Fresh Fish 8/FreshFishVol8-CD1.bin/useful/reviews/software/games/hiredguns_2

Internet Message Format | 1993-10-22 | 15KB

Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Bill Bennett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Hired Guns
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games
Date: 22 Oct 1993 21:53:10 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 319
Sender: [e-mail] (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Bill Bennett)
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Keywords: game, role-playing, adventure, multi-player, commercial


PRODUCT NAME

    Hired Guns  (Version 39.25)


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    A "Dungeon Master" style science-fiction role-playing game, with a
strong element of armed combat strategy.


AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:           DMA Design (distributed by Psygnosis)
    Address:        29 Saint Mary's Court
            Brookline, MA 02146
            USA


LIST PRICE

    29.99 UK pounds.  Usual reductions for mail-order, I paid 22.49.
Price in US will be roughly equivalent, perhaps slightly higher.


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        Requires 1MB RAM.
        Requires 1MB Chip RAM to run from a hard disk.

        If you have 1.5MB memory or greater, and at least 1MB is
        Chip RAM, the game will feature greatly enhanced sound
        effects.

        If you have 1.5MB memory or greater you can save and load
        the game from RAM - recommended, as you will die a lot!

        Works with an A1200 - no restrictions on Amiga type are
        listed on the box, although the memory requirements are
        clearly marked, so I assume it works with a 68030 as well.
        The demo said the game would work with ANY Amiga.  Perhaps
        someone can confirm this.

        Can work with a Sega Megadrive joypad (requires slight
        internal modification to joypad - detailed in manual).

        A second floppy drive is recommended if running from floppy,
        but not essential.

    SOFTWARE

        Runs under Kickstart 1.3 or higher.


COPY PROTECTION

    The game comes on 5 AmigaDOS floppies with no on-disk copy
protection.  Uses manual protection:  numerical entry from a printed table
is occasionally required during load/save position in the game.  I find it
acceptable -- I played the game for two days before I had to use the table.
Game saves are written to a non-game floppy.


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

    PAL A1000, 7MHz 68000
    Kickstart 2.04 in ROM - also tested under 1.3
    512KB Chip RAM
    4MB Fast RAM
    1 external floppy drive
    72MB SCSI hard disk (but see below, as this is not relevant!)


INSTALLATION

    It uses a custom hard disk installation program, which worked well
and installed about 3.5MB of files.  Unfortunately, as noted above, the game
will not run from hard disk on a machine with only 512KB Chip RAM.


REVIEW

    "Hired Guns" is basically a Dungeon-Master clone:  first-person
perspective, moving a party of four heavily-armed mercenaries through a
series of "dungeons".  The main difference from a classical fantasy RPG such
as "Eye Of The Beholder" is that the setting is science-fictional, and the
characters use high-tech weaponry and psionic devices rather than swords and
spells.

    The other major difference is that each of the four characters can be
controlled independently, and there are many problems in the game which
require the cooperation of multiple characters at different locations.  This
also makes the game particularly well-suited for more than one player; and
although the game plays very well with just one controller, it gets better
with more.  Some of the more intense fire-fights with multiple attacks from
different directions can be difficult for a single person to handle.

    The story is, as usual, irrelevant, but the scene-setting novella is,
speaking as a dedicated SF fan, actually not bad.  The scenario is that your
team of mercenaries are landed by drop-ship on the planet "Graveyard".  A
rather beautiful fractally-rendered map gives the location of 19 target
sites, and by moving a cursor to a site, you can read off some useful
information - particularly the "Threat Level".  The sites have been overrun
by genetically engineered bioweapons, and four of them contain a fusion
core.  Your mission is to explore and clear the sites, retrieve the four
cores and take them to the spaceport (Threat Level 15 -arrggghhhh!), where
you set them to explode and "waste half the planet".  To quote from  the
manual:  "Team extraction impossible after mission time expires.  Ground
Support: NONE;  Air Support: NONE; Orbital Support: NONE".

    Prior to taking on this full campaign, you can enjoy a series of short,
sharp training missions.  The weapon familiarisation missions are easy, but
the combat scenarios tend to be lethal.  These missions are optimised for
one, two, three or four players - four missions for each category - but if
you're a schizoid ambidextrous genius with catlike reflexes you can play a
four-player mission on your own.

    The campaign sites are quite varied in character - each has a different
style of graphics, which are detailed and stunning.  My main criticism is
that, as with Dungeon Master, it can be quite difficult to figure out where
you are if you lose track, since the walls all look similar.  However,
auto-mapping usually solves this problem, assuming you can spare the time to
call up the Digital Terrain Scanner screen.  This is not always convenient
when running frantically in the general direction of "away" from a large,
slavering bio-engineered creature.

    I've only been through the first six sites, but they were all quite
varied in appearance, layout, opponents and "feel".  The "feel" of the game
is what makes it stand out - even on a humble 512KB Chip RAM machine, the
atmosphere is electric.  The wind moans through the rocks at the
labyrinthine cave system, power lines hum balefully at the fusion reactor,
vast machines chug in the background at the mining depot.  On top of this,
doors whine, bushes rustle, and a squelchy cracking sound means that
somewhere nearby a giant egg has hatched another bioweapon....  The fusion
reactor site was stocked with deadly combat robots and humming machinery,
the abandoned test-lab site was crawling with lethal worm creatures, and the
decor was an odd combination of chequered floors and rough-hewn rock walls
with coloured veins of minerals running through.  And so on and so forth....

    (My) gameplay tends to be in "short, controlled bursts" - you arrive
at a site, send a character out to explore rapidly and get a feel for the
layout of the site (movement is the standard Dungeon Master flick-forward in
squares, but faster), and then die.  Horribly.  Send out the next character
and start sussing out the puzzles and items.  Primary consideration is to
find where the exit teleport is for the site.  This is often locked, and the
secondary consideration then becomes finding the key.  Tertiary objective is
to locate all the useful items, and having done all this, you can then start
to assemble a strategy for getting through the area without being terminated.
This is where the RAMsave comes in extremely useful - a game position reload
from floppy takes perhaps 40 seconds, so if you only have 1MB of RAM, I'd
strongly advise you try this game before you buy, and decide whether you can
live with the added aggravation.

    It's annoying that the monsters are totally silent, but this is due to
lack of Chip RAM on my machine.  If you have 1MB or 2MB Chip RAM, an extra
410KB of sound effects are heard, including (according to the manual),
monster noises, thunder in the distance and a much wider variety of weapon
noises.  Even on my machine, the weapons sound good, but, for example, a
mini-gun sounds exactly the same as a light assault rifle.  More bizarrely,
a huge metallic cyborg makes exactly the same, rather effeminate, grunt of
pain when hit as a female character does.

    Even more annoying is the fact that this game absolutely will not
run from the hard disk on a 512K Chip RAM machine - even with buckets of
Fast RAM.  Counterbalancing that is the knowledge that this game is pushing
my Amiga to the limits, graphically and sonically, so I shouldn't complain.
Running from floppy is surprisingly good - DMA have put a lot of work into
makin