WASTED TIME
A Review of Capstone's Chronomaster
by Edmond Meinfelder
A sad fact is that people take great ideas and, instead making great products, create items of astounding mediocrity, or worse. Today, Chevrolet's Vega and the Commodore Amiga make room for Capstone's Chronomaster. Seeing a wonderful game concept poorly executed is throughly disappointing.
The game places you in the shoes of Rene Korda, a retired specialist in
the creation of pocket universes. At the start, the Terran Regional
government hires Korda to reactivate two pocket universes illegally
placed into temporal stasis and apprehend whomever is responsible.
Since time no longer flows in the two pocket universes, Korda employs
"bottled time" to act in the universes. Each container of bottled time
provides Korda with a local field allowing time to flow freely within
that field. So, walking in front of someone shooting a gun, is a bad idea
as your local time-field conveniently allows time to flow for nearby
objects, like bullets!
Chronomaster's universe, created by accomplished writer Roger Zelazny, is as rich and detailed as anyone could ask for. The setting is far in the future, where man has not only conquered the stars, but can now created specialized universes with altered physics, making magic possible. Smart-remarking artificial intelligence's alongside jinn and magic carpets not only make sense, but is creative and welcome.
On paper, Chronomaster looks a winner with a rich original universe by a Hugo-winning author and art masterfully created with 3- dimensional modeling programs. Game design, however, can make or break a game and the game designers shattered Chronomaster. The result is a game that looks quite good on the screen, but plays poorly.
In adventure games, players explore new areas, resolving conflicts successively until the (hopefully) fun conclusion. Good adventure game design does not penalize the player for exploring options. Chronomaster, on the other hand, penalizes harshly. If you ever played Sierra's King Quest V and seen King Ghram die countless nasty ways, you know all about bad adventure game design. I thought Lucas Arts had set forth enough examples of good adventure game design -- Loom, Sam 'N Max and Day of Tentacle -- that games like Chronomaster would no longer show their gruesome faces on my CRT.
In bad adventure-games players save before attempting anything. Simple actions become laborious tasks as the player saves, tries an action, gets thrown out to DOS and then must wait to re-load the saved game. Games should never be so "real" as to convey real-life inconveniences of simulated actions! Otherwise, the game no longer entertains, but frustrates.
Bad game design is almost forgivable when players can only enter
lethal situations by demonstrating the dazzling intelligence of a small
rock. For example, before entering walking in front of a firing line,
Jester -- your ship AI -- warns you. Why not leave the dangerous
situation at that? Instead, if the player attempts to "test the waters" of
their time-bubble, a death sequence awaits. As I said, this is almost
pardonable, but not quite; these gratuitous death scenes are too
annoying to forgive.
Sometimes, not only is there no warning for death, but each option appears equally valid. At these times, Chronomaster masquerades as Monty Hall asking you to choose between doors' number 1, 2 and 3. If a car, goat and pile of dirt were the only things behind the door, I would have no complaints. But as Tim in Monty Python's Holy Grail said, "Death awaits ye with big, pointy teeth!" Chronomaster has multiple sequences where the player makes conversational decisions from a list like, "lie" and "tell the truth," with no clues as to either what the protagonist will actually say, or what the repercussions might be. At the Urbs end-game in the Council of the Wise, one slip of the tongue, when you have no clue what Rene Korda will say, means death.
Chronomaster sports full-speech dialogue and the voice acting varies
greatly in quality. Ron Perlman who played Beast from Disney's
Beauty and the Beast is fantastic as Rene Korda.
The opening
sequence, as Rene takes the job, is worth watching more than once
because of Perlman alone. Perlman makes Korda seem like the coolest
hero in the universe. Sounding like a blend of Happy Day's Fonzie
meets Dr. "Indiana" Jones from the Raiders series, Perlman makes you
hang on Korda's every word. Sadly, bland writing muddies Perlman's
performance and leaves Korda a less interesting character through the
remainder of the game.
Brent Spiner best known as Data from Star Trek's The Next Generation, performs well but has a much smaller role. Lolita Davidovich, as Jester, is technically good, but the spoken lines as written and performed, annoy. Jester's helpful pointers like, "... uh boss, magnetic north is right, uhm, where that big scary statue is standing," annoyed me. Such phrasing does not sound like a quirky ship AI, but a scatter-brained teenager. Davidovich's lines were performed well, but the script limited how much I could enjoy the performance.
One small nit is the writing, which is not exactly stellar. An average person may say, "right where that statue is standing," but an outstanding person says, "right where that statue stands." Even worse is the written text given with the spoken text frequently does not match. Often, the spoken text is less formal, but as I could not stop reading along, the conflicting styles annoyed me.
Beyond the big three voice-talents, the performance suffers considerably. Case-in-point is the opening, where Milo's grandmother speaks utterly without passion as pirates destroy their home. How does anyone manage such a flat, unemotional voice as pirates destroy home, friends and family?
Chronomaster's art keeps pace with Zelazny's creativity; all the scenes and characters make you look twice at the detail. Not only does the game's graphics boast intense detail, but the rendered scenes evoke atmosphere. The quiet parks and oases look quiet and frozen. The use of 3-dimensional modeling programs makes everything look attractive by exploiting realistic lighting effects and textures.
Most of Chronomaster's art is consistent, but some art is the more
traditional bitmap art. Both Jester and the transmissions on the video-
phone are bitmap computer art. The other style, 3-d rendered art, has a
very different look, almost surreal. The inconsistent use of the two
styles is not a good choice, but the discordant styles appear only at the
opening with the video-phone, and when the player looks at Jester in
the cockpit.
Technically, Jester is rendered in the form of the hovering PDA (personal data assistant). The PDA, however, lacks any character or apparent concept. In contrast, the bitmap figure of Jester in the cockpit has a powerful image: a young woman with punk-like blonde spikes of hair and a colorful outfit somewhat resembling a Jester. I would have enjoyed the rendered female image of Jester following Korda more than the hovering PDA.
The cut-scenes that show animation for special events is spectacular for the ships, but falls short with people. Though the walk from the ship platform to the museum on Urbs is astounding, the other cuts, like the magic carpet ride, do not have the same attention to detail. Rendering life-like animation with 3d computer-aided design programs is hard; this is why the movie Toy Story is such a technological marvel. If Dreamforge did not have the resources to create animation's natural in appearance, another method for the cuts would have served better.
The puzzles in Chronomaster range from average to downright awful.
In a good adventure game, such as Broderbund's Myst, puzzles blend
well with the game's plot and concept. A fetch X to give to Y is fine as
long as each puzzle feels like an interesting part of a story. Despite the
myriad of deaths in King's Quest V, every puzzle in that game felt like
a part of a larger story.
Chronomaster's puzzles, however, seem
artifical, like inconvenient fences, rather than smaller parts of a larger
story. For example, part of restoring each world involves locating its
world key, and to do that, Korda must place a device at magnetic north.
Coincidentally, something is standing upon magnetic north on each
world. Solving the magnetic north puzzles is a part of the plot, but feels
too contrived to be fully enjoyed. Rather than an interesting story,
convincing someone to move is just inconvenient.
The worst puzzle was at the Urbs end-game, where Korda must restore an out-of-sequence 3x3 grid holding 8 pictures to order. This grid puzzle is much like the common plastic child's puzzle with numbers from 1 to 8. Only the puzzle pieces morph from one bitmap to another, making the puzzle needlessly tedious to solve; normally the child's version has numbers on each tile because sequence is the key. Morphing bitmaps means the player must draw out each tile on paper, assign a number, move a tile, and redraw the sequence on paper. If that sounds like fun to you, I have some grains of sand in Cozumel you can count.
There are a lot of good computer adventure games on the shelves today and Chronomaster is not one of them. Save your money; Chronomaster isn't the hard-edged science fiction masterpiece you were waiting for. The masterful graphics do not redeem the poor puzzles and many obnoxious death scenes. Another excellent game concept lands on the shelves with a resounding "flop" noise.
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
Capstone's Chronomaster |
| Company: |
Intracorp Inc.
|
| Cost: |
n/a |
System Requirements:
IBM Compatible 486/33+ Mhz
DOS 5.0 or higher
4 megabytes of memory
Super-VGA (640x480)
Sound Blaster, General MIDI compatible
Double-speed CD-ROM
Microsoft compatible mouse
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 1
Graphics 5
Sound 4
Interface 4
Replayability 0
Overall Score:
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