Eternal Destiny

Please note that this review was made using an ARM710 computer - a StrongARM version (ie. on a faster computer) will follow

After two years of intensive development and numerous missed deadlines, Eternal Destiny has finally been released. When it began development it was the only game of its kind on the platform, but now in an Acorn world which includes such seminal classics as Doom and Quake, can it really expect to compete, given that it is yet another example of a 3D explore and shoot game?

Eternal Destiny is a cross between Doom and Quake - it has truly 3D levels like the latter, whilst in almost every other respect functioning like Doom. In particular you are not able to look up or down, which is a strange omission in a game where being able to move up and down is critical to success. But before discussing the play mechanics, what of first impressions?

Destiny comes in a large white plastic case with a low-resolution colour inkjet printed box, which contains six installation discs and one key disc (which must always be in the drive whilst playing the game), along with a sheet of simple instructions and a reference sheet listing in-game objects and an intimidatingly long list of key presses. Installation requires 70Mb of harddisc space, although once actually installed it only uses 40Mb. The game is also recommended for use solely on a StrongARM processor, although allegedly "it plays well on a Risc PC 600 and 700" (in actual fact it doesn't, but more of this below).

Installation takes about quarter of an hour, but is fully automated, other than for the obvious need to insert each floppy disc into the drive when requested. Once installed and run, the game installs an icon to the iconbar, presenting the most hideous front-end ever invented. It somehow manages to slow the pace of my desktop to an absolute crawl, despite not actually seeming to be busy, and the windows it uses are all hideously non-standard, which really does make them confusing. There is a nightmarish configuration window (it's not actually that complex, but the frontend doesn't make it seem so!), and an horrifically complex key definition window which I still don't understand, using all sorts of colour codes, dragging and a massive list of possible commands. It also only updates about once every two seconds, making it virtually unusable. This is still in the desktop.

Running the game leads to a disturbing warning that the game cannot be quit. You must kill off and finish any work you are doing in the desktop before running the game. Why this is necessary in a machine with lots of memory I do not know, but apparently it is. After finishing with the game you must reset the machine manually.

Choosing to play the game brings up a screen of loading diagnostics, and then (after much whirring of harddisc and keydisc) the in-game screen, which is fixed at a low-resolution 320 by 256, accompanied by some passable music. At this point, however, my computer hung absolutely, and despite waiting for some time and pressing every possible key press the game refused to do anything. I decided to reset my machine with a clean boot and try again. This process, however, causes the game to hang at an earlier stage of start-up - I didn't see the loading diagnostics, even though the discs whirred as before, and no in-game screen or music was shown. After several abortive attempts I tried running the game from my usual full boot-up again. This time it worked. It seems that if you've used the internet at any point (I use the ANT suite) then you must reset your machine to eradicate all traces of it before Destiny will start up successfully.

First impressions couldn't really be much worse, then! But what of the game itself?

Some care has been taken over the in-game front-end, as a menu of dancing letters is displayed with a background of a spinning room. This is quite effective, although it does make you feel a little seasick and it's a bit slow and jerky. The same menu can be brought up in-game, although this is very annoying because it takes several seconds to fly on to the screen and settle down into a readable form (on my Risc PC 700, anyway, although you'd expect that it would take the same amount of time on any processor). There is a huge selection of tracker music to choose from, although I would have rathered that the game chose music itself dependant upon the situation. The music is passable enough, although some of the tunes are a bit strange. The game menu also allows games to be loaded and saved, as well as the game detail levels to be reconfigured or to redefine the keys. The game does seem to auto-configure to your system, however.

Starting a game leads to a fair bit of disc accessing, a choice of skill levels, and then you are dumped into the game. At this point you get your first taste of the graphics engine - the part of the game which actually displays what you can see around you. The success of a graphics engine in a game like this can be judged on two points:

• Does it adequately allow you to see the game world?
• What graphical niceties and touches does it use for added realism?

Exploring the small room you start in immediately highlights some important problems with the graphics engine - firstly, it is remarkably slow. Walking into a wall so that you can see only the wall causes the game frame rate to drop to a crawl - it's somewhat scary that when it's displaying only one object that it is so incredibly jerky. You are also treated to a very pixellated texture, although this is not totally unexpected or unreasonable.

Holding down a rotate button, however, highlights an extremely serious problem with the graphics engine - it sometimes displays frames out of order! Spinning clockwise, for example, the scene rotates clockwise as you would expect, except that occasionally (about once every two revolutions) it will display a frame turning back anti-clockwise before continuing rotating clockwise. This is not a localised effect, either - throughout the game it will sometimes display frames out of order; I can only assume this a very major bug in the triple screen-buffering the game uses. It disorientates and confuses absolutely, however, and it is so fundamental a problem that I am simply astounded that it exists at all.

Unfortunately this is far from the worst problem - most fundamentally of all the game just runs so slowly that it verges on the unplayable. And worst still your movements are not correctly timed within the game world - holding a key for one second does not always turn you the same amount. This extremely basic problem means that any drop in the frame rate makes the game totally unplayable (since you can't tell how far you've moved), and since the frame rate is so slow this leads to a serious problem. Maybe it's okay on a StrongARM, but it certainly isn't on anything less. (A review of the game running on a StrongARM will be published at a later date).

You'd expect that with this frame rate the game must be doing something pretty special, wouldn't you? Well, to a certain extent it is. It can plot vast landscapes into the distance, complete with objects with holes cut in them, and with the ability for things to pass over and under objects. Unfortunately, however, it has the major limitation that you cannot look up or down, despite the fact that you often want to. The view is massively claustrophobic and restrictive at times. Furthermore, all surfaces are either horizontal or vertical - there is no subtlety to the architecture (almost certainly a limitation of the graphics engine).

The colour palette - somewhat unbelievably - appears to be limited to the old Archimedes fixed palette. Why on Earth this decision was taken, given the fact that the game is far too slow on any machine limited to such a palette, I don't know. Whatever the reason, it limits the scene dramatically.

The textures used are often badly designed - the screen becomes a mess of pixels, swimming seemingly randomly before your eyes like muddy snow in a vicious storm. It's often hard to work out where walls are, not to mention how far away they are - this problem is massively exacerbated by the complete absence of depth-shading from the scene. Things in the distance are just as bright and clear as they are in the foreground; or at least they would be if the textures weren't sampled so badly. This is one game which desperately needs lower-resolution textures for the distance, or some implementation of mip-mapping or anti-aliasing.

The game does implement lighting, but this is pre-defined for each location, although it can fade in and out. More often than not this is simply annoying, though, making the scene harder to make out than it already is. Playing Destiny is like watching a badly tuned television.

Moving around the game makes your eyes really start hurting within minutes, as you strain at the screen to make sense out of the maelstrom of pixels. Turning down the detail makes things worse, although unfortunately it seems to have very little effect on the speed - I found that turning down some detail even seemed to make the game slower! The overall screen resolution is fixed, so you can't change that. You can run in a multisync mode if you need to, but this does slow the game down and doesn't affect the resolution.

Okay, so the graphics engine has its problems. What of the gameplay?

You are thrust at the start of the game into a massive level based around an ascending central column which moves you up to one of various entrances which you can run and jump into. This is not the most sensible introduction to the game, since it's not immediately obvious that that's what you can do if you haven't played games like this before, and the level itself is far, far, far too big for a first go. It's also difficult and arbitrary - you can be killed in one shot by an enemy you haven't even seen, or fall from a platform you weren't even aware you were on (you can't see near your feet, which is a big problem, although you can lie down to get a closer look if you want). The level is high, and you spend ages waiting for an elevator to descend from the top of the level when you (inevitably) fall into the watery pit it inhabits. Zero marks for a gentle introduction, then, and it's poor level design from any point of view.

Something very strange has happened to the scaling in this game - as you climb stairs you can't see in front of you because each step completely blocks your view, and yet the steps only appear less than a foot high from further back. Your character seems to slide along a few inches above the ground! Some of the pick-ups appear incredibly huge, too, and others don't. It's all very odd.

Enemies seem to have been randomly distributed around the level, and there's little feeling of a coherent, functional game world which you have appeared in. Enemies vary radically in their firepower, and it's very hard to tell what's going on most of the time. They also appear to jump from one side of the screen to the other without moving anywhere in between, and their only function appears to be "walk straight towards you whilst firing". They also look quite ridiculous, and are very, very poorly defined. Even the most clearly drawn enemies look pretty much like a random mass of pixels.

Sound effects are very poor. You hear water when you're near it, but go round the corner and suddenly it's totally silent. There is no sound effect when you pick an object up - instead you have to look at the top of the screen for a status report. This is annoying to say the least, but what absolutely seals its fate is yet another fundamental flaw in the game engine - you can walk over something without picking it up! The game is so slow that it simply "doesn't notice" that you've gone over something. This is very sloppy programming and design. Coupled with the lack of audible feedback things become far more fiddly than they should.

Another big problem is that you stick to walls when you get near them - it doesn't matter if you're walking seemingly alongside them; if you get too near you 'jam' on the spot, and you have to move away. This is an extremely major problem, since it makes traversing the game's corridors incredibly tedious, especially when you're standing in water (as you often seem to be) in which you are thrown around by the current. It's confusing enough as it is (with the slow framerate) without continuously becoming strangely glued to the walls.

The presence of water is an interesting addition - the currents work well as a gameplay device - although the appearance is somewhat limited and is absolutely flat. Unfortunately getting thrown from side to side soon becomes annoying; the effect is overused, and certainly doesn't belong with such a big presence on the first level.

I've listed some pretty major problems above, but there's another one yet to come. And that's that the game crashes sometimes! In one step, as if the above wasn't enough, this virtually seals its fate. If you can't trust it not to die on you then you simply can't play it at all. I approached a ladder, pressed the 'climb' button, and the screen scrambled and the game hung. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...

There are other bugs in the game, which are almost minor relative to the rest of the game. The plotting order is sometimes wrong whilst displaying a scene - distant objects move in front of closer objects for one frame as the game moves, for example; this means that corner wall segments disappear and then reappear at times, too. More importantly, though, sometimes enemies disappear, or only their feet are plotted - even if they're in the middle of a huge empty room, still sometimes chunks of scenery are displayed on top of them! This is very strange.

Other bugs include the fact that water can still suck you along when you're on a platform over it (doh!), and that sometimes when you die the game erroneously displays the end of level completion statistics (but doesn't go onto the next level).

Destiny is very big on weapons, with lots of lovingly created guns which appear nicely powerful when displayed on screen - in fact, this part of the game seems to have had care lavished on it to the detriment of the rest. You can choose which gun you hold in each hand, and the attention to detail includes needing separate ammunition for each gun. The game also keeps track of the weight of what you're carrying, and if you carry too much it affects your abilities. This seems rather stupid to me, though - you can fall a long way and not die, so why make the game pointlessly fiddly by introducing a weight management scheme?! Why make one bit pseudo-realistic when the rest isn't?

The game also overuses the keyboard - the design is quite clearly "what can I use this key for?", rather than "how shall I make this action accessable?" The instructions list over 60 key presses, although admittedly a good chunk of them are for weapon selection. Why precisely, though, you need different buttons for 'throw object' and 'throw object hard' is beyond me, for example - sensible design would have meant that holding the button for longer threw it harder. It's fair to say that most of the other key uses are reasonable, however, and despite initial appearances it's not hard to get to grips with the game control method. You can use the mouse for movement.

Is there anything good about this game? There are nice touches here and there - you can swim around underwater (although it's sometimes claustropobic and like moving in thick fog), and you can interact with some of the wall panels (including keypad doors - on easy skill levels you start off being given the codes, but as the game progresses you have to kill enemies for them instead). You also have control over the display of the on-screen information, and can turn on and off a transparency overlay. If you're so inclined you can also define your own key macros, assigning multiple actions to one key. Mainly, though, Destiny strikes me as a nice idea which has only reached the prototype stage. Now it needs rewriting in a 'proper' version which works correctly and with a sensibly progressive level design. It's a great pity, because with an improved engine and tighter level design this game could have been so much better.

Eternal Destiny seems to me to be a game purely for obsessives. It's too complex to just have a 'quick blast', and it's too big, spaced-out and the view too limiting to make you want to wander round the game just to explore. You can follow a corridor and then wander along it for ages, devoid of features, until you become just plain bored. This hardly rewards exploration! Maybe if you like mapping huge empty areas (annoyingly no in-game map is provided), dying and restarting often, thrilling over the simulation of weapons and relish battling against a distinctly dodgy display then you'll enjoy this game. But for the average gameplayer, I'm afraid I can only recommend that you steer clear of Eternal Destiny, consigning it to the eternal oblivion that it sadly deserves.

Postscript

• The slow configuration window is due to a huge wimpslot on pre-RISC OS 3.7 machines. He will fix this by using dynamic areas if possible
• The bank-swapping problem has been traced to an incorrect branch instruction, and an update will fix this problem shortly
• He is working on fixing the compatibility problems with internet software
• Some of the enemy graphics are being redrawn
• A simpler first level may be developed
• The game is much more playable on a StrongARM-equipped machine

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