The story:
Two hundred years in the future, a gigantic cylindrical starship appears in our solar system. The International Space Agency decides to send a manned expedition of twelve astronauts to explore the mysterious ship, make contact with its inhabitants and ascertain their purpose.
A few days after their arrival, the commander of the mission, Valeriy Borzov, mysteriously dies during a routine medical examination. We are sent as a replacement.
The game:
Rama is a point & click game released in 1996 based on Arthur C. Clarke’s books Rendez-vous with Rama and Rama II, a fact I most definitely only researched after recording as you’ll be able to hear in the videos.
The game plays similarly to Myst and features Full Motion Videos and actors depicting many characters from Rama II.
I will be playing the game and explaining it’s various puzzles, joined by my co-commentators Devious Vacuum and Geop.
Rules:
Please do not spoil puzzles or plot points we have not seen yet.
Rama! I hardly expected to see an LP of this anywhere, so I’m hyped right off the bat. I first heard of this game through a review in Ross Scott’s Game Dungeon series, which got me into the books and eventually lead to me picking up a copy of this odd alien game, too.
I’m glad the crew impressions went down like they did. The reality-show crew getting lifted from Rama 2 was the best choice for this game; while the crew in Rendezvous with Rama were mostly believable, the FMV scenes in the game wouldn’t be nearly as memorable without the overt drama.
Loving the LP so far. The team’s commentary is a great mix of humor and information about the game, and the earnest reactions to the weirdness of Rama can’t be beat.
I love how everything was just going fine and dandy and then WHAT’S UP SPACE BAT TIME happened. And then it just gets weirder from there. I love this game already.
I read Rendezvous With Rama, uh, let’s see…sixth grade, so I was about…carry the two, convert to base-8…uh, well, let’s just say it was some time ago. It as one of the fist Clarke books I read, and it filled me with such an incredible sense of wonder! Here was this BDO that was utterly inscrutable, and it was being explored by this group of scientists, and it was all so exciting!
So yeah, looking forward to this is what I’m saying.
Oh dip, I owned this game back in the day. Had a few problems with the endgame but we’ll save that for when we get there. Let’s just say I was a dumb child and leave it there.
As far as I remember, the doctor greeting you is the main character in the novels and the player character doesn’t exist. Valeriy (which is the way you write that name in russian for a man by the way) Borzov dies at the beginning of the novel but no one is sent to replace him.
I never did manage to accomplish anything even in just this upcoming area as a kid, I recall it all being fairly obtuse even by adventure game standards but maybe I was just a dumber kid than I thought? But it pointed me towards the books which I ended up liking a fair bit!
No it was definitely obtuse as all hell. Like from a raw, gritty, realism standpoint, it’s spot on. You’re on a spaceship created by an alien species with no information and no guarantee they even think in a way you can comprehend so you’re stuck bumblefucking around the place hoping you stumble onto some kind of insight.
From a you’re-playing-a-game standpoint, there’s like nothing fun about that because you’re not really getting any feedback about what you’re doing right or wrong to build on, you just keep getting told “no, wrong” until suddenly it’s like “correct, now go again.”
I would argue the game does give you more advice and feedback than say the Myst games (which I love too btw, all 4 of them). I do have some nostalgia tinted glasses for Rama though so I may not be very objective about it.
But it pointed me towards the books which I ended up liking a fair bit!