THIS is the 21st CENTURY ...
THIS IS WAR!
John Sweeney takes a look at a new genre of
computer software - the futuristic wargame. Autoduel and Roadwar
2000 are leading examples of the genre and John has delved deep into
both
This is the 21st Century where the right of
way goes to the biggest guns. The roads are controlled by warring
gangs. No travel is safe. To survive a journey between towns you
need a heavily armoured car bristling with weapons. Your country is
depending on you. You will need to learn how to survive in this
harsh new world, indeed not only survive, but amass enough worldly
goods to ensure you can create a powerful enough force to fulfill
your many missions. You will need to learn about the towns and
cities of this future time, how to get what you need without making
too many enemies, how to follow the clues which will take you to
your final mission; how to handle the detailed road fights when you
are attacked by a gang of enemy vehicles, probably outnumbered and
outgunned. If you have learnt your skills well you can still
triumph.
So, which game am I talking about? Roadwar 2000 or
Autoduel? Well, both, actually. This is a prime example of how two
different groups of people can take the same theme and create two
entirely different games. Both are excellent games and will appeal
to a very wide audience. Both are sophisticated war games with a
basic requirement of learning how to survive and grow, while
searching the cities for clues so that you can complete your final
quest. All the details and game play are, however, very different in
the two games and one over-riding difference is in how detailed
combat takes place. In Autoduel fighting is done either voluntarily
in the city arenas or forcibly while travelling between cities. You
have a single car which you control with a joystick, shooting with
the fire button and switching weapons with the space bar.
The fights are, basically, sophisticated arcade
games. Roadwar 2000 does not use a joystick at all. The most
detailed fights, which can take place in a variety of terrains,
involve numerous cars on each side and are controlled by single key
commands to accelerate, brake, turn and move each car during the
movement phase and single key commands to choose a target and fire
in the firing phase.
If you are hopeless with a joystick and can never
successfully develop the motor (no pun intended!) skills necessary
to win arcade games you should avoid Autoduel. If you don't have the
patience to read and understand some fairly sophisticated movement,
firing and boarding rules and comprehensive (21 per vehicle!)
vehicle statistics, or the patience to spend well over five minutes
( and quite possibly half an hour!) on a single fight, then you
should avoid Roadwar 2000. Otherwise, you may well enjoy both – read
on and try to decide which one to buy first!
Where did it all start? Which came first – Mad Max
or Judge Dredd? Whichever it was, the idea of a future controlled by
warring road gangs seems to have gained significant popularity in
gaming circles. Apart from the computer variations you can also buy
board games such as Thunderroads ( MB Games), Battlecars ( Games
Workshop) and Car Wars ( Steve Jackson Games). Autoduel is actually
based directly on Car Wars, so let's look at that first.
"Drive offensively – The life you save may be your
own".
You
start by creating a new character and allocating 50 points between
Driving, Marksmanship and Mechanical skills. Shortly thereafter you
will be presented with a bird's eye view of your character walking
round New York. Ctrl-D will show you your current statistics: $2000,
low skills, no armour, and no clone to take over if you get killed.
In order to win you will have to improve all of these areas. You
should ignore the rather complex section in the middle of the
excellent instruction manual for the moment. This covers all the
details of how to design your own car, how to arm it, and how to use
the varied weaponry but you can't afford it yet! If you are the
gambling type you could hop on a bus to Atlantic City and try your
hand at Black Jack or Poker, otherwise you should head for the
Arena, pausing only long enough to buy some body armour at the Truck
Stop. Provided you haven't wasted too much time you should find that
it is Amateur Night – the only night you can get in without your own
car. They will lend you a Killer Kart – a fairly low grade machine
with little armour and only one weapon, a front-mounted machine gun.
Fortunately your opponents only get Killer Karts too!
So far, apart from using the joystick to move around
the streets of New York (which seems to have shrunk a bit by the
year 2030 – it only takes up one screen!) you will have been using
the keyboard to select items from numbered lists in the
establishments you have visited. Now the fun starts – you are into
an arcade game driving your Killer Kart around a vast scrolling
arena searching and destroying the other amateurs. The borders of
the screen are a mass of control panels indicating your weapons,
your battery charge, your speed and the remaining hit points on the
front, back, left, right, and
underside armour of the car, each wheel, your power
plant and YOU! You also have a small radar screen to help you find
the enemy. As you drive around the arena, avoiding the fences and
obstacles you will eventually come face to face with the enemy –
blast and dodge and may the better man win! Unfortunately there are
five of them and only one of you – not very fair really. You have
limited ammo, the status of which you can check with a Ctrl-C (which
will tell you all about the car design as well, but don't worry
about that yet – survival is all you should care about at this
stage!).
FIRST GET SOME MONEY
Getting started at Autoduel is not easy – you are
unlikely to emerge as an Amateur Night Champion on the first few
tries, but once you get the hang of it you will earn yourself $1500
and some prestige. Prestige and your various skills will normally
increase whenever you succeed at anything. This is important as you
need prestige to get some of the important jobs, driving skills to
get better control of your car, mechanical skills to enable better
salvaging of wrecks (both for spare ammo and to make money), and
marksmanship to improve your shooting – it is worth noting that the
computer is obviously 'throwing lots of dice' to decide whether or
not you hit since sometimes a shot will miss on the screen but still
have devastating effect, and vice versa – these 'dice throws' are
heavily biased by your marksmanship.
Amateur Nights come round fairly frequently so you
should soon be able to amass enough money to go and build your own
car, fortunately there is an Assembly Line in New York, so you don't
have far to go. (Your prestige will probably have reached six by
now, so you can forget about Amateur Nights unless you run low on
cash.) Now you need to read about car design. You have to choose
from seven body types, then decide on
the quality of the chassis, the suspension, the power plant, the
tyres, the weaponry and the armour! Fortunately the foreman
understands the principles of car design even if you don't and will
keep constant track of the space, weight and cost of your new car.
You first need to decide what you want the car for –
the game allows plenty of scope in what you do next. There are
sixteen cities scattered across the Northeast of the USA which you
can visit. Nine of them have arenas for you to fight in, eight have
branches of the AADA (the American Autoduel Association) which will
offer you courier jobs which can be extremely lucrative (up to
$15000!) if you get the goods to the right destination in one piece
and on time, and there are also the roads between the cities, which
need clearing of outlaws. On the fold-out map you get with the game
the roads are shown as nice straight white lines – don't be fooled
by these. All 'roads' are arcade-time again and are actually tangled
mazes of roads, some dead ends, some overgrown with forests or
littered with boulders – taking a wrong turning can add 400 miles to
your journey and if your power supply wasn't fully charged that
probably means you won't make it. These roads are NOT safe for
pedestrians! (Actually, if you do run out of gas you can cheat a
little – just Q(uit and save) and restart –you will find yourself
back in the previous city!.) The roads are also the natural habitat
of the deadly road gangs. These guys aren't limited to Killer Karts
with machine guns – here you will meet limousines armed with lasers,
rocket launchers, minedroppers and anything else that money can buy!
WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS?
The arenas likewise offer a lot more than just
amateur nights, there are Divisions 5, 10, 15 and 20 for cars of
total value up to $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 and $20,000 respectively,
plus unlimited nights and, every three months, the City
Championships.
So, before you build your car you must decide – are
your initial plans to be a vigilante, an arena champion, or a
courier, and if you are a courier are you going to be a rabbit or a
turtle? – do you want armour or weapons or speed? Even when you have
a vast fortune you will find the game is designed cleverly enough to
prevent you building the perfect car – either too much armour will
reduce your acceleration, or you won't have space for all the
weapons you want. You always have to balance your desires against
what is practical. And when you start out your main limitation will
be your bank balance! Also, beware of building a car which is midway
between two divisions. If you spend $6,000 on a car they won't let
you into Division 5 and you will find yourself outclassed in
Division 10. The only change you can make to a car after it is built
is to add weapons (money, space and weight permitting!). Once you
are rich you can of course have lots of cars, the garages will look
after the spare ones for you (for a small fee) and you can keep
different ones for different purposes or sell them for scrap.
One of the best aspects of the game is the range of
weaponry, both offensive and defensive: Machine Guns, Flamethrowers,
Rocket Launchers, Recoiless Rifles, Anti-Tank Guns, Lasers,
Minedroppers, Spikedroppers, Smokescreen, Paint Sprays, Oil Jets and
Heavy Rockets. Each has its own characteristics and uses. You can
have up to ten weapons, mounted on the front, sides or back of your
car – I especially liked the flamethrower, even if the long blast of
flame misses the enemy car, the resulting cloud hangs about on the
screen and may blind him! The Arena fights and road fights with
gangs of cars are excellent arcade games once you have a nice
variety of weaponry to throw at the enemy!
So what's it all about? Keep your ears open for
rumours and secret information at the Truck Stops and Bars and you
should eventually learn of some special courier jobs which are well
worth taking. There are also rumours of a Mr. Big who runs the
Eastern sea-board outlaws - maybe your final quest will have
something to do with him!
ONE SLIGHT CRITICISM
My only slight criticism with the game play is that,
once you have fully mapped the roads, got a good enough car, and
learnt how to use it to get past the road gangs, then some of the ,
drives between cities, which can still take five or ten minutes
'become a tiny bit tedious as you watch mile after mile of similar
looking road scroll slowly past, but by the time you get to that
stage you should have nearly completed your quest, so hopefully you
won't have too many such journeys.
Two points on the documentation. First, for Ctrl-A
read Ctrl-R and secondly, the detailed notes on Saving characters
don't fully explain how to retrieve a saved character if he has died
- the Q command to quit and save to the B-side only allows you to
resume once. If your character dies you will not be able to reload
him again. Obviously you can copy your B-side, but that takes a long
time. The simplest way is to Quit (which saves your character to the
B-side), restart, select Activate Old Driver, reply Yes you do want
to save your current driver, wait while it loads him into memory,
insert a formatted disk when prompted, wait while it saves him to
it. Now when it asks for the disk with the new driver to be inserted
just press enter to use the character you have just saved. The big
difference now is that the version of him on the formatted disk is
NOT destroyed by loading. If he now dies you can re-Activate him
from that formatted disk as many times as you like.
The XL/XE version is in black and white; the ST
version is in colour and also allows you to use the F-keys instead
of trying to reach ridiculous combinations like Ctrl-L with one
hand! The only other difference between the two versions that I
could spot is that the ST allows you to use a mouse, but since they
didn't complete the job you will need to reach for the keyboard
occasionally to speed up messages with the space bar and to reply to
questions with Y or N. Whether you can fight duels with a mouse is
another matter, I found the joystick much easier, but I am sure it
is possible to develop the appropriate skills to succeed with a
mouse-driven car!
Autoduel comes from Lord British and Chuckles who
brought us the superb Ultima series - and while you shouldn't expect
the depth of the Ultima games - you should expect many very
entertaining hours of Autodueling.
AUTODUEL
Origin Systems Inc. (Microprose) Disk
Price £24.95 (ST)
£19.95 (XL/XE)
NEXT ISSUE
... an in depth look at Road war 2000, same theme but a totally
different game.
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