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In a democratic society like our own, how does an elected government keeps its popularity?
How are scandals averted, subversive elements controlled, undesirables eliminated, and incidents covered up?
Just how does the government keep in power?
The government cannot be seen to be suppressing the opposition, invading privacy and spying on its own nationals.
Murder, torture, corruption.
The power behind the democracy...
This is the mood setting for Floor 13 game. And a quite captivating one I must admit!
When I've read the first review for this game back in early 90's It immediately caught my attention. The review itself did not generate much enthusiasm, depicting as an above average game, and the photos of it did also transmit some sort of quietness of gameplay...
The game portrays a secret organization on the 13th floor of an office building somewhere in the U.K. (most likely London) with a subversive goal to help the elected government, have it’s ruling, maintaining a strong popular support.
So any supporting government entities cock-up’s, embarrassments and all kind of scandals must be averted, minimized or eliminated. Opposition can be dealt harshly or can be publicly smeared…
Yep, as you’re probably thinking, it’s kind of a Secret State Police, except for all public knowledge it does not exist! The entity itself exists under the cover of the State Secretary of Agriculture and Fisheries. It operates in the shadow, and keeps its wining and losses to themselves – and to the Prime Minister who reviews the exploits of this secret organization.
Keeping the Government happy and up in the polls will keep you as Director General and even increase funding for the organization. Failure will result in your resignation.
If you're put off by this sort of doing, think it as more (non-scrupulous) intervention PR organization on behalf of the actual government...
So how do you operate? Basically you’re in charge of reviewing the media, news bulletin, inter agencies memos and allocating the resources to achieve the best resolution to the case posed – any solution is downright dirty and illegal at the very least! Hooray!
For that you count with 8 operational departments, each with it’s own unique function. These include:
- Surveillance – Phone taps, Mail opening all done with utmost professional eye and transcribed for you.
- Pursuit – Keep the meter on and find the daily whereabouts of any particular dubious character!
- Search – Breaking in and going thought the drawers and other personal items of a subject address – in a discreet or haywire way (you decide)!
- Interrogation – Abduction and torturing subjects ‘till they spill the beans! Then just a quick route to the river to dump the body!
- Removal – Assassination in a accident style fashion or dirt right bullet between the eyes (all depends on the subject and time window).
- Heavy Assault – SAS they may not be, but no bullets will be left behind (although no one will remain to tell the story anyway).
- Dis-Information – Scandals can also be created, having the right amount of money will get anything on the news! And I mean anything
- Infiltration – Conspiracies are handled by different type of groups, these can infiltrated and “converted”. Also additional info on their agents can be gathered…
Of course since you’re a political secret organization, any action should be well thought. Snooping, abducting and killing high profile subjects (political, military, reporters…) might attract to much attention from police, MI-5 or even the public eye, and that means you might get a visit from Mr. Garcia (on behalf of the Prime Minister) and find out what defenestration means (Flying lessons with no wings)!.
Ok I’ve pretty much described the underlining plot and atmosphere setting, but how does the game handles?
Well for starters, it’s simple cursor controlled menu system, with checkbox type options, which leads to more of the same. Options are limited, and you can only do whatever is presented. It works, but that is the far it goes!
Saving game is necessary option, but I did find some problems when saving the game for floppy disk, so I would suggest you to game with the copy and not the original.
Forget any animation or sound excitement – none of this is present through out the game. It does not kill the serious atmosphere set up, but it does not help either.
The intro music seems to promise much, but then you’re left in complete silence.
Prior to this review I did some research regarding to the display on the PC and on the Amiga. If you’re somehow curious why the game is in black and white, it’s because the original one wasn’t too colorful either. Using a 640x480 display type at the time, the VGA color on-screen becomes limited to 16 colors (shades of blueish gray).
The conversion to Amiga had some kind of thinking going into it. To have a similar resolution would mean that the average Amiga user would have to cope with interlace, so the choice was to reduce the resolution vertically by half.
And because of NTSC users the final display was trimmed to 640x200. All of this was done quite ok, except they also reduced the number of colors to 8 (presumably to save disk space).
So you get a more Grayish color system then you would on the PC version, to cope with colour reduction.
It’s a shame, but that’s something you’ll only notice if you play the PC version, and to be fair, I believe that the graphics display rather well on TV or on a 15khz monitor.
Anyway, although it’s no state of the art game for the Amiga I would say that most people will find enjoyable. I did, even if only for a limited time period. I still play it once in a while...
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HI-RES monochrome graphics is what you get all the way. While not state of the art, they fit nicely the atmosphere, and have a distinct professional look for the time of the release. Lack of animation of nay kind will undoubtly baffle everyone, but for the kind of game, there isn’t really needed much anyway.
Still one could hope that they would put a bit more into it, and add a few more graphical sequences and final touches.
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The Amiga music is really different from the PC version, and is very good for the intro and also sets the mood, but that’s it. Silence is what you get all the way into the game, and I believe that this unfortunately deprives of some of the atmosphere that could be enjoyed while playing (look at lost patrol).
No sound effects and no music during gameplay just doesn’t sound like an Amiga game!
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The menu system while comprehensive is somehow shallow, but one gets accustomed (not enjoyable!) – If you’ve played Conflict in Middle East you’ll know user interface it’s pretty similar. Clicking in boxes and more boxes (better use cursor or keypad)…
The plot is presented in a no linear fashion, is always is pretty enjoying, and you really try to get all the things right. Of course the somehow limited control, which is offered to the player, to deal with the cases posed makes the nature of the gameplay limited.
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I guess it’s the underlining subversive nature of the game that appeals me so much! If you’re looking for an exciting game, search elsewhere. This is an old-school management game with a very drab setting both in the sound, graphical and user interface department...
But if you’re able to overcome this initial issue, you’ll find a decent management game with lot of politically incorrect stories, conspiracies and lot of plot twists, skulduggery…
If you love spy novels and games I definitely recommend you play this one! |
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