moving them.
I save and hit the streets.
Joe's car key doesn't open the trunk or the backseat, but it will open the front seat door, where I find:
A photo of a very large woman, which triggers a deja vu moment.
Siegel's car registration and home address - 1212 West End St.
A street map with some instructions. Some very incriminating instructions.
Is she still in the trunk?
I try popping the hood - and the car explodes. No need to guess what happens when you start the ignition, I'm sure. Reload!
Heading west - there's nothing but trouble going east - I encounter:
A newsstand. The headlines state "Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor," placing today at December 7th 1941. The newsboy advises me that the cops are looking for me - a woman across the street saw me doing something sketchy and tipped them off.
A gun shop has a Luger in stock. I can afford it, but I've already got a piece. A piece that will get me fried, but having a spare won't change that.
Two cabs, one blue and one yellow, are idling on the west end of the street.
A dame approaches.
I punch her out before I can find out what she's got for me.
In her purse is a Saturday night special, a makeup kit, and a $20 bill, which I take. And soon after I meet a bum who wants $20 for a tip - I give it to him and learn that Joey's hit man is waiting for me in "my office."
I enter the blue cab and take it to 934 West Sherman, the pharmacy's address. As it turns out, also my address.
I see the goon through the window and plug him with a .38. But the door's locked and I haven't got the key, and I can't break though the glass and open the door that way. Dr. Brody's office is also locked.
Next I go to 1212 West End St. to check out Siegel's apartment.
I find nothing here except a broad's photograph and an address - 520 S. Kedzie. I go there next.
The door's locked, but I can shoot my way in. This doesn't spook the cab driver at all.
There are a few things in here - a familiar scent of perfume, an earring, an unmarked key, a combination "33-24-36" written on a pad of paper, and a diary with the letters "M.V." embossed on the front, accounting the owner's past relation with Joe Siegel, and an ongoing affair with one John Sternwood.
The key opens Dr. Brody's office. Why does she have a key to this?
Two marked vials are here - one labeled Sodium Bicarbonate, another "SPECIMEN - 11/13 Todd Zipman." The cabinet here is combination-locked, and M.V.'s combination doesn't work, but my last bullet does, and there are many files inside:
Multiple orders of sodium pentothal for Joe Siegel, all handled by Marsha Vickers.
A carbon-copy of the pharmacy bill found in Siegel's office.
Several drug cards, starting with one on sodium bicarbonate. An alkaline gas relief solution. What kind of a pharmacist needs to keep a file to remember what that is?
Biosodiumitis - An antidote to diethanol trimene.
Diethanol trimene - An experimental memory-loss drug.
Sodium pentathol - Lowers inhibitions, and induces unconsciousness and veracious verbosity. Wrong, guys, that's hypnotism... though they do spell it wrong here.
Chemopapain - Pyschoactive euphoric drug.
Medrezine - Nerve gas counteragent.
Ofreeall - Anti-arrhythmic heart medication.
Several deranged memos detailing symptoms of conditions such as "cardiovascular shutdown" (e.g. death).
A copy of an advisory to Mr. Ace Harding, recommending that I quit smoking.
The key also unlocks my own office.
There are spare bullets in the desk, and some notes in the filing cabinet.
"Sugar Shack" has it in for Siegel. Reason unknown.
Some case notes concerning a blackmail against the alderman. Sugar Shack was the culprit, and our evidence put her away for a nickel.
Lastly, a letter from presumably Joe Siegel, asking me to kidnap a wealthy lady.
Evidently I took this job and things didn't go right for either of us. Clearly I have a (very possibly criminal) past history with Siegel, left him for the private eye business, and got into some trouble with the mob. He'd have me do one last, high-risk job to clear my name. But then, why would he want Mrs. Sternwood? More likely that Miss Vickers... or Mr. Sternwood... would want her (and Siegel) out of the way. And Vickers had been supplying the office with Dr. Brody's sodium pentothal, for whatever reason, giving her opportunity to be in on this.
My thinking - both Vickers and Sternwood are behind this. Sternwood, who we know is very wealthy, hired Siegel to kidnap his wife, promising him so much money that he could afford to pay off the mob. I did the job, but someone in their employ shot Siegel, blackjacked and drugged me with the cocktail that Vickers supplied, and hauled me, along with the murder weapon and Siegel's trenchcoat, down to the bathroom to take the fall. Ironically, they could have done nothing, and Sugar Shack, the one fly in the ointment, would have blown up both of them.
I'm still not sure why Vickers had a master key to 934 West Sherman, or why they bothered getting antidote, or who actually shot Siegel, or the point of giving me his coat (or at least putting his stuff in my coat), or why his hitman was after me. Perhaps Siegel intended to double-cross me so that the kidnapping couldn't be linked to him.
But now I'm stuck in a stupid way. I can't return to Joe's Bar because the cab driver needs an address, and I'm not sure what it is! It's just as well - the game warns me that I'm rapidly turning into a vegetative state, and it's not clear that I'm even on the right track to curing this. I suppose the antidote ought to be found in Siegel's office somewhere, but if it's not in his combination safe then I don't know where else it might be.
