From Shadowsoft Entertainment Software and Stardock Systems, comes a game that's sure to keep you glued to your screen for battle after battle. It's called Trials of Battle and is described by its creators as a cross between Quake and Mech Warrior.

The plot is fairly simple. You have been abducted by aliens, referred to as the "Intendants", who have taken you to their proving grounds on a far away planet. There you will face combat in hovertanks in an arena, against other abducted aliens. For every opponent vehicle you destroy, you gain kill points, used for repairs to your vehicle and for purchasing upgraded weapons, armour, and other assorted gadgets.

You must progress in rank, striving to become "Battle Master", and reflect well on the human race. Besides that, increasing your rank results in more technology for your vehicle being available, and you'll need it, because one of the gee-whiz features in this game is that your opponents, as well as being computer controlled players, can be human players via the Internet, LAN, modem, or a combination of all three!

Installation

I noted that even with a full installation, you are still required to have the CD-ROM in the drive in order for the game to start (unless you are connecting to a networked game server that does have the CD present). This is undoubtedly a copy protection issue and unfortunately requires you to dig out your TOB CD each time you wish to play. As well, some folks like to play an audio CD in the background and turn off the game music, as one might do with Quake. While you can use a separate stereo, the experience is more intense if you are using headphones (and all the sound is going through them). A minor annoyance.

Under the heading of cool, the game's sound effects and the opening AVI are available in the installed directory. I imagine it would be possible to substitute files of your own choosing by simply replacing the files. Say, doesn't that twip.wav file sound familiar? It's from OS/2 Warp 3.

Performance

While there is an options dialogue (GIF, 8k) with various options that can be turned off to improve performance, there seemed to be no option for brightness control. This is a big issue for myself, as my monitor is already cranked to its limits. Most of the good DOS games (for example DOOM) have brightness controls and with them I have no trouble. In TOB I have a lot of trouble seeing the darker items like the walls. When you die, for example, there is a white flash and only during this flash did I notice that the walls are not solid black, but that they have patterns on them. In some cases I can't see the walls at all until I hear the sound of my hovertank hitting them.

I did not realize that there is a brightness, or gamma correction, feature until after speaking with the game's developers. Although I had the final production version of the CD to test, I did not have the final documentation. To my knowledge, this earlier version of the documentation did not mention this feature and, more importantly, the game does not list the keys (+ and - while in combat) in its "Cockpit Controls" when Help is displayed.

This game fully exploits new OS/2 features such as DART (Direct Audio Real Time) and DIVE (Direct In Video Extensions) which is why it has such good performance overall.

Appearance

For the most part, the graphics are very slick, however there are a few odd problems that occur that probably could have been easily fixed. The first one is that the designers of the game choose a really small font (GIF, 3k) for most of the text. Second, in almost every dialogue box that displays scrollable information the text does not fit properly. In this example (GIF 7k), about 6 characters on the right side get cut off and you have to scroll over (GIF, 7.2k) to see the repair costs, something which should not be necessary given the tons of screen real estate remaining (this problem occurred in both 640x480 and 800x600 video resolutions).

Multi-Player Galore!

One thing I did note was that if you selected any of the options such as LAN, Modem, or TCPIP by setting it to one player or higher, it is not possible to set it back to zero without going to the previous screen and returning -- a small bug.

As well, while a game can normally have 12 players, once Modem is selected, the total number of players can only be 6.

One of the game's beta testers informed me (and I can confirm this by checking the Stardock TOB tips page) that the server has to be on an ISDN or better connection to the Internet for proper multiplayer (more than 2) game play due to the amount of information that has to be sent out continuously to each player. Ideally the server machine would not be used to play, just to act as the server. In any case, if you are connecting with a couple of friends, make sure that the person with the best bandwidth (and then CPU) is running the server. Stardock is offering to list people with ISDN connections or better on their web page that are willing to be servers.

Game Play

And if you're playing against real humans, strap in and prepare for a great game.

Closing Comments

The game is quite stable, but it is a CPU hog (it is a game, so that goes without saying). However I did find one way to consistently crash it (albeit accidentally). I was double clicking on a hovertank part near the top of the "repair" list in order to repair it, and I accidentally double clicked on the line underneath "Description". This consistently brings the game down with a SYS 3175 error. The moral: watch where you click. Other than this glitch, the game seems to be rock solid.

Bottom Line

Suggested Hardware:
Pentium 75 or better
16MB RAM (20MB? for Warp Connect or Warp V4)
28.8 modem for multiplayer games
OS/2 compatible joystick.

Trials of Battle v1.0

--

[Our Sponsor: Best of OS/2 - News, demos, over 150 products, Hobbes Report and more!]
[Our Sponsor: BMT Micro - Registration site for the best OS/2 shareware applications available.]
[Our Sponsor: ChipChat Tech. Group - 32-bit OS/2 text paging software and Sound Cards.]