Guardians of the PaST : Chaos Engine, The


Title Screen		The world is in Chaos! (1/23)
Splash Screen	Resolution : Low

Overview

What's in the Box (9/11)

Related Items (10/10)

Multimedia

Cheats/Tips (3)

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Publisher	Renegade Software	Type of Release	Retail
Developer	The Bitmap Brothers	Country of Release	France (249 F) Germany (90 DM) Italy (49000 L) United Kingdom (£25.99)
Year	1993	Language	English
Origin	Original Atari ST Game	Packaging	Box: 2 Piece Cardboard
Genre	Shoot'em Up - Run and Gun (topdown)

Requirements
System	ST / STe Enhanced	Required MB	½ mb
Controls	Joystick	Display	Colour Monitor / TV
Players	1 - 2 Players Simultaneously	Hard Drive Installable	No

Technical Details
Number of Disks	2	Protection	RNC disk protection
Drive Type	Double Sided	Software Version
Drive B Support	Unsupported	Preservation Status	No

Development Team
Code	Steve Cargill	Design	Eric Matthews Simon Knight
Additional Code	Mike Montgomery	Project Managment	Graeme Boxall
Graphic Design	Dan Malone	Ingame Music & SFX	Richard Joseph
Title Music	Joi (Farook Joi & Haroon Joi)	Manual Copy	John Penn (Yoyodyne Systems)
Manual Design & Production	Micky D & Desmondo a la turk (Red Cloud)

Software Notes
From The Box	Sometime during the last century, an experimenter with time, space and early computers created a bizarre machine. The inventor’s name was Baron Fortesque. The machine was… THE CHAOS ENGINE Although primitive the machine became incredibly powerful and went crazy, turning ordinary humans and household pets into razor toothed, armour-plated killing machines. Enter six hard nailed mercenaries for hire. The Thug, Preacher, Mercenary, Gentleman, Navvie and Brigand. These ball breakers are armed to the teeth with over 25 weapons and a host of special, destructive devices peculiar to their class. Select two characters to form your party and enter the World of Chaos. The sprawling adventure covers four graphic worlds and 16 levels loaded with fiendish traps, puzzles and secret passages. Get your hands on sawn-off shotguns, molotov cocktails and a huge amount of armament and buy, blag or blast your way through hordes of different monsters to do battle with the ultimate killing machine, THE CHAOS ENGINE.
Concept	The Bitmap Brothers have commented that Chaos Engine was inspired by games like Gauntlet and Crackdown. They thought a game in that style had never been done particularly well, especially on home computers. The idea is simple, after picking a pair of charcters from the six available, the player must work their way through four worlds comprised of four levels each. Along the way the player must solve action based puzzles and find three nodes (large electrical towers) that are hidden around the landscape. Once these nodes are activated the gateway to the next level opens. RPG elements were also deemed important since they had been very successful in Speedball 2 - player attributes for skill, stamina, speed, and intelligence, would be adjustable by the player as the game progressed. Many reviewers at the time of release commented that the mixture of sci-fi and the steam age is very similiar to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's cyber novel, 'The Difference Engine', but Eric Mathews said, "It's a coincidence. We've been working on The Chaos Engine now for two years. The idea actually came about in an effort to divise a scenario a bit more imaginative than the usual defend earth from the aliens plot". The surreal post modern Victorian era depicted in the game is obviously influenced by the sci-fi works of Jules Verne and H.G. Welles. In essence the game combined 19th century Victorian fashions with present day technology.
Development	The development of The Chaos Engine was far from trouble free for the Bitmap Brothers. Development began in early 1991, but various setbacks caused delays that severly hampered progress, as a consequence the release date was pushed further and further back. The main setback was when a designer left halfway through the project. At this point the game was re-assessed and it was found that what they already had wasn't going to fit what they wanted the game to be. The graphics were done Dan Malone who was influenced heavily by the works of Victorian science-fiction writers H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The games features a profusion of heavy pistons and pipes throughout the levels and swiss leather interiors and brass fitting in the power-up screens, all adding to the period feel of the game. Books on Victorian and Edwardian furniture and interiors were even brought in for research purposes. Dan Malone used sketch books to help visualise the way the graphics would appear. The drawing above (left) is an early conceptual sketch of the Gentleman. It would however take several more revisions before Dan arrived at one that made it into the final game. Even at this stage however, you can still see the absurdly exaggerated weapon he's packing. Eric Mathew's intelligence routines for Gods were further developed for Chaos. All the enemy creatures are intelligently minded and do not follow pre-programmed wave patterns. As with Gods, this innovative system of programming ensures the gaming environment is subtly altered to better reflect the player's abilities e.g. fare badly and mutants won't be as ferocious, but will instead act cowardly. One of the most astounding technical feats of Chaos is the way the computer guides a second mercenary around in one player mode. To the player it actually feels like playing alongside a human counterpart. There were restrictions placed on the 'intelligent' computer controlled player (CCP) however. It is only only allowed to do certain things - kill baddies, pick up treasure, and shoot nodes which open level exits - and cannot pick up keys that reveal routes through each stage. As the game progresses the CCP will become more intelligent and as such will seek out more things on screen and defend themselves better. It took a huge amount of time to get the CCP working correctly since it was difficult to get a realistic balance. It was actually quite easy to get a character to work like a drone and follow the player about, or to have him intelligent enough that he whizzes around and does everything. However, if the balance wasn't correct then player would feel cheated. To see if they had succeeded a simple test was devised whereby they set someone up playing a one player game in a room by themselves and then brought people in to watch. Most people couldn't tell which character the person was controlling on screen! In the end therefore they where happy the correct balance had been achieved.
Title Track	The title track used in The Chaos Engine was provided by band Joi. The band consisted of the brothers Farook and Haroon Shamsher. They had established themselves on Rhythm King Records in the late 1980's with a series of critically acclaimed vinyl releases.
Beta Version	An early 3 Player beta version of the game was previewed on the British TV show Gamesmaster, shown below. The reviewer was a very nervous looking Graham Boxall from Renegade Software. At the end of the preview it was stated that the game would be released for the Amiga, ST, and PC formats in the Spring of 1992. In fact it would be another full year before it was actually released for the Amiga and ST, and another two years for the PC. Some screenshots of the beta version were also featured in popular computer magazines of the time, as shown below. When a designer suddenly left half way through development many parts of the game was re-assessed. Amongst the changes was the removal of the third player element as tests had found it to be superfluous to the action and impractical. Although the beta looks very similiar to the final game the control panel is very different as it shows three mercenaries instead of two. In the single player mode the player would control one of these characters while the computer assumed control of the other two. You can clearly see these three mercenaries in the action area of the screenshots. As you can well imagine it would get a bit crowded on screen when the pace picked up!
ST Enhanced	In the game manual it states the game will run only on ST's with 1Mb of memory or any STE. At first glance this seems a tad strange since an STE may also have just 512K of memory. So how can it be for any STE? This is explained by the game's use of hardware scrolling on the STE which ensures it doesn't need to preshift map blocks as it would for a standard ST. This would account for the lower memory requirement for the STE. Despite the hardware scrolling however, the game still scrolled with slight jerkiness while playing. Russel Hayward, co-author of the STeem (STE emulator) confirmed that frame update was every three vertical blanks, meaning a real-world of 17 FPS, and scroll increments of six pixels. The complex AI and the number of sprites, also help to decrease the FPS to the point where it can become noticable to the player. On the STE the game uses 32 colours for all static screens, like the titles and character attribute screens. This was reduced to 16 colours for Ingame screens which would help keep the speed up. In the example shown above, the right hand screenshot clearly has more colour than the left hand screenshot. The liberal use of dithering and dull tones makes it difficult to see any difference without side by side comparisons like this one. Despite the STE having DMA sound hardware no use of it was made, not even for the title music let alone the in-game sampled effects. Again, in the manual, the Brothers state, "Unfortunately, due to the hardware limitations of the ST, there is no sampled speech in the ST versions. All important information is given either by appropriate sound effects or additional graphics". To play 50khz stereo samples on an STE requires little code and virtuaslly no CPU usage, and so it's a little puzzling what these 'hardware limitations' actually were. It's even more puzzling why - at the very least - the title music wasn't enhanced since it plays on a static screen and not in the main game.

Title Viewed	1762	Version Viewed	1590
Title Created	Mon, 17 Jul 2006 13:49:49 +0100	Version Created	Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:03:50 +0100
Title Updated	Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:58:33 +0000	Version Updated	Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:45:46 +0100
Title Updated By	Goldrunner	Version Updated By	Goldrunner
Whats in the Box	11	Related Items	11
Votes	9 from 1 vote	Multimedia Items	0


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