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Game Review
Trials
of Battle
Review
by: Craig Miller – 08/01/11
OS Reviewed on: eComStation
2.1
Audio: Uniaud16 V1.9.5 & Uniaud32 V2.1.1
Video Card
Driver: Panorama (eCS 2.1 package)
Year:
1996
Version: 1.00
Game Type: Shooter
Developed by:
Shadowsoft Entertainment Software
Published by: Stardock
Systems
Homepage
Link: Click
Here
Manual – Click
Here!
CD – Click Here!
Box Art – Front – Back – Spine
Reference Card – Click Here!
Registration Card – Front – Back
Download
Trials of Battle now!
This is the full version, file size:
21.9Megs
(still have to burn these files to a CD)
Download the ISO version: 33.5Megs
(1)
Introduction:
“Trials of Battle was a game in which you were abducted to represent humans in an intergalactic arena.
You are put in a vehicle and combat other identical vehicle. Winning gains you points and credits which you use to upgrade your vehicle or change to a different one. To be successful you need to use tactics as wells as be good at simple first-person-shooter.
You need to balance what to buy and where to go in the arena (which of course changes from battle to battle).
There are 3 different vehicles. The first one is a lightweight ground based one, the second one available is a flying vehicle and the third is a heavily armored ground based one.
You need to decide what to focus on: armor, speed, laser, mines, rockets among others. It gets more complicated when they add radar, radar jammers, dead radar zones.
Trials of Battle is best described as a multiplayer, multivehicle simulator, that is designed to facilitate fast paced, close quarters combat. There is no blowing up an unseen enemy radar blip from 10 miles away with a long range missile. This is up close and personal, in your face combat, with mainly short range weapons and the vehicle of your choice. For your vehicle, you may choose from one of two types of Battle Pods or a Hovercraft.”
(2) Installation:
Installation could not have been any easier, using the standard IBM installer. The minimum installation is 8-10MB and the maximum is 35MB. I never install a program partially and now-a-days 35MB is nothing. The whole install took 26 seconds after I told the installer where to put it. Man, I miss old games like this when it comes to installing, new games can take 60 minutes with the install and patches (I'm looking at you PS3).
-
What and where to install
What percent.
Even with a full installation, you are still required to have the CD-ROM in the drive in order for the game to start. I am sure it's a copy protection issue and unfortunately requires you to dig out your TOB CD each time you wish to play. A minor annoyance.
(3) Startup:
There are three options in the new Trials of Battle folder: Installation Utility, TOB Server, and Trials of Battle icon.
I
wish you could have a setting icon so you did not have to go in
the game to change things
After clicking the Trials of Battle icon, you start off watching the into movie, which, at the time, was impressive. Looking at it now, it really does make me simply go “mah” but none the less is interesting to watch and does take me back to the early days of OS/2.
After the movie, the first screen asks you if you want to play a single of Multiplayer game. Surprisingly, I highly suspected there not being any servers setup, so I chose the Single Player Game.
Since you are not playing a multiplayer game, the network settings are grayed out. Really, the only thing you have an option here is the Difficulty level. I know I am jumping forward a little here but Easy is very easy, going to Medium and Hard really notch up the AI and will kick your ass.
The final window before the game allows you to make a new pilot, as you can see, the whole family can join.
Hitting the OK button will take you to the Main Game Window.
(4) The Program:
Trials of Battle came out after Doom, and I think they (Stardock and Shadowsoft) were trying to see if the OS/2 market would bite on something native and cash in, it never really worked out. I think mainly because it never brought you an edge of your seat experience DOOM did, and the single player mode is just you killing BOTS, with no story line.
Where
is the bathroom?
After the setup, you are dropped into the Hanger window. This location is where you get to view your hovertank and add/remove parts, check your options, and start a “trial”. There is no manual on the CD and I could not find one on the Internet, so it is a “trial” just to get to learn the game.
My initial impression of TOB was that it was confusing to understand, especially without online help. There is limited help available via the big question mark in the Hangar View, all it shows is how the keyboard is mapped out, and while this is nice, we really need something more, otherwise you will be lost for awhile. Hopefully someone with a copy will scan it and send it to me so I can have it for people to download, until then, make sure you keep some time open just to figure out this mess.
To make it more “challenging”, there is no real menu screen so you take your mouse and hunt around until your mouse pointer changes, showing you there is something to click on. An example of this is finding the settings, if you notice the small little computer-box-thingy right above the hovercraft in the picture above, you can click on this and a new window will come up showing you the options menu:
To do a review, I always install and play the game a few times so when I start writing, I don't have to go back too often and redo something that I wrote in error. Talk about annoying. Before I started my review for Trials of Battle, I played the game a dozen times at least just screwing around. Of course, one of the first things I do is go to the options menu to see what I can play with. As most of the games of the time, there are not many things to play with but I did make sure I was doing High Res and Terrain Texture Maps. When I first saw the Show Frame Windows I thought it was to have a number running at the top of the screen telling me how many frames were running, something I have seen in the past since computers were slower at the time.
So I am playing Trials of Battle and a major annoyance is that I cannot find a way to make the game play in a window (a personal preference). During this review though, I upgraded my computer with a much faster processor, I thought it would be interesting to see the frames. I checked on the Show Frame Windows and to my surprise Trials of Battles is now in windows mode...sigh.
*** Ok, so this is embarrassing, I guess TOB is always in a window even if it's full screen, but because I have my eCenter Bar at the top of my desktop, I never saw it. I thought about removing the last two paragraphs but then wanted people to see some of the odd things that happen to me, so maybe someone programming will keep this in mind, when developing a game for a morons like myself.***
Man,
I feel dumb =(
Game play itself is surprisingly entertaining, I had a few false starts playing but when I got in there and actually took the time to play, it was fun. Playing TOB at the "easy" level may be a little less than challenging (when playing against the computer) but it is still fun. And the more advanced levels are anything but easy. I found the jump from easy to medium, a long one.
Basicly, you zoom around in your hovertank, shooting at other hovertanks. In the Arena, there are a few walls, some Modules (Fuel, Oxygen, and Energy) to pick up, and of course, hovertanks, but otherwise, there is not a lot here. Mindless violence is the best I can explain it, though the fun wears off quickly when you first start, if you stick with it for a few sessions, you will get the hang of it, and then the addiction kicks in.
Depending on how you want to play, you can slug it out, run and gun, or somewhere in between. There are options on items you can buy after winning a round that makes the next round more interesting such as better guns, armor, and spare supplies.
I
never even started buying things until round five or six, but when
I did I have a lot of money.
I tried playing the first round straight slug out and I got my ass handed back to me, run and gun seems like the way to go until you can buy better Armor. My issue was I had a hard time controlling the Light Hovertank with the keyboard but after a few minutes of playing I got the idea on how it works and learned the walls are your friends.
There are options to play also by a mouse and a joystick. I did not try the joystick but the mouse controls were worse then the keyboard.
I have three methods of screen capture: Gotcha, PMView Pro, and Screen Grabber, none of them would take a proper picture of the game while running, I would actually get a black screen each time. So the picture above was downloaded off the Internet. I might have been able to get a few pictures if I was running eCS in a virtual session but I am old school and run eCS on it's own computer.
So the screen shot above is a good representative of the game while in the Arena. The main window shows the action, but it is very limited in how much you can see, I wish you could of done a full screen mode but I guess back in the day when this came out, our poor 486 CPU's could not handle it and they thought computers would never go faster.
The center window shows (I think) Fuel, Power, Oxygen, and energy. There are modules that are scattered along the ground which helps slightly to raise them back up. From what I saw though, only if Oxygen goes to zero you get kicked out. Technically you never die, you just get sent out to the dock to repair your hovertank and then you can go back into the fray.
You
will see this a lot when you first start.
After each round, you get a message:
Ya...who
is your daddy!
You might also get a promotion which allows you to buy more crap, and isn't that what life is about?
You will also need to constantly try to upgrade and improve your vehicle by purchasing more advanced armor, weapons, and equipment as the combat rounds become more difficult. I did not figure this out for awhile, but it worked out better for me since when I did learn how to buy things, I was able to get whatever I wanted. Kill Points are awarded for each vehicle you destroy during combat. The higher the rank of the opponent whose vehicle you destroy, the more Kill Points you will be awarded. You can also earn Kill Points by selling the pieces of equipment that you pick up in the Arena (if you don't want to use them yourself, of course). Also, the Arena's terrain and environmental conditions (visibility and gravity) can change from round to round. You don't want to get stuck with a loaded down Heavy Battle Pod in high gravity conditions. You have the ability to store or sell equipment that you don't need or don't want for the next combat round.
It actually got damn addicting once I gave it a shot and I figured out some of the basics. I found myself trying to play one more round, and then again, and again.
Of course it's the multiplayer that is what Trials of Battle was made for but there were no servers running and so I had no one to play the game with. So sad...
In setting up a server, you can run it via LAN, Modem, and TCP/IP. Obviously TCP/IP will be the standard plays on now-a-days and you can play up to 12 people. I am thinking with a full group of players, it would be hella fun, hopefully with Trials of Battle now easily downloaded, there might be a group of us that can jump on for an hour and beat the crap of each other!
(5) Final Thoughts:
There are some games you just have to give some time to get you hooked, Trials of Battle was that to me. When I actually first started playing this game I thought it was horrible. With no instructions to find anywhere I gave up quickly. Once I decided to give TOB a real chance, it did become fun, but having to actually focus on that asks the question “why play it in the first place”?
The game is quite stable, and CPU usage was minimal. In window mode, eCS was very responsive and I could easily work on other things (like this review). I suggest staying away from the mouse and never tried the Joystick options because you have to install additional drivers, but the keyboard should be the best of most people.
Like almost all of Stardock's games, for me at least, the sound was there but skipped all over the place making it annoying.
I guess at the end of the day we have to look at what you get here, back when this game came out and was $50.00 to buy it, I would say hell no, not worth it. Since I have it for download now (full version, of course), that point is mute. I do suggest downloading Trials of Battle if you have the patience to give it the time to grow on you. If you do, I think you will find a game in there that is just down right addicting.
(6) Updates after the review:
08-06-11 – Sam Lewis again has hooked us up! This time he has scanned the TOB CD and the registration card! I think we have everything now!
08-03-11 – Sam Lewis has taken the time to scan the original box and the TOB Reference card! I have now place them at the top of the page!
08-03-11 – Kirby Hylton has been awesome enough to take the time to scan the Trials of Battle Manual for us. I have now added it to this page (at the top). Also, Kirby had some additional info about TOB”
“I once talked to Sondra Iverson (of Dean and Sondra Iverson, Game Design & Programming) who said they were working on a 2nd version. That would have been an even greater game, had it come to pass.”
********
Kind
of sad news there but it was interesting that they even discussed
a version 2.
08-01-11 – If anyone has the manual, please scan it and send it to me, I will then share it with everyone!
