Houston, we have an addiction. Review

Houston, we have an addiction.

Rumor has it that Moonbase Commander was never intended to be a game. That’s

not quite true. It was never intended to be a commercial game. Apparently,

it was the pet project of some programmers over at Humongous who were working

on another title for Infogrames. This game was just their little hobby. But they

kept playing it. And other people at the company started playing, too. And suddenly,

the LAN was full of people trying to rule the lunar surface.

Rather

than criticize people for not getting enough work done, the publisher decided

to just release the title upon the earthbound public just to see what would

happen. I have no idea if this is true, but it makes a nice story, and it might

explain some odd things about Moonbase Commander. More on that later.

Part Artillery, part Worms, part

chess, Moonbase Commander is a dorky, cute little game that won’t win

any awards and won’t make the ten o’ clock news. But its oddly addictive nature

might keep you up past ten, and eleven, and possibly even twelve, depending

on your bedtime.

Moonbase Commander puts you in remote control of a lunar module for

one of four mining companies, your very first “hub.” You must use your hub to

build other units, explore the moon’s surface, exploit energy pools, build offensive

and defensive stations, and blast anyone else you find into deep space.

The tricky part is in the way that you expand. From any of your hubs (which

you see from an overhead view), you can aim in a 360° circle. You then launch

your units from your hubs; the longer you hold the launch button, the further

they will travel, arcing over the lunar surface. They must land on flat ground

or they will crash and explode. On top of that, each structure trails an energy

line connecting it to its parent hub. These energy lines cannot cross or land

in water.

After your hubs, your most important structures are you anti-air stations.

Not only will they shoot down enemy weapons, but they will shoot down enemy

launches, preventing them from expanding too near you. Energy collectors are

also very important. Place them on energy pools to supply you with much needed

energy. Other structures include shields, offensive launchers, and towers. Everything

you build or fire requires energy, which makes securing sources of energy a

primary objective. The game is turn-based and like Worms, you only have

a certain amount of time to make your move. When you run out of energy, the

round is over.

Attacking

a well-defended enemy position is tricky, but you have lots of different weapons

at your disposal (although nowhere near as many as in Worms). They all

work the same way: aim carefully and launch. Bombs are the simplest and one

of the cheapest weapons. Just try to arc them to land on your opponent, Artillery

style. EMP bombs will knock out any units in their range for one turn, giving

you a valuable window of opportunity. Prowlers automatically crawl along the

surface in the direction they were launched until they hit something, causing

the biggest explosion in the game. Launch a Virus into your enemy’s system,

and it will roam along his energy lines wreaking havoc. However, all told, there

are only 18 total structures and weapons.

This is probably a good thing, because the instructions are sparse. The manual

does a poor job of explaining many things and there is no in-game tutorial.

There is, however, a “challenge mode” which starts very simply and provides

a series of increasingly harder maps and opponents. There’s also a quick skirmish

mode to play against some computer opponents, but there’s no campaign or story

anywhere in the game. The main game mode for Moonbase Commander is clearly

the multiplayer game. This is solid and seamless and obviously provides the

best challenge, but multiplayer matching must be done through Gamespy, which

isn’t always solid and seamless. Ugh.

It’s all these little things that makes me believe the story about the origins

of Moonbase Commander. The skimpy single player game, the lack of an

internal matchmaker, the clean but very simple graphics and the inability to

save your game make Moonbase Commander feel more like a hobby than a

commercial product.

That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, and like Tetris you can get sucked

into the simplest games for hours without realizing it. And Moonbase Commander‘s

$20 budget price tag does a lot to make up for its shortcomings. If you’re not

a hardcore gamer looking for the latest graphics and the biggest explosions,

or if you just have an older computer that can’t keep up with Battlefield

1942, you could do a lot worse than Moonbase Commander.