Beneath A Steel Sky

I thought I would let you all know how UTTERLY DISAPPOINTED I was with this one.

I finally got around to playing it a few years ago when the CD talkie version became freely available for ScummVM.

The graphics and style were good, but it was way short, has stoopid Yorkshire accents (the thing was set in futuristic Australia, and everyone in charge is from Leeds!), had puzzles that were trivial to the plot (messing about at the Travel Agents and the Plastic Surgeon's), and had bizarre unexplained bits like your coworker Anita appearing dead in a locker near the end.

It had great potential - the idea of LINK, being in cyberspace and interacting with concepts to gain access deeper into the system was great but there were only about 4 screens. There were only about 4 levels to the tower you were in, and the sense of the mystery was forgotten for most of it. It was clever working your way down, but finding a fat rich woman in a pink gymsuit at the bottom stroking her dog ruined the atmosphere it was trying to create. It didn't do too well on atmosphere, the locations were fairly sparse of people and it was a confined space, you didn't get to see life outside of the tower which really would have helped.

It was okay, but it didn't take long to complete and they didn't really explore the potential enough for me.

I never completed it due to an error on one of the floppy disks. I guess I played half through then, if you say it is really short. But that is already some time ago, and I can't remember if I was pleased with the game or not. Will have to give it another try, but definitely in Scumm.

I have to disagree. BASS is one of the best looking adventure games for an OCS/ECS amiga (The CD32 version only added speech, nothing was done to the graphics.). The fat woman in a pink tracksuit stoking her dog was because no matter what happens to the world there will always be a fat women in a tracksuit with a stupid little dog. It's part of Einsteins unpublished laws of Space/time.

You should look here to read some of the problems that the design gteam had with BASS. It might make you appreciate it more.

It doesn't. In fact, it makes me appreciate it less. And it's not 4 times bigger than Lure of the Temptress.

Okay, tastes differ, I liked BASS.

I think Beneath a Steel Sky is a fine adventure game. It's not my favourite, but I've enjoyed playing it. I never got around to completing it though, but after seeing this thread, I think I might give it another shot.

I also really liked BASS. OK, it wasn't the longest adventure game, but it still contained a lot of great content, conversations and story.

You are actually the first person I've heard say they were disappointed in BASS. I do agree that it would have been great to have been able to explore the futuristic world it was set in much further, especially by going outside, and yes the areas of the game were a bit sparse of npc characters, but nothing is perfect. For game characters Lure of the Temptress was way ahead of it with its character day cycle system, and even Future Wars felt more like you were visiting populated areas. But a game has to have some restrictions or the developers would never complete it and get it released.

I also thought that the adventure game Universe had a very similar feel to it and kind of felt like the outside world that you might have encountered had you been able to explore outside in BASS.

I never got to play the talkie version of BASS so only played it through at the time via the ECS version on my A600. I remember really enjoying it at the time though.

The voices sucked. Voice Acting does not mean "get one bloke to do as many regional accents as possible, and get the receptionist to voice the girls".

Things are on the whole better these days with the bigger budgets the games companies have, but back in the early CD days games developers just didn't have the budgets so had to use their own voices, and those from with the company to make up the vocals.

I liked playing the game, but I remember something about a lot of disks :)
Maybe I should find the CD32 version...

They could have had the local am dram society do it for free, for some publicity and a mention in the credits. You can get lots of things for free if you're inventive.

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Originally Posted by taunusanden

I liked playing the game, but I remember something about a lot of disks :)
Maybe I should find the CD32 version...

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Just install it to your HDD, otherwise you get mad with swapping.

So true. If ever a genre was always destined for HD it was the adventure game.

I still remember all the disk swaps for the larger advanture games. I had a system setup with 3 external disk drives, so could have 4 disks in the drives at any one time, but I still had to swap them loads of times. I was so happy when I got my first HD.

I never got a HD for the Amiga, I also had several extrenal floppy drives, but when playing Fate of Atlantis f.ex., I had to swap anyways.

One thing that always really annoyed me what when the developers of the games had done something very strange with the order of the files on the disks. So often a game would ask for a disk that seemed quite random. For example if you were playing through the the game and were currently using disks 3, 4 and 5, when suddenly the game asks you for disk 11, you swap them over, it access disk 11, reads it for about 3 seconds and then asks for disk 4 again! Aghhh!

BASS was very good at asking for random disks as was STS. The strangest HD install i ever had was for Final Writer. You start at disk 1 and then you have to insert disk 6,7,8 & 9 then go back to disk 2, 3, 4 and 5 and finish off on disk 1 again.

Oh, I've had some very odd HD installs over the years. Some on the PC have been just as odd too. Some recent PC games have been just as bad. I have one game on 6 CDs and it kept asking for the discs in a completely out of sequence order, and for each one more than once. Very odd. Especially as you would think that the majority of a game install is just involving the copying of files from the discs to the HD.

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Originally Posted by Buleste

The strangest HD install i ever had was for Final Writer. You start at disk 1 and then you have to insert disk 6,7,8 & 9 then go back to disk 2, 3, 4 and 5 and finish off on disk 1 again.

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That's true. When I got my Amiga 1200 last year, I installed it to HD, and I found it very strange that you had to insert the discs in that order.

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Originally Posted by Harrison

One thing that always really annoyed me what when the developers of the games had done something very strange with the order of the files on the disks. So often a game would ask for a disk that seemed quite random. For example if you were playing through the the game and were currently using disks 3, 4 and 5, when suddenly the game asks you for disk 11, you swap them over, it access disk 11, reads it for about 3 seconds and then asks for disk 4 again! Aghhh!

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That was also exactly what happened in Fate of Atlantis, drove me mad.

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Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner

That was also exactly what happened in Fate of Atlantis, drove me mad.

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[Use Orichalcum detector]
INSERT DISK 5
INSERT DISK 7
INSERT DISK 5
"Nope, nothing here"

[Kidney-punch developers] etc

And how about the latest Sierra adventure games for Amiga?

Insert StartUp-Disk
Insert Disk 1
Insert StartUp-Disk
Insert Disk 1
Insert StartUp-Disk
Insert Disk 1
.
.
.
.
and this is endless of course... :blink::D

loved it on the miggy! n fact I love it so much ive downloaded the pc version with chit chat from GOG.com! :thumbs:

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Originally Posted by StuKeith

loved it on the miggy! n fact I love it so much ive downloaded the pc version with chit chat from GOG.com! :thumbs:

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I too have recently downloaded it from gog,as well as two others all for free!. Wich was nice.

CD32 version is the best, as it has speech. But I believe the best adventure for CD32 is DarkSeed.

True, the CD32 version of BaSS is awesome, not to mention you can copy it onto your HD and play on your A1200 (though I've no idea if it needs AGA).

There's one tiny bug in the version I had, once you finally travel down on the ground level, below the pool there's a tool-shack-cellar-kinda location, once opening it (or somewhere around that action) you should get some kind of a comment, but in the talkie version it misses the file (or just mine version didn't have it, dunno) and there's like half a second of the text and it vanishes.
I remember I wanted to try the normal, diskette version, but never had the time nor cared enough to check it again up to that point.

Yeah, I remember reading something about some lines of speech missing from the talkie version. Also that several spoken lines were worded slightly different from the written ones, mostly because the actor spoke american and the text was written in proper english.

Well, the text isn't exactly missing (in the above mentioned example at least, don't remember any other), you can see it for like 1/10th of a second, guess it usually shows the text as long as the sentence is playing.

True about the differences, I'd say a good 80% of the texts differ.

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Originally Posted by Teho

Yeah, I remember reading something about some lines of speech missing from the talkie version. Also that several spoken lines were worded slightly different from the written ones, mostly because the actor spoke american and the text was written in proper english.

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That's correct. Some sentences are not speeched. But I think the same applied in pc versions too.

I played this, for the first time ever, on the iphone recently. It worked really well on a touch-screen interface.

Full talky version, with music and apparently some extra intro/outro footage done in cool comic book style.

I very much liked the game, the humour and story. At 2.99 or whatever I paid for it, it is great value, flippin awesome in fact. Back in the day, at 25 quid and with disk-swapping.... I'm not so sure, with hindsight.

Still, very gripping, solid 9/10 from me.

Indeed, nice adventure but a little short (well, not so short as Loom :p ).