Future Wars

Future Wars is an early project of Delphine Software team, which involved both the creators of Flashback and Another World. That is the reason I bought it many years ago. It’s a straight-forward point-and-click adventure game.

I read the manual telling some science-fiction story about aliens traveling through time in order to invade our planet. The plan was cunning indeed – place the bombs (or some equally destructive alien technology contraptions) where the generators of Earth’s force field would be built. Excited, I watched the intro showing some people fried by laser beams, only to begin the game as... a window cleaner. A window cleaner? Where’s the future, where are the aliens, the laser beams?

Okay, okay... I know the protagonist gets to that pretty shortly. I just wanted to express my initial surprise at playing as a window cleaner, whose life’s pleasures consist of making pranks on his boss. In the end, the idea is simple; after all, what a sci-fi story can be about if not about – all together now – SAVING THE WORLD!!!

As you can see, if you scroll down a little, Future Wars is darn good looking, considering its release date: 1989. It features a lot of text, showed in pretty, shaded boxes (which in the DOS conversion got colored): some dialogues, but mostly funny comments coming from the faceless “narrator”. You get a feeling that the creators didn’t want the game to be very serious. The interface is everything you’d expect from an early adventure game: the action menu with a lot of options. Thankfully, it’s not very complicated and after a couple of minutes, it even gets intuitive and natural. Still, there are places where it can be a pain. For example, typing a code to a security keypad. Once you examine it, a convenient image is displayed, showing all the keys. You think all you need to do is click on them? Nossir. You bring up the action menu, choose “OPERATE” and then click on the first digit. Then you bring up the action menu again, choose “OPERATE” and then... You get the pattern? And all of this happens while the ceiling is slowly coming down on your head.

The game does commit two sins which the gamers of today won’t easily forgive. The first one is an enormous amount of pixel-hunting. Apart from some cases where you can clearly make out a pickable object, taking things (and figuring out places to put them into) usually takes some frustrating moments of moving your cursor across the screen, searching for the right spot, like one single branch on a tree which has at least twenty of them. Secondly, you can get stuck. All it takes is not to pick up a plastic bag from the waste basket and later, having traveled back through time, you’ll discover you can’t dispose of the vicious wolf guarding an area. In the past, the solution was simple: either being extra meticulous in scanning the screen or saving a lot, or both. While in the nineties many games offered a possibility to reach a dead-end (I remember one semi-erotic adventure game called Fascination where you had to replay pretty much the entire thing if you hadn’t picked up a newspaper or some shit at one point), today it would be considered an unforgivable blasphemy.

Moving around is another nuisance. How do you do that? Well, you move the cursor to the destination spot and left-click. Sounds simple and, in most cases, it is. Yet, there are places in which this can drive you bonkers. Take a look at the swamp on a screenshot below. Your task upon arriving there is to make your way to the left of the screen, to the mosquito nest. To do that, you have to walk precisely on the dark green pixels and if you make one step on the dark-gray ones, you drown and have to load your last save. It is perfectly doable, you just have to be patient, but is such an aggravating sequence really necessary in an adventure game? Plus, there are some arcade stages, one of which is making your way through the maze of platforms (in a Flashback style), with a timer counting. Twice. Boy, was that a bad idea.

Okay, the final paragraph. As most games in Press Play on Tape, Future Wars is a granddaddy and we tend to forgive our granddaddies a lot of things (even the smell). Especially if they still look kinda good. Besides, it’s still considered by many to be one of the best point-and-click titles of all times and, even though it took me a lot of nerves (and years) to finish it, I must admit I liked it.