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: Barracuda II: The Escape, Barracuda 3
Barracuda is a curiously straight-faced adventure-sim action-exploration... thing. 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. Wind your way into labyrinthine shipwrecks, find your treasures, then escape unharmed.
This is a hugely ambitious game by Game-Maker standards, involving large environments and several different play modes. The only thing that Barracuda lacks is the features added by subsequent updates to Game-Maker -- digital sound effects and interstitial presentations. Nevertheless, Janelle cobbled together his own solutions.
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, dodge the mines, 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 at the local wildlife, to unknown efficacy. This section is more of a slow-paced bit of exploration. Again, there's no faulting the presentation; ponderous as it may be, 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.
Even compared to the sub the diver moves slowly. And the areas inside the ships are enormous mazes. They seem to follow no known engineering logic, consisting of one murky corridor after another. It all looks pretty much the same. 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.
The shareware version of Barracuda is an unusual collage. Long before Game-Maker supported interstitial .FLI files, Janelle hacked together custom Deluxe Paint animations and a text-mode wrapper, to lend the game an intro and outro, and the industry standard registration bugs.
To add to the professional presentation, Janelle put together his own loader, using LHarc compression to archive the game's files then to invisibly unpack them on load and repack them on exit. So instead of a directory full of .MAP and .CHR files, he presented a small number of mysterious data files, an executable, and some supplementary text files. Much tidier, and a function often requested out of the box by Game-Maker uses.
Stiff and ponderous as it may be, Barracuda is one of the most significant and technically inventive games in the Game-Maker library, and on those merits is worth a look.
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Contents
Story
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
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
Versions
Barracuda was originally distributed as a set of archived files with an executable and some Deluxe Paint .ANM animations tacked onto the front end (along with some text-mode shareware nag messages). This version was relatively hard to pick apart. Some years later, Janelle offered the game up to RSD for distribution with the CD release of Game-Maker 3.0.
This version of Barracuda had many subtle changes: the diver sprite was swapped for a completely different and more fully animated one; a few background blocks were tweaked to rationalize collision issues; all the wrapper animations were removed; and somewhere along the way nearly all of the background block sets and maps became corrupted.
The game would play fine, and would start normally enough. If you kept to the right areas of the right levels, nothing seemed all that amiss. Maybe the seas seemed a little lonely; weren't there fish in this game? If there are no threats, then why does the sub have weapons?
For distribution here, the map files and the relevant background tiles have been extracted from the earlier version of Barracuda and substituted in the CD gameware edition.
Availability
Janelle seems to have reached some sort of exclusive distribution deal with RSD, as early copies of Game-Maker include the shareware version of Barracuda on an unlabeled stand-alone 5-1/4" floppy diskette. The later Game-Maker 3.0 CD release also includes the adjusted Gameware version of Barracuda (minus the intro, and with altered spritework) as a sample game.
During the early 1990s the game was available for download from GameLynk's Frontline BBS.
The game is also available on several shareware compilation CD-ROMs, including:
- Power User Software's So Much Shareware! Three (November 1993),
- Chestnut Software's Deathstar Arcade Battles (1993),
- Dr. CD-ROM's Dr. Shareware Gold (1993),
- Micro Haus Black Box #5 (1993),
- Chicago Computer Broker's Games 1994 (April 1994),
- STG Computer Limited's Gamefest (August 1994),
- 101 Games (October 1994),
- CMS Distributing's Ultimate Gameware CD-ROM (October 1994), and
- From Super Oz Software's Sprint Games and Entertainment 6 (February 1995).
Archive history
Barracuda was introduced to the archive with the purchase of Game-Maker 1.02 in September 1992.
Links
Interviews / Articles
Listings
- MobyGames entry
- archive.org entry
- demu.org entry
- Squakenet entry
- My Abandonware entry
- "If you like naval, puzzle-solving, spy / espionage, download, install and enjoy"
- Anna Anthropy's ⒶNNARCHIVE list
Misc. Links
Downloads
- Barracuda: Secret Mission 1 (Shareware Edition) (307.2 kB)
- Barracuda: Secret Mission 1 (Gameware Edition) (180.7 kB)
- Cutscene intro map (7.5 kB)
- Sea Chart (26.9 kB)
- Level 1-1 map (19.9 kB)
- Level 1-2 map (54.4 kB)
- Level 1-3 map (18.1 kB)
- Level 2-1 map (16.3 kB)
- Level 2-2 map (153.7 kB)
- Level 2-3 map (29.2 kB)
- Level 3-1 map (17.6 kB)
- Level 3-2 map (367.6 kB)
- Level 3-3 map (133.8 kB)
- Level 4-1 map (16.8 kB)
- Level 4-2 map (19.0 kB)
- Level 1-1 map (19.9 kB)
