 Well, it’s the middle of the summer here
at GamesFirst! headquarters and things have been picking up lately. Some really great, highly anticipated titles have
finally made it into the stores--Diablo II, Vampire: The Masquerade, Icewind Dale and Deus
Ex, just to name a few--and gamers are happy. Yes,
life has been good. But I knew it
couldn’t last long. Every so often
a pit sneaks into the lemonade and makes the cool draught bitter. Same thing
happens in the PC gaming business when yet another title hits the shelves masquerading as
a good game only to turn out to be a stinker. Terminus
is one of those games. So, without further ado, I invite you take a sniff.
Despite the great gaming summer so far, I had some
reservations about Terminus when GamesFirst! graphics wizard Al first dropped it by my
desk and asked me to take a look at it; the packaging was chintzy and the box was crushed.
Still, Terminus did fall into one of my three favorite categories (those being
Space Sim, FPS, and RTS). Anyway, the game
was waiting for me when I got to work (along with a few others), and after much head
scratching, I decided that the best thing to do would be to keep an open mind and at least
see what I had to work with. But I should've followed my gut in the first place.
 After a couple of hours of play, my worst fears for Terminus were confirmed.
There was VERY little to work with. This
game is such a huge step backward in space sim design and playability that it is almost
embarrassing. I have been playing games
(console and computer) since Pong and Commodore 64’s were the top of the line
platforms. Therefore, I would like to think
that I have some idea about what makes one game “good” and what makes another
game a disappointment. Of course, there are
always some gamers who like the games that others abhor, just as there are gamers who
insist that the old games, like Space Invaders, consistently outclass the flashy new
stuff. Maybe Terminus could be for them.
Terminus seems to start fine. You drop the disk in and go about installing the
software (650 min or 1.2 gig full; it's a space suck) and you think that you’re ready
to play. Well, think again. If you’re using a Ge-Force (or any D3D card)
you might have some trouble. The game seems
to default to a Glide setting, so when you try to run it and there is no Glide card on the
machine, it pops up some errors and fails. Of
course, there is a way to select Glide or D3D in the start menu, but sometimes you can get
there and sometimes you can’t. So far, Terminus--which means "end" in
Latin--is not even off to a good start.
 After you get the video settings squared away, you're now ready to start the
game. The menu setup looks fairly standard in
its design, but looks can be deceiving. It is not a very functional interface. The configuration is not at all intuitive, and I
have never played a game that I had to fight with as much as this to set my control
preferences for play. Trying to quell my
mounting frustration, I settled for a “sub-standard” configuration so that I
could actually play the game and not spend hours just looking at the menu.
Before you actually get into the game to play
though, you have to choose your “path” in life.
You can be a Pirate, Mercenary, Fighter Pilot, or Bounty Hunter--you have a lot of
different roads that you may travel, which makes the game interesting. (This wide array of career choices, by the way,
account for half of the 2 star rating this game is being awarded.) So with your career choice made, it’s off to
the space station where you can get busy making a name for yourself. Of course, as is the case with many summer
rentals, when you actually get there it’s not nearly as lush as it was in the
brochure.
The “station” area reminds me of the old
Wing Commander games, but if you can believe it, it’s even more stripped down
than that. You really only have two options
in the station. You can talk to people
(sometimes) or you can go to the hanger and fly. You
will notice some differences if you’re in Free Mode, or Career, etc., but overall
it’s pretty apparent that you've begun your climb up the slippery slope of doom and
it’s all just a free fall till you hit rock bottom.
 Finally, you make it aboard the ship and get out into space. The game's designers did get the stars white, and the
vastness of space black, and even some of the ships look pretty cool. The big BUT is that the cockpit HUD (that you see
all the time) is the most basic, ugly, un-functional, piece of equipment I have ever seen
on a space sim game. Wing Commander
and all of the Star Wars space games had better looking and better working
displays. And yes, I did go back and check! The radar or scanner display, as
it's
called, is extremely awkward to use, which makes finding your target a project in itself. Of course, if you’re a young Jedi and the
force is strong with you and you don’t need radar or scanners to play than you should
be just fine. And don’t even get me
started about the strange green blocks that form some kind of demented “vapor
trail” in space--at least on my machine it looks like a mistake. (As
mentioned earlier, though, maybe there's something here for the Space Invaders fan in all
of us.)
 There is a multiplayer option with the game, but with the single-player game
itself so bad, you'd think the multiplayer mode can’t do much to save it. Surprisingly, the multiplayer function is ok, but
again it is hard to get past the rest of the game to actually enjoy playing it with other
people. All of the other space sim games out
recently (StarLancer, Alligiance, Tachyon and others) blow Terminus out of the water with
no trouble. Granted, they tend to be space fighters/operas
as opposed to the Terminus career/economic model; unfortunately, the packaging seems to
imply the former, not the latter. “But Ben," you may ask, intrepid reader,
"you have only accounted for 1 of the 2 star rating so far. Where is the other half?" Well, it’s in the versatility of the
game. A single Terminus CD will run on a PC,
a MAC, or a Linux box. Given the limited choices
available on platforms other than Windows, Terminus might be an alternative worth
investigating but I'd suggest steering clear of it on the pc.
--Ben Moore |
