Immersed in Terminus

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May 25, 2000
Web posted at: 11:27 a.m. EDT (1527 GMT)

by Lee Anderson

(IDG) -- Vicarious Visions, a company well known for its titles on the major gaming consoles such as the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation, has come out with a new Linux game. Terminus, a realtime, space-combat, role-playing game is the latest from that developer and is due to debut this month. Versions for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows will come packaged in a single box -- a first in gaming history. Our story starts in the year 2197, when the human race has begun the colonization of the solar system. The sudden discovery of ancient alien technology has allowed the construction of vortex gates, interstellar portals -- such as the stargate from the movie and television series of the same name. The use of such portals allows ships to fly between planetary nodes where players fulfill contracts, carry out missions, and fight epic battles.

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The game world includes fully operational space stations, vigorous merchant trading, a realtime economy, and ravenous pirates who pillage and plunder unsuspecting craft. Your mission is determined by the role you choose to play, and the untamed game world reacts and interacts with your own decisions and movements. That living environment allows the user to become part of the game. The complexity of the opportunities and ideas presented in Terminus are unparalleled by predecessor space simulations such as Wing Commander.

Training

Before you put on your jump suit, you may want to consider taking a refresher course at flight school. Terminus boasts an innovative game engine, where the level of realism and accuracy of game physics will see even the most hardened pilots crash to a college freshman status. The zero-gravity environment presents a new learning curve for those used to common flight simulators. You can quickly reverse that seeming disadvantage in combat, however, by acquiring new skills like zero-G strafing.

Terminus includes five training missions designed to introduce you to the general idea of spaceflight and familiarize you with the Head Up Display (HUD). The missions are very basic to start, with later training exercises becoming more involved with combat training, docking (with space stations), and a heavy emphasis on inertia controls.

The Gauntlet

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The Gauntlet is aptly named. It is best described as a free-for-all combat situation, where waves of enemy craft of increasing strength try to shoot your ship to pieces. To date I have never been able to destroy more than four waves of fighters, even on the easiest difficulty level. The Gauntlet can be used to hone your fighting skills and fine-tune your controls before you make your way into the campaign storyline.

I'd like to think of The Gauntlet as a single-player option that is an extension to the training missions, preparing you for a more realistic battle atmosphere. I learned the hard way to conserve fuel and save missiles for important targets, and those lessons proved valuable in the full campaign.

Campaign mode

Based on a premade plot, the campaigns are the central achievements of three years of Terminus development. Featuring story lines that unfold in realtime and react to your movements and decisions, the campaigns reminded me of evolved versions of such LucasArts games as Day of The Tentacle and Sam and Max: Hit the Road.

At the start of a campaign, you decide what faction you wish to join. There are four main factions to choose from, the choice of which determines your character's career and the part he will play in the plot as it unfolds: the United Earth League (UEL), the Mars Consortium, the Marauders, and the Mercenaries. The roles your character can take range from fighter pilot to spy to galactic pirate.

The easiest of the four is a UEL career. Upon entering a UEL campaign, you are placed in the officers' lounge on the UEMS Artemis (a space station owned by the UEL), where you can access a number of features including the communications center, the transaction database, and the flight deck. In the communications center you can look at the solar economy, read important news, and set your navigation path. The transaction database is a facility to find and select contracts, which are the equivalents of regular game missions.

Careers outside the UEL focus more on pilot skill and customizing your own ships for combat. The Marauders, for example, pillage spacecraft for supplies and weaponry, while the Mercenaries are solitary beings, traveling space for work to carry out. Those two paths involve users in building their own spacecraft, which raises the stakes when it comes to combat and maintaining the ship.

I found that Terminus suffers from a common problem that I have experienced in almost every realistic flight simulator. When embarking on a mission, the time it took to travel from one point to the next became quite boring . Those long flight delays due to Terminus' realtime play might make casual players lose interest during missions. Interstellar travel isn't as fun as it sounds.

Graphics

Besides the intricate storyline detail, Terminus presents a fully three-dimensional environment where players are able to move and rotate their ships in any direction. Video support on Linux comes in the form of Glide, so I recommend a Voodoo chipset -- my 3Dfx Voodoo 3 supported Terminus without any problems.

Being a space simulator, a lot of the scenery in Terminus is, well, space. The game has broken that drab backdrop by using colorful textures to depict distant galaxies, far-off burning stars, and vibrant planetary dust clouds. Lens flare and velocity lines and velocity trails are incorporated into the display, which help in determining what direction you're heading and where surrounding craft are going in relation to your ship.

Craft explosions were of particular interest to me. You can target specific areas of a ship to partially disable it. The enemy craft will then spiral out of control with a spectacular trail of engine fire blazing into space. When you finish off such a craft, the result is a wave shooting from the center of the explosion, reminiscent of an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon. The graphic detail that has gone into explosions and craft functionality is visible throughout your space travels.

All of the ships are modeled quite well: the space stations demonstrate moving parts and smaller fighter ships with beautifully textured flame trails from their main engines. Even the smaller thruster jets can be seen in precision flight. Cut scenes have also been incorporated into the graphic features, providing an external three-dimensional view of automated docking maneuvers.

Right down to each detail, Terminus appears attractive to the user and applies a structured and involving plot. It is a combination sought by many but achieved by very few.

Conclusion

Terminus is a game like none that I have experienced before. It uses a realtime persistent universe -- a feature that was scoffed at by many in the gaming industry a few years back -- to provide a dynamic and involving environment. It successfully creates a highly intricate and evolving experience that will engage both casual players and hardcore gamers.

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Vicarious Visions
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