ROBOTECH: BATTLECRY (PS2)
Harmony Gold/TDK

The Short Version: Protoculture is a miraculous new energy source that can run a Veritech Fighter a virtually unlimited amount of time. Battlecry, however, runs out of steam early. Still. Robots. Whee.

The Long Version: Let’s put the Robotech franchise’s blenderized pedigree (being a chopped up version of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada with a dash of Megazone 23 if you include the short lived and widely unknown movie) aside for a moment and regard the fiction as the fiction itself. If you’ve read the Jack McKinney novels, (which I might actually reccomend since they’re fairly loose adaptions that don’t have to rely on trying to make mismatched animations seem to flow with one another) it actually makes for a pretty involving universe, and for a time even after I started to ‘know better’ (became acquainted with the original Macross series) I still liked the multi-generational plotline they went for. Well, besides Southern Cross, but nobody seems to miss that one a whole lot. There were a couple brief Robotech ressurections a few years back, though you can be forgiven for missing out on it since the first time was as an inexplicable figure dump toward the end of the Exo-Squad toy line, then the bigger boom that came with the remasted DVD releases and associated merchandise, much of it from Toynami. Among the consumables that came riding out on the battered old spacefortress bandwagon were a handful of video games- a side-scrolling GBA shooter, a rather rightfully obscure Halo knockoff sort of thing based on the normally good Mospeada/Invid arc, and the subject of today’s twisting, billowing missile streams.

Battlecry puts you in the seat of Jack Archer, a relative newbie pilot whose presence is excused because he was friendly rivals with the Big Brother character Roy Fokker in the Big Global Free For All that preceeded the alien spaceship crash which started the whole mess. Really though, I could say ‘you control a smug ace pilot’ and you can fill in the blanks with the typical kind of Bubsy-like witticisms he rolls out in the middle of a fight. I could go on about his bitchy CO/love interest and the plot in general, but honestly, it’s pretty much cut-pasted from the original source. What’s-Her-Face is basically a blonde version of Lisa Hayes. I tuned out the majority of the dialogue, though I’m pretty sure they even had an “old sourpuss” comment in there. But the biggest hit the plot takes against it would take a wordy, annoying digression for non-fans to fully soak in.

There’s a period of the Robotech timeline dubbed the Reconstruction, where after the world is effectively destroyed by 4 million alien warships firing on it at once, the belatedly victorious heroes return to settle down with the surviving aliens who weren’t quite as bad. However, some Zentraedi are too used to a life of fighting to ever give it up, let it down, or run around and desert it, so they… rebel. Naturally, 50 foot humanoids with a mean streak is a problem, especially given how many still have goofy looking battlepods with enough guns on them to keep the other evil aliens from laughing at them. So, the defense forces start a series of patrols to try and keep things in line for everyone who isn’t experiencing roid rage from beyond the moons. Due to the vague duration of the setting, the Reconstruction is home to about 9.99999999999299999999999% of all ‘expanded universe’ fiction and role playing expansions, because there is totally a lot of mileage out of the ‘fly around and fight some Zentraedis in the desert’ scenario.

This is when the largest chunk of the game takes place. Even though you do get to do some space flying, and a handful of setpiece battles borrowed from the series, Robotech: Battlecry basically ends an hour or two in and becomes “Robotech: Everything I Hate About Mech Games.” While the actual game engine is pretty alright, if unrealistic (your missiles are plainly mounted to the underside of the wings in threes, but you really have an unlimited number if you just wait a second for them to regenerate from nowhere, and the gun can only ‘overheat’ temporarily) the things they make you do with it seem utterly determined to squish whatever freedom you might get from flying a transforming spacefighter/robot. I hate escort missions and base defense missions, as a rule in any game. This kind of thing seems to be Battlewhine’s preferred fetish or something, as they combine them at times, plus a dash of ‘carry object to place kthx.’ In one mission, you have to destroy some weapon stockpiles (Whee!) then suddenly retreat to base to protect some large, heavily armored robots that would normally be fine on their own, which is followed by an order to change to jet mode and find a radar plane to escort… somewhere… out over the desert. With no time to breathe, and enemies who are far too eager to wail on that jet before you’re done packing lunches for the seven year olds who probably drove the Destroids you were shielding with your smaller, delicate Veritech. The HUD isn’t especially helpful in this mission since the radar beacon just seems to ballpark where the craft in distress is while you zoom about with some broad asking where the hell you’re going. I don’t know, bitch! Left, apparently!

I guess I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Roast Beeflecry is a cancerously poor game, but it isn’t very inventive or do a heck of a lot with the universe to make it feel much different than “Mechwarrior- but this time you can fly around!” It exists, which is more than we can say for the aborted N64 launch title Crystal Dreams, which debuted with an awesome, smooth looking CG render of a Veritech in its hangar bay, and proceeded to get more and more underwhelming with each screenshot until finally sinking. By the end, the graphic engine looked like three white boxes (your jet?) lobbing ‘impact’ sprites at a green sausage in the background. I’m still not sure whether the initial hype of the ships being so massive it would take up to five minutes to fly across them was referring to their epic hugeness or the slowdown that would probably result! I’m not sure if I’ve heard a game since claim that ‘large stretches of nothing much to do’ was a selling point.

Oh yeah, this game also features multiplayer and unlockable color schemes of various sorts, from the series or not. I’m fond of putting Jack in a generic grunt’s color scheme and pushing mute so I can pretend he’s a red-shirt as I smash nosefirst into buildings. Whoops!