A Sense of Place: Midwinter
(1989, Maelstrom Games, played on Atari ST)
The first in a series of posts about my favourite virtual spaces.
I've been hunted from one end of this island to the other. I've been shot at, bombed, almost collapsed from exhaustion and just barely evaded capture in my mission to overthrow the dictator who has taken control of this frozen land. I've spent days in hiding, recuperating from my wounds before putting my skis on and heading back into the frigid wilderness. Now, arriving at a cable-car station, I am allowed a few precious minutes of solace. Nobody can touch me while the gondola makes its way slowly up the mountain. All that's required of me is to sit and watch the scenery, and the pylons that loom out of the fog then disappear behind me like friendly giants.
Midwinter wasn't the first game I played with solid 3d graphics, but instead of spaceships or abstract flat-walled mazes, this felt like a real-world environment. Setting the game on a frozen island was smart. Its undulating snowdrifts and craggy peaks could be convincingly rendered from just a handful of polygons and a limited palette, and the draw-distance-limiting fog was a technical necessity that only added to the sense of atmosphere. The sequel, "Flames of Freedom", was set on a lush tropical island but failed to pull it off as believably.
That the cable-car journey took a couple of minutes during which time you, the player, could do nothing other than look out the windows of the gondola... that it could, in fact, be quite boring... made it all the more real, and was something that I don't think I'd seen in a video game before. Something about the mundanity of taking what was effectively public transport from one part of a virtual world to another appealed to me, much like riding the bus around the cities of Mercenary III. (And the taxis in later Grand Theft Auto games, for that matter.)
I was never able to complete Midwinter the "correct" way, by traveling the island, hunting important characters, using your knowledge of their relationships, friendships, and feuds to recruit them to your cause. I did, however, discover a shortcut which could end the game without requiring you to ever have to talk to a single NPC. Simply make it to the top of a mountain, use the hang-glider to fly over the enemy's defenses and into the heart of their base, and blow it up with dynamite. But the best part was taking the cable car to get there.
