Noctropolis Review

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Noctropolis

Review by ScoutJuly 2003

Who hasn’t secretly wanted to be someone else? Who hasn’t, as a child, conjured and inhabited futures of spectacular adventure and sumptuous rewards? Rock star, lost royalty found, superhero, to the wizard class born … Fantasy role-playing is the name and entertainment is the game. Books do it, movies do it, comic books and computer games do it too. Sometime in the early 1990s Shaun Mitchell and Brent Erickson of Flashpoint Productions imagined a double knock-out combination—a computer game built around a comic book superhero. Lacking the resources to license an existing property, they made one up: Darksheer, champion of the night, protector of Noctropolis. Only a single issue was ever published, a limited edition included with the game Noctropolis.

Noctropolis, published by Electronics Arts in 1994, is a comic book world come to life … literally. You play Peter Grey, a mild-mannered bookstore owner down on his luck. For an idea as to how bad things really are, click on Peter at the start of the game when he is still in his bookstore and you’ll get this description: “Perpetual depression has rendered you lethargic and hollow.  Numbed by apathy, you sigh vacantly, wondering when your existence turned so bleak.” The roof leaks, sales are down, the bills are piling up, utility services are about to be cut and, worst of all, Cygnus Comics has just delivered its very last issue of Darksheer, your favorite comic book, in which your hero Darksheer hangs up his cape and calls it quits. This is not your beautiful life. But wait, you have won a contest put on by Cygnus, and after a strange little girl dumps your prize through the mail slot, you open it.  Inside are two coins, silver and gold, and oh joy and rapture, a new original Darksheer comic. After eagerly reading the comic, you flip one of the coins in the air and are magically transported to the eternally twilight world of Noctropolis. Things are looking up. Or are they?

Darksheer’s inexplicable retirement has left Noctropolis without a hero and the comely leather-clad Stiletto without a partner. All of the archvillains have escaped from prison and are on a vengeful rampage, nightly beating the citizenry to its collective knees.  In the midst of all this chaos a mysterious skyscraper is being built, a tower so magnificent that it pierces the eternal cloud layer that covers Noctropolis, soaring out of sight. As the new Darksheer, your first order of business is to drag Stiletto from her drunken retirement. After gaining her trust (and apparently her affection) by besting her in a little punch, kick and claw, the two of you head off to battle the bad guys. Oh, and what a delicious dastardly dire group they are. There’s Succubus, a spirit-sucking demon residing in the voluptuous body of a young nun, Greenthumb, a reconstituted mutant horticulturist, Tophat, a magician savant gone mad when her mentor assaulted her, Dreamler, a psychotic with advanced mental powers who can manipulate your dreams, Master Macabre (my personal favorite), a talented surgeon turned sicko sadist, and finally the man behind the curtain, the brilliant mastermind of mayhem, the ever-enigmatic Flux. The theme of transformation, so dear to comics in general, is in full play in Noctropolis.  Everyone has been someone else in another life, everyone has experienced a transformative, defining moment and no one is any better for it. Change is a bad thing in Noctropolis. Nothing good ever seems to come of it.

Noctropolis is a mouse-driven, point-and-click adventure game. It has optional keyboard commands printed on the back jewel case insert, though I never did get the hang of them … and I actually like keyboard commands. A right-click brings up the interface pyramid, wherein reside your commands. Want to talk to a character? Right-click to the pyramid, left-click on Talk to change your cursor, left-click the cursor on your subject. It sounds a little awkward, and it is.  Other commands are Travel, which takes you to the game map, Move, Look, Open, Get, Use, GoTo, Inventory, File and Setup. There are an infinite number of save slots, accessible by clicking on the Save As New button in the Disk Service Box. To restore a game you use the Loading a Game button. A handy feature here is the Info button, which tells you the location, time and date of your save so you don’t have to bother typing in descriptions.

You progress through the game in the usual way, exploring locations, running through dialogue trees, building your inventory and, of course, solving puzzles. The puzzles are easy to medium in difficulty.  The few times I got stuck were when I had carelessly overlooked an item I needed. The game has an obvious comic book look to it, and while at times it can be a feast for the eyes, the result is an overall visual homogeneity. Nothing stands out from the background, everything seems to blend in with everything else. Luckily, the hotspots react to your cursor, so be sure to take the time to scan the rooms when you first enter them. Items you need usually are lying around in plain sight and are easily acquired if not always so easily noticed. Eagle eyes are required here.

The game won’t let you advance beyond the point of no return if you don’t have a necessary inventory item, so don’t worry about dead-ends. Only once did I have to return to a location to retrieve an overlooked item. Unfortunately, it was the most difficult location in the game to access, especially with a slower computer. So, a word of warning, try to make sure you have taken everything that’s not nailed down before moving on to the next location, especially if you’ve just spent the last two hours sneaking into a certain building.

Items are used by clicking on Use, which opens up the inventory.  From there, you click on the item. If it isn’t relevant, the game will tell you so. If the item is usable, the game will complete the required actions automatically. Noctropolis is fussy that way. It knows what it wants and when it wants it, thank you.  This makes for some autopilot puzzle-solving, as all you have to do is click on the right item at the right place and then stand back and let the game do its thing.

Gameplay is a simple as dirt. Confront and defeat the villains.  One by one. There is a twist, though. Several of the fights end up with Darksheer being poisoned, gassed, stabbed or otherwise physically compromised. When this occurs, a timer will start up in the lower left corner of your screen. If this timer reaches zero before you’ve made your way to the Darklair for a dip in the old mystic mother liquid, you die. Cheesy cutscene and you’re back to the opening sequence. In practice this isn’t as onerous as it sounds. I only died once this way and never really felt undue pressure, as the timer stops during dialogue or cursor-triggered actions, giving you plenty of time to think, explore and experiment. Plus you can save inside the timed sequences, which is always nice.

At the end of each confrontation, the game more or less dumps you back at Darklair with little or no direction as to what to do next.  Unfortunately, unless you revert to a hint guide or a walkthrough, be prepared to roam from location to location, running through dialogue and clicking on inventory until you find your way again. To be fair, the game does drop subtle hints here and there, so it is best to pay close attention, especially during conversations.

The sound in Noctropolis is notoriously hard to configure so that the voice dialogue plays throughout. If for some reason you can’t get the voices to play, the game defaults to a stylish dialogue text box. But if you can manage it, do—while the actors vary wildly in their deliveries, their work gives the game a much-needed extra dimension. Master Macabre and Tophat were especially wonderful (though the rest of the female leads were obviously hired for attributes other than thespian). Still, if you require quality acting in your games, be warned. Noctropolis glories in the cheesy, the bloody, the gross and the questionable—in all areas. Other things that might offend are mild scenes of female nudity, sexual situations and occasional profanity. Also, a bunny rabbit dies.  Sorry, but it’s true. The wascally wabbit bites the big one.

As you progress you learn the cosmology of Noctropolis, why it became the city of eternal darkness and who are its secret movers and shakers. There’s a lot about Elementals, natural phenomena, Light and Dark, Good and Evil and the standard operating procedures of the local demigods. It gets pretty complicated pretty fast, but the player doesn’t need to take notes. While there are no pop quizzes, there is a big info dump at the end that pretty much killed Flashpoint’s shot at a bang-up climax.

Despite all of its shortcomings, Noctropolis is a fun and engaging game. It has a campy, tongue-in-cheek humor and never takes itself too seriously. To get the most entertainment value for your money, I suggest you play this game in a similar spirit. Take it for what it is and you’ll come away happy. Want it to wear sensible shoes and eat its broccoli? I’m afraid you’re in for a bit of a disappointment. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Flashpoint Productions Publisher: Electronic Arts Release Date: 1994

Available for: DOS

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System Requirements

386 DOS 4.0 or higher 4 MB RAM 2X CD-ROM drive Super VGA or VESA video Sound card Mouse

Where to Find It

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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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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