In tomorrow's almost wholly automated world, the employment-starved population is fed by the leisure industry. Gone are today's more traditional pursuits though. Music, cinema, the theatre - even video games - are joys of the past. The entertainment medium of the future is DreamTracks: recorded patterns of pure imagination produced by Dreamers.
Visit foreign lands, planets or solar systems from the comfort of your own armchair. Smell, touch, taste, hear… LIVE the dreams of others imaginative enough to produce them. Others like Chad, a successful Dreamer whose career was about to rocket… Until he discovered that his latest Track had been laced with deadly subliminal images capable of destroying the minds of anyone who experiences it. Horrified by the possibility of even greater global vegetation, Chad sets out with his opposite sex partner, Kaf-E (complete with symbolic appendage), to recover and destroy the Master Track from the DreamTrack Corporation's High Security building.
What got me interested in this game was that I found it listed as an FPS on Bunny Abandonware. And this is interesting, because it was developed two years before Wolfenstein 3D, which is usually considered the first FPS ever, and got ported to DOS the following year.
Is it an FPS? I can't be sure, I could not play it. Every time I started it up, it did nothing for a while, then went into a demo mode, refusing to acknowledge any commands. At least I could take some screenshots. From what I read about it, it certainly comes near. It could probably be better compared with a game like System Shock.
Interphase is an Amiga game, and it was far more popular with the Amiga crowd than it ever got with the PC crowd. This is not a rare phenomenon. Different computer systems attract different people, and I think Lemmings is one of the few successful Amiga games that was successful on the PC too.
Interphase is a first person shoot-em-up taking place in cyberspace (a visual simulation of the inside of a computer system). The problem is that it doesn't know that it's a FPS—it desperately wants to be a simulation or deep hacking game instead. But what it boils down to is that Interphase is a shoot-em-up just like Quake is a shoot-em-up. It has levels, obstacles and objectives just like any other FPS and it's just a shame (for Interphase) that they probably forked out a hefty sum for the Neuromancer licence to produce this game.
Despite all the creative designs in the game, Interphase is at the end of the day a letdown due to confusing 3D graphics and difficult interface. The novelty of puzzles and obstacles you face in 3D also wear off relatively quickly, and soon Interphase simply becomes another run-off-the-mill action game that could have been a lot more. For a better use of Neuromancer license, play Troy Miles/Interplay's classic Neuromancer instead.
This game is definitely recommmended to all but pure action addicts—the puzzles the game offers require quite a lot of lateral thinking which might bore those looking for instant fun. With its unique mix of 3D action, puzzlesolving and intriguing plot, Interphase creates an experience which would probably make a wonderful Science Fiction novel or movie—which is quite refreshing since it is usually the other way around.
