Planet's Edge, a review (with pictures) Options

[jack cloudy]

Planet’s Edge, review of an oldie

What is it?
Well, Planet’s Edge is an old party-based cRPG set in space. That’s it. Characters are pre-defined so you can’t make your own. Just a small price to pay for one of the best RPGs ever.

Requirements:
Planet’s Edge (PE, for short) dates from a time where computers weren’t the overpowered machines they are now. And it shows. Unless you’re using a slowdown utility of some sorts to dial down those multi-core overclocking speeders, you’re lucky to play for three seconds before getting the game-over. The real-time sections aren’t very forgiving.

So turning to the subject of slowdown utilities, I am afraid I must say that Planet’s Edge has been an exception to the rule. While most other oldies (that run under windows) I’ve played worked just fine with cpukiller (a lot more benevolent than it sounds, really), Planet’s Edge refused to SLOW THE HELL DOWN! I’ve only got a 500-600 megahertz processor, but things went quicker than lightning.

So slowing down might be a problem. Apart from speed issues, Planet’s Edge is a Dos-era game and most likely won’t run under windows. Fortunately, there is a free program available on the internet that gives windows good old Dos, Dosbox. It takes a bit of work and some common sense to set it up but once you do, it works like a charm with nearly every Dos-era game (or program, but who wants to emulate Word’s ancestor when you can do something more fun than that?) Dosbox also manages to slow PE down, somehow, but it still goes rather fast in the real-time sections.

Summary of the requirements: Dosbox or a sufficiently old comp.

Where to get it:
Planet’s Edge has never been a good sale, for as far as I know and even finding it in a discount bin is nigh imposible. So the most likely chance to find it is to download it somewhere. Which means it is really a case of where do you stand on the subject of legality. Do you find it ok to download software from a company that has gone under years ago?

THE BIG STUFF BEGINS HERE. (Namely, the more interesting stuff. Gameplay and stuff.)

Story:
,,Come round, come round. Sharpen those ears and listen to the story I am about to tell. A story about grand adventure, about mystery and above all, about courage.”

Somewhere in the nearby future, mankind has moved into space and built a shiny moonbase where everything is good and well….shiny. Anyway, that’s all mankind has apparently been doing. Let’s just get to the real story, shall we?

One day, an alien vessel appears in our solar system. We, being the lovable monkeys we are, try to make contact and generally act scared out of our wits at seeing the newcomers. All attempts at communication fail miserably, and some paranoid guy gets the smart idea of sending interceptors to take down the alien vessel in orbit. They seemingly fail, but then the whole place goes up and…………….earth is gone. So are the aliens, for that matter.

The only survivors of the incident are the heroic people at moonbase, a research facility with an unexplainable militaristic streak. (Cause really, is it absolutely necessary to have a freaking HEAVY WEAPONS SPECIALIST? It’s the moon, what are they going to shoot at?) Since the moonbase apparently has researchers from all expertise’s, it doesn’t take long till the wiseheads start cracking and figure things out, for the most part. They deduce that Earth isn’t gone after all, just sucked up by a black hole. The most obvious clue for that theory is the fact that the moon itself still follows the exact same orbit it would have followed if the earth was there.

Moonbase was never meant to be completely self-sustaining, so they have to do something before dying. Namely, turn the black hole into a white hole and make it spit out good old earth so said planet can give moonbase the supplies it needs to keep on ticking. The easiest way to do that, they figure, is to built a faster than light starship and boldly go where no man gone before. Yes, that’s right. Not enough resources to maintain the base, but apparently enough to built a fully functional starship, military laser included. Admittedly, most of it, including the engine, was salvaged from the alien wreckage. (Which didn’t disappear as much as they’d have you believe at first.) The admittedly itself turns rather wonky when you realize that they’ve apparently built an infinite number of the basic starship as replacements in case you get vaporized.

The brave crew gets chosen and sets out for Alpha Centauri where they’ll find an alien base, conveniently turning it into the ‘tutorial mission’. Once on Alpha Centauri, it doesn’t take long (two, three seconds) for the brave crew to come under attack by alien robots with lasers. Get ready to play.

The brave crew

Note: As the story already suggests, logic takes a backseat. The game does not try to be overwhelmingly serious, so don’t expect that. It does have this wonderful retro-science-fiction feel throughout, which goes a long way towards making the game enjoyable.

Goal:
The goal of the game is to get earth back. To do that, you have to collect a couple of artifacts (the Centauri device) spread all over the universe. Basically, it is the science-fiction version of ‘go to the ancient forgotten dungeons of doom and collect the five skulls of the serpent.’

Setup:
The treasurehunt for the pieces of the Centauri device is played in episodes, with little to no connection between them. This gives it a bit of a Star Trek feel. The only thing missing is the ‘captain’s log narrative’. Unlike most rpgs which feature a ‘find the seven plot-mcguffins’, the game is non-linear. It is possible to get any piece in any order, once again because the episodes aren’t connected. You can even drop one episode for a while and do things belonging to another. But possible is not the same thing as plausible. The sectors have a difficulty-level attached to them in the form of the hostiles you encounter and some places should simply not be visited with a handlaser. So while you’ll be fighting a dozen or so big worms in the first sector, you’ll be fighting swarms of Alien-lookalikes in the third. Fortunately for you, each next sector features better weapons and armour.

Each episode follows the same general plan, which is as follows:
A: Arrival in sector and an attempt at finding a system that was mentioned at the Alpha Centauri information center. If possible, find any visitable planets. No matter how inconsequential they may sound, you’ll be visiting all of them before you get your prize.
B: As the crew travels around, they’ll be hearing rumours, investigating, helping friendly aliens and blowing up bad aliens.
C: Finally, after a lot of hardship, a piece of the Centauri device is obtained and its time to coast back to moonbase where it gets added to the device the engineers are building. After that, it’s time to do it all over again in another sector.

While the idea is basically the same, the game manages to keep it interesting by putting it into different costumes. You’ll be doing such nice things as arranging the marriage between a bird and a talking onion while walking through a minefield (I’m not kidding), take a cruise on the president’s ship and nearly plunge into the sun while gambling, return the talking stick to the non-talking onions, help the president with his assassins. And this is all still in the first episode.

Gameplay:
Gameplay is split into three portions. They are Moonbase, Space and Ground, in the order you’ll meet them.

Moonbase:
,,A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind. Only now, we’ll be making a bigger leap. Alpha Centauri, prepare. Mankind’s first interstellar tourists are coming your way.”


Moonbase is your home. While the emphasis is on the Space and Ground missions, Moonbase is absolutely vital. Over time, it grows. The research lab for example used to be a trailer, but now it looks more like a couple of containers in my case. The different menus, all accessed by clicking on the various buildings are colorful and in the case of the shipyard and the crew’s quarters, it is beautifully animated. I’ll go over them in detail except for Save game, Load game and Quit to DOS. Those three should be easy enough to understand.

Research Lab: This place is where you can check on your progress. There is the diagram of the Centauri device, which gets filled out as you collect the different pieces. And that’s all there is to it. Don't mind the technobabble blueprint. Just remember, polarizing the neutron-flow fixes everything.

Crew quarters: Look at the cute robot reading the newspaper. He’s an animated guy, reading and sometimes looking at you with those huge blinking eyes. This is the place where you can resurrect your dead crewmembers, sort of. Click on the cloning vats, select the character you wish to clone and they’ll come strutting across the screen in a moment. You can even clone still living characters. What they do with the surplus clones, I have no idea.

Warehouse: The warehouse is where you unload or load the cargo on your ship, build items, equip your crew and you can even build whole starships. The last option becomes extremely important although you’ll have to find a set of required blueprints first for each techlevel. The ship the crew is given at first is only an emergency option and barely airtight. It is slow, fragile and that laser should only be used as a flashlight.

Launch pad: There is nothing to do here and it is not even a separate screen. Just click on your shiny starship and it will take off for the void.

Shipyards
Here is where you can outfit your ship. While you start with this. (Except for the engine, that’s an upgrade I added.)

Three episodes later you may have something like this.

And the ships go up all the way to size 7.

Space:
,,Space the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Ulysses, the damned clunkiest bit of taped together trash ever to cross the spacelanes……Scratch that, we need to keep up the morale back home. It’s better not to call the Ulysses worthless in our logs, even though it is. Nelson, you got the life-support back on line? This breathing mask itches.”

Space is what you’ll be seeing a lot as you move from star to star. There is truly a mind-boggling number of systems, most of which are completely useless. And yes, you’ll have to travel to them first to find out if you can do anything there or not. Fortunately, Planet’s Edge makes the job easier by including an auto-pilot, saving you all the hassle of trying to find that system you went to earlier. Unfortunately, the auto-pilot also logs all those useless systems.

Anyway, Space is divided into three sections, all of which are real-time: Interplanetary, Interstellar and Combat. In each section, you’ll be giving commands to your crew, creating a ‘captain’s seat’ feeling. If any crewmember is killed, his/her place will be empty and the next best qualified crewmember will respond to your request if you click the empty place. If all crewmembers are dead, it is assumed that you skip home in an escape pod and wait for some freshly cloned replacements. As such, each crewmember is there for a certain category of tasks. I’ll list them by the colour of their uniform.
Purple: Scanning planets, beaming down to planets and healing crew.
Yellow: Cargo transfers, damage control.
Red: All the auto-pilot functions and the map
Green: Communication and shooting. (A diplomat with a gun….sure.)


Interplanetary: You’ll always start here by orbiting the moon. Oh, and the planets orbit the star at crazy speeds. Either this is just some more visual eyecandy, or we have to believe that mankind’s first interstellar mission consisted of three years orbiting the moon and another fifty in space. Either way, Interplanetary allows you to hop from planet to planet, to engage in orbit around them (another autopilot feature, good cause doing manual catch-up is hard.), to beam down if possible or to beam up cargo if possible (mining for resources, important if you want to build that kickass starship or two dozen flamethrowers). Flying off the edge of the screen will deposit you in…

Interstellar: Interstellar is interesting to look at at first. The screen seems to consist of several background levels, with some nice scrolling when you move. Anyway, there isn’t much to do here, just fly from system to system. To enter a system, you have to fly into the star. This is harder than it sounds. If you’re going to fast and make the turn too late or too soon, you’ll end up pulling circles around it. You can stop, rotate in place and then enter, which is easier. This however, takes time and you’d rather not be immobile when you’ve got half a dozen pirates out for blood on your tail. Yes, that’s one downside to Planet’s Edge. There are a lot of pirates, all of which will chase you from one end of the galaxy to the other. So if you’re doing a long haul, you might end up seeing a whole string of purple dots on the radar screen, all following your exhaust fumes.

This is however, the place where the auto-pilot really shines. As mentioned earlier, it can ferry you to systems you’ve already visited, even if you forgot where they are. And trust me, you’ll be using this a lot. Trying to find a specific star that lies twenty maps away is pure terror. Space is big, after all. Now apart from the ‘auto-pilot’ mode, there is also the ‘pursuit mode’. At times, you’ll get an alien vessel in the left display. Activating pursuit mode at this point will make your ship follow that alien vessel. This is nice if it is a trader doing his round, but bad if you’re following a pirate who would rather turn around and blow you out of the sky. Of course, for that scenario, there is…

Combat: Combat can be forcefully engaged by NPCs, or engaged by you. Just hail a trader and then tell the green-uniformed gunfreak to ‘commence attack’.

Anyway, combat is conducted in a topdown display that wraps around at the edges. Ships have several guns, that fire either forward, sideways, backwards or everywhere. Damage is first applied to the shields and then to the hull. When the hull starts taking damage, your ship will slow down and lose its performance. It is pretty simple in theory, but damn hard to do manual due to the high speed the game insists on. Fortunately, the auto-pilot comes to the rescue again and offers several options to automate combat, including velocities, weapon usage and whether it should run away or close in. If you’re far enough away from any hostiles, you can order to disengage from combat.

Combat is mostly a viewer’s affair because it is almost impossible to do it yourself. Even then, you have to make sure your ship can trash the other because the auto-pilot doesn’t exactly know the word ‘evasive maneuvers’. In a simple formula: Bigger guns + shields=win
Unfortunately, the starting ship can’t take hits, can’t dish them out and it can’t outrun either. So till you get something better, be prepared to spend a lot of time getting blown out of the void by pirates.

Ground:
,,Beam me up, Scotty. And order some fresh clones while your at it. These buggers are still hungry and we’re all out of cannon-fodder.”

Ground is the core of the game. These play like Star Trek where the away team goes planetside. Hell, your crew is even wearing the same kind of jumpsuit! Anyway, all the puzzling and most of the shooting will be done here as you go through the various quests. There is not much to say about it. You have an inventory, grab, give, look, shoot, a map and the ever important ‘beam-out’. You can also change the leader, who is the character doing all the actions. That’s a good thing, because you’ll be doing that a lot. On the other hand, it also turns to frustration together with the inventory where you have to switch leaders all the time. Unlike space, this section is turn-based, which is nice because there is no auto-pilot to do the shooting for you. And unlike the other sections, there are no real animations here, which is a bit of a shame. The part where you’ll be spending most of your time has the worst graphics. Yes, graphics aren’t important, but they are nice to have around.

Dailogues are big popups. Usually, they're completely scripted though in some cases, you get to answer yes or no. Said choice usually results in 'will you open fire?'.


One point for realism is the exclusion of leveling. Your characters are supposed to be pros, and they show this by never improving. While more realistic than the ‘guy who gets killed by flies turns powerful enough to take on all the twenty lords of hell’ scenario, it is also a bit frustrating when they won’t improve in the areas where they should be able to improve. You’ve got four characters, all with guns, but only one can actually hit her mark. And she’s the specialist. The non-specialists apparently never take the time to practice or learn by trial and error. And with the scale of combat here, that’s not good. So in the end, I’d rather have a leveling system.

Speaking of combat, it’s turn-based. In a turn, you can either shoot or move. You could also go into the inventory, but that’s less useful during a firefight. Fights tend to be pretty big. Half a dozen hostiles are no exception. More than that are possible as well. On one planet, you get to deal with as much as thirty onscreen! (Which were all hand-to-hand monsters and taken down while hiding behind a wall of crates.) The balance is a bit weird. Your characters are fragile, the enemy is not. (twelve grenades to the face, and it still moves. One grenade in Osai’s face and well….she ain’t moving.) On the other hand, most enemies (and three of your characters) have really lousy accuracy.

Apart from nasty critters with guns or claws, there is also the threat of minefields. With two exceptions, all minefields I’ve run across are invisible and a trial-by-error affair. While they add a different challenge than yet another gun-toting lizard, they also make the use of the save and load buttons a necessity.

Quests are as varied as they come, even though they generally translate to ‘bring object A to NPC B’. They can also be solved in two ways. Either by puzzling, or by blowing up everything that stands in your way and picking up the remnants after the smoke has cleared. The latter is harder, since everything that stands in your way tends to pack the guns that make it possible to stand in your way. You also run the risk of pulling the trigger once too often, thereby blowing up the spoils of victory.

Items: I thought I should do a small section on this. Items fall under several categories, which I’ll list.
Healing: Medikits, in all their forms. The best character to use these is the one in purple, cause she’s the doctor.
Ammo: Ranging from slugs to batteries to pure antimatter caches, these are the little boxes that keep your guns blazing. There are never enough of them to go around, it seems.
Armour: Armour is worn to protect you from whatever nastiness might be out for your head now. Each has a specialization, whether that would be hand-to-hand, laser, solid rounds or explosives. They also degrade as they take hits, which means you’ll have to switch often.
Weapons: From sharpened sticks to rocket launchers and laser rifles, make sure to carry some of these wherever you go. Rocket launchers and laser rifles, not sticks. All characters can hold all weapons, but only the heavy weapons specialist in green should be allowed to wield the rocket launchers. Unless you like seeing Nelson putting a rocket in his own face, that is.
Quest: These items are only useful for quests where you trade them for other items or services. Hang on to them till you finish the episode, then dump them on Alpha Centauri’s courtyard where you can find them if you happen to need them later.

All items are placed into the same inventory in one long list, although each character has his/her own inventory. The inventory accessed will always be the leader’s This is a bit of a hassle. Looking through four long lists for that one item can get tiresome. At this point, I honestly wished they ditched the realism and went for a single inventory, one with two or three rows of items rather than one.

And those are all parts of the game, I suppose. Hmm, what’s next? Oh yeah, my opinion.

Pros: Colorful world. Varied quests (even though they’re all the same type.) Multiple solutions to quests. The ability to outfit your crew and your ship to your heart’s desire with tools of mass destruction. Funny dialogue and characters.

Cons: Relatively weak graphics planetside. Manual flight both in combat and out is annoying. Pirates follow you everywhere, ignoring all the juicy trader NPCs. Inventory is rather inconvenient. Your characters don’t level, meaning that after twenty firefights, they still miss at point-blank. Only one character capable of conducting combat and hitting her target. (Pro: She’s also the one with the big guns.)

[Agent Griff]

Hm, despite you reviewed a game that most would find uninteresting I found your review charming. I especially liked how you parodied certain parts of Star Trek. As I've said before, you really have a knack for all things Sci Fi. Too bad you haven't played Mass Effect.

It's kind of like this game, only with awesome graphics and a somewhat more involving story (Bioware made it, you figure out the rest ).

[chrisssteeven]

The game's plot centers on investigating the sudden disappearance of planet Earth, by venturing out into the universe from a moon base. There are two main play modes: real-time exploration and combat using various spacecraft, and turn-based exploration, problem solving, and combat on the surface of hundreds of planets. Like most CRPGs, the game features a variety of objects, weapons, and quests/missions, but unlike most CRPGs, it lacks any detailed experience or stats system for the four characters the player controls.