Exodus: 3010 - The First Chapter (Amiga) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko has returned to pass judgement upon an old Amiga game from the early 90s that's presumably set 988 years in the future. Unless the title's lying to us.

Happy new year, everyone! Can you believe it's been over ten years since I started playing games as mecha-neko for Super Adventures in Gaming?

Today I'm going to revisit a game from my childhood. It's also one of the first games I wrote about as mecha-neko, but it's not one that's appeared on this site as a Super Adventure.

Developer:

Temet

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Release Date:

January 1992

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Systems:

Amiga 500

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To celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, I present space survival management/flight sim Exodus: '3010: The First Chapter'!

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Exodus was published by Demonware, a C64 and Amiga publisher whose logo is way too cool not to show:

"DEMONWARE - The power of the 90's." (external link)

No kidding! What could be more 90s than chrome sci-fi text (another 'Stop EF' font for Ray's collection!), a giant shiny floppy disk and a fascination with the Xenomorphs from Alien!

Exodus begins at the end...

Hang on, I'll type up the text instead of using lots of screenshots.

FEBRUARY 3009

THE EARTH WILL BE DESTROYED IN NEAR FUTURE...

A HUGE SPACECRAFT WILL BE BUILT

It's sad that the Earth is coming to an end, but this very catchy epic retro sci-fi electronic rock opera theme (YouTube link) the game's got going on lets us know that all is not lost.

JANUARY 3010

THE COORDINATES OF THE LONG JOURNEY THROUGH THE UNIVERSE ARE PROGRAMMED.

The first planet we'll pass on our journey is... The Sun. That's not a planet, that's a sun, but alright. This isn't the time to argue. After the Sun, we pass "Zendrion II", which I can't find on any of my maps of space. Finally, 'Our New World': Mrynn. The picture looks like Earth - all the continents are even the right shape! - and it has 'Resources: J', so that's where we're gonna go.

I don't think they expected anyone to look at these numbers too closely - if Mrynn is thirty times as far from the Sun than Earth is then that puts Mrynn right next to Pluto, and if Mrynn is three times the mass of the Sun, then by all rights everything ought to be orbiting around it. I'm no astronomiser though, so maybe it all works out.

JULI 3010

THE PEOPLE ARE PUT IN THE SPACECRAFT AND FROZEN FOR THE JOURNEY...

AUGUST 3010

THE SPACECRAFT STARTS INTO THE DEPTH OF UNIVERSE
NO SECOND TOO LATE...

They were not kidding. They timed that departure down to the second. I was expecting a slow, dramatic, epic rocket launch, but humanity's escape UFO practically pulled a sick handbrake skid out into space. They might've even been counting on the gigantic planet-nullifying explosion to get that little extra kick out of the atmosphere.

I also expected the end of Earth's habitable period to be a excruciating, terrifying decline like when you get a Game Over in UFO: Enemy Unknown. But no, apparently either some archaeologists discovered a giant damn bomb deep in the Earth's crust that was due to explode in 3010 A.D., or somebody on the Exodus ship left the stove on at home.

Anyway, yeah, that's about it for planet Earth. Hope nobody forgot anything.

MANY YEARS PASS BY...

THE SPACECRAFT DRIFTS LONELY THROUGH THE UNIVERSE...

I'm doing well so far. The ship's been built and launched and I haven't even done anything yet.

This intro is skippable, by the way!

Wait a minute - the titular Exodus happened in 3010, but 'many years' have passed by? What year is it now then?

SUDDENLY...

THE ALARMSYSTEM IS ACTIVATED...

Oh no!

The situation is serious. We've got 'Attention...!!!', 'Red Alert...' and 'Danger...!!!' all at once!

The Exodus ship is raising hell because it has detected signs of alien life along our flight path and it doesn't know what to do. As the ship heads into the unknown, it does the only thing it can: raise the Captain of the ship from cryostasis and place the fate of the human race in his hands.

The game begins!

It's chucked us right in here. Let's take a moment to figure out what we're looking at.

Exodus is a management-with-story game, like Millennium 2.2. Don't mind the blinking cursor down there, this isn't a text adventure. The manual calls Exodus one of 'a new generation of strategy games' that 'combines traditional arcade elements with in-depth missions and fully icon-controlled gameplay'. That sounds really cool! I bet it sounded like the bees knees in 1992.

Unlike Millennium 2.2, which leaves you scared and alone with the eerie gasps and beeps of space, Exodus' management theme "Galaxy Blast - Select Ship" (YouTube link) opens with a deep, humming stereo sawtooth bassline, and envelops the player's senses in multiple layers of sweeping pads, followed by a satisfying synthy drumbeat and brass stabs, letting you know it's all down to you and you're about to reveal your cool plan as you launch a bunch of heavily-armed spaceships and save the human race.

I hope you like this music as much as I do, because this is the only music the game has from the moment the intro ends to when you either win or lose the game.

The Mothership energy is 3000 units, which is always good to know, and thankfully it isn't ticking down as I take stock of what I've got to work with. The Mothership woke me up with 'Danger!!!', but nothing seems to be happening out there at all. Assuming that thing in the top left is us, we've got one white pixel harrying us. It's going round in circles, sometimes towards the Mothership, othertimes away again. I figure we either need to go towards it, go away from it, talk to it, capture it, or blow it up.

If we're going to set a course, the logical place would be ... the Engine.

I'm not sure what I expected to find, but it definitely wasn't this.

Is it safe to run the Mothership with the cover off like that? I don't know much about mechanical engineering, but Rule #1 of fixing engines has to be 'Don't put your hand in it while it's still running.'

Nevertheless, that's exactly what I'm gonna do. The only way I'm going to figure out this thing is to click everything and see what happens. Don't lean too close to the screen, though. You'll probably lose a finger.

Right. I count thirteen engine components in here, all with cryptic and bananas names such as 'Aircooled Solutionsreflector' and 'Octaltetramator'. If you're curious what the game says they all do, click here for a guide.

A Communication Synchroniser
Transmits information from HQ to the Lab

B Gigatronomator
Transfers Energy from the Mother-Ship to the Fighters

C Photon Regulator
Controls the robots that transport the space ships to the Hangar

D Skalar Compensator
Commands the actual robots to produce everything in the Opticalomator
Needs Radioactive Material

E Communications Adapter
Analyses information from the main information screen
Requires many Computers

F Thermo Deflector
Keeps the frozen pilots alive
Uses a lot of Energy to keep a constant temperature level

G Ionic-Compression System
Responsible for the detection of Alien objects
Requires highly sophisticated Sensors

H Octaltetramator
Commands the Laboratory robots to combine all raw materials in the Multicompressor
Converts energy figures

I Emulation Reflector
Opens and closes the Hangar locks
Needs High-Quality Batteries

J Tuning Synchronizer
Responsible for optimal command transmission to HQ

K Aircooled Solutionsreflector
Digitizes the Energy of the Mothership for use in the HQ

L Imposator
Updates the Main Computer and displays all information graphically

M Multi Synchronizer
Makes it possible to freeze and thaw the pilots

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And now you know!

I can't find the Multicompressor or the Opticalomator mentioned here on the Engine screen, so they must be elsewhere on the ship. It is a bit weird that all these different things are all squished together next to each other like this.

Only the animated engine parts are interactive, and right now the Mothership is satisfied that they're all 'OK'. I'm okay with 'OK'. But the system isn't going to tell me where we're going, how fast we're going or if we're going anywhere at all!

Maybe I'd have more luck checking the 'Pilots' screen.

We've got bars. Lots and lots and lots of bars.

Each one of those in the top box is a cryogenically frozen pilot, like our man Jerome Dempser here. Underneath that box are two rows of skill 'tapes' that I can combine with him to create the ultimate ace of space. The length of the bar at the top shows the pilot's Intelligence stat, and each skill tape contributes four more stats: Pilotskill, FightingSkill, Aggression and Courage. Once you've picked a subject and a tape, you're rewarded with a bundle of meaningless wavy lines in the panes below telling you the result. In the 31st century, I suppose you can get new skills downloaded into your head much like in The Matrix, except with more ZX Spectrum loading sounds.

Humanity's guardians. It is the 31st Century, and there is time for... pencil moustaches.

There's 46 frozen pilots (male and female) and 120 skill tapes, so either we left 74 pilots behind somewhere on Earth, or they're right at the back of the Mothership behind all the bagels and nobody can be bothered reaching back for them. Let's see: which of these guys is the cream of the crop?

Jerome Dempser, 6'5" tall, Intelligence that's off the charts. Makes me wonder why they didn't select him to be Commander instead of me. And why aren't the pilots sorted by anything, not even by name?

The pilots don't have any special vehicle or weapon skills like the MegaTraveller 2 cast does. They're all just faces and stats, and I haven't got a clue what the stats do, though bigger numbers surely must be better. You can only have ten pilots out at a time and it doesn't cost anything, so I don't see any downside to taking the ten most intelligent pilots and ten most capable tapes and making the best squad you can. You could just pick the guys you like the look of most, if you wanted. I can't talk to the pilots for advice or ideas, or do anything except shove them back in the freezer so I think I've won this screen for now.

That pixel floating around the Mothership hasn't gone anywhere. You know, I'm just going to click on it, see what happens.

Aha! That explains why nothing much is happening! The Mothership has attracted a rock into its orbit. I think 'rich in raw materials' is the most overt clue I've had so far as to what I should be doing. I don't see any way to suck the meteorites into the ship though - the Engine has lots of components but none of them are to do with meteorites.

I'm going to click on every other screen one by one until I get somewhere.

Here's the Products screen. Would you look at all that stuff.

We've got things in the ship's stores on the left and we've got things to build on the right. Click on something on the right and it tells you what you need in that box in the lower left. For example, the Drone requires 1 Metal Alloy, 1 Grey Laser and 1 Sensor. When you click on the item in the Components pane, the Raw Materials pane slides about all fancy-like to show you the item in your storage so you can see how much of it you have available.

OH! This is a bloody crafting system, innit! Perhaps the first! Exodus (which came out in 1992) might not be the first game to have combinable resources or a factory simulation, but there's no denying that if you put this screen in front of someone, they'll recognise it as a crafting system.

As impressive as all these lovely icons are, I'm concerned about the actual amount of stuff we managed to escape the Earth with. The entire human race of the year 3009 was (presumably) united in the common goal of self-preservation, with a year's advance warning and every resource on the planet at our disposal, yet we managed to pack a grand total of zero Iron.

Scrolling through the list of Raw Materials, the combined remaining mineral resources of the human race are:

1486	T	Steel
10	K	Copper
8	K	Gold
3		Ruby
2	K	Silicon
29	L	Oil
123	K	Plastic
2037	G	Uranium
290		High-Energy-Battery

And finally:

1

Bottle Of Air

The list of things we don't have is a little concerning: Iron, Granite, Diamond, Carbon, Plutonium, Anti-matter, Dynamite and Sensors are all dry. So as long as you want to sit around playing on your Game Boy all day and you're not interested in magnets, drills, pencils, explosions or breathing, I've got you covered.

I'm a little stumped as to what this little goodie bag of mine adds up to. With the exception of the 1.5 kilotons of Steel, I can picture the rest of my resources fitting in the back of a van. Clicking through the list of products, I've got enough stuff to make a Computer, an Energy Changer or an Impulse System. Energy Changers are a prerequisite for the Grey Laser and the Protection Shield, so that sounds like a pretty good pick. Can't shoot the meteorites and suck up their mineral goodness without a laser, right?

Ta-da! Success! Come to mecha-neko's for all your energy changing needs!

Oh, okay. Sorry, never mind. Let's go back. Probably should have told me that's what you expected me to do first if we only had enough Copper to make one thing.

Hey. HEY! Time out. Calm down. LET'S NOT OVER-REACT.

And so, having selected the wrong thing to build from a choice of three, Captain mecha-neko has caused the Mothership to self-destruct and mercy kill the entire human race. All that remains of humanity and its accomplishments is this depressing as hell saxophone music.

As tutorials go, that was a bit harsh. Don't you think?

I think this game might have contributed to my childhood fear of stark silent screens in games that suddenly display large capital letters. Like Lotus Turbo Challenge 2's game over, and Donk! The Samurai Duck and, of course, Jurassic Park. I bet SUPERHOT would've scared the ever-loving shit out of little me. (And, y'know... good. It's supposed to.)

Now that I know what I'm supposed to be building, let's give that old human race saving another shot.

ONE RELOADING THE GAME LATER...

I'm back at the Products screen, building the things, and only the things, necessary to produce the Blue Giant Fighter.

During manufacturing, grey bars appear in the centre pane of the Products screen. They're unmarked so I don't know what they mean. It doesn't cost any Mothership energy to build things and there's no time pressure, so who knows.

I am the proud owner of one brand new Blue Giant Fighter. If they only take a few seconds to manufacture I wonder why we didn't start with one. I guess whoever built the Mothership thought we didn't need one, and we could produce one if we ever did.

Here's the Laboratory. It looks too much like the Products screen if you ask me.

The game is due some kudos for the fancy way all these rectangles animate onto the screen when you change displays. They don't slide on like Desert Strike or the EVA installation from Command & Conquer but it's still nice. You can't drag the windows around. This isn't a Sakurai menu (external link).

There's three boxes in the corner labelled 'Current Combination' and a button below labelled 'Reaction', so you can see where this is going. Unlike the Products screen, you manually select the crafting inputs here, letting you experiment with the things you have. It is a Laboratory after all.

This screen is also the only one which tells you what all the different items are for. Sort of. It isn't very helpful. The guide says Gold is 'A metal desired by many different races!', which makes me wonder if Earth of the year 3009 had already encountered aliens or not. If we had, couldn't they have given us a lift or something?

Here's some helpful Exodus advice if you're going to muck about in the Laboratory screen:

Leave the Uranium alone.

ONE RELOADING THE GAME LATER...

There's one last screen to go: the Equipment screen.

Aha! Ten ships for ten pilots. Makes sense. They should call this 'Hangar', not 'Equipment'. Well I mean they do, right there at the top, but it doesn't say 'Hangar' on the main menu.

Clicking 'Add. Blue' moves the Blue Giant Fighter I just built onto the launchpad. Easy. Getting someone in there is another story - you have to click the 'Pilots' button on this screen until the name of the Pilot you want to assign appears in the InfoWindow box, and then click the large graphic of the ship on the left to make him board. If you're not watching the InfoWindow closely, you'll miss the confirmation text and be stuck there forever wondering where your pilot has gone.

With the Pilot installed, we can launch the ship! ... Except the game won't let me until I've built and equipped a weapon. I know I don't have enough resources to build anything else at this point, so I'm not falling for that again. Hmm.

This is all reminding me a little of Armour Geddon: we're building vehicles and it's all confusing and strange and I just want to make something 3D happen.

The system's stopped complaining about weapons now (I don't know the reason why), but it's yelling at me to set a destination object, which I guess I do on the main menu screen since there's nothing here relating to navigation.

So - having deployed a ship on a pad, installed a pilot, activated the ship by right clicking and selected a destination on the main menu, can I finally launch the ship? YES.

Please insert disk A and press space
Oh, what a palaver! But we did it. We finally beat the menu screen of Exodus: 3010: The First Chapter!

I have no clue what this means.

There's ten windows around the edge of the screen for ten pilots. I'm getting the hang of it! Jerome Dempser is in the top left. I can order him to Fight, Wait, Return or Helps, but he's set to WAIT now. What I want to do is mine that meteorite and I can't see any way to do that from here. I can't tell Jerome to target either of the green objects beside him. As strategy screens go, this one could be a little more informative and a lot more powerful. Ordering Jerome to Return to the Mothership resulted in him... returning to the Mothership. At least the meteorite stayed put so I could redeploy him and have another shot at capturing it.

I tried right clicking on Jerome's pane and now I'm controlling him through spooky mind powers! Or maybe I'm just taking control of the ship remotely. The ship doesn't work without a pilot, maybe it is mind powers! Moving the ship feels a little strange. Mouse, keyboard and joystick all work to steer, but the other controls are all over the place. I've found it easiest to use the keys to steer and the right mouse button to boost. I can't find the throttle.

The cool music has long since gone, leaving me with eerie low-fi engine sounds and occasional distorted unintelligible radio voices. That circular object in the distance is, believe it or not, just a moon, and I'm not reaching it any time soon in this thing.

The radar is showing objects to my left and to my right. It looks as if it should be a standard 'bearing and elevation' radar, but something about the ship's pitch isn't working right. It feels incredibly slow and heavy. I should be able to face towards an object and then flip my ship head over heels to get the object behind me, but I can't. There's also definitely no way to roll.

I have LOCATED OBJECT, as the HUD would put it. This thing started off as a sprite, but changed into a real-time spinning octahedron when I got close. Take that, Wing Commander!

What now? Two choices: hit every key on the keyboard, or look it up in the manual. I want to (M)ine it, (G)rapple it or something like that. Let's see if we've got a good old-fashioned (T)ractor beam.

Tractor beam engaged! Jerome heroically sucks up the asteroid into his ship. Directly into his ship. The thing smashes against the hull, causing critical damage.

That was our only fighter, and without any way to build more...

Yep, that's game over. It was a good effort Jerome, but it looks like the human race just isn't cut out for the terrors of deep space.

ONE RELOADING THE GAME LATER...

There's a knack to this. There's gotta be.

I noticed that the tractor beam wanted to raise the asteroid up and over the ship when I activated it, so this time I moved Jerome so the object was as high above me as the reticule would allow before activating the beam. When I did, the rock sailed out of his field of view, and according to the overview here it's now following Jerome about like a little duckling.

I've told our hero to Return and he's heading toward the red circle which I'm hoping is the Mothership.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Copper has arrived. The Exodus management music has never felt so triumphant.

We're back on the main ship screen and the remaining asteroid is still waiting for me so I need to get back out there and nab it as well. Alright, let me try this manually. This really shouldn't be so difficult.

Step one, send out Jerome again. The ship doesn't need refuelling or anything and the Copper has automatically been added to the stores. We're ready to go.

I take control of the ship manually and use F9 and F10 to zoom the radar in the centre so I can see where the asteroid is. Once more, I very carefully fly underneath the target and snatch it safely. With the object held (the only way to know is to check the TRACTOR ACTIVE caption above the window), I have to get it back to the Mothership.

The only other object out here is this glowing tetrahedron. I've got no fancy targeting system to tell me what it is, how far away it is, or anything like that. None of the keys on the keyboard do anything useful. In the absence of any better advice, I'm just going to fly straight into it.

And now the cockpit is flashing bright purple. I really, really need to stop flying into things.

Oh! Wahey! Mission complete! I am the Master of Minerals, the Count of Copper, and the Saint of Silicon.

That pyramid was the... exit marker I guess? Any ship that enters that zone gets sucked up into the Mothership together with its cargo.

I thought I'd get to have a satisfying moment to myself to bask in this region of space that I've claimed in the name of Humanity, ready to engage the super-hyper faster-than-light drive to move onto someplace new at my convenience, but either we've automatically already moved onto a new location, or I took so long that I've been intercepted...

New object located...

It's an alien trader ship! Communication is possible! First contact with an alien race, how exciting!

Unless it turns out to be humans who left Earth hundreds of years ago and had already colonised space. That would be the letdown of the century.

We've got options! How very Monkey Island, and how very unexpected! I can ask what they're carrying, or I can give them a guarded threat. Or I could do nothing and leave them alone. Maybe they want some of my delicious Copper?

I did wonder if our Mothership was named 'Starlight'. It says it right there in the middle of the scanner, but I wasn't sure. The English manual calls it 'Starlight', but it also calls it 'Starflight'.

The overhead sensor display is the only image of Starlight you get. It's not shown on the game box or manual. It's sort of like a flat claw type thing, I guess. There's two stubby prongs either side of a cylindrical central bridge area, unless the ship is facing to the right and all those details are the engines.

From "DC's Legends of Tomorrow"
All told, it kinda looks like the Waverider from the TV show Legends of Tomorrow. I think we can agree it looks nothing whatsoever like the UFO that got blasted into space during the intro.

Is it much of a secret mission if you tell us all about your convoy and its cargo?

And hey, we weren't going to attack you! We don't have any weapons! The only type of damage we're capable of right now is the accidental, self-inflicted kind. They are right to be wary though, since we're experts at it.

The trader still isn't going anywhere, so I might as well progress the conversation.

This is the only choice the game is giving me, and I'm not sure how to read it.

Does it mean 'We've got all the materials we need right now. We could always do with some more though, please.' or does it mean 'You're outgunned. Thanks for the cargo, by the way. Don't worry, we'll put it to good use.'?

Humanity isn't going to make a very good first impression if we destroy the first trading ship we encounter because nobody bothered to pack a single ingot of Iron onto the Mothership.

Just in case, I've built a second Blue Giant Fighter with the Silicon and Copper I now possess, and given both ships a shiny-new Grey Laser. Adding equipment changes the ship graphic, yeah!!

I've been leaving the trader alone in the background to see if he'll get bored and leave me be. For someone on a secret supply mission, it sure seems like he's got nothing better to do than to fly around Starlight in circles like a moth. I don't think there's anything special about Starlight that's preventing him from leaving, he's just an idiot.

Okay, might as well see where the two dialogue choices lead...

Battle stations!

The music doesn't change and there's no sound effects but the screen shakes when we get hit! We're losing Mothership Energy! Nooo!

The trader says exactly the same line if you tell him to 'Pass by quietly' in the first choice, so I guess this guy is simply destined to die for the good of the human race. Sorry, pal.

Starlight doesn't have way of directly defending itself: there's no countermeasures or exterior turrets I can take control of like the Moon Base has in Millennium 2.2. It's down to the fighters to save us. I've quickly woken up a second pilot for my second ship (introducing Mr. Dave State) and off we go to defend humanity!

The thrilling battle for the fate of humanity begins...

Those two tiny blue bugs are my pilots. That orange thing is the enemy. On Dave's screen I can see a small green diamond which could be the enemy's cargo, or could be another meteorite.

I'm going to... I don't know what I'm going to do. My options are just as limited as they were before. I can tell my fighters to fight aggressively, stay still, or come home. I've got no control over what they fight or where they fly, so I might as well be standing on the bridge of Starlight waving a scarf about, yelling 'Go Team!'.

Well, we won. I assumed direct control of Dave and had him bring in the booty. Wouldn't you know it - it was a crate of 185 Energy Changers. The very same thing I tried to build first and which ended up triggering the Mothership's self-destruct.

I have to redeploy the pilots to take care of a second blip that's appeared: 'This ship is help for the first trader'.

This time I'm going to lead the assault personally. Jerome is going to stay put while a manually-controlled Dave takes him on.

Hey, look at that! He's dragging the box above and behind him like a birthday balloon, just like I pictured it.

And there's Jerome in the thing on the left. The enemy craft is a simple pointed arrowhead, but it gets the gist across. I have to admit I'm surprised that I can even see my own ships on this view at the same time as the enemy. Displaying multiple primitive 3D objects at once isn't the Amiga's strong suit, especially the Amiga 500, but this works, even if the view is a little small. Sadly, there's no external camera views or cinematic cameras in Exodus, or any way to turn the cockpit off.

Right, got to make sure not to shoot the box or crash into the box.

I've figured out why the vertical motion feels so bizarre - it's because it's playing more like 'All Range Mode' in Starfox 64. 'Space' is a large, flat area like a big grassy field. I can turn about on the spot and move up and down but I can't pitch or roll the ship. The ships act like bumpercars or hovercraft scooting about and rising and falling inside a squat little pizzabox of space.

It's a world apart from Elite: Dangerous' completely un-space-like fighter plane 'roll to the side then pitch to turn' style. (Like StarFighter 3000.) (Also Dangerous is rubbish.)

My sortie versus the trader's escort ended with all objectives achieved. The escort was destroyed. Sadly, so was Dave because we crashed into each other trying to get one another in our sights. I'm willing to accept the loss of Dave in the name of dynamic storytelling authenticity. We barely knew him, but his memory will be honoured by wingman Jerome's survival and continued service as he carefully retrieves the box that so much blood was shed over.

No wait, he'll tractor it into himself and blow up again. I really couldn't make this up.

I reloaded the save and tried real hard to not let anyone drift anywhere near anything. Either the game doesn't want to show me the results screen today, or the box the escort was carrying was empty. Whatever.

Back on the main screen, a new encounter has been, uh, encountered. Somebody wants to talk to us! They're probably not keen on us blowing up their trading ships, but it's not as if the game gave us a bloody choice.

Eeeah a giant freaky face!

I would be the absolute worst starship captain because I would be constantly yelling stuff like that. At my own crew.

Let's see what he wants.

They want a favour? Sure, wouldn't hurt to hear him out.

Three tests to become a pirate, huh? They do like that kind of thing.

The game giving me a set of thrilling and varied dialogue choices there.

That's a very polite and longwinded way of telling me he's going to destroy us!

Hmm, the Rondon has a plan. It's not a very good plan, but it is a plan.

But how about...

"No!!!"

Not as if I had any other choice. Oh well.

He's gonna blast us! One last check to make sure Jerome and Dave are ready in their fighters...

The conversation is still going on; the game's giving me no choices other than to stall for time by asking about his fancy spaceship. I think I see where this is going.

It sure would be terrible if he were somehow tricked into activating that 'Lightspeed-Escape-System'!

Oh, come on.

And so the captain of Starlight cunningly tricks the would-be pirate Rondon into engaging his Lightspeed-Escape-System, and the crisis has been resolved.

Sure would've felt like a boss if I was given the option to not hit him with such a dastardly psychological trick. As it was, it was silly - funny perhaps - but I'd have liked to have been given the chance to reach that option more naturally.

There was one thing I could've done differently... I could've pre-emptively attacked him the moment I didn't jibe with his jib. Let's see what could've happened!

Hey, he's got a unique ship model! Neat! It looks like the ship from the Volfied adverts (external link).

I let my two pilots auto-fight him. We lost Dave, but Jerome survived with the Rondon's cargo.

Wow, the Pirats Corporation of the Hondragunes are cold. They'll give a brand new, top of the range ship to anyone who asks, knowing that they'll fly off alone and get themselves blown up. Leaving hidden messages to let their killers know that they've rid the universe of an idiot who could never cut it as a pirate and who wont be missed is an impressive amount of pointless additional spite.

Let's not be so mean to the Rondon, though. I'm going to let him fly away.

ONE RELOADING THE GAME LATER...

The next encounter is a 'space patrol from the space police', whatever the hell that means. The wanna-be pirate Rondon set off SUPERCOP-1's radar gun as he blasted off, and now we have to answer a few questions. Mostly, they want to know if we're missing anything out of storage. I don't recall the Rondon getting close enough to steal anything, but if our magic pyramid thing can materialise our fighters out into space, maybe the Rondon has a pyramid of his own and did manage to steal some of our stuff.

The space police are offering to let us pick up the Rondon's suspicious cargo in case it turns out to be ours. If it isn't, well, maybe it'll be useful anyway.

ONE HAPHAZARD SPACE SCENE LATER...

After very very carefully tractoring the space patrol's box aboard, we find... the same note about pirates that the Rondon dropped when we blew him up on my other save. Well, okay.

Just for kicks I tried firing on SUPERCOP-1, and he swept away Jerome and Dave with a barrage of missiles and autonomous laser drones as if our guys were nothing. So don't do that.

Next up, a 'Rondon fleet that looks quite old' tells us they've 'declared war on the universe'. And that includes me!

There's no way to talk myself out of a fight - no matter how I react, all the Rondons start yelling over one another, goading their Captain to blast Starlight to bits for the fun of it. Oh no!

Can I be bothered going through all that loading again to get to the strategy screen and try to manually micro-manage Jerome and Dave to defeat each of the Rondon ships one by one? No, I think I've had enough of this for now. Which means it's time for...

CONCLUSION

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If you'd have stopped reading while I was fumbling about in the resource screens, you could've thought this game would be awesome. From the outside, Exodus is impenetrable and mysterious. It's a sci-fi adventure into the unknown, with the survival of the human race at stake. It's bold and crazy and interesting, just begging you to click on all of its pretty buttons and make spaceships and aliens happen. But the more you play and find out about the universe of Exodus and how the game is played, the less you're likely to want to. Partially because of those awkward space controls, and partially because of the humour.

The eighties were before my time: I wasn't around for the science fiction and fantasy vibes that movies like Star Wars, early home computers, and a zillion adventure paperbacks would bring, but from reading books and researching the life and times of Inherit The Earth's producer, I can say there's three types of sci-fi fan. The first are your average Joe who watches action and fantasy movies and enjoys the escapism and the fun. The second type takes worldbuilding incredibly seriously and finds satisfaction in the way every tassel on every uniform makes perfect sense (or writing at great length when they don't). And the third type of sci-fi fan are 'daft bastards'. And especially when it comes to writing computer games, those last two types are usually one and the same.

At the start, I found it hard to tell if the universe of Exodus was meant to be serious or silly. Then I met the Rondons and the Supercops and knew for certain the game was written by daft bastards. These people loved space, space films, space games, space battles and couldn't get enough of any of it. Exodus feels like it was written by a pair of programmers, one English, one German, both throwing in anything they thought was cool or funny the instant it came to mind, with each agreeing to translate the other's stuff when they were done. The result is a shaky, goofy translation that makes everything feel very daft, and even the more serious parts of the dialogue feel entirely off-the-wall. Exodus is earnest, lighthearted and goofy, and I don't know whether most players would want to be play a space survival game like that. Other games of the same stripe (though sandboxy rather than narrative), like Master of Orion, Star Control or Starflight (rated 15th best CRPG released up to 1992 by CRPG Addict) struck me as very 'serious', and you know I think Millennium 2.2 is misery incarnate. But if Exodus was written by daft bastards for daft bastards, then everything makes a lot more sense. I bet the makers had a whale of a time showing the game to their friends as it came together.

I got a lot of satisfaction from figuring out how to play Exodus, but I'm not sure that was the intended design at all. I'm sure everything made sense to the developers at the time, but Exodus just feels weird. It's nothing as demented as Captain Blood's bio-punk madness, but the way Exodus feels - the colours, the graphics, the text - give it a compelling, bizarre aura. I'm sure it was supposed to be an approachable sci-fi management game, but the zero margin for error turns it into a survival horror mystery. Even figuring out how to launch the ship or realising the game is a linear series of encounters to be solved feels like a thrilling victory. You never know what's going to happen next.

Twenty years after I first played Exodus, I went back and beat it. I had to know if it was even possible. Maybe it was the lingering guilt of failing the human race, or perhaps the management music was just that good. I felt like the only person alive who'd ever played the game past the first encounter, never sure whether the game had become unwinnable because of some earlier choice I'd made. It took until the very last encounter before I figured out where and what to click on to equip my fighters with shields. Even then, I felt like I had to trick the game into giving me a shot at winning; micromanaging my pilots and recalling them quickly, hoping that the enemy fleet encounter wouldn't reset between attacks as long as one of my pilots made it back. The true final bosses of Exodus are the Guru Meditation crashes that lurk between the management and strategy phases, ready to punish players who play too long or lose too many pilots in one session. And when you win a sortie, be careful with the 'Return All' option - your pilots have no concept of an orderly queue.

I can tell you there's no hidden 'good bit' of Exodus just around the corner. There's no landing on strange new worlds, driving vehicles on the surface, exploring buildings, meeting alien representatives or getting into gunfights. What you see in this post is what there is: making fighters, talking to weird freaky faces, taking control of your ships and getting yourself blown up, and then reloading and letting the CPU fly the ships instead. There are some parts where you need to take control of a ship to pick up cargo as part of a difficult piloting challenge, but if you expected Exodus' space combat, management and multi-vehicle combat to fit together into a coherent, slick experience like Carrier Command or Team Yankee, I can imagine you'd have been really let down.

Only go into Exodus if you have an excess of time, patience, and a willingness to make an obsession of fighting through a stupid and frustrating story and stupid and frustrating mechanics in search of what happens next.

And what does happen next in the universe of Exodus: '3010: The First Chapter'? Was there ever a second chapter? The manual seems to think so:

The game is split into two distinct parts, with the player initially exploring the known galaxy in their mothership - the last hope for your race - searching for a series of ores which will enable you to build scouts and pods to fulfill the second part of your mission - the colonisation of a new world.

The First Chapter ends when you reach Mrynn, so saying the game is split into two parts is either a bit of a fib or overenthusiasm on the part of the publisher. It could've been an early plan for the game, adding a city-building phase once you've reached a certain point in the game, sort of like Reunion on the Amiga or ActRaiser on the SNES. Or it could've been a miscommunication after being told the game has two distinct parts: ship management and space strategy.

Did they ever follow it up with a 'Exodus: 4010: Planet Mrynn', like how Deuteros continued the story after the terraforming of Earth in Millennium 2.2?

Well, no.

Exodus' silly translation and sense of humour reminds me of Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad of all games. Which, as it turns out, makes perfect sense.

Exodus was the first and only Amiga game made by the studio 'Temet', but it wasn't the only game made by the guys behind the name. The credits list Temet as a collaboration between a group named Reaction, and pinball gods Digital Illusions. Reaction as far as I can tell was a demo group that made an Amiga diskmag game called Galaxy Blast, and I figure Exodus was made soon after since the management theme in Exodus is called "Galaxy Blast - Select Ship". They must've thought the track was too cool to waste on a cheap coverdisk game.

If you take the Reaction squad: coders Michael Büttner and Sander Karl, and artists Antony Christoulakis and Jan Jöckel, and add in Peter Thierolf from Kaiko, you get NEON Studios, whose first game was... Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad, originally known as Timet The Flying Squirrel!

Which, by the way, is absolutely crazy. I had no idea that two completely different games, one a cute mascot platformer I thought was never released for twenty five years, and the other a mystifying sci-fi management game that haunted me for twenty five years, were by the exact same people.

NEON Studios existed until 2005, with their last game being Legend of Kay on the PS2 - with Project Lead Jan Jöckel, Lead Artist and Game Designer Antony Christoulakis, and Lead Programmer Peter Thierolf!

All the Reaction guys stayed in games in some capacity after Exodus, which is way cool. I wonder if any of them think back to their oddball space management game or Timet from time to time. Do you think there's any relationship between the names 'Temet' (an Egyptian goddess) and 'Timet'? Who can say. :)

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Thanks for reading! Guest reviewer mecha-neko will return one day, probably, and Super Adventures will be back in two weeks with another mysterious game. There's a clue on the left if you want to try to figure it out early.