B.A.T.

 

EARTH, 22nd century.

You are about to embark on an exciting and dangerous adventure. The Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters has selected you as their special agent.

Your mission: to find and destroy Vrangor, the evil genius who is threatening the people of the planet Selenia.

• Player interaction gives you the chance not only to participate in the lives of other characters, but to be plunged into the actual city of terrapolis.
• Pilot the DRAG, a genuine flight simulator shown in 3D.
• Learn how to use B.O.B., the programmable computer implanted in your arm.
• Explore over 1100 different locations and meet characters from 7 different species.
• Enjoy the futuristic atmosphere provided by outstanding graphics and sound effects 

~ from the back of the box

In the decade-long transition between the text and the graphic adventures, there were a number of titles that straddled both mechanics to varying degrees. Some kept the text parser while providing images to replace the descriptive paragraphs. Others fully transitioned into the full point-and-click goodness that we know today. Some, such as Ubi Soft's 1990 cyberpunk adventure B.A.T., got rid of the typing but kept the flavour text.

Going by the graphics alone, B.A.T. didn't really need them. While not the most animated, each screen is alive with detail. You don't need text to tell you that the city dwellers live off the "immoral earnings of crime and corruption" or that the restrooms are "not very pleasant". These permanent blurbs can take up half of the screen - space that could've been used to showcase more of your surroundings - but they do have a function of reminding you what is there. The cityscape is fairly open and it's not so easy to tell if that door you're about to enter is that of an ammunition store or a brothel. The text will tell you that. Ironically, these words have more of a disassociating effect than you might expect. Instead of intuitively reading the images to find out how to progress, you are taking your eyes off of the scenery to read. Relying on visuals alone will get you nowhere. They may be beautiful to look at but they don't seem to have been created with gameplay in mind. The comic-book presentation does add a strong visual style but it's a design choice that ultimately takes away from the game overall.

And overall, it's just above average. There is very little signposting in-game of what you need to do and why you're even doing it in the first place. In fact, the premise of the Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters feels more like an excuse to get the ball rolling on a convoluted sci-fi conspiracy than an actual, fleshed-out addition to the world.

There are some basic RPG elements to it too, such as character creation and combat along with item, health and weapon management. While the combat isn't especially deep, it is incredibly annoying. Even though they are scripted events, they seemingly crop up when you're least prepared and will drain your health before you realise what's happening. At least that's what I felt going into it thinking it would more-or-less be a straight adventure.

Beyond this, every NPC can be interacted with. You can ask them any question pertinent to the case whether they're an informant or a worthless street hobo. The most important thing to ask, though, is the time. The game has an internal clock where events happen at certain times which is a mechanic I  don't tend to care for, even if done well. I guess it could add to the sense of immersion but when everyone responds like a mechanical talking clock, that breaks any illusion of an alternative reality you may have had.

As such, I couldn't really get into B.A.T., even though I thought I'd enjoy the story at the very least. If you're able to get past the design choices - or even embrace them - I'm sure it'll live up to the generally positive reviews and user ratings. For me, I didn't have the patience to stick with it.


To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses DOSBox to bring the PC version to modern systems and FS-UAE to emulate the Amiga version. Manuals, Maps and Walkthrough included. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 93.2 Mb.  Install Size: 200 Mb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

Download

DOS	DOS
Amiga	Amiga

B.A.T. is © Ubi Soft
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

ARTHUR'S KNIGHTS: TALES OF CHIVALRY (aka ORIGINS OF EXCALIBUR)

 

Long ago, Honor was worth dying for...

Travel to the age of Kings and Queens. Monsters and Magic. Live the legend of the Order of the Round Table and become Bradwen, a Medieval hero who will forge his fate with the aid of renowned characters King Arthur and Merlin. Travel to the kingdom of Camelot, and the legendary place called Avalon, as you battle monsters and attempt to outwit your rivals.

Experience the journey from two different perspectives as you choose your destiny. Select between playing the role of a Christian or a Celtic Knight.

Play two separate and unique story-lines that will determine your ultimate fate.

Main features

• Enter the medieval legend of King Arthur and the Round Table
• Stunning backgrounds, dynamic cameras and fluid 3Dnimation
• 2 games in one
• 2 playable characters
• 2 separate quests and ultimately a knight's honor to be won

~ advertising blurb

The Legend of King Arthur is a ripe subject matter for an adventure game. Back in 1999/2000, Cryo Interactive must've known this as they'd created a short-lived series of adventure games based on the legend. The first was Arthur's Knights: Tales of Chivalry (or Origins of Excalibur to us Brits), and even this had two different stories in one package. Look like they were all in with wizards, grails and magic swords.

 

The game begins with a young squire begging for tales from the Knights of the Round from his uncle, The Chancellor of Champagne. Two books are open to you, each telling an alternate tale of a Knight named Bradwen. One casts him as a Christian Paladin, a pious defender of the faith. The other has him take on Celtic traditions with Merlin himself as his mentor. Both are very different in their story, but neither are as polished or deep as you want them to be.

Choose the Red of the White book to tell a different story of Bradwen (left).

Combat is animated nicely, but the outcome is entirely pre-ordained (right).

 

Part of that could be down to the visuals. They do look good for the time, with 3D polygons superimposed on pre-rendered 360° wraparounds. It's just very sparse. There are only a few objects or characters with which to interact with, meaning most progress is simply done by talking to everyone or taking everything that stands out from the background. Some puzzles require you to answer riddles by making a choice, but not once did I find any of this particularly engaging.

 

It doesn't help that the controls are a little muddled. It is a mix between direct and mouse control awkwardly lumped together. You control Bradwen with the arrow keys, but most interactions are done with the mouse; not on the game screen, but on some icons at the bottom. It's not the most intuitive, nor is it the most complex, but stick with one or the other. 

There are three sections in this little pop up; conversation, items and travel. Whenever you pick up an item or learn of a new location or piece of information, they will show up as selectable icons. The inventory is self-explanatory, as is the dialogue tab, but the horse allows you to fast-travel to different locations. Clicking on the circle to the left of this will continue any dialogue but it may also offer up its own options and choices - such as fight. Combat is entirely pre-scripted, meaning that you will only win if the game wants you to. Failure is death, obviously, but it's not easily signposted. Sometimes, the criteria for success is a puzzle in and of itself and the only way to know it is one is to get a sword through the throat. It wasn't long before I just got into the habit of saving before each conversation instead of the beginning of each area.

An extensive historical encyclopedia can be accessed at any time (left).

Choosing the right answer for a riddle. There are a lot of these types of puzzles (right).

 

What I did like over anything else is the locations. All of them spark the imagination, inviting you into a visual world more cohesive than the story. It's a pity they're not exactly explorable, but the thrill of a new location is what kept me going through most of it. 

 

I don't exactly have high praise for the first entry in the Arthur's Knights series. It's a game that suffers from the same type of problems as many other Cryo games - all filler, no killer. They look good, but there's a certain rushed and under-baked feeling towards the entire thing. Another thing they all have in common is a promising premise. That may keep others like me playing for far longer than others.

**UPDATE**
As of 18th April 2021, Arthur's Knights is now available to buy on Zoom Platform.

Buy from ZOOM


Arthur's Knights: Tales of Chivalry (aka Origins of Excalibur) is © Cryo Interactive
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

ARK OF TIME

 

It is the summer of 1997 and somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, an historic event is about to occur. A rag tag team of four intrepid explorers descend to the depths of the ocean in their search to locate and enter the mythological, sunken city of Atlantis. However, something has gone wrong.

Four days after the teams' last communication, in a frazzled editor's office high above the streets of London, Richard Kendall, our hero, in informed of their disappearance.

This starts and adventure which will take the gamer to the four corners of the globe. 'Ark of Time' treats the player to a visual feast, passing through environments including the luch Caribbean Island of Rum Cay, the austere grandeur of Stonehenge and Easter Island, and ultimately to the breathtakingly beautiful city of Atlantis.

FEATURES

• A wide-ranging virtual adventure
• Accurately based on real-life locales
• Intuitive point-and-click game control
• High resolution, high color, fully rendered game world
• 3 1/2 + hours of digital speech
• Specially commissioned orchestral soundtrack
• Fully cinematic game intro and level animation

~ from the back of the box

Journalists must live an exciting life, at least if you’re only perception of them comes from point-and-click adventures. These games tell you that these pen-pushers can chase alien mindbenders (Zak MacKracken), solve a Colonel’s murder (Laura Bow) or uncover time-travelling corporate conspiracies (Synnergist). Ark of Time by Italian developers Trecision continues this trend by putting sports journalist Richard Kendall on a globe-trotting adventure to find none other than the lost city of Atlantis.

In actuality, he’s reporting on the missing scientists who were on an expedition to find it. This somehow means he will travel to some far-flung and remote places that would surely cost his editor a fortune in plane tickets and insurance alone. But he has to, otherwise he’s fired. Somehow, Stonehenge, Easter Island, a Caribbean holiday resort and an Algerian prince all have something to do with it. Considering the middle-American twang spoken by almost every character, it is surprising that we do not visit the United States even once.

You'll visit some well-known landmarks on your travels including Stonehenge in the UK (left)
and the Moai stone heads of Easter Island (right).

Growing up, I fist played this DOS game on the PlayStation. Like a lot of point-and-click adventures for the system, it was a European (and Japan)-only port. I found it in a bargain bin and my local GameStation and wouldn’t make it beyond the first location bemoaning the joypad controls and pining for the PC version. Even so, I could still see the low budget creep through an otherwise decent looking game.

For a game first released in 1997 (1998 for the PlayStation), it is somewhat surprising that it was a DOS game for computers. This was a time when Windows ’95 was almost fully established as the norm for PC gaming. Regardless, the SVGA graphics do look nice and somewhat contemporary, with inviting pre-rendered backgrounds and a polygonal main character cohesively wondering around them. As was becoming the norm, it is fully voiced too - at least within the gameplay sections. For some reason, video cut-scenes aren’t instead displaying dialogue in a large ugly font in the middle of the screen while generic music plays in the background. The in-game visuals are good enough for the game to not rely on video sequences too often, but the silent movie approach is ugly and jarring considering most other lower-budget games would likely make the opposite choice.

Richard Kendall has no time to do anything fun. Even if it's UFOs or sex lines.

Gameplay-wise, Ark of Time isn’t anything fans of the point-and-click genre haven’t seen before. You have inventory-based puzzles with a simple mouse-based control scheme. Left click walks and looks, while right click talks and interacts. It’s a tried and true control method that’s unobtrusive to the game design. You won’t ever come up with the answer and be stuck implementing it, however some of the logic is a bit weird. When Richard is too afraid to enter a scarily dark cave on account of all the bats, he has to light up an old light in a lighthouse using by lighting some flares, aim it towards the cave, then convince the owner of a hot air balloon that there’s treasure on the island so you can deflate it giving the light a clear path to the cave. And here’s me thinking a good torch would suffice. I wouldn’t ask about how those flares or fake treasure map got into my possession, but it included acquitting a condemned Algerian prince and flirting with an older artist on her Caribbean holiday.

It may be crazy logic, but there if you pay attention it’s all hinted at. The script will hint at what you need to do through dialogue, for example, that owner of the hot air balloon will tell you about a hidden treasure on the island (Easter Island to be precise) and that aging artist freely yaps on about her forgery skills. You will have to suspend disbelief frequently, as the laws of time and physics are often bent. That Algerian prince is to be hung the next morning, but in order to free him, several trips to England, the Caribbean and Easter Island are needed. Some of these are locations are half a world away! The story is told as if it all happens in a single day, but counting travel time and the sheer amount of it, I would reckon it lasts at least a couple of months.

If you can forgive this, the story is a compelling one. The missing scientists provide a MacGuffin that allows for all sorts of escapades with Atlantean artefacts ready to be discovered in many fascinating locations. Each of them are depicted using computer generated backgrounds that have been retouched by hand resulting in some nicely nostalgic artwork. A crumbling church in Avon, England is as impressive as the Easter Island heads or Yucatan pyramids.

The CGI cut-scenes are disconcertingly devoid of voice work.
Dialogue obscures the image by being displayed in this large, ugly font.

The voice work is - how shall I put it - of its time. It’s cheesy and overly dramatic but never less than entertaining. Each of the actors voice their characters with gusto, even if their attempts at accents leave a lot to be desired. Whether it be a British construction worker sounding exactly like an American yokel, or an Algerian street gambler sounding exactly like an American yokel pretending to be Middle Eastern, it’s as if they didn’t know the geographical context of their words. At times the script is deliberately winking at the audience with comedic banter and the odd breaking of the fourth wall. Richard, for example, will comment how he is solving puzzles as if being controlled by a guiding hand and his climactic response to the whole adventure is “this stuff happens…”. I admit, the lameness of the jokes did manage to eke out a chuckle or two.

While Ark of Time can’t compete with the greatest the genre has to offer, the globe-trotting adventure is still a memorable little trip. Whether you’re painting crabs white or learning how to make chloroform from its raw materials, it’s a game whose quirks and little oddities are its identity. I would’ve liked fully voiced cut-scenes and perhaps some more bombastic set pieces over verbose humour and banter, but I enjoyed it from beginning to end. I’m glad I delved into the DOS version after bad memories of the PlayStation port. It was well worth it.

 

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 383 Mb.  Install Size: 692 Mb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

Download


Ark of Time is © International Computer Entertainment Ltd
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me