What is it?
TRANSARCTICA, a giant steam-engine, a monster of wind and fire, belching out huge clouds of smoke and steam across an ice-locked landscape, searching for the Earth's lost Sun…
Welcome to the world of Transarctica, a new and exciting concept in strategy and adventure gameplaying.
- Plan and build your own train with more than 40 different classes of wagon.
- Realistic depiction and handling of a leviathan 1000 ton steam engine capable of pulling a hundred carriages.
- Tense wargame element, battles between trains feature sabotage, missiles, cannons, mines, infantry…
- Game unfolds in real time: you must constantly plan and update your strategy to outwit the war-trains of the Viking Union.
- Trade between towns for mammoths, machinery, slaves etc… and manage natural resources such as coal and lignite.
- Frighteningly realistic scenario of a possible future for our planet.
Transarctica and Arctic Baron are one and the same game. The only difference is the name of the engine.
Like many European games, and many Amiga games in general, Transarctica defies the usual classifications, which were created mostly for US PC games. It has been called an adventure game with strategy elements, or a strategy game with adventure elements. It has many similarities with role-playing games, too, and fans of this genre might well enjoy it.
In Transarctica, you are in command of a huge railroad engine which you drive through a world frozen over in a new ice age. The engine can pull up to a hundred cars, which can contain goods you deal with, including mammoths and slaves, barrack cars which house soldiers, or a huge gun on rails.
For you will act as a merchant between the various city to obtain the precious coal needed for fueling your iron behemoth, or new cars that will improve your trading and your fighting power, for sometimes you will be attacked by enemy trains. Sometimes you will encounter a herd of wild mammoths (free trading goods if you have the slaves or soldiers to catch them, and the livestock cars to transport them) or nomads who will sell you rare goods at low prices. And all the while you will seek information about the reasons for this new ice age.
In case you should wonder why the Transarctica looks so
different on the box, and why there is no snow: The box art was
not created especially for the game, it is based on
Rodney Matthews'
1985 ink painting Heavy Metal Hero
, which in 1987 had already
been used for the cover of the album Am I Evil?
by the
UK heavy metal band Diamond Head. Click on the picture below
for a larger version.
![[Heavy Metal Hero by Rodney Matthews]](http://www.lauppert.ws/images2/heavy_metal_hero.jpg)
There is only one—official—cheat: On the world map, move the cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen, and Ctrl+Alt+click (Alt+Command on the Mac). You will see all the mobile units, color-coded as follows:
| Amiga/Atari | PC/Mac | |
|---|---|---|
| Enemy Trains | Green | Yellow |
| Hordas | Black | |
| Nomads | Red | |
| Mammoth Herds | Purple | Green |
Employing this cheat is useful in regard to the Viking Union trains, otherwise it's a bit like playing Pac-Man with invisible ghosts.
There are rumors floating around the Internet that clicking the same way into some other corner will give you a "supertrain;" or, reduce the number of enemy trains; or, give you a secret scenario. These are probably just that, rumors. The above cheat was published by Silmarils in their official solution, and it works in all the versions.
There were two versions of the graphics: 16-color for ECS and Atari ST, 256-color for AGA, Falcon, DOS and Mac.
The PC version has a reduced musical score. It will run under pure DOS only, and will run on a 286. It runs well on DOSBox. You will have to experiment a bit with the cycle setting: too many will screw up the sound, too few will make battles excruciatingly slow (a general problem of the DOS version).
The Mac port came a bit later, in 1994 or 1995. It has the full musical score, and is uninspired, but not badly done. It feels a bit like playing on an emulator. I played it both on my Performa 630 and on my Macintosh IIcx without problems, but it won't run on PowerMacs.
The interface needs some getting used to. Information often pops up only as long as you hold the mouse button down, and to save or load a savegame you have to type in the name, the only time the game uses a keyboard at all. Numbers, be it in a name for a savegame or be it in a menu, must be entered over the numeric keypad only. Ending/restarting the game is only possible by committing suicide (!), which can be done only when you have access to the boudoir car. So unless you are playing it on some sort of emulator, you cannot end a hopeless battle prematurely except by powering down your computer.
Copy protection is a manual check. It is triggered when you enter Sparta or Berlin. Since these are the only places where you can recruit soldiers early in the, it's hard to pass by. Home of the Underdogs has a bad scan of the manual, but it serves the purpose. Lost Treasures Fr has a crack, which is intended to use with the version they have for download (it has already been applied to the HOTU version). It does not remove the abovementioned manual check, I don't know what it does at all.
