I head down to the last room on level 3 and run into another Mondite. He goes the same way as all the others.

Behind him is a big metal contraption built in to the wall – as soon as I step into this it closes on me.

When it opens up again, I’m encased in a nice shiny hardsuit. This should mean I can go into the reactor room.

I want to explore here first. I get the reactor access code off one of the screens.

The dead mondite dropped a log book which gives me the code to get out of the base as well.

Another set of screens in the corner of the room gives me some info on a special sort of spaceship that the Mondites have been working on.

A button on this screen lowers the floor area I’m standing on and I’m dropped down into the room with this ship and yet another Mondite.

The ship looks the part but its not going anywhere for now as the battery is dead.

Instead, its back upstairs where I discover a set of controls for a forklift truck which I drive into the reactor room and push its guard off the edge of his platform.

Its time to try to fix the reactor. I head out and another Mondite has appeared. He assumes I’m one of them since I’m in my hardsuit so I get a free shot at him before we fight. Every fight in the game has unique dialog and this has lines like “Guess we Mondites aren’t all one big happy family”. These lines are nearly always funny – combat in these games can be a bit of a chore but its always kept fresh in Bioforge.

There is some sort of alien cyborg in the reactor room – presumably the one that escaped from the cell near mine.

He isn’t friendly and I fight him for a bit but he isn’t going down. I get more ridiculous dialog like “What manner of foul creature are you?” and “Will you die? Damn you.”

I’m taking too long over all this and a countdown starts before the reactor blows up.

What I have to do is to run back over the force field bridge after I’ve hit the alien a few times. I can then turn it off after he follows me so he drops down the chasm. This is a staple puzzle in any game with a light bridge in my experience.

I then have to pull the levers on each side of the reactor and key in the code into the console.

The timing for this is extremely tight and I only have a couple of seconds to spare. The reactor becomes stable but its only a temporary measure and I still need to get off this moon.

I head down to floor 4 – it all looks quiet then as the doors close behind me a security bot walks in the other end.

One hit and I’m down. This is a nicely done scene – now I just have figure out how to survive it.

The bot only fires off a shot every 5 seconds or so. I have to dodge these and get a shot of my own off before dodging again. A few hits later and it makes a nice bonfire.

This gets me to the landing pad I saw in the introduction of the game. I head for the nearby lift.

There is a path cut into the side of the cliff guarded by loads of little bots. These things can’t do any more than aim straight at me so I can run through without any danger of being hit as I’m long gone by the time the laser shot arrives.

I’ve found an alien cube in my travels which comes in handy now. Its a sort of transportation device which lifts me between these blocks over an acid lake. I remember taking ages to figure this out the first time I played the game – there is no real clue anywhere and you can only find this out by trial and error which isn’t my idea of a good puzzle. It’s the only one of these in the game.

These blocks make a path of sorts which I float across.

At the end of all the blocks is a little island with one of the crashed dropships on it. There’s a missle on the ground which I’m tempted to look at but I need to leave this for a bit.

While I’m out here a giant monster comes up out of the lake – I really don’t want to be outside and head into the ship.

The inside of the ship looks as alien as anything I’ve seen. The marines all appear to have died in their cryo chambers.

There is one left alive in the bridge at the end. This will be my toughest fight yet. When he dies I get a remote control off his body giving me access to the bridge.

There isn’t much room in here but I find a monitor which lets me fire off a few missiles.

I can’t aim them but I shoot a missile off and it causes a fire in the structure at the end of the lake. The big monster looks interested and wanders over.

When it gets there I fire off another shot and it loses most of its head in the explosion and comes crashing down into the acid.

I now need to grab the end of the missile which turns out to be a counting bomb and head back over the lake with it as quickly as possible. I take a shorter route behind the drop ship. The dead monster forms a bridge between some of the blocks.

I need to run into this pipe with the bomb and blow up the door at the end of it.

I literally don’t have a second to spare with this and it needs a couple of attempts before I make it in time. The door is blown out allowing me access to a new area. I need to go back and pick up a giant gun the marine on the dropship left behind. I couldn’t carry this and the bomb at the same time.

There is another of the hardsuit machines at the end of the new area. This takes me to a new area as well as removing my hardsuit.

Doctor Escher is in here being eaten by some sort of floating alien. I don’t know the details but the doctor rebelled against Mastaba somehow so I’m hoping she will be on my side.

I kill off the alien. It rolls into a ball each time I hit it like an armadillo. I have to wait for it to unfurl before hitting it again. I use one of my medical devices to help Doctor Escher. She gives me a translation device in return and sends me off to an alien dig site to translate the alien runes there.

I head up the corridor to have a quick look around before I head for the dig. There are a load of alien storage chambers in the new room. Before I get chance to investigate, my alien friend from earlier bursts through the wall and attacks again.

As soon as hes hit me he runs off for the next room. He uses a device to light up the tube and jumps in it. I can’t follow for now as the lights go out again.

I head back and open up one of the chambers.

Inside is a well preserved alien holding a device. There is a puzzle of sorts I have to do to free him from the energy shield but I leave this for now and head for the dig site.

Something I notice when I get back outside is that my hand is shown inside the hardsuit when I’m saving my game. I do like this sort of needless attention to detail.

The dig site is a strange looking place covered in alien symbols. The globe in the middle of the floor looks significant but I can’t do anything with it. There are 3 panels on the walls which I can use the translator on to read.

These translations give me a bit of history on the alien race from this planet (the Phyxx). They used the technology that is a part of me to improve themselves and lived in several great cities. They had separate classes warrior, learner, etc but there was some sort of falling out and most of them have killed each other off. There are rumoured to be phyxx sleeping at the center of the planet waiting to be revived.

I don’t learn anything hugely significant actually from the dig and I could probably have skipped it if I’d felt like it. I head back to solve the puzzle to open up the alien chamber then grab the device that the body is holding.

This device activates the tube which the alien jumped through. I do the same and am sucked into the center of the planet.

This gets me to a central hub with four of these tubes to pick from but none of the others are lit up yet.

There is a central console which I have to use to make the symbols shown above the dead tubes. I just pick the shapes which when joined can make the same sign.

The first chamber gets me into a zero g room with a lethal star thing in the middle. I can propel myself by shooting my laser – I just need to time one shot to go through the door at the far side of the room.

This place is looking more alien all the time. The floor in here is glass so I have to be careful to stand on the girders.

The alien shows up again, this time with a new toy. Its a reflective shield which bounces back laser shots. I have to take him out the old fashioned way.

I finally beat him and get to steal his shield for good measure.

I use the shield on myself and walk through the field blocking the door.

This gets me into a large room with a single panel. This panel is another puzzle. Its dead easy – I have to fill up the entire board moving between adjacent octagons. The only difficulty is that the directions reverse every other move but this really isn’t a big problem and I get this done in no time.

Once complete the room starts to light up a bit at a time.

It looks like I’ve restored the power down here. An alien ship looking like a collection of building blocks pops up and an alien comes out and floats over to me. The room is vast I gather and I can see an alien city in the distance but the perspective doesn’t come across too well until this point. The alien tells me that I need to take the ship I found earlier to escape from the moon. He regards me as one of his race now and wants it to survive through me. There is a giant loop shaped tunnel circling the moon which I can use to achieve escape velocity but there is debris in this I need to clear first. He also gives me the duracell of alien batteries with an extra large charge. I will be able to use this to power the space ship.

I go back to the central hub and use the same console to activate another exit. This gets me access to the loop I was just told about. Its full of asteroids I have to clear out. To do this I can step on the arrows on the floor here to rotate the rings in the distance. When I get the symbols correctly aligned the ring opens.

All the asteroids are ejected into space. All I need to do now is to get back to the ship.

There is a monitor at the central hub. I examine it and see a couple of soldiers examining the dig site.

Pushing the top button on the monitor lifts up the sphere in the middle of the room. One of the marines walks over and has a look in.

I press the bottom button and drop the sphere straight on his head.

I lift it back up to try the same again on his buddy but even a marine isn’t that dumb. He chucks a grenade in instead. This gets sucked along all the way the the room I’m in. I have to quickly grab it and throw it back.

With that threat dealt with I go back to see how Dr. Escher is getting on. She has vanished and the hard suit room has been bombed so I can’t get out that way.

Escher’s log has been left behind. This log tells me how she wasn’t really a true Mondite but joined up for the opportunity to work on dig sites such as this alien world I’m on. Mastaba was only interested in the technology and what could be done with it – she clearly has sympathy for my plight but was not in a position to do anything about it. I get a new access code from this log.

I have to exit through the dig site – my reflective shield serves as an environmental suit. A load of new marines must have arrived as I have to fight my way through a series of them.

2 marines later and I’m approaching the landing platform. A new dropship is sitting on it and taking potshots at me. I have to back off each time it fires to avoid being thrown off the cliff.

When I get close enough to be safe the ship takes off. Mastaba has got away and he promises to carry on his experiments with Dr. Escher who he has onboard with him. He has also left a couple of marines behind. He says he will come back if time allows – I wouldn’t fancy my chances if I was one of the marines.

After dealing with another marine on the platform I find a logbook with a new access code to get back through the airlock and into the base again.

I work my way back to the operating room and key in Eschers code into the monitor here. I’m able to discover my identity but it seems insignificant by this point.

I go to the ship and swap batteries with it.

The roof is lifted off and I climb in. The game has gone onto autopilot at this point and this marks the start of the end cutscene.

The roof is welded back onto my ship. I blast my way through the wall, accelerate through the loop and escape into space. A few alien craft join me along the way and the phyxx live on. Mastaba has escaped for now though and I would have got to attempt to rescue Escher and get revenge on Mastaba in the next game if it hadn’t been cancelled. The intro for Bioforge 2 was completed and is on youtube for anyone who is interested.

This game deserved a sequel and it really is a shame that it never got completed. The ending struck a reasonable balance between cliffhanger and satisfying conclusion but a sequel was clearly expected. I’ve always said that games with unresolved endings hardly ever get sequels though.

I really have enjoyed playing this again but it is a much shorter game than I expected. Last night was the first time I put any serious effort into it – I never thought for a moment I’d finish it. Knowing it as well as I do now, I could easily sit down and finish the whole thing in a morning. On the whole, this is the price for having a game as rich and detailed as this and its one I’m wiling to pay myself.

After a large batch of mediocre games in the last year or two (with the odd gem), 1995 has been a major return to form for Origin. Abuse wasn’t really an Origin game so I’ll ignore that but this and Cybermage have both been excellent. This is set to continue with the final game of the year.

Next: Crusader – No Remorse.

There are still a couple of screens I’ve not looked at in the control room. This one gives me a lengthy log about whats been going on here for the last day. There has been some sort of problem with the reactor and the place has been evacuated.

Another screen gives me details about the emergency procedure. I’ll be needing one of those hardsuits it mentions.

There’s a repeating warning about the reactor which I shut up by pressing this button on the right. Somehow I don’t think that cured the problem.

It’s time to have a look at that cell I opened yesterday. There isn’t much in here – a log and a flute. I discover that I know how to play the flute.

The log tells me how the cells old resident came in on some sort of lost military drop ship that was captured by the “Mondites” on this moon which is called Daedalus. He hatched an escape plan with one of the security officers but they got recaptured – the security officer was the blue guy with one arm which explains why he ended up that way. The log contains a
security code which he was given. It also mentions something huge being put in cell 3 and me being brought to my cell. He has no idea who I am though.

I use the security code on the panel in the control room and I can now open the door with the appropriate palm print.

That would be the severed arm then. I can’t just use it myself though for no obvious reason. I have to get the medical robot to pick it up and drive it to the scanner, then go and stand on the panel nearby to get the door to open.

I run out into the next corridor and immediately get blown to bits by a giant robot. I’ll have to try that again.

I think this robot must have tunnel vision as it can only see in a dead straight line. I can just hide in this niche here and wait for it to pass though.

I run through into the next room which contains a load of bio-chambers.

My timings good as I’m hearing warnings about dropping cryo-fluid levels in one of the chambers when I get in. A log on the wall tells me about what is in each and I can see the temperature rising.

The moment I’m done reading, the lid flies off and a dinosaur like thing jumps out and attacks.

I kick it into unconsciousness and it does a sort of slow stagger round the room until it falls exactly onto the middle of this iris like trapdoor in the floor. It’s like one of those comedy death scenes where someone takes 5 minutes to finally keel over and a bit of a clue if I ever saw one that I’m supposed to open up this door.

I open up the door and hear some sort of commotion going on below. For good measure I turn the valve next to it and spray it in cryo-fluid.

I climb down the ladder and see that it was about to get eaten by some sort of giant scorpion thing. I definitely didn’t want to meet that. If I’d come down here first I’d have been dead meat by now.

There isn’t a lot to see down here, just a big pipe with a couple of buried holes in it. The one on the left takes me to instant death thanks to a several hundred meter fall. The one on the right takes me to the final cell which I couldn’t get into before.

There is one of the Mondites lounging around in this cell – presumably hiding from the giant scorpion. He attacks as soon as I get in but I take him down in no time.

The combat involves a new set of repeated phrases. These are silly but entertaining and I make a bit of a speech once hes down. While I’m here I grab his gun which is in essence what all this has been about.

I run back to the niche in the hall and this time use the panel to open up the elevator. I’ve got a choice of floors here. My first task is to head for the roof and deal with those marine drop ships.

When the doors open there are little security bots floating outside. These die with 2 laser hits but I don’t want to get in a straight fire fight. I have to bounce shots off the elevator walls and hit them from a covered position. Attempting to aim is impossible. The best I can do is adjust once I’ve seen where my first shot goes.

I work my way through the bots slowly and find another Mondite. This one is scared stiff of me and cowering at the back of the room begging me not to kill him.

I beat him around a bit until he promises to start up the big gun at the back of the room. Here’s my chance to do something about those drop ships.

I can aim the gun (somewhat) using left and right and just have to time it so that I shoot a dropship as it flies from left to right. All the graphics here look great – I can see where the interactive movie theme was coming from.

Once the first ship is down another pops up ready to attack. I change my aim and take this one out as well. That’s one less thing to worry about. I leave the cowardly Mondite up here.

Its back to the elevator to try another floor. This time the door opens to a full size robot. I use the same bouncing lasers trick to take it out.

The first door in here takes me to the reactor room but the moment I step in there I die. Some sort of protective clothing is called for before I attempt to fix the reactor then.

The next place on the corridor is an operating room with another cyborg like me being created.

I meet my maker, Dr. Mastaba. He has a remote control for me which renders me powerless while he does the typical villains speech. He says I should revel in my new existence before calling in a security guard.

As a demonstration he forces me to kill the security guard with some sort of gun built into my arm.

He goes on to say how the guy on the table will be just like me but he goes too close to the table he snatches his remote control and crushes it. I pass out and when I wake up everyone has gone.

There isn’t a whole lot to do in this room. Firing that shot has knackered my battery so I need a new one. When I go near the bloke on the table he asks me to kill him. I oblige with a punch to the head then steal his battery. This goes in a slot in my leg.

There is a lengthy log written by Mastaba which I work my way through. The Mondites are some sort of technology worshipping cult who aim to join man and machine. He has been experimenting towards this – previous results have driven people insane. The trick was to wipe the memory first so the new cyborg had no previous basis for comparison with its current state – I’m the first in the line to have got this treatment.

I only spent another hour or so on this. Its a pretty short game actually – the more I play the more I remember and I think I must be 1/3 of the way through already. I had forgotten just how much fun Bioforge was – it really is something of a classic. There seems to be something for everyone in here with a combination of story, movie, combat and adventure elements coming together seamlessly – it does come across as a bit cheesy at times but it all adds to the entertainment. I can see where Origin were coming from now with the interactive movie thing but its more of an interactive B movie. This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned and I don’t think it has dated at all – its one of those games where I can just forget its age and enjoy it for what it is. After a slow start I can feel a long session coming on tonight – I’ll see if I can’t get into a position to finish this off on Friday.

I didn’t manage much time on Bioforge yesterday so this is going to be another short post.

I figured out how to read the log I found. I guess its made by me before my surgery and states how I will remain unchanged no matter what.

I don’t look that unchanged though. While I’m doing this I keep hearing chimes going off.

The chimes mean I have a new entry in my journal which automatically updates itself as I play the game.

I make my way outside and a find a fellow prisoner in one of the other cells. This has to be the defining moment of Bioforge and is what I’d remember first if anyone asked me about the game. He’s lost him arm in the forcefield. I pick it up and he tells me “If you’ve come for the fork, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

I go into his cell and the one armed blue guy attacks me. I beat him to death with his own arm while coming out with lines like “We should be working together” over and over again.

After the fight, I stand over the corpse and say “Sorry friend, we are both victims here, you and I”. I don’t know if Origin were going for laughs with this scene but both the dialog and the acting are pure B movie cheese. There can’t be many games where you beat someone to death with their severed arm in the first five minutes either.

I find another log in this cell. This bloke used to be a security officer here but committed some sort of offense and has been turned into a cyborg as punishment. The log shows how his mind deteriorated after the procedure.

He had a photo with him but can’t remember in his log who it was of.

I take the all important fork and leave the cell. There is a locked door outside and I prise the panel next to it open with the fork.

There is a simple puzzle now to connect a circuit and unlock the door.

Once unlocked, I push the door open. This is a strange mixture of 3D and pre-rendered graphics and looks a bit like when a cartoon character gets laid on top of a movie as the doors don’t quite move at the right times.

This gets me into a big control room. There are a load of screens I can look at and use. Some of these turn off the forcefields in the cells although I need security clearance for one of them.

There is also a screen with information on each cells occupant. I find the one relating to my cell which doesn’t tell me anything about myself except that anyone entering the cell should restrain my left arm?

There is a final panel which controls a medical robot – I’ve no idea what to do with this thing yet and will figure it out tomorrow. I’ve got a few new cells I can go in now as well. All the time I was in here I heard a conversation over the speaker system about there being an escaped prisoner in the guard room (me), and how a dropship of marines was on their way in to deal with it. If I didn’t remember otherwise, I’d be expecting them to turn up at any minute but I won’t be seeing them for a while yet.

I’m going to get at least an hour on this game tonight and see if I can’t make some real progress. Now that I’ve started, I’m realising that I don’t remember it all that well after all – I’ve probably not played this game since about 97. I remember a few of the puzzles and the general plot but none of the details. What I’ve seen has aged well and the detail on the models is as good as there is any point in doing in VGA. Walking around the static backgrounds works fine and was a good way to get a 3D element onto PC’s that weren’t really ready for anything better. I prefer my adventure games to be point and click, and without the combat but I’m still going to enjoy replaying this.

I’ve not done any more over the weekend than watch the intro for Bioforge. I’m now in the final 10 games and I’m not feeling the need to rush through quite as much as when I still had 50+ to go. I’ve been busy in the meanwhile messing about a bit with ScummVM again and have added digital soundtracks to Monkey Island 1 and Loom (floppy versions) so that I don’t have to put up with adlib on my PSP. Having got this working, I’ve managed to reset my PSP to default firmware while attempting to update to the latest version and I won’t be able to run any homebrew on it until the pandora’s battery kit I just ordered off Amazon arrives.  That means its back to the Origin games again with no distractions for a few days.

The sci-fi action theme continues with the next game Bioforge. Cybermage was undoubtedly a Doom clone but with a lot of extras and Bioforge could equally be described as an Alone in the Dark clone with extras. Like near enough all the other games left in this blog from here on I’ve played this before but it was a long time ago. Unusually for me, I do remember it quite well actually and was impressed by it although it did have ridiculous loading times if you restored a game (and you needed to do this a lot due to the extreme difficulty). I’m hoping this won’t be a problem on a faster pc.

It was actually marketed as an interactive movie which is strange considering the lack of FMV and how much reading I remember being involved. Maybe this contributed to the poor sales – there has been a running theme of good games not selling too well in this blog.

The intro is done differently from the last few games yet again and has quite a low framerate but no quality loss. It shows me landing as a prisoner on a planet, being dragged into a base and then operated upon by a sadistic looking doctor. I’m back in straight VGA again but the graphics still look ok – its less of an issue with pre-rendered graphics like this as they can be anti-aliased. It would still have been nice to have the game in SVGA though as the 3D characters in it would have looked a lot clearer.

Despite the VGA graphics and lack of full screen 3D, the requirements for this game were pretty steep and it needed nearly as powerful a PC as WC3 had which may not have helped its sales either. If you’ve shelled out a fortune on a fast PC, WC3 or even Cybermage would show it off a lot better.  The irony is that both those two games will probably not have stood the test of time as well as I’m expecting Bioforge to have done.

I don’t think there is no pre-story to pass on from the manual in this game as such (although I haven’t read it yet). The game starts off with your character having no memory and builds the story from there. This is a pretty common technique in games. Maybe Bioforge was one of the earlier games to use it (although I seriously doubt this), but either way it provides a good basis for exploring the game and discovering what your aims and goals are while playing it. In essence, this is the same plot device that games like Ultima 4 used where you are dumped in a world and have to discover what to do for yourself. The loss-of-memory plot line will also be making a return in Privateer 2 but thats a few weeks off yet.

Suffice to say, the intro looks good enough and provides a bit of intrigue without actually telling me whats going on.

I’m given a choice of combat difficulty, at the start of the game (easy, medium and hard). I remember the game being incredibly unforgiving so I’m going for easy here. It could be that it wasn’t too difficult and the only problem was the minute long load times stopping me from restoring as often as I should but I remember the game being more interesting for its puzzles and story than its combat.

The game starts with me being woken in a cell by some sort of earthquake. I’ve got more metal parts than human at this point but no memory of who I was. There is a medical robot in the room which wants me to get back on my bunk – this is a first chance to try out the combat. The combat system is surprisingly complex – I can either punch or kick and use CTRL and ALT for each. With one of these key’s held down I can then press any key around the 5 on the number pad to try a different sort of attack. That’s a lot of potential options and the game penalises you if you just keep using the same one. In practice I seem to remember just alternating between the same 2 attacks was my best bet but I’ll have to wait until later to try that out as the medical robot isn’t built to survive attacks by angry cyborgs and only lasts a couple of hits. At this point it goes out of control and bounces round the room until I push it into the force field guarding my room. This damages the field offering me a chance of escape.

There is also a log book on the floor which I pick up. Reading it is going to have to wait until tomorrow though when I’ve read the manual and actually know how.