Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
We've got another MS-DOS oldie here - EGATrek. Starting life as a space sim spread between
academic mainframes, a version of the game eventually found it's way onto IBM-compatibles.
The way I got my hands on it was when my dad had to take me and my older brother into work
one day. If memory serves, he basically booted his computer into DOS, pointed out the directory
and said something to the tune of 'go nuts'. But, y'know, more middle-class than that.
If I'd had any sense, I would have asked for a floppy to take it home but apparently, 8-year-old
me wasn't as smart as I would have hoped, because the next time I saw this game was
about a decade later. Browsing on some abandonware site, I recognised the screenshot and downloaded
it, all set to send myself back to 1992 again. And did I ever. I loaded it it up and I was
right back there at my dad's work - the big black chair, wide desk and beige monitor,
the smell of despair and toner - it all flooded straight back. If there's a better reason
to rediscover old games than to regain little pieces of your past like that, I don't want
to hear it.
Okay, digression over - EGATrek puts you in charge of a starship by the name of U.S.S.
Lexington. The Department of Space orders you to clear a local galaxy of invading Mongol
ships. The name EGATrek comes from the EGA graphics the game uses and... something else,
I guess. For those unaware, EGA is a 16-colour graphics mode for DOS. Technically you pick
those 16 colours from a 64-colour palette, but you probably don't care about that. I
know there's a pattern developing here, but I swear I do play DOS games that don't namecheck
their graphics mode in the title. In any case, that should let you know roughly how damn
old this game is. By the way, I hope you like PC Speaker noises
The actual gameplay is a simple concept that gets surprisingly complicated. You spend the
game moving from sector to sector killing Mongols as you find 'em. The Mongols are allied
with the Vandals and you can try attacking their ships too, but they don't fight unless
provoked and I've never been able to actually hit one because they're always cloaked...
which DOES raise the question of how the hell I know where they are at all. Asides from
combat, you can find starbases to dock with which replenish your energy, reduce the time
you spend on fixing up your ship and refill your supply of torpedoes to boot... unless
it's a research station; those are pretty useless but I guess it was just one more thing
to Chekov the list. If you find a planet, you can go into orbit and see if there's anything
useful down there, like energium (guess what that gives you) or enemy supplies. The only
other things of interest are stars (which pretty much just block your path) and black
holes which either spit you out in a random location or kill you shitless.
You'd best get used to this screen, because you'll be staring at it the whole time you
play; there's the local quadrant view in the top-left, which shows your ship as well. Laser
temperature here, the status of your various ship systems here, alerts and messages over
here, various info on the current stardate, energy and shield levels, warp speed, number
of remaining Mongols in the galaxy and torpedo count. The remaining windows are useless apart
from the Chart of Known Galaxy that sits up there in the top-right. Each move to a new
quadrant you make reveals some info on the surrounding 8 quadrants. Typing in the HELP
command does the best job of explaining those three numbers. If it's easier for you, just
remember that if the text is red, there's Mongols about. You heard that 'commands' thing
right, by the way; the entire game is controlled by typing in commands with the keyboard, a
fun little artefact of the time. I'll explain the commands a bit later, but suffice to say
it's a style of gameplay which is right up my alley.
It's hard to pin down exactly what about this game I find fun, given that I've probably
made it sound like a 24th century spreadsheet simulator. If it was just nostalgia, that
one day I spent playing it wouldn't have been enough. So pondering what it was, I realised
that it's surprisingly deep given the concept and the technical limitations of the day.
It's got strategy, being more or less turn-based, managing your energy levels and ship damage
throws simulation in there too, a wee sci-fi universe brought in from whatever the hell
that 'trek' thing is; there's a lot going on in that 276 kilobyte package. All that
explained, it's probably easier to demonstrate it. Don't know why I didn't do that first,
to be honest.
Let's go through a typical fight - you've got Mongols, you've got yourself. You can
destroy the Mongols with lasers or torpedoes. If you choose lasers, you need to specify
how much energy to fire at each target - different ships take different amounts of punishment
and you've only got so much energy to burn; bear in mind you might need that energy to
warp away if *** goes all nipples-skyward. The ratio of damage you do to energy used
decreases the more your lasers are damaged. If you want to torpedo the opposition, you
choose to fire between 1 and 3 torpedoes and then specify coordinates to fire them at.
In either case you'll do less damage the further away you are from your target.
Your typical enemy - the Mongol battleship - looks like this. The supply ships and scouts
are slightly weaker whereas Commanders are *** tanks. But not as much as the Mongol
bases, except bases have the common courtesy not to move. You want those bases dead quickly.
Also, be careful where you fire those torpedoes - hitting a star and turning it supernova
is generally considered a bad thing.
Should the fight go badly, like when a long range tractor beam drags you into a sector
with 5 enemies when you were off to a starbase to glue your ship back together, you have
two last resorts. The first is self-destruct - you actually set a password for that at
the start of the game... in case someone comes up to your computer while you're not there?
As if they couldn't just park you beside a star and turn it supernova. The only real
advantage to doing this is the possibility that you'll take some ships with you in the
process and increase your final score slightly... although the Department of Space still tends
to look down on that whole 'lost your ship' deal.
The second - and much funnier - last resort is the Death Ray. The reason this is a last
resort is because the results are unpredictable; ranging from destroying every enemy on screen,
to doing absolutely nothing, to turning the grid into a minefield of black holes which
you might not even be able to escape, all the way down to destroying your ship. Except
there's one more possibility somewhere in between; the Death Ray has a chance of turning
half your men into insane mutants. This means your View port periodically shows a noughts
& crosses game or a smiley face, and half your commands will will get ignored in some
humorous fashion. Because whilst I think the most pressing issue is the Mongol base intent
on turning my balls into salsa, my crew is more concerned that I know the chorus to "Don't
Worry, Be Happy".
So let's say you emerged from the battle victorious, but your ship is starting to resemble a Space
Hulk doing an impression of Swiss cheese; you can spend some stardates concentrating
on repairs, even specifying which systems to focus on. If more than half your systems
are damaged and you can hobble back to a starbase, I would do it - they'll finish the repairs
much quicker. Whilst those systems are buggered, you'll notice some adverse effects. For example:
A damaged Life Support system will start a countdown until your crew suffocates. This
isn't so bad on easy modes, but at the highest difficulty you'll only last two days - repair
it first if at all possible Warp engines will reduce in top speed to nothing,
whereas impulse engines just break at about half damage
Long range scanner will stop accurately reporting on surrounding sectors
and short range scanners will apparently disable your ability to look out of a *** window
The most annoying system to get damaged is the computer, because that stores information
on all the sectors you've visited which disappears as the computer takes damage. It's worth noting
down the positions of any starbases you come across, bearing in mind that only those labelled
1 or 3 will give you torpedoes. If you've never played this before, the HELP
command is going to be the most useful one to you (since it contains a list of all the
other commands) but I'll cover the basics anyway. Use MOVE with 2 coordinates to move
within your sector or with 4 coordinates to move between sectors. Right, there's something
you absolutely need to know about this game; your friendly neighbourhood Cartesian coordinates
are backwards here; it's vertical first, horizontal second. So the top-right is 1,8 instead of
8,1. There's no real trick to learning this one, you'll just get used to it if you keep
trying. And by that I mean after trying to stop a starbase getting destroyed only to
find you've moved to the wrong *** corner of the galaxy for the four-***-hundredth
time...
You use impulse engines to move within a sector and warp engines to move between them. Impulse
has one speed, but you can set the warp speed between 1 and 10. Higher warp speeds are faster,
duh, but they drain your energy far quicker. Which makes things difficult when you get
alerts telling you a starbase is under attack and you need to get there on time whilst retaining
enough energy to vape all the attackers. If you're worried about not making these, bear
in mind that losing a starbase robs you of a potential resupply spot, but missing planet
evacuations merely subtracts from your final score. If you care about that sort of thing.
Which you probably don't, because it's not 1985 any more.
The LASER command brings up this window, which asks you how much you want to unload on the
local bad chaps. Try 500 at first, then mess around with it to see what the various ship
types can handle. TORP will bring up this window, asking you how many torpedoes you
want to fire and then what coordinates to fire them at. Again, be careful of those suns.
DOCK... well, docks you with a starbase, ORBIT puts you into orbit around a planet - both
require that you're adjacent to it - and LAND lets you send a party down to a planet's surface...
if you've remembered to lower your shields first. That one's easy to remember though,
just press the Down Arrow key. And for Krishna's sake remember to put your shields back up
afterwards. For those 'OH DEAR GOD MY ***' situations, FIX will display your various
sub-systems and let you pick one to concentrate repairs on (if any) and for how many stardates.
And for those utterly *** situations, SELF will activate self-destruct (if you remember
your password) and RAY will activate your Death Ray. Best of luck with those.
So Mr. Iki, I hear you ask - how am I meant to remember all these different commands and
how they work? Well, I would reply... number one, stop transmitting questions directly
into my mind; it's freaky as hell and frankly, more than a little bit rude... although you
were considerate enough to address me as mister, I'll give you that. Second, you only actually
need to remember the first letter of the command. Also, commands such as WARP or MOVE let you
put in the numbers along with the command, and that pretty much halves the time it takes
to input them. If you're utterly gay for keyboards like I am, this will make you the happiest
of all the bunnies. Because the speed at which you'll be able to play this is insane. Want
an indicator of just how quick? On the lowest difficulty, I can complete a game in 2 minutes.
That's 120 seconds. I don't know how many Actions Per Second that comes to, but I bet
if I was in one of those pro Starcraft tournaments, I could... uh, you know what? Never mind,
that looks really ***' difficult. Point is that not only can you play this entirely
with the keyboard, but be blisteringly fast while doing so and that makes me happy in
the pants.
So is it worth a shot? I think so. You have to be comfortable with learning some commands,
managing your energy and damage levels and basically memorizing how much punishment certain
enemies will take. It gives you a lot of control over what you do, and you have to be okay
with the lack of hand-holding or mouse support. It looks intimidating, but it's probably less
complex than your average game of Civilization II. I'm not even sure I can sell this to people
who didn't grow up with DOS, but damned if I won't try. I haven't seen a game that gives
you such a simple mission in such a large game world. It's not a sandbox by any means;
you can kill Mongols, dock with starbases and land on planets - that's pretty much it,
but it's up to you how you do it. You can pick your fights, search all the sectors for
planets and starbases, try and finish the game when your Death Ray has already sent
half your crew Tom Cruise crazy - you get a lot of freedom and with that freedom comes
the potential for a lot of fun... once you actually figure out how to play it.