How to do the first hour of a game, compliments of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception (1988)
SummaryIn BattleTech, you're a student living on campus in an elite school and go about your day-to-day businessYou go through progressively more difficult mechwarrior training missions until you get surprise attacked by an enemy house during a (random) training mission, and you can lose your mech or die during this encounterIt's shocking, it's organic and it works as an intro to the gameCompare this to Deus Ex: Invisible War, where the scene is almost the same (student at an elite academy and academy gets attacked) but a whole bunch of things just happen to you all at once, and you're just like "oh"I like to think that old games brought a lot more imagination to game design, since resources were so limited back then. Developers made do with what they had, whether that was 16 colors, "PC Honker" sound, or 2 MB of memory.There was a game I played back in the late '80s called BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception. I've got a pretty hazy memory of most of the game, but the beginning and the end were memorable in quite opposite ways. The endgame was awful (sorry, spoilers) because instead of a boss fight/climax, there was this huge, idiotic puzzle where you had to grab keycards that could only open a specific door, and you could only carry three at one time. So you had to spend hours going back and forth between doors and figure out which cards opened which doors. Trial and error. That's not fun for anyone.As for the beginning, we'll get to that in a sec. For now...Some short historyBattleTech is (was?) a large franchise that started back in the 1980s and revolved around big robots (mechs) fighting each other amid a bunch of political houses backstabbing each other throughout the galaxy.In BattleTech: The Crescent…