The Side-Shows: EarthSiege (MetalTech)
Sierra didn’t want to be left out of the giant-robot arena,
so they commissioned Dynamix to create the MetalTech games. The
BattleMech license was already locked down by Activision, so they
had to create their own world – ‘Mechs were now known
as “HERCS” (short for “Herculean”). Instead
of Inner Sphere conflict, MetalTech used the Terminator cliché
of “bad A.I. (‘Prometheus’) wipes out humanity
with robotic soldiers (‘Cybrids’), human guerillas desperately
fight back”. Take away the back stories and naming conventions
of MechWarrior and MetalTech, however, and you essentially had
the same games. MetalTech combat design had a few differences
– heat was no longer a factor, but energy management (including
shields) did. The aforementioned shields also made combat weapon
management a little trickier – shields were good at stopping
energy weapons, but useless against slug-throwers. Dynamix’
designs also handled salvage better. In short, EarthSiege played
more like a hard-core flight-sim.
Three MetalTech games were produced – EarthSiege (1994),
a DOS game; MetalTech: BattleDrome (1994), another DOS game built
around modem-to-modem multiplayer; and EarthSiege 2 (1996), a
Windows 95 DirectX2 port of the 3Dspace engine. While these games
were pretty good in their own right, they were stomped flat by
the popularity of FASA’s Battletech world in the MechWarrior
2 games.
The first EarthSiege and BattleDrome are now best left to ‘Mech
game completists, and are hard to find. Bargain-bin, jewel-case
copies of EarthSiege 2 are everywhere, though, and the game’s
50 difficult missions are actually worth playing for hard-core
robot jockeys.
The Freak Show: Heavy Gear
Activision lost the Battletech license in 1997, after bleeding
the MechWarrior 2 series dry. Undaunted, they chose to pick up
another pencil-and-paper robot-game system gaining popularity
at the time: Dream Pod 9’s Heavy Gear. Theoretically, this
should have been a change – Gears are small ‘Mechs,
marginally larger than Elemental-type battlesuits. (The best comparison
is with modern military vehicles: if ‘Mechs are main battle
tanks, Gears are armored personnel carriers.) While more vulnerable
and more lightly-armed than ‘Mechs, Gears are supposed to
be more dexterous. They can also transform into wheeled vehicles.
Gear combat is faster and deadlier. There is also a large RPG
component behind Heavy Gear.
Unfortunately, Activision set a nine-month (!) development cycle
on their first Heavy Gear game, and it showed. It was a sloppy
effort hurriedly dropped, willy-nilly, into a Direct3D port of
the aging MechWarrior 2 engine. Naturally, it played like MW2,
as well – it was extremely disappointing to end up fighting
the nimble Gears in the same old “Circle of Death” fights.
The graphics were a chop-shop mishmash, including the unintentionally-hilarious
cobbled-on particle system, and Gear animations that did not change
even when they were climbing 60-degree slopes. The final straw
was a massively-multiplayer host system that promised a virtual,
continuing war between the game’s antagonists. What it delivered
was an unruly, lopsided conflict (when it worked), and blue screens
of death in WINSOCK (when it didn’t). The pencil-and-paper
Heavy Gear’s RPG elements were tossed aside, in favor of
that bastion of cheesiness – full motion video.
Heavy Gear is another jewel-case bargain-bin favorite, and, before
Heavy Gear 2 itself hit the bottom shelf, could be found in the
newer game’s package gratis. In any event, it isn’t
worth getting, even for completists.
