Bay 12 Games Forum

We start with an intro cutscene, which starts with the developers logo fading in from a static filled background, this made my eyes hurt.



So as stated in the manual it all starts off on mars, humanity drove earth into the ground, much to the surprise of no one, and now in the 38th century, everyone lives happily on mars... Except of course mars is run by an insane theocracy (because why not?).


So the priesthood is engaged in a big time Stalin-style purge, they're getting rid of all revolutionary minded people, and so a group of revolutionaries start up the "iron seed" project, which involves a plan that goes something like this:
Step 1: Program a computer virus that will wreck up all the technocratic priesthood's ship. Thereby destroying the government of mars. Give said virus a thousand day counter, just for giggles.
Step 2: Steal a ship, download a crew of six members into the grey goo matrix, blast off into space, go into sleep mode until the virus activates, then come back.
Step 3:
Step 4: Revolution!


However it turns out that despite being able to program a planet wrecking virus, they can't program an alarm clock correctly, so instead of sleeping for a thousand days, they sleep for a thousand years, and thus find themselves waking up way too late to catch their revolution party doh!


Oh yeah, and some aliens are in the middle of trying to kill them, don't ask me why. Something about them being scavengers I think.






The ship crash lands on some planet.


And that's all of the intro. So it's basically something like Lost In Space, but with more grey goo.




So this is the main menu, for reference all those little white and grey pixels slowly tick by to the left in unison.

Let's do this thing.


So clicking new game gets you to the ship select screen, on which some kind of light rock techno synth-punk music plays (or whatever the kids are calling it these days).

Basically clicking the up and down arrows will cycle you through all the different ships one by one, this is pretty annoying since all it is is three categories of ship style with three choices in each.
These categories don't seem to be named, so I'll just come up with my own.

The first category we'll call "size", you small, strategic, and heavy. sizes,

Then there's "style", which has shuttle, assault, and storm.

then there's "role", which has transport, frigate, and cruiser.

All of these seem to represent some kind of trade off, and not necessarily in the ways you'd expect. I haven't really looked into the different possibilites too much since I don't even really understand the significance of the statistics yet, so I just went with the one it automatically starts you off on, which is the heavy shuttle transport.

Incidentally I can click the little red light next to ship select, which toggles it between green and red, I have no clue what this does, maybe it changes the alarm clock between "years" and "days".



So this is the crew select screen and ermm... yeah that font is pretty hard to read isn't it? I've been told there's a way to switch it, which I'll look into as soon as I start the game in ernest.

So yeah, the first crew member we pick is the psychometrist, which as near as I can tell is a combination of doctor/comms officer in this game. There's four choices in all including three well accredited psychiatric professionals, and apparently a gifted psychic, go figure!







I went with Serine Delin at the bottom because I thought she sort of resembled Vector, and this seemed like as good a reason as any to go for her.

The next crew member we pick is the Engineer. I'll explain my thoughts on these as I go along.


This guy seems kind of crazy, so I elected to pass him over since I hear crazy crew members are a big issue in this game. I'm also pretty sure they're using his arrest mugshot as a profile picture, which is never a good sign.


this one's apparently some sort of kid genius, who risked it all for love... cute. NEXT!


The baroness here is apparently a gifted engineer, but also a total snob.


... Ermmm, I think I'll pass on this one.


Apparently this girl is the result of abiogenesis through lab accident. And is not even technically human, but hey, who isn't in this day and age of goop-driven transhumanism? I decide to go with her, mostly because nothing drew me to the rest of the candidates very much.


So the next position to fill is the science officer. Let's take a look at our candidates.


This one is a xenobioligist, with what appears to be a completely ordinary and not even slightly manic character...


I notice it never actually mentions in his profile what his qualifications actually are.


I actually like the sound of having a philosopher onboard our ship.


I really don't think I want a "perfect" person on board, I prefer my people deeply flawed but in acceptable ways, thank you very much.


And this guy is apparently some brain damaged dude that started this whole revolution. He doesn't seem very qualified to me.

I think I'll go with the philosopher then.

The next position is security, for which there is five candidates. Let's take a look.


So apparently a very gifted but emotionally unstable person who couldn't come to terms with her synthetic parentage. Because apparently being born in a tank is pretty common in this day and age.


I actually like the sound of this one. Not much to say though.


Perhaps a career criminal would be a poor choice.


So a pretty similar background to the other athlete then.


Ah, another snob, pass.

I go for the second choice

The next crew member to pick is Navigation.

I think at this point you guys have an idea of how this all goes, I'll post all the rest of the profiles together in a seperate spoiler and just show you the ones I picked.





I pick these two to make up the rest of our intrepid crew. As soon as I pick the last one the game asks me to pick a slot to save in.



I'll continue this in the next spoiler.

As soon as I pick the slot out and click ok, I'm treated to this screen explaining the situation.



For those of you unable/unwilling to decode the hard to read text, here's the gist of it. A mysterious distress signal has woken the crew up, they've just found out that the ship's clock has failed. We don't know how long we've been adrift for, and we can't seem to map any of the stars to those visible on mars, so we don't know where we are either. We're lost... in space.

When waking up the captain (which is us by the way), experiences a hallucination that says something about the iron space between thoughts. Which psychometry assures us was just a meaningless malfunction.

There's a mysterious wreck on the planet below we're advised to send probes down to probe it.


So before things start up I get this screen with a rapidly counting down counter, I assume this is some sort of glossed up loading screen.


And then I get this screen of us over the planet surface.

This is where things finally get fun, because now I have to figure out the controls!

So the square thing with the buttons on it is the "command cube" it, like many other varieties of cube has six sides, with one for each station, there's a whole bunch of buttons on each station, and they're not always very clear about what they actually do. The functions of the buttons are listed in the manual, but the manual isn't 100% clear on how you operate this thing so bear with me here.

The first thing I did was click the brain stem which takes me to the psych evaluation screen.


So in case you haven't caught the message yet, in this game humanity has successfully achieved it's dream of turning itself into goop. Said goop is currently being depicted on the left side of the screen. The goop will change colour according to their moods.

So the crew have these three statistics, skill, performance, and sanity. All of which are pretty necessary. Skill seems to indicate how well a crew member does their job, while I think performance infleunces how fast they can do it?

Sanity is the health of a crew member though, if it runs out the crew member goes nuts. Which is really bad. We also have the ability to save and reload crew members using the "encode" function.

I know we control the balance of the crew members stats through increasing or decreasing the chemicals in their system, but I'm sort of afraid to touch this right now, so let's check out some other options.

I click the one that sort of looks like a cluster of people, which gives me the crew stats screen.


Which looks like this, here you can see the crew's experience points and level... that seems to be this screen's only function. So I go take a look at something else.

The screwdriver seems to be the research button, which I leave alone for now. Instead I click the small brain projecting brain waves, which is the crew communication button.


Here we can talk to one of our crew members, and hopefully be enlightened. Let's try talking to the lab accident!

EDIT: This image actually appears to be missing, and I really don't feel like going back and replicating it, all it is is she says, something like "What do you want my Laird?"

She seems like an ordinary, ration, not quite human being so far. This game is one of those ones with keyword based dialogue, where you type in keyword and get results. LAIRD is written in yellow, so I assume it's a keyword, so let's ask her about that.


Oh geeze... They don't seriously call people LAIRD's around here do they? Let's ask more about that.


I think she's threatening me a little bit.

Asking about LORD gets the same thing as LAIRD... Apparently in the future the English language went back to no longer being standardized.

Anyway, since ADVICE and WRECK were both highlighted in the log we saw at the beginning let's try asking about them.


Her advice is to investigate the wreck, and talk to the scientist for more details. Let's do that then (asking about WRECK gets the same answer).


Yeah, she basically just explains how to send down a probe.

There's other keywords revealed when asked about such as SCIENCE, FUNCTION, ALIEN, ANOMALY. All of which are pretty uninteresting. I futz about talking to some other crew members but there's nothing new or interesting, so I decide it's time to send down some probes!

It's at this point that I also found the options in the medical section and changed the font to "CLEAN" which seems to be much more legible.

Anyway, this is what the planetary scan screen looks like.


Essentially there are several types of scans, I do the anomaly scan first, the process of scanning looks something like this:


The probes move about the planning scanning different spots, and as they do so the counters on the bottom left tick up.

There's five different kinds of scans to do, Lithosphere for land, Hydrosphere for the liquid surface, atmosphere for the air, biosphere for the life.

After scanning for a while I exit this screen and am greeted by another log.



And I think that is where I will leave this, because it's getting kind of late and I'm getting kind of tired.

Psychometry








Engineering











Science












Navigation












Medical

    Subversion City Generator Prototype (DRM Free)
    Voxel Destruction Prototype (DRM Free)
    7.62mm (DRM Free)
    Talisman Prologue (Desura) (DRM Free)
    Darwinia (Steam)
    Multiwinia (Steam)
    Defcon (Steam)
    Uplink (Steam)
    Hearts of Iron III (Steam)
    Demigod (Steam)
    Galactic Civilizations I: Ultimate Edition (Steam)
    Fibrillation (Desura)
    Darwinia Soundtrack (Music)
    Defcon Doundtrack (Music)
    King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame (Steam)
    King Arthur II: The Role-Playing Wargame + Dead Legions DLC (Steam)
    King Arthur: Fallen Champions (Steam)

Thank you to the steam gifts forum for providing me with a list that was easy to copy paste.

Challenge 1, show appreciation.
Show someone you appreciate them, it can be someone you know IRL, like a parent or a friend or whatever, or it can be someone on this forum or online elsewhere. Shoot them a PM telling them they're awesome, give them a hug, whatever you feel appropriate. Post results here!

Challenge 2, wordy stuff.
Write some poetry, or a story, or anything like this, post the results here!

Challenge 2, pretty stuff.
Draw something, or paint something, or make a sculpture, or a dress, or anything artsy, but remember, pics or I use my imagination, and you don't want me using my horrible, horrible imagination.

    choppy(1st)
    teoleo(2nd)
    Baneling
    Jopax
    cerapa
    Thobal
    ragnar119
    Sirus
    miauw62

We mess around with it a bit until we figure out the system.


It occurs to me to write a message.


I draw this for no particular reason.


Then we make use of the map. Apparently the person I was playing with lives somewhere called Terps, and is going to move out west. Unfortunately they wrote, "Bye" and left before I could advise them to pack plenty of ammo for hunting, and to be careful about fording rivers.