Maestro Review

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            MrLipid’s Closet of the OddMaestro

Review by MrLipidJuly 2006

Once upon an Era …

Remember the early 1970s? Nixon was still in the White House, George Peppard was vexing insurance companies as Banacek and a young Englishman released a bestselling album that became the musical signature of The Exorcist.

Though Nixon and Peppard are no longer with us, that no-longer-so-young Englishman is and he has been busy. That Englishman is, of course, Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame, and for the past decade or so he’s been intrigued by something he calls MusicVR.

Sounds … Promising

Maestro, the second program to make use of the specially written MusicVR engine (Tr3s Lunas was the first), enables players, alone or networked and chatting with each other, to fly through spacious fantasy worlds while searching for objects called medals—medals that look like self-adhesive premade silver ribbon gift bows. In the namesake Maestro mode, players achieve the title of Maestro by collecting enough medals to reach enough worlds to find and escort a quartet of “Gravitars” to a special Gravitar holding pen. (Don’t ask what a Gravitar is. I have no idea.) Another mode involves collecting precisely two dozen medals from all of the worlds of Maestro. (If one is playing with a friend, one can exchange medals or simply give them away.)

Maestro is, in many respects, the embodiment of what more than a few adventure gamers have described as the ideal future of adventure gaming: a nonlinear quest set in an enormous universe that can explored from a first- or third-person perspective, alone or with friends, with complete freedom of movement. What’s not to like?

Say What?

How about this: Maestro has no save game function.

Let me repeat that. Maestro has no save game function.

Exiting the current game, whether by choice (F4 = exit), accident (F1 = new game) or crash (nothing’s perfect), erases all traces of a player’s progress. The next time Maestro is fired up, it will behave as if it has never been played before.

There is no clue, either on the website or in the game, why this particularly odd design choice was made. There are oblique references to leaving Maestro running—”When you are not participating in Maestro, leave the world running all night as an active screensaver or as a Windows background to your day-to-day tasks”—but that’s not quite the same as saying, “Leaving Maestro = starting over.”

(Leaving Maestro running makes sense if it is possible to minimize it and get some work done. While I was never able to minimize Maestro in 98SE, it obediently shrinks to the task bar in XP Pro.)

What’s the Good News?

If you can’t imagine yourself playing a game you can’t save and come back to, you might as well quit reading now. If you’re a patient soul with nothing else to do, read on.

Maestro’s defining characteristic is scale. The worlds in Maestro are huge. There are seemingly endless plains to fly across and entire mountain ranges to soar over. There are massive building exteriors to examine and immense interior spaces to explore.  While the player may not have a clear idea why a certain world is full of floating clock gears or how to relate to a scorpion made of circuit boards, there is always something to see and, more often than not, that something is worth seeing.

More Bad News?

That said, there are more than a few instances where inspiration appears to have failed, and a placeholder, be it an overly familiar texture or an incongruous object, was inserted while Maestro’s creators awaited, in vain, the return of their muse.

More fundamental than the sometimes stale textures and overall coarseness of the objects throughout Maestro are the limitations of the game engine. Maestro is striving to offer the player something resembling the dream state of flying. It needs a game engine with the flexibility of 1995’s Descent or 2000’s Shark!  Hunting the Great White. Both of those engines offered players full freedom of movement. Want to tumble in space? No problem in Descent. Swim along the ocean floor while looking up at the surface? Go ahead in Shark! A few moments of flying in Maestro reveal that the game engine not only enforces the idea of up and down, it also limits how far one can turn upon an axis. There are times in Maestro when one feels one is dreaming the dream of a tether ball, wrapped too tightly around the pole to move and forced to “unwind” in order to proceed.

Control in Maestro could not be simpler. Pressing the left mouse button moves one forward, and pressing the right mouse button brings one to a full stop. Press the right mouse button after a full stop and one reverses direction. While the control is simple, it takes a fair amount of getting used to. Expect to overshoot more than a few doorways and pile into more than a few walls. Though Maestro is a nonviolent game, there are times when it is necessary to open doors or trigger puzzles by launching a volley of circuit boards or chunks of DNA at them by pressing the space bar.

A substantial portion of the gameplay in Maestro consists of drifting through massive spaces looking for the aforementioned medals and Gravitars. The speed at which the worlds drift past is determined by the MusicVR engine and, because said engine is designed to convey a sense of scale, the pace is leisurely. Maestro is not a title designed for those who can vividly remember demanding to know, most likely from the back seat, “Are we there yet?”

Between long drifts, the player can ponder how each world works.  What ties to what and how does doing one thing affect another? Is it a good idea to open the birdcage by pressing the spacebar and firing what look like circuit boards at it? Should one pelt a chrome statue with chunks of DNA? Is it always a good idea to fly through a painting? And what about those unicorns?

The Living Diminuendo

For a game designed by someone who made his name as a musician, there is surprisingly little music in Maestro and not many sound effects. Just a quiet, slow drift through worlds that frequently look like they were wallpapered with web page backgrounds from the mid-1990s.

Am I glad that I’ve spent some time in the worlds of Maestro?  Yes. I haven’t run into anything quite so odd since Welcome to the Future or Weird. Can I recommend that folks dash to the Mike Oldfield website and buy a downloadable copy?  No. What I can recommend is that folks drift to the Mike Oldfield website and download the demo. If you like what you find in the demo, you’ll find even more to like in the full version. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Mike Oldfield Publisher: MikeOldfield.Com Release Date: March 2004

Available for: Windows

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Pentium 3 processor OpenGL compatible graphics card Windows 98/ME/2000/XP 128 MB RAM

Where to Find It

Mike Oldfield website

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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