Much Ado About Everything

I was cleaning up my PC yesterday and while doing that I decided to start playing some really old games I got years ago but for some reason didn’t play.  The one I decided to do first was Independence War: Edge of Chaos.  It’s an old space sim.

Now, space sim games are one of my favourite genres.  Unfortunately, this genre is all but dead.  I haven’t played one since Freelancer and that was in 2003.  But the genre was dead already at that time.

I went through the intro sequence, played the “tutorial” mission, if you can call it that, and then finally after about an hour, I got to actually start the game proper.  Which is to say, I was given a guided tour of the system I was in.  I left my base, speeded up to the first waypoint, received a bit of radio chatter and then received a message that went something like “surrender your ship or die”.  My ship’s AI said “oh, soonoer than I expected, but don’t worry, this ship can take them”.  As I was reaching for buttons on the joystick to steer, speed and prepare to find the enemy and fire, I was “treated” to what I thought was a cutscene.  A ship was shown in the center of screen and it blew into pieces.  Wow, I thought, the ship really did take care of them, and on its own.  After all, it’s been only a few seconds.

Alas, that was my ship!  It was me who got destroyed.

What the? – I thought.  Oh well, I must’ve run into something.  So I decided to load and retry.  It only takes about a minute and half to get to that scene.

Next time I believe I managed to live for 10-20 seconds.  The following time I was even luckier at about 30 seconds.  The final two times I tried it, however, I died within 5 seconds again.

No, I am not kidding.  I died in literally less than 5 seconds several times.  I’m guessing I was blown to bits by missiles. 

Now, I don’t even have energy to yell out a rant.  I mean, seriously, what kind of CRAP is this?  It doesn’t even deserve a rant.  This is the worst, crappiest junk of a gameplay I’ve ever seen.  I’m sorry, but there’s nothing, but nothing I can do in 5 seconds to avoid a salvo of missiles at point blank range.  I was thinking of using flares but I have no idea how to activate them, and God forbid you can actually remap, or forget remap, just see what key mappings are.  I can’t find my manual and the game didn’t teach me that in tutorials.  I doubt flares would help anyway.

In fact, I believe I was firing flares at the enemy instead of lasers, those 2 times I survived for 20-30 seconds.  I mean, I did manage to get them in my sights, but instead of quick laser beams – that it would fire before the dogfight started – the ship would fire some kind of slow ball thingies.  Either flares or some kind of missiles.  They weren’t hitting anything anyway.  Now, I have never EVER seen a space sim where the joystick button 1, primary fire, doesn’t mean “fire” at any point while in the cockpit.  I can only guess that by selecting the nearest enemy it also switched the controls in some way, making the ship fire something other than lasers.  How and why?  Who knows?

What’s worse, according to a “walkthrough” I found on the web, the AI of your ship is supposed to use this mission as the dogfight tutorial.  I think that time when I managed to survive 30 seconds, he did say a sentence or two.

Now, did I just maybe end up in the worst possible spot when the attack was triggered?  I don’t know because at that point the game is not telling you to go anywhere, but even then the game needs to be set up so you can see who your opponents are.  Instead you get a cutscene “give up your ship or die”, during which of course you cannot see anything or control your ship, and after the cutscene the unseen enemy pounds you to death in 5 seconds with missiles.

I don’t think this kind of stuff ever happened to me in any of many space sims I played.  I was attacked by swarms of ships firing missiles but never the very second the mission starts and without any kind of forewarning.  Even near the end of the game.  And this, this was the very first real mission in this game.

I am without words.  I didn’t even pound on my keyboard.  This is just pointless.  The worst gameplay I’ve ever seen.  Particle Systems, the company that made the game, was later acquired by another company.  I can only hope that by today the person responsible for this crap is washing dishes in a poor neighbourhood somewhere.  I only wish the stupid payola critics that gave the game high marks would join them.

5 seconds.  Primary fire doesn’t really fire.  Just unbelievable.