Long ago, when I was just a little whelp of... some age that's sufficiently little and whelp-like, I found our entire house bereft of phone, internet, and cable television during one of those rainy spring breaks that flies by too quickly despite offering few opportunities to do anything with it. What's more, my TV was for some reason out of commission at the time, so my technology-addicted self was agonizing over a very long weekend.
My mother, in her infinite mercy, allowed me to drag one of my game systems into my parents' bedroom for part of the day, and even picked up a rental game from Price Chopper (anyone else remember those days?) that she thought I'd like.
This turned out to be a copy of Goblin Commander for the Nintendo Gamecube.
All together, now: WAAAGH!
Of course I immediately threw myself into this game. I had never played any of the Warcraft series at the time, and World of Warcraft was still several months away in late 2003, but somehow I was still drawn to a game all about non-evil goblinoid creatures as if by instinct. Probably because I somehow managed to sympathize with or find a few of the orcs from the Lord of the Rings films charming.
Somehow.
You'll notice I was very quick to mention Warcraft in this post. That is because there are certain massive similarities between the universes, as I later discovered after delving into WoW and its precursors for a decade. I will try to point all of these parallels out after I'm done rambling and waxing nostalgic.
The story starts us off with an introductory historical narrative by a mysterious baritone voice while we are treated to a crawl of the map of the land of Ogriss. The goblins of this world are not a native, evolved species, and were instead created from scratch as servants and laborers by the ambitious human sorcerer Fraziel. Fraziel put the five goblin clans (the mining Stonekrusher, deforesting Hellfire, lightning-channeling Stormbringer, swamp-farming Plaguespitter, and ancient technology-scavenging Nighthorde) to work building a "Great Machine". The goblins dutifully labor toward what Fraziel promised them would be a source of untold power for them all.
Then it gets sabotaged and explodes.
Fraziel dies amid the wreckage.
Grommel, chieftain and head foreman of the Stonekrusher clan, gets framed for Fraziel's murder in his efforts to figure out what the hell happened, causing the other four clans to rise up against him and his people. With picks, hammers, rocks and bullwhips in hand, this motley bunch of miners goes on the offensive to try and uncover the truth before their people are torn apart by war. Grommel also happens to possess the power to transform into a ball of energy that is the literal cursor of the game, so he takes to the air to command his troops for the bulk of the actual game.
Goblin Commander suffers from the same clunkiness that most console-based RTS games experienced up until... well, it's still a thing, really. Unit selection was limited and cursor movement was slow, though base management was fortunately very minimal. Each clan had one or more Shrines on a map from which units would spawn, and where the game's two resources were pooled: gold, and souls. Neutral buildings could occasionally be fought over, including Alchemist shops where one side could obtain magical aid. One of the big draws of the game was that, with enough upgrades, gold, and souls, you could summon your clan's Titan. This massive creature was directly controlled by the player, and was significantly stronger than most units. The Stonekrusher titan is, appropriately enough, a Stone Ogre.
Majestic.
I definitely struggled against the controls a little as I played, but that didn't seem to dampen my enjoyment of the game as a whole. I don't remember it being too terribly long, because I was able to finish it before the end of that long weekend.
As Grommel advances through the locales of Ogriss, defeating the heads of the other clans who oppose him, he absorbs the clans and gains access to their units. This growing confederation of tribes eventually corners the Nighthorde clan, whose leader, Naxus, was the one who sabotaged the Great Machine. As it turns out, the Great Machine was actually a massive weapons factory which was able to produce hundreds of magical bombs capable of stealing the souls of everything killed by them. Fraziel was going to use these bombs to sap all of the soul energy from Ogriss, presumably including his own goblin servants, in order to reshape the world in his image and pave the way of conquest into other worlds through ancient portals called Moongates, which the Nighthorde clan had originally been tasked with unearthing. Naxus wanted this near-omnicidal power for himself however, and so offed Graziel and framed Grommel so that he'd rise to the top.
The game ends deep in the pits of the world, with all of the other goblins, including a traitor faction of Nighthordes, cornering and defeating Naxus. He lights one of the bombs in the caves before legging it through a Moongate however, trying to escape and kill as many of his pursuers as possible. Grommel manages to throw the bomb through the gate behind Naxus, destroying the gate and presumably killing him in an ambiguous Event Horizon-esque moment.
Finally, with his people united under him, Grommel poses on a mountaintop and announces his intention to find a purpose of their own with master and machine now gone.
For anyone with a passing knowledge of Warcraft lore, you might have already picked up on the similarities between the goblins here, and the orcs there. Ogriss is essentially Draenor, and the clans of goblins working together toward a great goal are the Horde with less demonic influence. Fraziel is very similar in function to Medivh the corrupted human archmage, or perhaps the orc shaman Ner'zhul with the tragic backstory bits left out. Naxus meanwhile is a power-hungry usurper like Gul'dan, and his Nighthorde clan seems to me to be as sneaky and clandestine as the Shadow Council full of warlocks and their ilk. Even the Moongates leading to other worlds amid unstable explosions resembles the twilight hours of Draenor during the Second War, when orcs who were of the opinion of "Screw this, I'm outta here!" were fleeing a losing battle through portals whose arcane energies were in turn tearing the planet apart.
On the other side of things, Grommel, chieftain of the most orc-like clan by proportions, seems to combine the heroic elements of Orgrim Doomhammer and his successor Thrall, as civil war victors and saviors of their people, respectively. Grommel even wields a hammer in cutscenes similar in size and design to the Doomhammer. His name seems light it could be evocative of Grommash Hellscream at first glance, but he bears no real resemblance to that ambivalent character at all.
All in all, the game was one of those odd titles with middling-to-decent review scores you'd probably only ever find in the store bargain bin. But I had fun with it, which is why I'm always slightly disappointed that it was a very stand-alone title, and that it didn't even get a proper PC port, where I think it could have performed way better overall. Objectively speaking, sales didn't merit the sequel that was planned. The company in charge of making it, the US division of Jaleco Entertainment, moved on to other projects until it seemed to quietly go defunct sometime around 2008. Wherever the property rights are, if they even exist, is a mystery to me.
I'm not counting on it, but maybe someday we'll get another game similar to this out of the quirky indie market.
SOMEDAAAY!
On a more positive note looking forward, there are games somewhat similar to this in concept out there, but different in execution. Possible for the best, really. I regret not helping its Kickstarter, but the game Goblins of Elderstone might someday give me my goblin RTS fix, but this time elaborated into a full-fledged city simulator with more building, worker management, and stupid levels of cuteness.
I don't have another shallow, one-word response
to this picture like the others. I just really like it.
They're really charming little buggers.
No comments:
Post a Comment