Throwback Thursday - The Mines of Titan
Today’s story is about the computerized masterpiece “Mines of Titan”. A friend had this back in high school and I have some very fond memories of the game. It was one of my earliest forays into rpgs.
But before I get into that, I should let some of our younger players know that this game came on an actual 5-1/4” floppy disk, and if I remember correctly there were four or five in the box.
I don’t remember much of the plot. The main guy had crashed his ship or something like that and gotten stranded on the Jovian moon, Titan (“Jovian”, like how I slipped an actual astronomical name in there? I do). Anyway, the main guy controlled by the player is trying to raise money to get off of Titan. If I remember correctly, we were supposed to find a missing city and find out what had happened to the settlers living there.
My friend who owned the game played the main character. Another friend played one of the first guys he recruited and I played “the chick”. I’m pretty sure my character’s name was Janice. But that doesn’t matter. Combat was turn-based so you’d click on your character and then on where you wanted the character to move, what weapons you wanted to use, who you wanted to shoot at and so on. You earned points to spend on skills and attributes based on how well the character did in a fight. This is where the game became gloriously unbalanced.
The distance you could move and the number of actions you could take when you get there was determined by your character’s Dexterity (or Agility or whatever it was called in this game). Being the chick, I was fairly weak but was the Proverbial Nimble Little Minx. I could run thirty or forty feet, jump up onto a table, shoot about 15 guys and then knife someone else while the other two characters, while far more durable could take something like two steps and shoot one guy if he was close by.
Janice, with her high Dexterity score excelled in combat. She was racking up kill after kill and earning more points, which were then fed into Dexterity and weapon and armor skills (Pistol, Blade, Heavy, etc) allowing her to off even more thugs and goons and earn even more Xp faster than either of her male teammates.
We mostly wandered around town getting in fights, killing everyone we ran into and then going either to the training center to “level up”, the casino to gamble away our loot (I think that was Player One’s main thing) or the hospital to recover from wounds (We spent so much time there that Player Two eventually trained to become our medic). Then I topped out. I had learned so many skills and had improved them to my character’s max that I couldn’t actually advance any further so when we finally got a hold of some Golem Armor, I couldn’t become proficient in it. The guys, who had plenty of room to build up their skills were stomping around the city in these fantastically-invulnerable suits, shrugging off hits from missiles and grenades like they were nothing while I was restricted to “Regular” Heavy Armor.
Compared to what's available now, the graphics were horrible. There were some props included in the boxed set (I think - like a weapons catalog and maybe a map and/or story about the history of the town you were looking for). I don’t think we ever actually finished the story but I had an absolute blast playing this game.
But before I get into that, I should let some of our younger players know that this game came on an actual 5-1/4” floppy disk, and if I remember correctly there were four or five in the box.
I don’t remember much of the plot. The main guy had crashed his ship or something like that and gotten stranded on the Jovian moon, Titan (“Jovian”, like how I slipped an actual astronomical name in there? I do). Anyway, the main guy controlled by the player is trying to raise money to get off of Titan. If I remember correctly, we were supposed to find a missing city and find out what had happened to the settlers living there.
My friend who owned the game played the main character. Another friend played one of the first guys he recruited and I played “the chick”. I’m pretty sure my character’s name was Janice. But that doesn’t matter. Combat was turn-based so you’d click on your character and then on where you wanted the character to move, what weapons you wanted to use, who you wanted to shoot at and so on. You earned points to spend on skills and attributes based on how well the character did in a fight. This is where the game became gloriously unbalanced.
The distance you could move and the number of actions you could take when you get there was determined by your character’s Dexterity (or Agility or whatever it was called in this game). Being the chick, I was fairly weak but was the Proverbial Nimble Little Minx. I could run thirty or forty feet, jump up onto a table, shoot about 15 guys and then knife someone else while the other two characters, while far more durable could take something like two steps and shoot one guy if he was close by.
Janice, with her high Dexterity score excelled in combat. She was racking up kill after kill and earning more points, which were then fed into Dexterity and weapon and armor skills (Pistol, Blade, Heavy, etc) allowing her to off even more thugs and goons and earn even more Xp faster than either of her male teammates.
We mostly wandered around town getting in fights, killing everyone we ran into and then going either to the training center to “level up”, the casino to gamble away our loot (I think that was Player One’s main thing) or the hospital to recover from wounds (We spent so much time there that Player Two eventually trained to become our medic). Then I topped out. I had learned so many skills and had improved them to my character’s max that I couldn’t actually advance any further so when we finally got a hold of some Golem Armor, I couldn’t become proficient in it. The guys, who had plenty of room to build up their skills were stomping around the city in these fantastically-invulnerable suits, shrugging off hits from missiles and grenades like they were nothing while I was restricted to “Regular” Heavy Armor.
Compared to what's available now, the graphics were horrible. There were some props included in the boxed set (I think - like a weapons catalog and maybe a map and/or story about the history of the town you were looking for). I don’t think we ever actually finished the story but I had an absolute blast playing this game.
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