Beneath a Steel Sky is one of those games you always heard about, that have become something of a legend. Well, thanks to the developers, and ScummVM, you can now try it out yourself.
If you are using ScummVM on the Dreamcast, DC Evolution has a CD image that you can burn, it also has some special files for use with the Dreamcast only.
After the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy setting of Revolution’s first game, Lure of the Temptress, Revolution decided to go down a completely different avenue with its second adventure game, Beneath a Steel Sky, that of Science Fiction. A bleak vision of the future was imagined, where mind control and medical science combined forces to repress the populace. Leading comic artist, Dave Gibbons, joined the design team to visualise this desperate landscape. The result, released in 1994, was the cult classic Beneath a Steel Sky.
Beneath a Steel Sky (or BASS for short) was first released in 1994 for MS-DOS, Amiga and Amiga CD32. In 2003 the game was made freeware by its creators; the sourcecode was given to the ScummVM team to incorporate BASS' Virtual Theatre engine into ScummVM. Today, Beneath a Steel Sky is playable under a wide range of operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, MacOS and BeOS, thus making this great game truly immortal.
The graphics were somewhat blocky, the music sounded like a series of (at times annoying) mobile phone ring tones, and some of the dialogue was rather corny, but all up I had a fair bit of fun with Robert Foster and his robot pal Joey.
There must be over a hundred screens, and probably there are near to a hundred puzzles, maybe more. Whenever you complete one, it`s always through logical deduction (well, mostly!), and this also helps things bounce along. The only thing perhaps that goes against this game is the fact that it is so massive—at one point in the game, you have access to near on 50 screens, and if you get stuck, it can seem very daunting. But in its favour, BASS looks great, it`s easy to get into, and it plays a great game. Although the game pretty much is linear in that there is only one way to complete the game, that path is never clear to see.
I opened the box and looked at those fifteen glorious disks just waiting to be installed on my hard drive. The first disk installed fine, but when I got to the second disk I began to worry. It had been installing the second disk for over eight minutes. I was tempted to boot the computer and start over, but decided to let it go. Another four minutes passed (twelve minutes all together) and it finally asked for the third disk. I sighed with relief and continued installing.
