Under the sea, nobody can hear you scream in frustration

There’s a joke (among many, countless others) in Monkey Island 2: as Guybrush is hanging over a pit of acid, you can make him ask LeChuck “why didn’t you just shoot me?”. And then LeChuck will reply, “because we had an extra disk”. Games have often struggled with available space, and multiple floppies or even discs were fairly common. Yes, even CD-Roms, with their 400X times the available space of a 3.5 incher, would sometimes not be enough.

Deadly Tide actually runs at 320×240. All images in this post have been pixel-doubled. Better than forcing you to look at them with a magnifying lens.

Of course, the main culprit was the widespread use of FMVs. Cutscenes everywhere! Sometimes all of the game was a cutscene, like the ubiquitous Dragon’s Lair. But some games went further and used FMVs during the gameplay itself. Such is the case for on-rail shooters like Rebel Assault and Deadly Tide. The former is more famous, but the latter is fairly unknown. Let’s fix this.

I just want to point out that the HUD in this game doesn’t make sense. On the right, you have a health bar. On the left… kinda hard to say.

Developed by Rainbow Studios and published by Microsoft (you can tell because they bothered to use DirectX 2 – no DOS here, they must have actually believed this could have been a Windows 95 killer app), it portraits humanity’s struggle against a race of underwaterish alien lizards. The aliens come to Earth during a long and expensive-looking intro cutscene that probably takes most of disc 1, and a few years later they have flooded the planet with some kind of space technology, or maybe they just waited until climate change did its job. Not really sure. Anyway, you get a prototype ship and bring the fight to their home turf.

It’s kinda Archimedean Dynasty, but with a lot less intrigues and a lot more aliens. Just kidding, it’s nothing like Archimedean Dynasty. It’s a rail shooter that uses FMVs as its very foundation. If you have played Rebel Assault 2, you know the drill: shoot at anything on the screen while the background kinda moves along. However, some sections even let you look around freely, and those are kinda surprising. I wonder what kind of technology it was – I can only guess that it must be something similar to what adventure games started to use a bit later.

The same screen-rotating technology is used in the mission select menu. However, the whole game takes place in the Pacific and the Atlantic. Sorry, Europe.

Too bad those free rotating sections, while kinda impressive to look at, also offer the most annoying challenges. It’s not cool, being killed by an enemy outside the screen. Sometimes they even get above you! Often, during these sections, you can only learn where the enemies are before you die, and then use that knowledge on your next attempt.

To spice things up, you’ll occasionally face on-foot sections and even steal enemy ships. These intermissions are almost invariably a pain, since you’ll have far worse weapons at your disposal. Prepare to die a lot. Too bad, because the game overall isn’t that hard, and missions are short enough that retrying isn’t too much of a chore. But maybe they were trying to artifically make it last longer. Even so, it won’t last more than 2-3 hours.

FMVs are somewhat compressed. Try not to move too often. Oh wait, you have no choice.

Aside from the quite impressive rotating screens, there isn’t much worth remembering about this game. But it’s 4-discs jewel case, while not tremendously rare for the time, is at least a good shelf filler. Just like The 11th Hour, and that Zork Legacy box. And a few others. Imagine if digitl downloads hadn’t taken off, maybe now we’d have PC games on four or five DVDs. Unless Blu-rays somehow managed to become popular.

Ah, who am I kidding? Even if Blu-rays had become the norm, developers would have found ways to fill at least three of them. Maybe with a 4K remake of Deadly Tide?

Terminal Velocity Review

Apparently, Saturday was “Review A Great Game Day”. Never heard of this before. But I’m not one to let these things slide. So let’s see… it’s still Saturday in Honolulu. I guess it still counts, right? Right. Let’s try and review something a bit less famous than usual.

This is actually quite representative of the game itself. What a rare sight.

Terminal Velocity was developed by Terminal Reality (can’t be a coincidence…) and published in 1995 by 3DRealms, back when they were still relevant. You probably remember the developers for pearls such as Kinect Star Wars and that Walking Dead shooter, but ages ago, they were also fairly big in the early Windows scene, making games that were at least trying to take advantage of the newly-fangled Direct3D technology, including Hellbender and Monster Truck Madness. I pity them, because by all accounts, early Direct3D was terrible.

Terminal Velocity is, for my money, still their best game (though admittedly I haven’t played all of them: I heard pretty good things about Nocturne). In case you couldn’t notice from the cover, it’s a space shooter, a very common genre in the mid 90’s, thanks no doubt to the amazing success of Descent, which had spawned several clones. But TV breaks the mold somewhat by letting you fly on large planets, making it less claustrophobic and far less nausea-inducing. Interestingly, you can still fly your ship in complete freedom, so it’s actually possible to go far above the clouds and near the atmosphere even. Good luck spotting your targets from there.

There are three camera modes: first-person, third-person, and a weird fixed camera third-person mode that is near unplayable but probably very cool for screenshots.

The structure is fairly similar, if somewhat repetitive: you get objectives to complete (usually flying to a spot and then destroying a target base), weapons to collect (lasers, missiles, your typical arsenal), enemies to kill, bosses to survive. Since everything takes place on open terrain, you are usually free to take the route you want, and exploration is even encouraged by hiding powerful weapons off the beaten path. You’ll also get attacked from all directions, so keep wary. Sometimes things can get overwhelming.

In order to retain a sense of purpose, you are often asked to fly through underground tunnels. These are presented as point A-to-B voyages where you need to dodge doors and destroy ships who just love ramming through your own. There’s a vague sense of Descent in these 3D metal tunnels, but with completely straight paths, it’s a bit more like a rollercoaster. For extra fun, try using the afterburner in there, and see if you can survive.

With the small radar pretty much useless, you’ll quickly learn to play with the super-imposed radar constantly on. Turok didn’t come first, guys.

The controls work fairly well for such an early game, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble with that. Even the graphics are quite pleasant for their time, once you get used to the giant pixels. Since you know I’m a 3D accelerators aficionado, I’ll also tell you the only “accelerated” version was made available for S3 Virge cards. Of course, in exchange for texture filtering, it actually runs slower than the base version. Don’t cry. Also, as was standard procedure for the era, there are not many music tracks in the game and the few available ones are repeated very often. Still, they are quite catchy, so I’m not complaining all that much. There are also vague hints of a story somewhere in there, presented at the start of each mission, if you can be bothered. I don’t think the developers cared that much either though.

A tunnel. It looks better in motion, I swear. The pixels aren’t attacking your eyes like thousands of small knives, for example.

There’s the distinct feeling that terminal Velocity could have been an all-time great, but it’s somewhat held back by its repetitive structure. With nine different planets and three stages on each, it would have taken a lot of variety to keep players interested throughout, but the game just doesn’t have that. The different tilesets are nice to look at, including giant volcanos places (maybe a Venus expy?) and snowy landscapes (before Skyrim made them all the rage), but I don’t know how many people will have the willpower to see it through to the bitter end – and bitter it was, if I recall some of the later bosses were an utter pain, made worse by the lack of saving during missions.

So, the game was repetitive, much like my reviews. That shouldn’t deter you too much though, because while one might not last long enough to see the ending, at least there’s fun to be had for quite a while. Besides, most 90’s games didn’t even have a meaningful ending, so what do you care? Get on that ship and fly to your heart’s content. The game is easily available on GOG and Steam. Did you know there’s even an Android version? Never tried it, but just to be sure, I’d steer clear of it. Besides, I still have the old disc. Fun times.