Review: Lunicus (CD-ROM)
Reviewed by Christopher Breen

Type: CD-ROM Arcade/Adventure
Publisher: CyberFlix (615) 573-8849
Retail Price: $99.95
Mail Order:
$79.95 Available only through Educorp.
Requires: 256-color Mac, CD-ROM drive, 4MB RAM, HD, System 6.03 or higher.
Protection: None

The future’s so bleak I gotta wear a cybersuit and carry a cumbersome plasma weapon. Yup, it’s 2051 and Earth has experienced a technological renaissance thanks to a few crusty paleontologists who, in the year 2023, dug up an alien artifact discarded in the Jurassic age. These same bone-diggers, seeing little value in something not preserved in amber, turned the device over to the proper authorities, who then used its design and components for the good of humankind. At the height of the peace, love, and understanding of this techno-revolution, the U.N. established the moonbase Lunicus. You, an inexperienced, male space cadet, have the ill-fortune to be assigned to Lunicus when the littering aliens, obviously miffed about the infringement on their copyright, decide to invade Earth. Their purpose: to biff a bit of free labor back to the old homestead. 

Your job is to jet down to various cities on Earth where you engage the evil alien machinery in a fight to the death. As you free city after city from these otherworldly interlopers, you rise in rank and move steps closer to the Ultimate Alien Challenge.

After an introductory sequence, you find yourself standing by your bed on Day One at Lunicus station. Your assignment for the day is to get the lay of the base, chat up the crew, and thrill to the beautifully rendered 3-D graphics of the game. While schlumping about the base, you will also become familiar with the navigation controls that allow you to move around with the mouse or keyboard (in the education biz, this is called a "readiness activity"). In addition to providing you with a safe environment in which to get a feel for the game, this period gives you ample time to read the online Help files so that you will be better prepared when that alien-nasty draws a bead on you. Day One ends after you’ve attended a briefing to discover that Day Two is your chance to fly to Earth and blast the bejeezus out of some hostile alien hardware.

From Day Two onward, the game follows a pattern of chatting, briefing, chatting some more, flying to Earth, dealing death to the alien machines — first in a high-rise and then on the street — triumphing (or dying, depending on your skill), jaunting back to Lunicus, even more chatting, and finally, sleeping.

Pull My String. It might seem that your character has more pressing business than wandering about the base chattering like a magpie to every crew member who stops long enough to get an earful. And yes, you can skip these encounters without seriously hindering the completion of your mission. But if you do decide to become the stoic member of the crew, you will miss both the development of the plot and the wonders of CyberFlix’s Cyber Puppets. Here’s how it works.

Lunicus is billed as an interactive movie. In reality, it’s more like arcatainment — an arcade game surrounded by a space melodrama. No matter what you choose to call it, you really haven’t gotten your $99.95 (only $79.95 direct from Educorp) worth if you don’t engage in a bit of social intercourse with the other characters. You do this by approaching a crew member and clicking on his 3-D image. Bang, up pops the Cyber Puppet. A Cyber Puppet is a talking head that looks a bit like those strange animated creatures from “Clutch Cargo” or “Speed Racer.” You know: The mouth moves in a way reminiscent of dubbed Japanese rubber-monster flicks, the eyes clatter back and forth and — when the Puppet is really feeling it — an eyebrow raises or forehead crinkles. Perhaps interactive is a slight overstatement. In fact, to talk to your Puppet, you choose from a series of questions or phrases from an on-screen menu. The Puppet then responds, and you move on to the next menu item. Having exhausted a particular Puppet’s font of information, you log out of the conversation by clicking the menu’s farewell.

Time Is On My Side. The real meat of Lunicus is your series of encounters with alien life. In terms of arcade action, there is nothing new here. You are initially equipped with a rifle that fires shells, grenades, and rockets. You find yourself in a maze that contains aliens and an occasional equipment locker for replenishing your supplies of weapons, shields, and energy. As is typical in these kinds of things, your job is to stay alive, kill enough aliens to unleash the Really Bad Alien, destroy the RBA, and return home. What are not typical are the graphics and sound that accompany the action.

Lunicus looks great. Everything except for the Cyber Puppets is rendered in breathtaking 3-D. The battle scenes are wonderful to view and the digital sound, although a bit hissy during the spoken-word sections, lends a nice realism to the game. Considering the limitations of CD-ROM, movement is impressively smooth.

The star of Lunicus is the technology. In most CD-ROM games you run through a scene and then wait while the next scene is loaded. Given the speed of CD-ROM players, you could be in for quite a wait. CyberFlix has developed a proprietary toolset that lets the player move about in real time. One component of this toolset, the Interactive Movie Editor, gives you access to buttons and sounds within individual movie sequences and allows you to jump to another sequence with no waiting.

Workarounds. Unfortunately, CyberFlix hasn’t solved all the problems associated with the CD-ROM format. Although terrific for storing the massive graphics files that make Lunicus a pleasure to watch, the use of CD-ROM imposes some restrictions on game play. Because the processing and memory overhead required to move smoothly about the maze is so high, certain compromises had to be made in the action. For example, if you are standing in one spot, one of your enemies, a Drone Bomb, will come after you and explode on contact. If, on the other hand, you are moving through the corridors of the maze, the Bombs will pass right through you, inflicting no damage. The same applies for an oncoming Wasp (a flying machine that blasts you with bullets and plasma bursts). As long as the Wasp is on-screen and you are moving, it will do you no harm; the processing required to render the poor thing takes all the fight out of it.

Also, because the battle scenes of Lunicus seem to be arranged in loops, the action tends toward the repetitive. The layout of Floor Five of a particular building is exactly the same as that of the floors below. Due to the loops, it’s a simple matter to cheat your way to success. Suppose, for example, you’ve arrived on the top floor of a building. You can easily clear out the weapon lockers, jump back into the elevator, push the up button (you’ll be informed that the elevator is jammed), and return to the same floor to discover that all the lockers have miraculously been restocked. Obviously, the point was to fight your way down through the various levels of the building, but there’s really no need since the game isn’t smart enough to remember where you’ve been. From here, all you need to do is kill enough enemies to initiate the release of the aforementioned RBA, take the elevator to the street, jump into your tank, and survive long enough to complete your mission.

Plottus Typicus. I referred to Lunicus as a space melodrama and, believe me, all the elements are there. The commander, Vladamir Molotov, is a bullet-headed Russian who routinely refers to you as “slug,” but deep down he has a heart of gold. Dr. Sasha Serenskaya, representing the love interest, was supposedly born and raised in Kiev. Apparently, through the wonders of future-science, someone at the Ukrainian Medical Institute managed to transplant the accent of a San Fernando Valley Girl into her puppety little head. 

The other characters are equally stereotypical. The most disturbing for those of us in politically correct Northern California is Terry McCallum, an African-American character whose hobbies include sports, music, and fixing things, and who is known for joke-telling and fierce competitiveness. Although McCallum is a positive character who dearly loves his family, you are forced to speak to him in dialect not reserved for other characters. For instance, you greet Terry with “Hey, McCallum,” whereas you address Raife, the overly-sensitive moon-babe with a simple “How’s it going?” To finish your conversation, you must fling the hipster-like “Later” to McCallum, versus the simple “Goodbye” reserved for Dr. Heisenstein, the absent-minded German genius. 

As a piece of science-fiction writing, Lunicus rates somewhere in the young-adult category. A thirteen-year-old might find it completely engaging. Older players might cringe at the hackneyed dialogue. But let’s face it, like those little episodes that followed every fifth level of Pac Man, the plot of Lunicus serves largely to compel the player through the battle scenes.  

Conclusion. According to the press release, Lunicus took two years to develop. In that time, the folks at CyberFlix came up with some nice techniques for presenting their material. As you read this, Bill Appleton and his crew are refining their craft and working on new and better games. Considering that the development of entertainment CD-ROMs is in its infant stage, Lunicus is a fine first step.  

If you have the money to spare and are interested in seeing just how smooth and attractive a CD-ROM can be, Lunicus is worth a peek. If your budget is a little tight, try out the standalone demo at your local dealer and send CyberFlix a note of encouragement. Based on the technical skill shown in Lunicus, we can expect great things to come. 

Pros:
• Cool 3-D graphics
• Attractive interface
• Remarkably smooth movement
• Nice sound
• A call to tech support puts you in touch with the game’s creator, Bill Appleton
• Replayable

Cons:
• Predictable plot line that allows only for a male protagonist
• One-dimensional characters
• Processing overhead makes it too easy to avoid the bad guys and stock up on supplies

Christopher Breen. When not banging the ivories in his band, System 9, Christopher Breen works as a freelance writer for such magazines as MacUser and HyperPub.