giftgogl.blogg.se

1. #Rescue on fractalis how to#
2. #Rescue on fractalis manual#
3. #Rescue on fractalis full#
4. #Rescue on fractalis tv#

This, like every other fascinating tidbit in the manual, not only explains several in-game behaviours but also answers a few “But why don’t they just…?” questions before they’ve even been asked: This is the reason why these capable military officers stay where they crash and don’t try to get out and fight off the evil Jaggies or do the sci-fi equivalent of getting a bag of spanners and performing the emergency repairs necessary to rescue themselves. Remember the unappealing sickly sky colour and terrible draw distance I mentioned earlier? It turns out the atmosphere is yellow and murky because it’s composed of cyanitric acid – an acid strong enough to eat away at the spacesuits of those awaiting rescue within mere minutes. Rescue on Fractalus, a game with pixels so large you can count them by hand, is everything – and exactly – what it wants to be.

#Rescue on fractalis tv#

Whatever the case, once you’ve read it through you’re left in no doubt that the gap between what you’re being shown on your TV and what you’re supposed to believe is actually happening is wafer thin. It turns out the beautifully realised descriptions written on this fold-out piece of paper change the game completely – no, they are the game.

At first this extraneous information looks like something an over-enthusiastic intern would produce during their first week at Lucasfilm a nice effort for sure, but ultimately just some light fiction to gently amuse idle players for a few minutes then safely ignored once the game’s booted up.

#Rescue on fractalis how to#

There’s all of the usual help in there: How to get the game up and running, colour-coded key commands across three different formats, the boring legal stuff and so on – but what it also does is sneak in lots of game-relevant information under the guise of scene-setting sci-fi snippets.

#Rescue on fractalis manual#

Waiting for the tape to very slowly transfer its data across to the computer does at least allow you plenty of time to pop open the box and read the manual at your leisure. So long as you have the patience to wait for the tape to load, that is (I’m playing the C64 tape version here – floppy discs, cartridges, and other tapes were also available on a selection of the usual computer formats of the time). They’re clearly vulnerable, alone, and their only hope of rescue is you.

It’s only when we flip the box over and take a look at far less heroic tale shown there that Fractalus starts to reveal its hand the whole frame used to display the image of a downed and possibly unconscious pilot sitting in the scarred and gently burning remnants of a battered ship. Impressive, but still easily interchangeable with a dozen other games from the same period. Looking at the image again after spending a little time with the game reveals it to be an incredibly accurate physical representation of a typical in-game screen, right down to the shape of the rescued pilot’s helmet and the layout of the cockpit’s instrument panel.

#Rescue on fractalis full#

Not that you’d know it from a quick glance at the front cover: Going off that the game’s the embodiment of eighties alien-bothering shooter fare (Space Invaders has a lot to answer for) with a full compliment of all the usual lasers, explosions, UFOs, and some sort of shiny spacesuit hero-guy sitting in the cockpit of a sci-fi vessel. Well Rescue on Fractalus!, for starters (I do wish developers would stop including exclamation marks as part of their titles). In spite of this phenomenal flexing of programmer muscle raw first impressions of this thirty-six year old adventure might not do much to get pulses racing: The sky of planet Fractalus looks a lot like a murky yellow soup, the landscape can only be described as “brown and pointy” – what little you can see of it thanks to the game’s short draw distance – but worst of all you’re not even there to shoot aliens! What kind of eighties sci-fi game gives you violent green extraterrestrials, your own spaceship, and then tells you you’re supposed to get busy doing something else?! This sci-fi rescue ’em up by Lucasfilm – yes, that Lucasfilm – builds an entire game around one stunning technical achievement: Real time 3D flying within a fractal-generated landscape (and this is true 3D, not little tree>medium tree>big tree graphics running down the side of a palette-scrolling line of grey “road” fudging) on formats that I know from personal experience require some concerted effort just to get a functional text adventure running on them.