Some games are bad. Many of them are bad because the people behind them simply aren't up to what they're trying to do, or are rushed off their feet, or just churning out the latest in the current run of sequels. But then there's the kind that started out good and, through a trip to development hell, became bad. These are perhaps the saddest, because the player can see the glimmering shards of what the game could and *should* have been among the trash heaped on top of them.
Games end up in development hell for many reasons: Mission: Impossible was shifted around between about a half-dozen companies as each went bankrupt. Body Harvest, supposed to be one of the N64's launch titles, went through three companies and a change of genre before it was finally released by DMA design. Prey was judged impossible with current technology and shelved for a decade, and Starfox Adventures was ruined by infighting between the developer and publisher, finally being shoved out the door after being rushed to completion.
And this brings us to Epic.
Epic's story began in 1990 when DID and Ocean, fresh from the success of 1989's F-29 Retaliator, decided to make a game set in space. Originally, Epic was to be based on Elite,
and include aspects of trading and strategy as well as shooting. The game would use DID's F-29 Retaliator engine, which at the time was one of the best ones.
Fast forward to 1992. DID is bored of working on a game based on an outdated engine and champing at the bit to start on their ambitious new flight sim TFX. Ocean still wants to make money out of a game that's been delayed and delayed again, and no longer even resembles what it was supposed to be. Just to add to the problems, they can't give Epic any more time to shape up; Elite 2 has already begun to cast a colossal shadow over their little space shooter. It seems the solution was to simply throw something together and hope, and here that something is.
You can't really call yourself a player of retro flight sims unless you've experienced Epic: sadly, this does include having to play it. You also can't fully appreciate the game without reading its manual before playing: the manual is completely inaccurate, and describes the game Epic presumably would have been if anyone had bothered to finish it.
The controls will probably be your first clue something's wrong; there's only one button for the throttle, for a start. Only being able to cycle weapons forward was ok in F-29 where the aircraft was realistically loaded so there weren't very many of them, but here, as we'll soon see, it's horrendous.
Firstly we get the introduction; in its day it was incredible, with dozens of 3D ships moving against static backgrounds as the plot is explained. It's basically the same as Battlestar Galactica: fleeing from their homeworld, the massive human fleet must make its way through dangerous space controlled by the violent Rexxon empire in order to find a new planet to settle on. You control humanity's secret weapon, the advanced Epic starfighter. After a briefing on your first mission, to clear out a minefield and destroy a tracking station beyond, it's on to the game itself.
Right, now we're onto the game, the first thing that hits you is the Epic's cockpit. It's vast, taking up almost half the screen, and seriously under-detailed. On the right, you have your F-29 style zoomed-out radar, and it's stuck on the completely useless basic version that didn't give you the enemy's bearing and speed. In the middle is a context-sensitive display that can be either map, message box or missile tracking camera depending on what it feels like being, and on the right is a distinctly under-detailed readout of your shield strength, fuel and speed. Want a damage indicator, threat warning light, altitude gauge or numerical airspeed gauge? Well, tough, they aren't there.
But this doesn't strike you quite as fast as the gunsight does. Epic's gunsight is red and absolutely gigantic, with no mark in the centre to assist the player in actually aiming, so you basically have to lob shots around hoping to hit. It doesn't indicate when things are in range, meaning you also waste a lot of ammo on targets that are too far away to hit. The HUD has no direction indicator save a rather useless 360-degree bearing indicator, no ladderbars, and no attitude indicator. This means that if you can't see the ground you have no real idea of where the Epic's nose is actually pointing, until you hit the magic 90 degrees. For some reason, the Epic can't loop, so if its nose it at 90 degrees it just stays that way. To make flying even more of a chore, your fighter appears as a simple dot on the map with no indication of which way it's actually facing, so navigation is difficult.
You'll also notice the manual is wrong on two counts: firstly, you don't have a limited selection of weapons like it says you do, and secondly you don't have the ammo counts it says you do. The manual says that you should have 60,000 rounds for your laser, 240 for your pulse cannon, 12 for your ion beam, no number given for your Epical beam, and four photon torpedoes. What you'll actually find is you have every single weapon in every mission bar the Doomsday Bomb, and 99 shots of each. This generally means the lasers run out too fast and the torpedoes [missiles] too slowly.
And here's where you start wishing you were playing F-29. It seems fairly obvious that this game was once supposed to either have a loadout system, or all these weapons were just tests of different ways to display weapons effects. I guess Ocean left them all in to provide the illusion of a wide selection of weapons, even though there's no real difference between any of the weapons of a particular type.
There's no key to cycle lock-on, so if your torpedoes lock on to the wrong target you have to get it out of view. Equally, there's no way to keep a lock on a target once it does leave your line of sight. Add this to the aforementioned gigantic and imprecise gunsight, and combat becomes a matter of throwing random shots about and hoping, then boosting away, turning and repeating. None of the weapons have much in the way of range, which coupled with the Epic's inability to really do anything approaching dogfighting means that in a straight-up fight with Rexxon fighters you're basically dead. No wonder most of the mission objectives are fixed ground targets. In some cases the game doesn't bother to tell you what these targets *are*, either.
There's really no excuse for any of this: F-29 Retaliator was three years old and the game Epic itself was based on, and it still managed to pack in a gunsight that lets you shoot straight, beyond-visual-range weapons, a radar that tells you which direction the enemy was facing in, the ability to flip right over, ladderbars and an attitude indicator, a compass, a moving map with a position finder, and objectives actually clearly marked on said map. It's truly inexcusable when a game's own prequel completely outmatches it in as many ways as F-29 outmatches Epic, and makes it all the more obvious that the actual *flying* part of Epic was just thrown together at the last minute so they could stuff it into the box.
And yet...under all the shoddy attempts at a user interface, you can't hide that Epic is *still* fun at times. The explosions are nice, especially for the time, with things blowing up in a way that brings up memories of Starfox. The story, despite being under-played, is somewhat compelling and you really want to finish it at least once just to see everything that's there. I have fond memories of playing Epic on my uncle's computer as an altogether less discerning 11-year-old, and it was the first game I played which was definitely built around its storyline. Nowadays, the wackiness of the cutscenes is obvious, but back then they were spectacular.
All told, playing Epic, much like playing, say, Starfox Adventures, is a rather sad experience: you find yourself *wishing* it was just terrible, because then you could hate it. Instead, it's a disheveled little thing that you know could have been great if only it had been given more time and more work.
But nobody cared.
