#time-gate

Time-Gate has an important story to tell you. It’s a story about how the human race built technological miracles, how civilisation spread throughout the galaxy, how peace and prosperity reigned for millennia, and how the golden age inevitably fell apart. At first it was hubris that caused the mighty empire to crumble, then aliens came along to finish the job. But all is not lost because the surviving humans have found an ancient spacecraft capable of traversing the legendary TIME-GATES. It’s up to one brave pilot (that’s you, player!) to travel back in time, find the aliens’ homeworld, and prevent the threat from ever appearing, through a quick and easy act of genocide. All this info is helpfully dumped on the player over five screens of text every time you load the game.

Sounds like a desperate situation! You’d better get on and vanquish those baddies so humanity can safely resume its slow decline through complacency and decadence. Oh wait, Quicksilva presumably blew the packaging budget on a four-button keyboard overlay, so there’s only room on the inlay card for the loading instructions. You have to click through fifteen more screens to find out how to play before you start…

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Ok, we’re off! The game is a first-person space shooter that uses scaled sprites with an Elite-style moving starfield to create a 3D effect (the 4th D is due to the time travel conceit, of course). You have a long-range scanner showing 18 playable sectors and whether they contain enemy ships or planets. Any sector may contain a time-gate but it must be cleared of enemies before you can access it. Upon finding a time-gate you are immediately whisked thousands of years into the past to repeat the process until you find the homeworld.

On warping to a sector, you will find… nothing. The game requires you to hunt your quarry using a system of gauges to determine its location and distance. Once locked on, you get to anticipate the visceral thrill of a good old-fashioned space dogfight. Eventually, a tiny spaceship comes into view and it’s time to duke it out, hoping your laser zaps are faster and more accurate than theirs. If it goes pear-shaped, damage can be mitigated by warping to a planetary system and setting down for repairs; doing so uses up the resources of the entire planet but it’s all in a good cause I suppose.