Sunday, October 18, 2020

INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES

This was a review I wrote for Computer Gaming World, March 1995, Issue 128. You can download the issue from the CGW Museum here. I contributed two reviews to that issue, and as you can probably imagine, I enjoyed playing through the other game considerably more. What made CGW reviews much better than those of its competitors was that CGW required its reviewers to play through the entire game before writing the review, preferably without using cheat codes. Of course, this made it very hard on the reviewer who was under time constraints, or, as in this case, who had been inflicted with the task of reviewing a substandard game. 


CAN'T STAND THE HEAT?

Then You’d Better Get Out Of INFERNO’s Kitchen

I don’t know about you, but I can al­ways seem to tell when I'm watch­ing a British television show. Even without the obvious clue of the ac­cents, it’s usually something I realize immediately. I don’t know if it's the light­ing, or the sets, or the acting, but there’s always something that just doesn’t jibe with my Continental sensibilities.

My Brit sixth sense went wild when I first booted Ocean Software's INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES, an import from our friends across the At­lantic. This probably tells you more about the game than you could learn without playing it yourself, because INFERNO is more than a little different in a lot of ways.

INFERNO purports to be a space combat game with a multi­media twist—sort of  a WING COMMANDER put on by the BBC. Despite its English pedigree, it has that “Sillywood” vibe to it. a term that rather accurately describes the quirky results one has learned to expect when Hollywuddites are mated with game develop­ers. There aren’t any B-movie actors or stars from bad Fox sitcoms in­volved, but there is a Director's Cut ver­sion waiting to be played. Hey, like Bladerunner, right?!

The plot is a generic one involving hu­manity’s war with an alien race called the Rexxons, who have green skin, big tusks, and look rather like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Many years ago. hu­mans defeated the Rexxons in the first Epic game, and now their descendants are back to have another go. Fortunately, humanity has a hero and the most power­ful space fighter ever devised—the Infer­no space craft.

If this is starting to sound like some­thing you've heard before, maybe an old sci-fi movie from the 50s, you’re on to something. Not only does the manual have an actual comic book woven into it, but one dial boasts lines like: “By walking into my little trap, you have unwillingly provided us with the technology to bring about the annihilation of your species!” It was awful, though not quite bad enough to cause me to do any­thing as extreme as opening a vein.


NO JOY

However, I did find myself seri­ously contemplat­ing a first degree CD-ROMicide af­ter an hour of wrestling with the joystick configu­ration. As the proud owner of a Thrustmaster Flight Control Stick. 1 was pleased to see that there were two joystick options: normal and Thrust­master. Unfortunately, the setup pro­gram and I were apparently not reading the same astral chart, because the pro­gram insisted that I did not have a Thrustmaster, despite the convincing evidence of my naked eyes. I managed to get the game to successfully recognize the FCS as a normal joystick, but upon enter­ing the actual game itself, discovered that the joystick didn't work at all. I'm still try­ing to decide whether it’s more fun to: a) play with the keyboard, b) play with the mouse, or c) perform manual labor on U.S. Air Force bases in Japan.

Once you’ve entered your name and call sign, you're given three choices of play: Arcade, Evolutionary, and the aforementioned Director’s Cut. The Di­rector’s Cut is the “interactive movie," while the Evolutionary game offers con­trol over both the strategic direction of the war against the Rexxons as well as tactical command of the Inferno fighter. 

However, the Action option, which promises "a quick blast," is hardly that, due to an intro sequence longer and more tedious than the average dental ex­amination.

But if you grit your teeth or manage to find the ESC key in time, you’ll eventual­ly find yourself in command of your spacecraft, ready and waiting for your command to launch. At this point you may recall the great graphics on the box and in the ads, but you can forget about them. Those lovely 3D renderings are only seen in the cut-scenes, not in the playable game. Flat-shaded polygons in primary colors are pretty much what you're left with.

Believe it or not, the game itself bears more than a passing resemblance to some of the original CCA flight sims. The action is very fast and furious once you figure out what's going on, which is rather difficult because the cockpit looks as if it was designed to be displayed on an amber monochrome screen. Unfortunately, Inferno offers a remarkable ap­plication of that old saying about not judging a book by its cover.

Now yon might think that I’d be in se­rious trouble playing only with the mouse and keyboard. After all, without a joystick you’d survive about 3.2 seconds in FALCON 3.0 or TIE FIGHTER. But surprising­ly, this isn't the case at all. Instead, I found it relatively easy to take out the Rexxon fighters simply by holding down the space bar and waiting until their flight path intersected with my constant stream of laser fire. They don’t have much in the way of armor or shielding, so you can regularly take out a squadron in a single burst if you plot your trajecto­ry correctly.


ZERO GRAVITY

The flight model, such as it is, isn’t. 

Which is to say that Ocean has taken the reasonable position that by the time hu­manity has established an interstellar em­pire, we’ll probably have turned gravity into humanity’s lapdog. When flying the Inferno craft, there’s little difference between cruising through deep space and cutting through the thick particles of a planetary atmosphere. Essentially, the rule is to simply point your nose and go, without wor­rying about little things like G-forces and the like.

Other than the handy new anti-gravity technolo­gy, the Inferno fighter also boasts an impressive array of auto-assistance. There’s auto-navigation, auto-pilot, auto-docking, and auto­-combat options, which will almost let you cruise auto­matically through the game if you have the pa­tience for it. While the rest of the auto-assistance works fairly well, the auto­-combat doesn’t handle the Inferno much better than you’d expect R2D2 to handle an X-Wing against Vader. But keep in mind that you don't score points for suc­cess garnered this way, and the manual seems to consider it bad form.

And speaking of bad forms, one thing that can­not pass without being mentioned is the truly unbelievable cinematics. While the dialogue be­tween the armless Emper­or and the prosthetically- enhanced protagonist is cheesy enough to stun senseless nearly any sen­tient being, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone with a pulse can be expected to listen to over two-and-a-half straight minutes of subtitled alien grunting. Two-and-a-half! I swear, I timed it! Rumor has it that the CIA is looking into buying the rights for use in interro­gations. “HNGH GACGH GRRLLL GRAAAKCKH?” “gwo heegee krakrakrak urrnaath neeewhom!” Okay, 1'11 talk!

There are some positive aspects to INFERNO. The sound effects are quite good, as is the music soundtrack provided by Alien Sex Fiend, a British band of some renown in the mid-lo-late 80s. Fans of the band might be a bit disappointed, as the music sounds more like pop MIDI techno than the band’s traditional sound, but it’s good pop MIDI techno, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

Also, while it seems that the designers of Inferno have fallen a fair ways short of their lofty goals, they do succeed in creating a game universe with a very large feel to it. While the cheesiness of the plot and weak combat prevent one from caring much about the fate of this particular universe, it seems clear that there was the potential for a very good game in INFERNO. It’s unfortunate that the potential was left waiting at the altar.

INFERNO isn’t a bad game, just a terri­bly mediocre one. But in a world with games like TIE FIGHTER and WING COMMANDER III, it’s really impossible to rec­ommend INFERNO to anyone,


THE EDITORS SPEAK

Rating: 1/5

Pros: A CD space combat game that will run on 386 PCs.

Cons: Combines mediocre action with paralyzingly dull cut-scenes.


INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES

Price: $59.95 

System Requirements: IBM compatible 386-33Mhz or better, 4 MB RAM, VGA graphics, 4 MB hard drive space, CD- ROM; supports AdLib, Roland, and Sound Blaster sound cards; supports Thrustmaster FCS and WCS controllers.

Protection: None

Developer: Digital Image Design Publisher: Ocean Software San Jose, CA (408) 289-1411

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