Crusader (computer game)
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- For other uses see Crusade (disambiguation).
| Crusader: No Remorse | |
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| Developer(s) | Origin Systems, Realtime Associates |
| Publisher(s) | Electronics Arts |
| Designer(s) | Tony Zurovec |
| Engine | Enhanced Ultima VIII engine |
| Release date(s) | 1995 |
| Genre(s) | Action game |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: Teen (T) ELSPA: 15+ |
| Platform(s) | PC (MS-DOS), PlayStation, Sega Saturn |
| Media | CD (1) |
| System requirements | MS-DOS 5.0 or higher, i486 DX2 66 MHz, 8 MB RAM, 65 MB hard disk space, Sound Blaster compatible sound card, VESA compatible SVGA video card |
| Input | Mouse, keyboard, joystick |
Crusader is a series of action oriented computer games created by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts which comprises two titles: Crusader: No Remorse, released in 1995, and Crusader: No Regret, released in 1996. Set in a nearby future, the games center on the main character, a Silencer nicknamed Tin Man or Captain, who wears a suit of red armor, reminiscent of Mandalorian armor or the Emperor's Royal Guard, from the Star Wars universe.
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[edit] Overview
Both games use an advanced version of the Ultima VIII isometric view engine featuring full SVGA graphics. The game's audio uses a specially made engine, called Asylum Sound System, which employs MOD files rather than General MIDI, in order to provide good quality without relying on expensive hardware. Each mission and intermission level has its own track.
The Crusader games feature Full Motion Video (FMV) sequences with live actors; FMVs are used in cut-scenes to further the story, generally through interaction with other characters. These conversations are generally one-sided, as the player character never speaks.
Like all Origin games, both No Remorse and No Regret shipped with significant back-story material, including a fold-out propaganda poster-cum-newspaper and a Field Operations guide from the fictional Resistance.
Crusader games are divided into missions, each with their own locations and objectives. Settings vary from military bases to factories to offices to space stations, and contain a variety of enemy soldiers and servomechs, traps, puzzles and innocent bystanders (who can be killed with no penalty). There is an additional incentive to kill unarmed bystanders is present in No Remorse, as the player character being able to loot the bodies for credits which are used to purchase better weapons. As well, all locations have alarm systems, which can be triggered by the aforementioned bystanders (another reason to eliminate them), security cameras, weapons fire, and other conditions, such as destroying a security door; setting off an alarm will bring down significant military presence, and the player is encouraged to avoid triggering them, or deactivate them as soon as possible if set off.
Most of the environment can be destroyed by weapons fire, providing a previously unprecedented level of setting interaction, and some traps or defenses can be manipulated for use against the enemy. The geography of the setting encourages the use of tactics and combinations of moves (crouching, strafing, hiding, timing movements according to sensors) in order to hit the targets effectively with the minimum possible loss of resources; No Regret added a handful of new maneuvers to the original game, including the ability to dive forward, and to sidestep while crouching. Weapons, ammunition, credits (No Remorse's form of money, which does not appear in No Regret), healing facilities, and other equipment is scattered through the levels, allowing the player to upgrade their arsenal.
The game's firearms are graphic and often morbidly entertaining in their use: one weapon, which fires ultraviolet radiation, literally burns the flesh from the target's bones, whereas someone struck within a rocket's splash damage radius will catch fire and run around screaming before collapsing into a pile of ash. No Regret added several new weapons and death animations, including freezing (and subsequent shattering) and two different kinds of melting. In No Remorse, the Silencer could carry no more than five firearms at once; in No Regret, this restriction was lifted entirely.
A third game in the series (with a working title of No Mercy) was never released, possibly due to the fact that most of the members of the Crusader team left Origin and joined Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts at his new company Digital Anvil, as well as Origin refocusing its efforts on Ultima Online. Preliminary storyline ideas included boarding a shuttle and making a daring assault to get back to Earth. On the message boards of the Echo Sector fan site, one of the site's operators claimed to have been in contact with some of the games' development team, and that as many as five games in total were planned.
The Pentagram game engine reimplementation project is working on a Free Software cross-platform version of the Ultima VIII engine. Since Ultima VIII and Crusader games share the underlying engine to great extent, a long-term goal of Pentagram is to support Crusader games as well (once Ultima VIII is fully working). Currently both titles are playable in the DOSBox emulator.
[edit] Plot
| Crusader: No Regret | |
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| Developer(s) | Origin Systems |
| Publisher(s) | Electronic Arts |
| Designer(s) | Tony Zurovec Jason Ely |
| Engine | Enhanced Ultima VIII engine |
| Release date(s) | 1996 |
| Genre(s) | Action game |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: Teen (T) ELSPA: 15+ |
| Platform(s) | PC (MS-DOS) |
| Media | CD (1) |
| System requirements | MS-DOS 5.0 or higher, i486 DX4 75 MHz, 8 MB RAM, 65 MB hard disk space, Sound Blaster compatible sound card, VESA compatible SVGA video card |
| Input | Mouse, keyboard, joystick |
Due to economic downfalls at the end of the 20th century, the nations of the planet Earth began gradually to organize themselves into huge economic super-conglomerates. Eventually these continental organizations merged into the World Economic Consortium. The WEC is a tyrannical entity; while the world is made to look peaceful and prosperous, the reality is that most freedoms are suspended, taxes are well over 90%, military force is used mercilessly against those who dare oppose the WEC, and freedom of the press is barely even remembered, and then with contempt. Only an elite upper class of WEC executives have true power and wealth. Among these are WEC President Gauthier and Chairman Nathaniel Draygan.
The WEC is being fought by an organization calling itself the Global Resistance, led by former WEC colonel, now general, Quentin Maxis. The Resistance is a ragtag mix of disparate people: ex-WEC soldiers and employees rub elbows with political dissidents, life-long refuseniks, and plain old criminals. The Resistance, of course, is severely outnumbered and outgunned.
As the game Crusader: No Remorse opens, a trio of Silencers--mysterious and feared super-soldiers--are returning from a botched mission in which they disobeyed an order to fire upon civilians (a disturbingly common event; one firearm in the game, a full-auto shotgun, is lauded for its ability to shred crowds of unarmored people), mistakenly believed to be rebels. They are ambushed by a WEC mech, and two of the Silencers--Colonel Anton Zurovec and Major Marcus Vittek--are killed. The remaining one, a nameless Captain, joins the Resistance after destroying the mech, where--as a significant symbol of the WEC's military power and political philosophy--he meets with resentment, distrust and (in some cases) outright hatred. (The word Trooper, a universal term for WEC infantry, is used as a term nearly equivalent to Nazi by certain Resistance members.) However, he uncomplainingly undertakes extremely dangerous missions, often with substandard equipment, and his continued success gradually earns the respect, however grudging, of his fellow Resistance-cell members.
In No Remorse the player undergoes a total of 15 missions. His travels eventually uncover secret plans for a WEC space station, the Vigilance Platform, which can attack any site from space, meaning cities with a known Resistance presence can simply be annihilated at the leisure of the WEC. All such cities are threatened with orbital bombardment unless they surrender. Concurrently, the player's Resistance cell is betrayed from within, and almost all the non-player characters are killed. Despite all these setbacks, however, the Captain infiltrates the Vigilance Platform and destroys it. The traitor is also on the station, guarding the lifepods, and challenges the Silencer to a duel over the access card for the last pod. (As might be expected, the traitor has stacked the deck.) The game can be completed without killing the traitor; one can simply scoop up the access card being dueled over from an earby traitor and run past the traitor to the pods, and the traitor will perish in the station's death throes. As the Vigilance Platform explodes behind him, Chairman Draygan contacts the Silencer's lifepod and swears vengeance against the Silencer. (Given the events of No Regret, it seems odd that the lifepod appears headed towards Earth in the ending cinematic.)
Crusader: No Regret begins 46 hours afterwards. A WEC freighter headed for the Moon picks up the Silencer's escape pod, and the Captain, upon moonfall, makes contact with the local Resistance (taking care to destroy the freighter before he teleports away, of course). The WEC uses the moon as both mine and prison, where most of the political dissidents and Resistance members are forced to extract a precious radioactive compound, Di-Corellium. This mineral is the basis of virtually all energy production on Earth. Approximately half of all known reserves are on the moon, and a shortage of Di-Corellium would cause serious problems for the WEC. For this reason Chairman Draygan is on the moon to oversee the Di-Corellium production, which has been lagging recently--possibly due to incursions from the Resistance cell on Darkside base. He is, to say the least, not happy when he learns that the Silencer appears to have survived and may well be on the moon.
Over the course of No Regret's 10 missions, the Silencer works to undermine the WEC presence on the moon, culminating in a showdown with Chairman Draygan himself. The WEC's lunar headquarters are destroyed and the Resistance takes control of mining operations, with the hint of further conflicts with the WEC. The game's story is notably more simplified and straightforward than that of No Remorse--there are a few character moments, but no real subplots, certainly nothing like the traitor mystery in No Remorse. No Regret also seems to take place in much less time than No Remorse: the introduction cinematic for No Remorse gives a date of February 2196, while that for No Regret says September, but the pacing of No Regret doesn't seem to indicate any downtime at all between the missions (and story-wise, several of those missions would not allow for any such free time), each of which can be completed within a matter of hours of real time.
[edit] Trivia
- Screenshots of a multiplayer Crusader game in action exist.
- The code 1701-D that appears sometimes on computer monitors in-game is a reference to the USS Enterprise from the Star Trek universe. The Vigilance Platform near the end of No Remorse also bears some design resemblance to Federation starships from Star Trek.
- "Echo base" is likely a reference to Star Wars. Other possible references to Star Wars in No Regret are the Di-Cor freighter, which somewhat resembles an Imperial Star Destroyer; the troop transport in mission 8, which resembles the Millennium Falcon; and the oft-repeated term (from Stormtroopers in missions and Chairman Draygan in a cutscene of No Regret) "rebel scum", though a fairly generic insult, having been featured prominently in a scene of Return of the Jedi.
- In No Regret, the number "451" is used as a keypad code with a nearby terminal giving the clue, "the temperature at which paper burns". This refers to Fahrenheit 451, which is (according to the book), "the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns". The allusion being used in a knowledge-repressive society is probably an intended irony.
- If Crusader is played while the computer's date is set to December 25, an "evil demonic elves" mix of the Christmas carols "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen", "Jingle Bells", and "Frosty the Snowman" are substituted for the normal tracks. Additionally, some graphics are replaced with Christmas-themed versions, such as a version of the Silencer wearing a Santa hat.
- The nerve gas container found in No Remorse's seventh mission is called "EEOD", short for "Easter Egg of Death".
[edit] References
- In-game literature for Crusader - No Remorse
- In-game literature and datafile (RESIST.TXT) for Crusader - No Regret
- Tyler M., Frase T., McCubbin C. (1995) Origin's official guide to Crusader - No Remorse, Origin Systems, Inc. ISBN 0-929373-26-X
- McCubbin C., Frase T. (1996) Origin's official guide to Crusader - No Regret, Prima Publishings ISBN 0-76150925-9
[edit] See also
- Silencer (Crusader), for in-depth information about the game's protagonist.
- A list of Crusader characters to find out who the Silencer's allies and enemies are.
- A list of Crusader enemies for a description of all kinds of WEC soldiers and mechs the Silencer will have to face in his quest for revenge.
- A list of Crusader equipment to learn about the weapons and equipment featured in the Crusader games.
