Millennium 2.2 (Amiga) - Guest Post

Well, here we are. I tried to prepare myself for this with colourful games but that didn't exactly work.

As unanimously requested by the mecha-neko fan club, here's Millennium 2.2. Hope you like words!

This is among the most depressing title screens ever created.

The Earth fades to a dull grey/brown while a truly miserable main theme (YouTube link) plays in the background.

Thanks, Ed.

Oh, the story? You want the story? You better read the manual, then! (No, really, you should. The story in there is more satisfying than the game.)

Here's the short version.

This is the Solar System. Half of it, anyway. On this view, we can see the planets outside the asteroid belt: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Pluto? Ha! How quaint.

There's no sound except an awful synthesized ringing sound playing on a loop, representing the background radiation of space.

Where am I, though? We're on the Moon!

The last 100 members of the human race on the moon. Guardians of Earth.

The Moon Base hums slowly.

Life Support is good, which is good. Energy, Research, Resources and Production are bad. Defence is yellow.

I've got to fix either the Energy problem or the Resources problem before I can start to even think about reclaiming the Earth. I'll just click on the Energy button. Click. Click on the button. Click-click-click.

Um...

Oh. Click on the DOMES. Right. Because those things at the bottom don't look like BUTTONS at all. Energy dome, please.

The Moon Base is running on batteries and is generating a total of 10KW of power. That's not a great deal at all, but they're only using 7KW of it.

Luckily, somebody thought ahead far enough to pack a MkI power generator in the Stores. I'll just... um... click randomly around the screen until I can figure out how to transfer the thing from the Stores into the Base itself.

Click. Click click click.

Okay. Clicking the name of the power generator installs it. We're clicking names now. The SolaGen MkI is plugged in and 100KW of power is at my disposal. Mmmm... that's a healthy, bassy hum. Like a high voltage tower. Let's not consider what'll happen to the power supply when the solar panel is in shadow.

Energy is solved. Let's check Resources.

We have absolutely zero Water or Oxygen. Or anything else, for that matter. That's... not good.

I wonder what's going on here... the resource machine is already built, and it doesn't look like it needs directing or programming, it's just not turned on! How about we crank this thing all the way to ACTIVATE.

Resource is condition green: let's try building something.

All I can build are Probes, SolaGen MkIs and Nodules. I can't build the Nodule yet because I don't have enough materials or power. It doesn't look like I can install more than one SolaGen at a time, so there's no point me building a second one, and I'm going to hold off on the Probe until I know more about the Moon itself. The last thing I need is to shoot the Probe at an alien planet and get myself stuck in an interplanetary war before I've even got the ability to build anything.

That's about it for the Moon Base. Is there anything else that needs to be done? What do the buttons at the top do? I don't think I need to use any of these right now...? I have no idea. I'll just consult the ol' manual again here and... oh. The manual gives you only the slightest hint of what the buttons do and absolutely no guidance on how to develop the Moonbase or recolonise the Earth.

I can't see anything else that needs my attention. It's time to Advance Day!

Time passes... slowly.

Doop-doop-doop-DOOP-doop-doop-doop.

Hey, the SolaGen MkII's been researched! Let's build it!

You've got to click on the tiny blue screen above the chair to select an item to produce. Obviously.

Nuts. I don't have the power. Well... uh...

I don't have anything that I can turn off. I don't have much of anything at all! I don't think the men would appreciate my turning off the Life Support, even if it is to build a better power generator.

Oh... silly me. I can turn off the mining machine. There we go. Production Running.

As for Research, I can pick from Colonisation, Transportation, Weaponry, Energy and Supplementary. Fair enough.

I don't know about Weaponry though. I've got a hunch that says the moment I start building defenses, the game is going to make me need them. I'll stick with improving the SolaGens for now. Can't ever have too much power.

And... Doop-doop-doop-DOOP-doop-doop-doop.

OH NO! WHAT A CALAMITY. All my beatiful SolaGens... gone!

Now I have to build the MkI, II and III again, in that order. Well, I can't complain. It was so much FUN.

I can research the next SolaGen immediately after the previous one without having to follow a complicated research tree. It also looks like the Moonbase has sufficient resources to build all the SolaGen types. In fact, the moonbase seems to have INFINITE amount of the resources you can mine, and they're limited only by how long you want to spend holding down the Advance Day button.

Time for a power supply building montage!

"It's been a long road, getting from there to here. It's been a long time, but my time is finally near." (YouTube link)

Right. 35MW of power. We're not going to be saving the Earth via time travel, but at least we've got the doors working.

I've also researched everything available in the Research dome. For spacecraft, we've got the Grazer, the Waverider, the Carrack and the S.I.O.S. Haven't got a clue what any of them do. I can also build Fighters and Orbital Lasers. I can also build a Bunker, which you can hide stuff in so it can't get raided during an attack. I'll build a spare SolaGen MkX and hide it in there.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How about some Fighters! I'm at maximum productive power (there's no upgrades to research or 'Advanced Factory' to build), so I may as well.

They take a week to build. And I can't queue them up. Great.

You go off and read a book or something while I make a dozen of these.

The Defence thing is now Green, so that's gotta be enough fighters. I don't have the minerals to build an Orbital Laser, so it's a toss between Probe and Grazer.

Oh, what's this? A message from Mars! Wait, MARS?!

You mean we're not the last humans? For the love of all that's holy, if humanity has colonised Mars, WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT?

If Mars is liveable, we've got a new planet! Great! Earth's just as much a unhabitable dump as the rest of the planets. If the Mars dudes want dibs on the Earth, they're welcome to it.

Give the Mars lads enough time, I'm sure they'll use their own initiative to reclaim the Earth from its volcanic state and then Bob's your uncle. They're almost certainly going to have a lot easier time of it than my 100 guys and their mashed up Moon base.

It's only since they've put me in charge that the Moon Humes have realised that the huge thing with all the drills on it is a mineral extractor, and that if they turn it on it'll shoot out some rocks that they can use to make solar panels! Not only that, my guys had some solar panels lying around that they weren't even using! Thanks to me, they can have both the bathroom and kitchen lights on at the same time now!

Well, if it's a war they want, it's a war I'm going to avoid for as long as possible.

Build those Moon Base Nodules, men! I want absolutely all avenues of production and research to be fully completed before I launch a damn thing.

You arseholes! You complete arseholes! You're gonna be for it now!

FIGHTERS, ASSEMBLE.

Whoa... this I did not expect. It's a full 3D dogfight!

It's a one-on-one duel against the Martian ship. I don't know what happened to my other fighters. I'm controlling my ship with the mouse; it's pretty straightforward.

Stay away from my Moon Base, you son of a bitch!

Pew pew pew!

Hahaha. You bet your ass the attack was repulsed. Go to hell, Marsman.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, Nodules.

TWELVE MONTHS PASS.

They attacked me again. Still a one-on-one dogfight, though there wasn't much actual dogfighting going on... the enemy ship seems to spin around randomly and I gradually take damage as the fight goes on. Eventually I can spin myself to face the enemy and hold down the mouse button to pew pew pew him until he turns into a bunch of disconnected floating shapes.

We're full of Nodules and can now support up to 600 people! That doesn't sound like a much. Can you repopulate a planet with only 600 people? The game didn't tell me that there was a Nodule limit, and it didn't tell me when the final Nodule was stuck at 99% completion because of it. We're well into FEB 2202 now.

Check out my shiny new Grazer:

You've gotta click on the unmarked, identical bays on the flight bay screen to select the craft once you've built it. Which is totally different from the very similar looking Energy screen where you have to click on the name of the SolaGen you want to install. Nice.

The Grazer looks like it eats asteroids, so let's give that a shot.

Hey! All the craft in this look like germinating seeds! OBSERVE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THIS MEANINGFUL THEME.

CRAFT CANNOT LEAVE MOON BASE WITHOUT A NAME. LAUNCH ABANDONED.

Like I care what the hell it's called! It's going to get blown up by the Martians anyway! Just call it Dave or Bob or something!

Hmm... Launch... then go to orbital view... click on the Dave icon and... we're in! Set a course for ASTEROIDS. Auto pilot is on. And there we go.

Now that I know I can take on the Martians puny attacks on the Moon Base, I'm going to send Probes to all the planets as well and see what there is to see.

Venus. The yellow planet. Ripe for the colomonising! Land the probe!

And... that's it? No receipt? The Data Base still saying 'collating data', so I don't know what to do here. Advance time until something goes 'ping', I guess.

Ping! Dave's reached the asteroid field!

Get out the binoculars, kids! We're looking for Methane, Sulphur, Copper, Silver, Chromium, Platinum or Uranium!

I can't see any 'Play Asteroid Grabbing Mini Game' buttons, so I'll leave Dave to his own devices and continue my planetary research.

I've worked out that you need to select the planets as a Research topic after landing a Probe on them. And by 'worked out', I mean 'clicked exhaustively while getting frustrated that nothing was happening'.

Aaaaand... Mercury is unusable. So is Venus. And of course, Earth's still a mess. Darn it. Well there's a waste of a few Probes.

The Martian folks sending four ships at a time now, every six or seven months. The dogfighting is getting really boring. It's almost impossible to lose.

Yes! Nice one, Dave2! You are the best of all the Daves!

So now I have to activate Dave2, target the Moon, turn on autopilot, wait 22 days, activate Dave2, land Dave2, wait two hours, activate the Moon Base, activate the Flight Bays, choose the right bay and then finally I can unload the asteroid without accidentally chucking it into space.

And then launch Dave2, select Dave2, target the Asteroids and set Dave2 on autopilot.

That could have been a bit easier to accomplish. It's not as if there are any other asteroids to send the Dave to, or any other functions the Dave has other than to travel to the Belt and back.

I can't make an Orbital Laser to put off these Martian attacks, but I can make a cool looking ship. I'll call it Cool Ship.

According to the Probes, Saturn is actually a viable colony planet!

But... "mutation will be inevitable"? That doesn't sound so good. Let's leave that place alone.

When you select your spacecraft destination, you're given a complete list of all the suitable bodies in the Solar system from the get-go. There's 38, including Mars, the Moon and Earth. Time to fast forward. I'm going to cram that asteroid field full of Daves just so I have something to look at while I get enough resources to build something other than a second useless Cool Ship.

Bingo. Leda (moon of Jupiter) has got Uranium. Uranium means Orbital Lasers. Orbital Lasers (hopefully) means not playing that daft dogfighting minigame any more.

Still need more Copper and Platinum. C'mon Daves...

Finally got enough Platinum to build a S.I.O.S for Leda. Let's do it!

The S.I.O.S is a colony ship, by the way. I dunno what it stands for, but it's probably something grander than 'Spaceship In Outer Space'. I'd have picked a simple name like 'Colony Ship' myself.

THREE MONTHS PASS.

S.I.O.S. Leda Base is ready to touchdown, and Cool Ship is carrying a spare SolaGen in case the new colony only has batteries.

And here we are! Leda, the second Human colony! If you don't count the Mars one that was apparently so distasteful that it had to be expunged from the record.

What!? There isn't enough power to mine anything! Lousy solar powered generators! Who'd have thought they'd be less effective when you take them five times as far away from the Sun!

Time to build a Big Ship to bring some serious power here.

Today, the part of Neptune will be played by a circle filled with a diagonal gradient.

I could colonise Neptune, but there's a risk of mutation here too. Plus it took almost an entire year for the Probe to get here, so its mineral contribution isn't going to be fantastic.

Same for Pluto, which is even further away. I'm not shipping a SolaGen MkX all the way out here just to find out that it gets so little light I can't even turn on the mineral extractor. I suppose it could be safer from the Martian attacks, but I'm not feeling particularly threatened by those right now.

The hardest part of the dogfighting is trying to face the enemy ships. Once you're facing the enemy, you win. If you leave the ship pointing in the right direction after defeating one ship, you'll still be facing that direction when fighting the next. Then you can just hold fire and instantly win.

Uranium is in the bag. After delivering its SolaGen MkX, the Big Ship can stay here and act as a cargo transport to deliver the Uranium back to the Moon. Of course, I have to keep track of that manually.

Next door, Callisto provides Platinum and Copper. There's no need to manually operate the army of Dave anymore. They're all going back to the Moon until I can find a use for them.

The colonies can only mine minerals, not produce items, which is going to become a worry if I start losing fighters.

The Martians are sending more and more fighters in their squads. It took me a minute to realise why I couldn't activate the Moon's defenses... They were attacking Leda!

The game time passes in real time, which usually means there's no reason to make snap decisions with distances on this scale... except when the attack alarm goes off and you only get ten seconds to find the Defense controls. The game doesn't automatically bring the focus to the planet that's under attack, you select it manually, having memorised its position on the destination list and memorised which of the unmarked Colony domes is the Defense dome.

The evil tykes blew up my good SolaGen! Well, time for me to send the Big Ship back to the Moon and pick up a new one. Round trip ETA, one year.

Orbital Lasers! I've got myself some Orbital Lasers!

They each take five days to build and each time I have to manually hit the Moon and select them for production. Gah.

In time, the Moon Base, Leda and Callisto all become equipped with Orbital Lasers, which are pretty anticlimactic in practice. They pause the screen for a couple of seconds and then destroy a random number of enemies. And the laser itself gets used up.

Keep clicking and building. Building and clicking.

Doop-doop-doop-DOOP-doop-doop-doop-doop-doop-doop-doop.

YEARS UPON YEARS PASS.

It's late 2206 and I'm informed of a new ship type. This only happened when I started up my fourth colony, which is something I was loath to do as it means making another Big Ship to constantly monitor and another set of spare SolaGens, Orbital Lasers to manufacture and transport.

I'd bet nuts to nuts that all of these Special Bulletins are scripted events happen exactly the same way every game. There's no difficulty levels or randomised resources as far as I can tell, so the game will be exactly the same every time you play it.

EIGHTEEN MORE MONTHS PASS.

Fleet Carrier: Bastard is ready.

So... uhh... what do I do with it? I could put fighters on it? And then?

Attack Mars... I suppose. They're the only other folks around here. I haven't found any of their colonies. I hope I'm supposed to do this. I don't want to attack Mars! I'd rather talk this out!

Huh? The Bastard is under attack!!

Uhh... buttons... buttons... LAUNCH FLEET! Yes! Do that!

Oh, it's the shitty minigame again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

I get the feeling I've somehow trivialised this awesome final boss rush. The enemy ships don't have any sort of AI. They all follow the exact same scripted route. All I have to do is point in the right direction and hold fire. One by one the Martian fighters are blasted to pieces. Hooray, I suppose.

Some fanfare would be nice. Or perhaps some acknowledgement...?

TIME PASSES.

There ya go.

I didn't want to kill you, Gredloch. I just wanted you to stop making me waste Uranium on these disposable Lasers! Oh well.

Mars is mine, I win! No, wait, I wanted the Earth! ARGH.

Now what? Do I have to colonise every other moon in the solar system?

When in doubt, advance time!

The Martians had a design for a Terraformer the whole time?!

Why didn't they use it on Earth already?

Why didn't they use it on Mars already?

So now I have to search every single bloody body in the universe for Chromium? No clues whatsoever...?

Search... every... single... moon... for... Chromium...

In games where you expand a civilisation, you get the satisfaction of watching your colonies grow and expand over time, be it watching buildings change from one type to another or watching a city gradually expand to envelop the infrastructure you've laid down for it. If there's no immediate threat, or you've got automated defenses, you can zoom out completely and set the game speed on full just to watch all your automated transports fly back and forth, trading resources amongst your starport network.

Can't do that in Millennium; nothing is automated. Every action you take just sets up the player for MORE CLICKING. These aren't even important decisions you're making, such as choosing between different types of expansion. The colonies have only four states: not Probed, Probed, colonised and powered. You've got infinite resources on the Moon for everything except plot-related craft so there's no choice involved. The player must 'do everything', always. There's no reason for the player to have to manually initiate it. The Martians only ever attack the surface of established colonies, not craft in-flight, so there's no tactical advantage to be gained by placing craft in any specific location.

Ditching the simulation facade and treating it as a straight up adventure game, the next objective is never completely clear. The plot shows up when you least want it and is absolutely nowhere to be found when you need it most. All you've got to rely on is the question 'If I were a shitty computer game, what would I need the player to do at this point?'.

Like every crappy adventure game, Millennium 2.2 is a game about exhaustively clicking menu items. Well, I've played for this long, may as well see how this all ends.

THREE YEARS AND TWO NEW MICE LATER.

After sending Probes to all the available destinations, waiting the better part of a year for them to arrive, then researching them, then building a S.I.O.S. aimed at the correct moon, then a building a transport with the SolaGen in it, then waiting for the population to increase to a sufficient level to turn on the mineral extractor, then waiting for the mining to finish, then a 200 day trip back to the Moon with the goods, I've finally got enough to build the Terraformer.

*Exausted and frustrated hurrah*

We've built it. We can't build anything big enough to carry it.

ONE MONTH OF STARING AT THE SCREEN BLANKLY AaaAAAAaalaalal.

The plot provides! We can turn Fleet Carrier Bastard into a Juggernaut!

Is there any reason why I had to wait over a month for this message to appear after finishing the Terraformer? Is there any reason why they had to be two different types of ship, one carrying 1050 Tonnes and one carrying 1060 Tonnes?

There's no enemies to fight against any more. You're just wasting my time deliberately and I don't appreciate it.

Doop-doop-doop-DOOP-doop-doop-doop.

Oh no! A secret Martian fleet. What do we do...?

Well, the Moon is full to capacity in Orbital Lasers and it has all the fighters I can be bothered building. If this ultimate fleet is full of the same foes I've been fighting so far through the whole game, I can take them all on myself without losing a single fighter.

The fleet was over two-hundred strong. My orbital lasers took it down to about one-fifty. Even if I were to manually fight them off one by one (which I had absolutely NO INTENTION of doing), there's not enough interface time for me to click the Launch 150 times before the blips hit the Moon and the attack counts as a success. I never stood a chance.

They killed EVERYBODY, destroyed the SolaGen MkX and now we have no Oxygen. (Actually, we've got tons of Oxygen according to the Resources screen. What are they going on about?)

Game over.

Not... game over?

Well, I can either wait for human life to evolve again from the dust... or I can simply use the spare power generator I put in the Bunker and repopulate the Moon from the crew of the various Daves and other ships left lying around.

I suppose that has to be the correct solution to this problem... power is never a real problem on the Moon as the game points out at the start by taking all your SolaGens away.

I don't know what you'd do if you had no spare ships. The only way that could happen if you dismantled them all yourself after building the Fleet Carrier, thinking you wouldn't need them. Without population, you can't finish the Juggernaut nor build the S.I.O.S. you'll inevitably need to finish colonising the Earth.

Because the population simply 'goes up' when there's vacant habitation space, it looks like it's possible to restore the six hundred strong population of the Moon from the crew of a single Dave. That's four people. Don't imagine that.

The Juggernaut is finished. (And it's love that it's still called Bastard.)

Juggernaut Bastard! Fix the Earth!

Meanwhile, all my outer colonies are declaring independence one by one. I hope I don't need any of those rare minerals... or any of the bloody ships left behind that I can't access any more!

ONE YEAR LATER. ONE YEAR OF DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING EXCEPT WAITING FOR DOOT-DOOT-DOOT.

The Earth is ready. Juggernaut Bastard is on the surface, S.I.O.S Earth Base is standing by.

HIT IT.

I had to kill half of the Martian race and watch the other half splat into my Moon Base domes like moths into a bug zapper to do it, and I had to spend ten years twisting the Solar System into a knot looking for the right resources... but there it is.

Winners save the planet.

No text. Just this picture with that depressing title music again (YouTube link). It sounds a lot better when the Amiga isn't murdering it (YouTube link).

Would you look at all that wheat. They could make a relaxing game about that.



Millennium 2.2 is an adventure game, pretending to be a strategy game, pretending to be a management sim. In adventure games, you're usually trying to use commonplace items to open doors, acquire items or coerce other characters to do things. In these space-management-adventure games, you've been locked in the control room of some important facility without any sort of guidance on how to use it, and you alone must figure out what all the flashing buttons do before spooky aliens or your own curiosity blows up the human race.

The Amiga had a couple of these: Deuteros, the sequel to Millennium, is one. My arch nemesis, Exodus 3010, is another.

Sure, they dress it up to and put some numbers on it to make it look like a management sim. They might enable two or more options at a time to make it appear that there's more than one way to solve the puzzles, but make no mistake: these are puzzles. Interface puzzles, to be exact. With pixel hunting. You're guessing and second guessing what the authors intent is at every point.

It's not Pirates, it's not Sim City, it's not Colonisation, it's not Civilisation and it's not Command and Conquer. It's closer to Transport Tycoon, if you had to drive every train manually. It's not fun.



The worst part? I'm not even done yet.

There was an MS-DOS re-release called Millennium: Return to Earth produced two years later. It looks different but it plays the same, so at least I don't have to sit through all that garbage again.

Everything's been redrawn in 256 colours: the Moon's surface is purple.

The Energy dome is blue.

There's a sinister bloke hiding inside the Damage Report computer.

Is that... my reflection?

The ships aren't seeds any more, but they ARE given default names!

The Moon Base is still a half finished wreck.

You can finally see what bays have craft in them, but you STILL can't click the text instead of the picture of the bay.

What have they done to my beautiful Cool Ship?

It looks like it was bolted together from junk!

That Fighter design just looks dull. I think I prefer the Fighters when they were seeds.

The fighter defense minigame plays slightly different on the PC. It's still a one-on-one dogfight, but instead of the the remaining stocks of Fighter sitting around like extra lives, they're all used in a simulated epic battle on your heads up display. If the Martians send out a dozen Fighters and you've got 50, you can turn up, shoot your single target and rely on your remaining 49 to do a thorough job on the rest with minimal losses.

And, from what I can tell, the resources are all randomised in the MS-DOS version.

The Carrack looked more or less the same on the Amiga.

And the interface is still the same frustrating ass-pile it always was. Except... they've made it so that Grazers can automatically travel to and from the asteroid belt, scanning for and depositing non-lunar minerals without any intervention from the player. I wish somebody would have told me that before I babysitted a half-dozen Daves for three God damned hours!

Ugh. If you really want to stare at these graphics and do the exact same things as I did in the exact same order I did them, play this version. It's almost certainly guaranteed to not screw up your save games like Amiga versions invariably do.

But, please, seriously, don't do that.