Operation GII (Demo) (Amiga) - Guest Post

The week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko has dug up something properly obscure for you. It's the demo for a cancelled Amiga first person shooter called Operation Gii! Uh, Operation G2 sorry.

All these Alien Breed games Ray has been playing has inspired me some! I'm going to play a sci-fi shooty survival game of my own.

Developer:

Psygnosis

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Release Date:

August 1994 (Demo)

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Systems:

Amiga

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"Are you ready to battle with rogue robots on a radio-active spaceship in our fab Coverdisk demo?"

You bet I am, Amiga Format!

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As you might have guessed from the picture above, Operation GII (or G2 if you prefer) is an Amiga-exclusive first person shootin' type game that appeared as a demo on the front cover of Amiga Format magazine's September 1994 issue. There's no backstory in the game itself; we have to rely on the magazine for the info. The gist is we've been sent to raid a derelict spacecraft full of valuable medical supplies but, alas, there are merciless killer robots on board. Oh no!

Advisory: A couple of these gifs have momentary muzzle screen flashes.

After a brief video glitch, we've materialised in this shiny raytraced corridor with a conspicuously non-raytraced pistol at our feet. We've got wires, lots and lots of wires. And some buttons. And a motion sensor! There's some blue bogies wandering around out there, but they're not rushing at me so I've got some time to figure out what I'm looking at. I'm lit up too. I'm assuming I'm the one in the blue tile that's not moving.

I move my hand mouse cursor into the window and daintily pick up the gun icon and place it in my right hand item slot. I'd call this type of game a Behind the Iron Gate-em up, if BtIG didn't come out a year later than this. Unlike BtIG, left and right mouse buttons activate the items you're holding in the hands, but left mouse button is also mapped to Dungeon Master-style tiled movement when you click within the 3D world, so that gets a little confusing.

The only two character stats I have are the T on my throat and the H on my heart. The magazine says the H is my Health and the T is my time, and it's going down fast. Nothing good ever happens when you run out of T. Let's get moving.

A closed door. A control panel. The plot curdles.

Let's inspect the panel.

Gosh, Corporation was a long time ago, wasn't it? Zooming right in on panels and fiddling with switches... that was the early 90's definition of environmental immersion. Nothing I can fiddle with here is helping though.

Oh, whoops. They haven't quite finished the graphics for turning away from a door towards a blank wall. Don't worry, nobody'll see this in the final game, I bet.

Movement is tile-by-tile with animation, like Stonekeep, except strangely Mr. G2 can stop on the boundaries between tiles as well. When you do, you can't turn to face the frame of the doorway you're standing inside because the programmers didn't render any half-tile rotation graphics. It's really disorienting when you're stuck like that unable to turn and I wish they hadn't bothered.

The turning animation is especially strange. The camera leaps back a notch at the start of the turn discontinuous with the static backgrounds, giving the impression of a slide being yanked about and clumsily replaced in a projector.

It's a dead end.

'vrrrp'

A sound! Am I being pursued by robots? Did one of them manage to open that door?

Ack, robot robot!

I keep missing my shots. I have to manually aim with the mouse, but it's not easy when everything is covered in tomato splats. And he seems to be able to hit me while he's deep in inexplicable blackness but my shots don't work when he's that far away. The gunfire and explosion sound effects are really nasty. They sound like basic placeholders.

I think I got him! He's not on the auto-map any more so I think he's toast. He didn't drop anything.

There goes a third of my H and four of my precious bullets. That could've gone a heck of a lot better, but I don't know how. I can't dodge; can't defend myself in any way. I feel like there should be some kind of evade or temporary forcefield button I can hit rather than taking all these blasts to the face like a statue.

At least I can go onwards now. Everywhere kind of is looking the same here.

Ah, that's convenient. I've been desperate to go.

Well I pushed the big square button and nothing happened. This up-arrow in the bottom right doesn't do anything either. Whatever this did, it's keeping it to itself.

The game won't let me accidentally shoot it, so that's not the answer.

Haaaaang on. Do you see that?

Let's go forward one step.

I'm still in the same room as the cyber-convenience, but one turn to the left.

It's a teeny-tiny, exactly the same colour as the ground ID Card!

Man, you've got to have the eyes of a lynx to be able to spot items on the floor in this game. I didn't see the card when I walked into this room, only as I was leaving and only because I was facing the correct direction.

The game's automatically opened up the inventory panel for me to plop the card into. I'd better click the rest of those buttons in case they're important. What do you know, they're all inventories. I have no character attributes whatsoever.

I assume this card goes in that first door I found. Let's go back.

I haven't done a looping corridor gif in ages. I love these, and I hope you do too.

I'm controlling the walking and turning with the cursor keys and, you know, it's not so bad. My fingers feel like they're where they need to be. I'm sitting right up to the screen and the game kinda actually sells the feeling of walking around in a spaceship, except the monochrome, grainy, low framerate window makes me think the bloke from Xenon could pop up at any moment.

I had to take the ID Card from my inventory and put it into the little slot myself, and that made some numbers appear. I don't know if they're going to be important but I'm going to write them down anyway. The door hasn't opened, so maybe I need to type in the code somewhere else? Oh, no, wait, I pressed the green button which looked like it was already recessed and the door opened. Makin' progress!

The corridors further on look identical to those where I started yet again, sadly. But I've found a wee metal block that kind of looks like one of the vehicles from Transport Tycoon! Yoink!

This thing goes in my first inventory. ID Cards go in the second. I don't know what the other three are.

It's strange that the gun ammo is listed as a number when there's a serviceable pixelled graduated gauge beside the item window that does nothing.

Oh you sneaky swine! Trying to sneak up on me while I'm figuring out how my interface works? Well, you succeeded. Good job.

STAND BLOODY STILL.

It's neat that the game correctly obscures the robot behind the door frame. Some of these tile dungeon Amiga games simply wouldn't bother.

And he's certainly demonstrating how useful it would be to be able to move and shoot in two different directions!

It's a bit weird that I have to aim the gun myself like it's a lightgun game like Operation Wolf or something. I have a vague memory of a game where you have a shiny hand at the bottom of the screen moving about while you aim, and I think it could be Spycraft. I haven't played enough old-school dungeon tile games to know for sure, but don't these types of games usually have you click on sword/fists/arrow/spell or whatever icons and the attack automatically aims at whatever foe is in front of you?

I got him but he still dropped nothing. Ugh, I'm wasting precious ammo here!

A cyber-John and a card-slot door in the same room? Operation GII, you're spoiling me. How much Chip RAM must it have cost to allow this new combination of pre-rendered items in one room, with all of the rotating transitions and so on? I'd rather you'd have spent the memory making some of these corridors different to one another, but you know.

There's no background music, just a constant hum that sounds more like we're sitting in a car idling. No footstep sounds. Lots of beeps and bips when the interface windows open to use a door.

Whoops. This is what happens when you leave the hand cursor at the bottom obscuring the auto-map! You get snuck up upon by the bad guys!

Well, this is combat. This is what G2 has to offer. Big fluffy pizza explosions obscuring the enemies as you try to click on them. I keep missing and he's a giant damned balloon, for heaven's sake! At least this time I managed to capture an animation of him exploding into ketchup for you.

I know I've only gotten about a dozen tiles into this but I could really use some health. I feel like I've barely done anything and I've wasted two-thirds of my time too. There's gotta be some batteries around here somewhere.

I've found a bar of delicious, grey, speckled space chocolate. It's already opened but nobody's had a bit yet so I think it's still good. When I click on it it brings up my fifth inventory... but if I know my Corporation-clones, what I'm supposed to do is put the icon into my character's face so he eats it. But the inventory pane is covering the character display! What am I supposed to do?

I figure it out in the end and silently recover some precious H, but no T. There's a chance that this level or floor or deck or whatever is pretty small - I'm bumping up against the four edges of the auto-map, so I might just make it in time.

I'm being shot at by something here, but the radar isn't showing it and I can't see it and I can't fight back.

I'm out of ammo, out of time, out of health and out of luck.

Dead.

Haha, why does that raytraced text crack me up? It's like it's from a GBA game or something. And it's made of carrots.

Okay, rack 'em back up. I want another shot at this. I'm still figuring G2 out. If the game isn't random then I can do the first few puzzles (hah, 'puzzles') quickly and not lose as much health from being bushwhacked by robots.

This game runs on all Amigas, but requires the RAM expansion, so surely they could've given us more tiles than this? Without the auto-map, this game would be absolutely impossible. But I do have a map, and I'm enjoying slowly chewing the game up and figuring it out.

You can see the strange way the camera yanks backwards momentarily whenever I turn pretty clearly here.

Hey! Hold up! I saw that. Look very closely at the bottom of the 3D window when I start to walk along the bottom of the auto-map. It's only visible for a fraction of a second, but there was a grey canister on the grey floor there.

It's a little tub of blue mush. Delicious health restoring blue mush!

I've figured out that those little grey oblongs I've been finding on the floor have been magazines for the pistol. As long as they're in your first inventory, you'll automatically refill your gun with one when you run out. But that won't happen if the ammo is in your left hand instead, or if you try to reload the gun manually by moving the icons about. Ugh. Behind the Iron Gate made immersive game design look so effortless... (Cue horrible flashbacks to trying to reload the gun in Corporation).

I was a bit overenthusiastic trying to get away from a robot and I think I've managed to fall out of the map by trying to turn and move simultaneously. The game can't decide whether I'm walking or turning and the screen is showing a mish-mash of movement frames. Dang.

Then on my next go I crashed the game by fiddling with the F-keys, so don't do that either.

I'm having to plan my route out so I can release the robots in a controlled manner and know the minimum number of steps and turns needed to complete the puzzles - scratch that, they're not puzzles in the 15-puzzle or Tower of Hanoi sense, they're just tasks. Even Corporation wanted you to play with spy gadgets to find hidden messages. G2's keycard sequence is entirely linear; the whole game is the puzzle. I don't think G2 was meant to be a hard-as-nails, perfectionists-only puzzle shooter, but that's what I've got in front of me.

There's barely enough ammo to shoot the enemy robots, not that there are that many. They can't open the doors by themselves either; there's an invisible pressure plate in one of the dead ends that opens the first locked door and another one near the blue goop.

Come on, mecha-neko. This is practically an old-school computer RPG, like Captive, right? What would the CRPG Addict do? They'd get out Excel and make a hecking map is what they'd do!

Behold, the map!

The level begins at the big S on the left and my objective at this point is to reach the green squares where I haven't yet been. The route hasn't been entirely linear: there's three additional unlocked doors you can find whose purpose is to hide a dead end with a deadly robot who'll kill you dead, and that's it. None of the enemies are dropping anything. I haven't found any treasure or weapons or crew logs or dead bodies or anything, just two ammunition clips, a jar of blue goop and an opened chocolate bar. This is the worst salvage mission mankind has ever known.

It was worth going all the way down to the bottom right of the map after all. I've found a plasma grenade launcher! It doesn't have a name in the game, but that's what I'm going to call it. It fires big red glowy dithery balls and explodes any robot in a single hit with a feeble tinkly spoon-in-a-tin-of-beans sound.

Wait a fucking moment. Red glowy balls? You're telling me we could've had red keycards and ammo packs and door markings in the first person window this entire time? Why in heaven's name has everything been grey?

Alright! I've done it! I've completed the first map of G2. Please enjoy this confusing diagram that took me ages to create.

The keycard you get from the far right of the map opens up the route leading back to the top left. The final keycard you find there completes the loop back to the start point, and that's it. The grenade launcher starts with six rounds and seems to run off the same ammo I've been finding for the pistol. By the time you get it, there's only one or two robots left to destroy. When they're all gone... nothing happens.

I guess this is the end of the game? Kind of an anticlimax after all that effort. I honestly thought there was going to be an ending. I went through everything again a few times, trying to do stuff in a different order, killing all the robots, picking up all the items. The three wall terminals seem to have no use at all. I tried turning them all on, then turning them all off, shooting them (the game won't let you). Nothing.

I tried looking around the exterior walls of the map in the final area I'd opened up. One time I managed to foul up the game and walk through one of the walls again. I thought I'd found a secret door, but then I got stuck and the graphics went funny and I had to reboot. I kept looking, sure that there'd be a master door somewhere along the edge leading out of the area into the next level.

And that's when I accidentally found this:

There's a keycard panel hidden on the inside wall of the dead end in the top middle of the map. Activate it, and it'll reveal itself to be a set of elevator controls!

The end. There's no end sequence or 'Thanks for playing!' or anything, the game just goes back to the title screen. But I think I've definitely won Operation G2 now. Hurray!

CONCLUSION

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I think I did quite well for someone who can't really stand tile based first person dungeon exploration. I tell you, the always-visible auto-map is a lifesaver. I'm sure the game would be wonderful and immersive and mega-scary if the first person view filled the screen like in Stonekeep, but keeping the layout of the level in my head would be too much mental commitment for me.

I liked playing G2, but I will admit it was kind of lame and wonky. It's impossible to sneak up on a robot. It's as if when you're within three tiles of them they head right for you. They don't even need to spin around to face you. If you don't anticipate every robot by keeping an eye on the radar, you're insta-dead, just don't bother playing. And I swear that there's something off about the enemy projectiles. Either they can home in on you, or the game doesn't model them like real objects - they magically stick to you as if the game has decided the projectile is a set distance away from you and that's it. The few times I managed to run away from a robot and hide around a corner, the projectile kept on coming towards me like it was burned into my vision.

It's hard to pin down what G2 even is. It's a very 'Amiga' type of game. And it's very old-school Psygnosis/Psyclapse in that it has a central trick and some nice muted graphics but the rest of the game doesn't know what to do with itself. It's got the musty stink of old Amiga tile-based dungeon crawlers, but it's definitely an action game. The rooms and the robots are more than a little bit like the zany, colourful 80s co-op arcade third person shooter Xybots. But Xybots let you move about inside a tile to dodge lasers, and it had a shop and powerups and all kinds of things. It was even on the Amiga too and everybody loved it, so...

All you do in G2 is scoot around, shoot robots, curse at keycard doors and try not to die. It's like a sci-fi survival horror without the horror - much like TECNO: The Base. It's definitely not an RPG. At least, not yet. G2 is missing the stat-filled character pages and hideous, sprawling everything that typifies an Amiga RPG. I've no doubt that Psygnosis were going to put that stuff into the final G2 and make it a full 'immersive sim' (if you like) but they never got around to it.

You're probably wondering why I didn't play the full game instead of moaning about a one disk, cut down demo. Sadly, Operation GII was never released! A forum post from the musician working on the game says it was never finished and it barely made it past what was in this demo. Some magazine previews mention the ability to hack doors and there are screenshots of one other level with a different type of enemy. I also suspect that the proper game tracked Food instead of Time, but we unfortunately may never know what the other two inventory buttons would have been for.

Amiga Format Issue 63 September 1994
In the same issue as this demo, Amiga Format ran a competition where you could win one of 25 copies of the full game of G2, which made for an intriguing, lingering mystery as time passed and the game never materialised. Eventually someone posted on Lemon Amiga that AF wrote to them offering a substitute prize, so that's not so bad, unless they were really looking forward to G2 specifically. And I can see why they would be. I want more of G2, and I don't even like it all that much, but it's new to me and it's weird and it's kinda cool.

I get the impression that this style of game was feeling very, very old-fashioned by 1994. We still wanted the real Ultimate 3D Virtual Reality Game experience (external link), or as close to it as possible, but the original chipset Amiga 500 wasn't really up to doing anything more involved in terms of a game engine, so we made allowances if what we got was visually interesting and had a sophisticated but approachable game design. If there was more to G2, I still think it would've sold. People wanted G2 so much that the coverdisk demo got cracked and trained like a regular game would.

At this point, anyone who owned a PC in the 90s is probably staring at this post in disbelief wondering what the heck the appeal is. This type of game was popular on the Amiga. It was What We Had. Mostly static, relatively detailed graphics was the Amiga's (and Atari ST's) strongest technical point, and everyone loved mastering those dungeons. I mean, not me personally, I couldn't stand flick-screen dungeon games. I was a Behind the Iron Gate and Trick or Treat real-time 3D guy all the way. It's not as if we hadn't heard of Wolf and Doom in the UK. It's just that we didn't have them at home. We had what we had. People made do and mended. That's how Death Mask and its bizarre sliding psuedo-3D came about.

Then again, Sony-owned Psygnosis probably made the right decision to dedicate less time to 16-bit, faux-3D games like G2 when other parts of their media machine were putting together minor things like some sci-fi racing game called WipEout. The Amiga itself was still going in a directionless limbo at this point, but as a games machine it had reached its limits. Operation GII was scheduled for release in October 1994 according to the title screen. You know what came out in September 1994 for the PC? System Shock.

Coincidentally, this issue of Amiga Format was the start of another missing persons case: Putty Squad. Twenty years later, Putty Squad turned out "M.I.A - O.K!" and got released in its original Amiga form together with the Squad reboot for the current next-gen consoles. There's no reason why Operation GII couldn't be brought back to life in exactly the same way, except whoever took up the task would have to 'draw the rest of the fucking owl' based on how much of the game was actually done, which probably wasn't a lot.

And now you know absolutely everything there is to know about Operation GII, and you didn't even have to play the game. Now that's what I call V.F.M.!

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Thanks for reading mecha-neko's words, I'm sure he appreciates it. If you feel like typing any words of your own on the subject of Operation GII you can use the box below.

You could also take a guess at what the next game's going to be. Probably won't be as much of a challenge this time.