All games have narrative in some form. The ways that it can come out of the most mechanical-seeming situations are often fascinating. The odd flashy animation aside, what we haven’t seen so much in this project so far are games with sections where they stick up a big sign saying ‘narrative here’ and have the player sit back and take it all in before going on to take control. Terminator 2’s video clips from the film were only a second long, at least. That is going to change in a big way, and it’s fitting that a game so self-consciously called Epic takes an early lead there.
From memory, you play a member of the Mffmffmff civilisation, forced to leave their planet and cross the space of the Rargmuffin Empire as a result of… I can’t remember, but maybe they were too pacifist like those dweebs in Armour-geddon? Things look pretty hopeless, but fortunately they have developed a new experimental super-duper Golden Warrior Hero Fighter ship! And have just the golden warrior hero for it handy (spoiler: it’s you). The actual content of the story slid right over me, focused as I was on the format it was delivered in. Which was roughly: the text crawl from Star Wars, but wouldn’t it be better if instead of focusing on the writing we split it up into bits, made it take forever and matched it to some generic pseudo-cinematic shots of ships taking off and the like? And make sure to choose the legally closest music possible to Star Wars (specifically the Imperial March) for it, obviously.
Of course, there is a game in there that all of that epic stuff is framing. And it’s one that works rather well. It’s a first person space combat simulator that’s easy enough to control and get into and does a good job with big crowded battlefields, even if they sort of feel like 2D set-ups that you happen to be able to go above and below. The lasers and homing missiles are satisfying to use and limited enough to require some kind of strategy. It has some delightfully colourful planetside bits. If it threw me straight into that it might have been a positive experience. But of course it doesn’t, and when the game is telling you view what you’re doing as part of a particular type of narrative, it’s hard to escape from the implications.
I daresay that Epic’s weaknesses are a lot more glaring from 2019 than from 1992, when this stuff looked new and flashy and, more importantly, when you would have to travel almost a decade in either direction to hit the nearest Star Wars film. God though, I just wish for any sign of ambition at all, anything that suggests that being a pale imitation of existing favourites isn’t the high point of its aims. Or that they just wouldn’t waste my time. Give me Project-X over this, any day.
Gallup Amiga charts, The One, July 1992
