Tuesday 6 August 2024

Game 154: Inca II: Nations of Immortality (1993) – Introduction

By Ilmari
I see there’s a World War I pilot ace in this game. I wonder whether he will fly a Sopwith Camel

Among the usual marketing puffery (“truly interactive movie”, “a great variety of breathtaking landscapes” etc.) I see an interesting detail: the Inca series is supposedly an ethnofiction saga. Ethnofiction, a subgenre of docufiction, should lie somewhere between pure ethnographic documentary and outright fiction, picturing real native people, but introducing fictional elements not really grounded in reality. For instance, in an early example of the genre, Moana (1926), the director persuaded young Polynesian girls to change their Western-style clothing to traditional grass skirts (they were filmed topless, of course, because nothing makes a documentary more interesting than an ethnographic study of female nudity) and bribed a young man to go through an outdated and gruesome tattooing ritual (whatever it takes to make your ratings go up).

Getting back to the Inca series, this means that although the games contain fictional elements, they should also have a strong documentary foundation. Cocktel Vision must have used the latest technology to contact the well-known Incan space empire and to take some breathtaking shots of their spaceships and especially of the space galleons of their enemies, the Spanish space conquistadores. Impressive, indeed, and no wonder then that there was a demand for a sequel.
Speaking of Sopwith Camel, Snoopy’s doghouse is not just able to fly (even in space!), but it is also bigger on the inside than on the outside, leading me to conclude that we are essentially dealing with a TARDIS, which makes Snoopy the world’s second most famous Timelord (the most famous being, obviously, James Bond)
Reading the story in the manual, we learn that the hero of the first game, Eldorado, became Grand Inca, ruling over Four Quarters of the Empire, known as the Tawantinsuyu, which extends across galaxies. Only the Old Lands (the Spanish conquistadors) refuse to join the federation. Recently, with the arrival of a strange and menacing asteroid, interplanetary communications have become increasingly hazardous. Eldorado has called a Council of Sages, made up of representatives from all over the Empire to discuss this new threat.

Unlike in the first game, we are not playing Eldorado, but his son, Atahualpa (named after the last Inca emperor?). At the beginning of the game, he is meant to take an initiation test, to show his worth to be received in the Council.
What, you can’t believe Snoopy is a Timelord, because he is a beagle? I dare to challenge you. Snoopy doesn’t look like a regular dog and several characters have just assumed he is a funny looking kid with a big nose. Furthermore, Snoopy can on occasion communicate with human children through thought balloons, making him clearly a telepathic alien
In fact, I have two tests to choose from: physical test, behind the gate of force, and mental test, behind the gate of wisdom. Not being very wise, I choose the gate of force and am instantly reminded of why I didn’t particularly enjoy the first game. Yes, there are still spaceship simulator phases in the game. This one is supposed to be easy, with simple target practice, where I have to shoot all the statues – lose one and you are out. As you might have guessed, it didn’t go very well.
This space left intentionally blank for you favourite Snoopy factoid (3 CAPs for each you can come up with)
Thus, I was forced to restart and choose the gate of wisdom. We’ll see in the next post what I found there. In the meantime, feel free to place your bets for this masterful piece of ethnofiction.

Session time: 15 minutes
Total time: 15 minutes

33 comments:

  1. I'll be playing along on this one on my own site, which I guess in a bizarre, roundabout way makes it a collaboration? Can't smoothly make a link so I'll just do it the ugly way:
    https://almostafamine.blogspot.com/2024/08/inca-ii-introduction.html
    (I'm already ahead of Ilmari, so spoilers if you care)
    Since Inca I, I've played their earlier space games to completion. Two of them, Galactic Empire, technically aren't space games, they're action-adventure hybrids before that was really a thing, the gameplay is closer to Azrael's Tear than anything else, there's no space combat at all, they just take place on alien worlds. They actually had some nice gameplay twists, the first had a clever plot twist, and this really interesting dialog system, it's just a shame that the controls are very pre-Wolfenstein FPS. (There's also ESS, but that's a straight space simulation and impossible to get running)
    The interesting thing about these are, by all accounts, these were a disappointment to Coktel, so why they greenlit the Inca series afterwards is beyond me.

    Anyway, Inca II, I note that while there's some bullcrap going on with the target section, I didn't have any trouble with it at all. I suspect the whole shooting them in order thing is a red herring, you just have to shoot them all. That said, there's something very wrong about the targeting system in this game, you can't switch targets and your cursor doesn't aim your shots like you'd think. So far, I haven't had trouble, but I'm sure later on I'll get a massive amount of it. There's no skipping combat this time, I'm afraid, the save system simply isn't built to allow you to do that, and I didn't see a skip in the manual.

    That said, compared to the original, this is basically just an Incan flavored space opera game, I don't understand why this is supposed to be some absolutely horrific game worthy of worst game of all time lists.

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    1. Glad to have you aboard! I am also somewhat further in the game than this post suggests. Since people are still making their score guesses, I'll try to reveal as little as I can what I like about the game - especially compared to the first game in the series - but I do admit that even I, knowing almost nothing about space simulators, noted that the targeting system is just weird.

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    2. With MorpheusKitami's track record of getting unbelievably frustrating games to play I half expected this to end up on his plate. When I saw it was Ilmari doing it I thought he had finally dodged a bullet, but looks like he's taking it anyway!

      I'm gonna guess 40, and while Snoopy wasn't ever very big over here I have found a lot of his cartoons on Facebook and finding them genuinely enjoyable have been able to glean the following:

      He has a brother in real estate somewhere I think in New Mexico

      He has a sister who I think is a nurse

      He's the only pilot to ever have been assigned to KP for losing too many planes

      He can petition the great pumpkin for new battle planes apparently

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    3. He has a brother in real estate somewhere I think in New Mexico

      Not a bad guess! Needles is actually in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, barely on the California side of the Colorado River that forms the border with Arizona.

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    4. I mean, compared to some of the shooters I play on my own blog, this is far nicer and simpler, and it probably wasn't designed by someone who hates the person playing it.

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    5. Torbjörn Andesson8 August 2024 at 17:00

      @ShaddamIVth "while Snoopy wasn't ever very big over here I have found a lot of his cartoons on Facebook and finding them genuinely enjoyable"

      GoComics (an affiliate of Andrews McMeel Universal, so I believe it's legitimate) has the whole thing.

      First one: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1950/10/02
      Last one: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2000/01/03

      I think it's reruns after that, except for one final Sunday strip published the day after the death of Charles Schulz: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2000/02/13

      Of course, reading through 50 years of Peanuts strips is going to take a while. I should know, I started long ago and I'm still far from done! (It can get a bit repetitive in large doses.)

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    6. Definitely legitimate. Andrews McMeel was one of the biggest publishing syndicates of newspaper comics. They also had Doonesbury and For Better or for Worse, along with Garfield and some other notables.

      That's pretty much the only thing I miss from printed newspapers. 😜

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    7. "Definitely legitimate. Andrews McMeel was one of the biggest publishing syndicates of newspaper comics."

      Thanks for the confirmation. I can't find my comment any more though, so it may have been removed for having too many links anyway? (Either that or for suggesting that people here might not want to revisit 50 years of modern history. Silly me! 😜)

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    8. Fixed. Gotta love Google's retroactive spam filter.

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    9. McMeel seems to have published pretty much everything of note in the newspaper world, I just checked the other big newspaper strips I know of, Foxtrot, and Calvin & Hobbes, and both were published by them. Was there actually anything of note they didn't publish?

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    10. King Features handled a lot of classic ones, like Family Circus and Hagar the Horrible, among others. The two of them combined controlled most of the comics pages.

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  2. I'll shoot high with 43.

    Also, did you know that Snoopy has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

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  3. I'll guess an almost as high 40, because the graphics seem decent.

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  4. I remember finding the space combat quite difficult in the first Inca game, too, so it's a bummer there's more of the same here. I enjoyed its general world and atmosphere, and of course it was visually pretty impressive for the time, but I've never played this second one.

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  5. I'll guess 30. I feel like the game will annoy you.

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  6. I'll guess 37

    Not a snoopy factoid, but when I was a kid my dad had a little yellow pocket calculator that was woodstock themed (snoopy's little yellow bird sidekick?). I didn't really see much peanuts stuff (wasn't as big across the pond I guess).

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    1. If you were raised as a red-blooded American, Peanuts was ingrained in your soul. The Christmas special is one of the perennial must-sees, and a few years ago there was a lot of drama when the rights to broadcast were taken away from a real TV station and given only to Apple/iTunes.

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  7. Wait, what? Snoopy is a beagle? Wow! (or arf!)
    I played the first Inca game two or three times, but didn't like it at all, so I never even bother to play the sequel. Anyways, I think that I've read someplace that the sequel was better. Only because of this, I will aim really high and bet 45 for the score

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  8. I played this game around 1994 or so, I had already played the first one but got stuck in the first maze I think.

    Inca 2 was really cool that time, I remember sunday's afternoons trying it, enjoying the music and the puzzles. I was already a fan of these french games because I was a fan of Goblins 3, which was my first game by them I think.

    I will say a 47, we'll see

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  9. sorry for the double post, but I just wanted to share that, in my exactly 38 years of gaming (including 2 of pro gaming), my first games which I recall (when I was 2 years old) were Tapper, Squish 'em, Frantic Freddy ... and Snoopy ! all in the classic C64.

    Snoopy was developer by someone named C. Kramer (not related with Seinfeld at all, since it didnt even exist yet), and was a dutch game. I find it fascinating since my life brought me coincidentelly to the Netherlands. The game is a fixed screen platformer with 20 levels. Funnily the developer ran out of ideas in level 16 so it's just an empty screen, and I used to just jump around imagining invisible dangers and enemies.

    The game is sort of a classic, only called Snoopy, so famous that someone made a remake for Windows and added tons of levels and more gameplay around 2010 or so.

    And another life story with this game, last year I finally worked on my own C64 emulator, and now it runs the game I used to play almost 4 decades ago. Was a huge highlight to beat the 20 levels being processed with code I wrote and see the inner workings of that specific game and hardware.

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    1. If the C64 Snoopy you are talking about is the one where the sprites were huge, it is the same I played as a kid. The music of that game is ingrained in my mind

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    2. indeed it is, the music is The entertainer by Scott Joplin, which is funny since the other game I mentioned, Frantic Freddy, has a lot of music by Scott Joplin as well (along with other bands like Queen and ELO)

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    3. This brings up so much memories from my childhood, since that Snoopy game was the only platformer I've ever completed! And yes, that empty room was a bit odd. Then there was one room with an elevator and one with lasers... and didn't each level has its own title?

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    4. I`ve only played it two or three times in a friends house before i got my own C64 (I had only an Atari 2600 by that time), so I never reached that empty room, but the games graphics and music really stuck on my head. Years later, when I watched for the first time The Sting I jump and said: "That is the music from Snoopy!" hahaha

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    5. each level has its name, you are right. The empty level 16 one was I think "No inspiration". Elevator level was I think level 7, and lasers there were many levels.

      Personally, the hardest level and the one I got stuck for years until I turned 4 or 5 was level 12. There's 2 very strict time jumps to do, that were impossible when I was younger. Now I can beat it with eyes blindfolded, lol

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    6. I think I sort of dimly remember that I had the Snoopy game on the 64 and my mom learned enough programming to modify the snoopy sprite into Optimus Prime for me.

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  10. 26 on the grounds that it probably totally sucks.

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  11. Gameplay footage of a possible new Laura Bow game:

    https://adventuregamehotspot.com/blog/2219/is-laura-bow-ready-for-another-adventure

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  12. Snoopy Developer, Cees Kramer.

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    1. that's right, I wonder how is he now, 40 years later

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