Missed Classic 27: Antheads: It Came From The Desert II (1990) - Introduction

Written by TBD

It Came From the Desert was recently voted the best Missed Classic we've played to date.

I heartily accept this award on behalf of the town of Lizard Breath

Oh great! This guy's back! He ran out of town at the height of the crisis last time. Surely someone in town has to be a better mayor than him.

With It Came From the Desert getting that accolade, it seems like an appropriate time to look at the sequel.

In true B-movie style, the first game ended with “The End... or is it?” covering my screen, thus leaving itself open for a sequel. Of all Cinemaware's games why did they choose It Came From the Desert for a sequel? I think Cinemaware's David Riordan explains it best:

“Every time we put out a game, we carefully evaluate the responses from reviewers, industry professionals and game players... When Desert 1 came out and got rave reviews, won awards, sold thousands of copies and so on, we knew we had to do a follow-up. The Desert gaming environment is constructed to allow for alternative scenarios, so we didn't have to start over from scratch.”

I particularly like the quaintness of 80s game developers getting excited about selling thousands of copies.

“When the original Desert started to get too big, we split these ideas off into a separate scenario which eventually became Desert II: Antheads. One idea that never made it into either game, unfortunately, was the original plan to have multiple monsters – mutant bunnies, lizards and so on... after looking at the disk space requirements for doing one creature convincingly, we decided to do one creature well, rather than multiple creatures poorly.”

I'm not sure if I find their multiple monster idea awesome or ridiculous.

I keep changing my mind over whether this game should be classified as a sequel or an expansion pack – it calls itself a 'data disk' but most reviews call it a sequel as it has a totally different story.

The game was only available via mail order in the US – but boxed versions were available in Europe. Like most expansions, Antheads required the original game to work.

They had originally planned to make it as a data disk for the first game, but made enough changes that they had to do something different. As they'd already published the purchase price, and sending multiple floppy disks would have been too expensive, when you receive the game the first thing you have to do is get 3 blank disks, run the copy program on the Antheads disk and spend 20 minutes sitting around, swapping disks when prompted.

Ah, nostalgia

For those of you who pay attention to the tags sitting silently at the bottom of our posts, you'll see that It Came From the Desert II is a 1990 game while It Came From the Desert was a 1991 game. Before you start worrying about the stability of the space-time continuum I'll let you know that the original game came out on the Amiga in 1989 but didn't hit the PC until 1991 – while this game came out on the Amiga in 1990 and wasn't ported to any other platforms.

The game comes with a manual of sorts (seems to be just a single piece of paper printed on both sides based on what I've seen) which includes a little background information on our hero, Brick Nash!

Of course, what's a Cinemaware game without a cinematic intro...

The intro uses exactly the same graphics as the first game's intro, but has a different voice-over. 

"Not once, in the five years since the defeat of the mutant ants, had anyone suspected that there was a second queen - thirsting for the destruction of all that is human!"

And so, our game begins! I wake up in a house with two people looking at me

Even after playing the first game for hours I never knew they were related

One thing I notice straight away is that there's a lot more dialogue in this game. The opening conversation goes on for quite a bit, and Brick has a much more noticeable personality than his predecessor, Dr Greg Bradley.

Fortunately I was found by people who were sympathetic to my cause. Biff and Dusty both know who I am and that my actions have saved the town. I also had help from the local mechanic, Elmer, who towed my truck where the government will never find it.

Less fortunately, the entire reason I went to Lizard Breath in the first place, Dr. Wells, has been dead for five years. Biff will take me to the doctor's old lab when things cool down

After Dusty and Biff leave I enter the map screen, and receive a bulletin that G-men are scouring the town looking for a plutonium hijacker (me!)

I check out the pub and overhear some conversations

• some tough guys promise to beat up the hijacker if they ever find him
• Billy Bob's now nothing but a bum, which makes me smile – I don't like that guy
• Benny's shift at number 1 pump finished a while ago but he hasn't arrived yet

I make my way to the Ore plant in order to get to Mine 1.

Looks like a puzzle

It's a very simple puzzle, I have three possible responses. I choose to tell him I'm a day laborer and he lets me past because everyone seems to be coming down with the flu. I go from mine to mine, but the second miner gets suspicious and makes a phone call as I leave. At the third mine I get threatened by the miner who just received the phone call. I sensed a fight coming up so went back to the ore plant. But when I got there the mine super blew a whistle and a G-man popped up from behind a shed and attacked me with a knife. According to wikipedia, a G-man is an FBI agent.

Apparently when FBI agents find dangerous fugitives, they get in knife fights with them

Well, in my first small adventure I encountered some minor dialogue puzzles, which the first game didn't have, and got myself stabbed by an FBI agent. I played a lot more and ended up failing to save the town. This game only gives me 10 days to save the town whereas the first game gives me 15. But I'm getting better at the action sequences and so expect better luck in future attempts.

Now get your score guesses in before our next episode, where we find out why the game got its title, meet a few of Lizard Breath's new residents and attempt to break into a safe!

To help you with the score;

• I gave the Amiga version of It Came From the Desert a PISSED rating of 57, but there was some suggestion I might have gone a little too high.
• The June 1990 issue of ACE Magazine rated Antheads 902 (presumably out of 1000) and said it was better than its predecessor. The same issue gave Loom 845. Will I agree and rate this game above Loom's PISSED rating of 65?

Session time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Total time: 1 hour 45 minutes