Barracuda: Secret Mission 1

Barracuda: Secret Mission 1

Release type: Shareware
Release date: September 7, 1992
Levels: 13
Author: Mark A. Janelle
Registration bonus: Any available updates + sequel, Barracuda 2
Registration price: $15-30
Related games: none

Barracuda is a weirdly serious adventure-sim... something. Basically, nuclear warheads threaten to blow up the Western world; you need to seek them out on the sea floor, then dive to retrieve them. It's a hugely ambitious game by Game-Maker standards, and involves huge environments and several different play modes.

Stiff and ponderous as the game is, Barracuda is one of the most important games in the Game-Maker library, and such an oddity that it's worth exploring.

Play

Getting lost in Mark A. Janelle's Barracuda

You start off as a blip on a map screen. You move with agonizing slowness in any of the four cardinal directions, half a grid square at a time. All the while, waterspouts randomly swirl around the map. If they hit your ship, well, too bad for you. There's no avoiding them, because once you hit the arrow key the game moves you at the rate it feels like moving you. Still, it all looks clean and professional. And it's certainly unusual.

Once you reach an "X" on the map, the game switches to a side-scrolling procedural submarine section. You dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, and dive, and then scour the sea floor for a wreck to enter. Along the way your sub can shoot torpedoes, though I'm unsure at what. Maybe the game presents some hazards later on; I don't remember encountering any. This section is more of a slow-paced bit of exploration. Again, there's no faulting the presentation; if you ignore the tedium, it looks and feels great.

Finally you arrive at a wreck, and the view shifts again. Now the game involves searching the wreck with a too-fragile diver. Health equates with air. If you get snagged on barbed wire and start to bleed out, you can find replacement air tanks to heal yourself. Makes as much sense as pork chops in a trash can, I guess.

Again the diver moves so, so slowly. And the areas inside the ships are enormous mazes. They don't seem to follow any particular engineering logic; they're just one murky corridor after another, everything looking pretty much the same. And then once you find what you're looking for, you need to make your way all the way back to the entrance. Which is... realistic.

Distribution

You'd better register...

It looks like Janelle reached some sort of exclusive distribution deal with RSD, as I believe my first copy of Barracuda came as a stand-alone sample diskette with my original copy of Game-Maker. Later on the CD release of Game-Maker included a stripped-down version of Barracuda as a sample game.

The reason Barracuda had to be stripped down, I suppose, is that the official version is an unusual hack job. Long before Game-Maker supported interstitial .FLI files, Janelle designed custom Deluxe Paint intro animations and a text-mode wrapper to strongly insist that the player register the game. One wonders who these many hard-working individuals are who form the Gamelynk corporation. If I fail to register, will they each send a sternly-worded note to my mother?

Something else kind of neat is that Janelle archived all of the component Game-Maker files, I believe using LHarc compression. So instead of a directory full of .MAP and .CHR files, you had a small number of mysterious data files, an executable, and some supplementary text files. Much tidier, and a capability that I always wished Game-Maker provided on its own. I'm not so sure that Janelle was as concerned with presentation as he was with preventing other Game-Maker users from tinkering with his files. Still, it's cool to see this level of ambition.

Story

Diving down, down down in Mark A. Janelle's Barracuda

CLASSIFIED....

The United States sent an F117A to intercept a fleet fleet of Iraq ships. They were beleived to be transporting peices to build a nuclear weapon. All ships were sunk, of course.

YOUR MISSION....

Recover the pieces before the Iraqi warships do!! You must not fail, the free world depends on you! From this point on you will be called "BARRACUDA". We have placed marker buoys in the location of the ship wrecks.

You must hurry. The Iraqi ships are in the area. Once you dive in your sub, contact us by pressing your [F1] button on your panel.

GOOD LUCK...BARRACUDA

DEPARTMENT CHIEF MARK A. JANELLE

Instructions

Plotting a course in Mark A. Janelle's Barracuda

ARROW KEYS move character / JOYSTICK moves character

[SPACE] fires sub torpedo / JOYSTICK BUTTON 1 fires sub torpedo

[P] Pick Up Items. Or... JOYSTICK DOWN + BUTTON 1

[D] Drop Items. Or... JOYSTICK DOWN + BUTTON 2

Barracuda! Be sure to 'pick' up ANYTHING you can, and be sure to search the surroundings. You must find four items to stop the bomb!

Find these items:

CONTROL PANEL

GUIDANCE SYSTEM

ROCKET BOOSTER

NUCLEAR WARHEAD

Good Luck and remember, you have to beat the IRAQIS!

Credits

DESIGN, GRAPHICS, ANIMATION: Mark A. Janelle

SUPPORT FILES: Jim Lund, Ron Cote

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Recreational Software Designs, Computer Worx

Sequels

Apparently the shareware episode of Barracuda has at least one sequel, Secret Mission 2. The registration form also suggests a future Mission 3, though it's unclear if that came to pass.

Links

• Mark A. Janelle (DIYGamer)
• Barracuda Secret Mission 1 (DOS Museum)

Downloads

• Barracuda: Secret Mission 1 (307.2 kB)
• Sea Chart (? kB)