Midwinter

1990 SyksyWinter for all, luck for the few. Rainbird's much-hyped Midwinter has now made it here to the land of the backwoods warriors, so how exactly do the advertising and the reality match up?

I kick my way through the drifts on skis, dodging the pines, heading for the nearest garage, which might let me take a snowmobile for my voyage. The hiss of the snow is broken by the sound of an approaching motor vehicle. I snatch the rifle from my back, scramble up a spruce and survey the scene through the scope. Something's moving over there! I twitch a finger, and the tanker bites the dust. An enemy sled in the convoy spits a couple of missiles in my general direction. Even though I manage to wipe out the whole herd, I think I'll ski off somewhere else all the same. At the garage I take a little nap and have a bite to eat before I take a look at the map to see what to look out for. Well, blow me! If I'm sticking to my goal of recruiting little Jenny Adams, I'd better not take the sled after all, because there's a mountain range in the way and my alter ego drives a sled like a southern flatlander drives a reindeer troika.

There is, however, a cable car station nearby, and at its far end you can usually find a hang glider. With the Snow Fox the trip there goes quicker, and its versatile missile armament may well come in handy, and I think I'll fetch a bit of dynamite from a nearby depot as well. But there are only ten minutes left before the clocks are synchronised. I pick John Stark and sabotage the factory and the police station.

The reason for all this varied outdoor exercise is a comet, which the Earth ended up underneath around the year 2017. Such a thick cloud of ash and dust rose into the air that a new ice age began, and what the ice spared, geological upheavals destroyed. For the most part, mankind went back to primitive tribal life.

One of the few pleasant places left is an island that has risen near the Azores. Heat mines keep life going, and the island, which used to live off tourism, is actually a nice place.

Unfortunately, tourism is picking up. A landing on the southern part of the island is made by General Masters, of the famous Masters of The Universe family, who of course wants to become ruler of the whole island. Masters has put together a 2000-unit package-tour party, so one by one the villages and heat mines change hands.

And standing up to this lot is the Free Villagers' Peacekeeping Force, which consists of a whopping 32 people, assuming they can all be recruited. You see, people have personality profiles, and person A won't go along with B if A's wife once upon a time went off with B. The personality profiles also affect movement, recovery from injuries and aggressive behaviour.

At the start of the game you control just one man, so it should be obvious that recruitment has a pretty high priority. If the radio stations held by the enemy can be destroyed, you can recruit the whole populace in one go; otherwise it's off you go, scurrying across the snowdrifts. The advance of Masters' conquering army also has to be kept in check with sabotage and by eliminating army corps. The final goal is to blow up Masters' headquarters before all the heat mines are in enemy hands. The game, by the way, takes quite some time to fall in love with. If the first couple of get-togethers feel hopelessly dull, don't get discouraged.

As your forces grow, the illusion of simultaneous movement is handled in an interesting way. Each character has two hours to run riot before the clocks are synchronised. Once the time runs out, the character can't do anything more. When everyone has been moved, the clocks are reset.

Graphically Midwinter is a giant leap. The fractal landscape, beefed up with filled vectors from Singleton's engine, not only works and looks good but also moves really fast, considering the amount of work involved. Particularly when flying the hang glider, we can talk about an experience like nothing before. Depending on the means of transport in use, you view the landscape through a windscreen, ski goggles, or the ski lift, not to mention peeking out from under the hang glider's wing. The area available is 160 thousand square kilometres.

When a journey comes to an abrupt end, you get a splendid animation of the character eating snow on whatever vehicle they happen to be riding. The sounds as such don't sound all that nice; the points are scored for how useful they are.

For the most part, the game is extremely realistic. There are a few annoying things, though. Characters can't pass equipment to each other, which is immensely annoying in certain situations. Nor, apparently, can captured mines and the like be made to change hands again. 160 thousand square-shaped kilometres looks lovely on paper, but the area could quite easily have been cut down drastically; at times the skiing really gets on your nerves. Some kind of autopilot option would have helped matters too.

The controls, which are handiest with the mouse, could have used a sensitivity adjustment as well. As it is, the end result is a lot like Hard Drivin's desperate mouse-waving. Otherwise there's nothing to complain about in the playability.

In any case, Midwinter is such a significant game that when you toss the good and the bad sides onto the scales, you've got a very good game on your hands. With a little fine-tuning we could really be talking about the strategy game of the decade; even as it is, it's among the best of the year.