Remembering Velasquez
Our heroine, folks. First line in the game.
Traffic Department 2192 was a shareware game from 1994, originally published by Safari Software, and one that has a bit of a cult following amongst people who could get past the terrible title. Firstly, no, it has nothing to do with being a traffic cop. The Traffic Department here is simply the planet Seche’s last line of defence, fighting a guerilla war against an unstoppable galactic empire called the Vultures. Presumably at some point these people wrote speeding tickets.
Now, they have missiles.
This sounds like a simple setup, but with around 50,000 words of dialogue spread over three games, it quickly becomes anything but. Characters get killed on a regular basis, often returning as clones later on, people switch sides, new revelations throw in everything from doomsday weapons to shapeshifting aliens, and there are so many characters that by the end it’s tough to remember just who the hell everyone actually is. Thankfully, there’s some relief from this, like the Vultures all having purple face make-up, the characters getting their own text colours, and the fact that our heroine really couldn’t give a crap who she’s insulting anyway.
Her name is Marta Louise Velasquez, and she’s quite possibly the most unpleasant female lead character in the history of gaming. She’s also what makes TD2192 worth remembering.
Don’t worry. They’ll never find us in our secret base with the giant yellow arrow pointing the way into our only hangar.
Velasquez works because of a few basic things. First, the script is actually pretty funny. Almost everyone has an attitude problem, everyone hates each others guts, and Velasquez is absolutely fearless when it comes to spitting venom in their faces. The script even comes in two versions – one with curse words, and one that tones down the sex and insults stuff.
More importantly though, the writer is fully aware of what a terrible, terrible person she is. This isn’t one of those games where the writer creates a Mary Sue and is blind to the fact that she’s a psychopath. Velasquez’s hideous personality is a massive part of the storyline. She has a standard issue tragic backstory, told in the introduction, in which she sees her father die just seconds from returning home from a mission, but it’s made quite clear that this isn’t an excuse. One character has some sympathy because of his past relationship with her father. Everyone else only tolerates her because her searing, undying hate is the one effective weapon they have left.
Also, any time they actually try to leave her on the bench, she just knocks out a colleague and steals their hoverskid anyway. At least when she’s on patrol, she’s the Vultures’ problem.
While it’s probably just down to lazy art (and there’s a lot of that, especially in the cut-scenes) it’s fun that this guy’s nose never, ever stops bleeding. When Velasquez punches you, you stay punched…
What’s unusual is that there’s a penalty for all this. Velasquez may make everyone around her miserable (except the Dispatcher, Carl, and the android barman who are about as close a thing as she has to friends throughout much of the game) but she makes her own life ten times worse with every new insult. Treating one of her colleagues like dirt throughout the first episode leads to him putting a bomb in her helicopter, turning her into a half-metal cyborg for the next two episodes. When she’s placed in a position of authority, half her squad deserts her immediately.
Almost the entire story is told in dialogue, with just a few rendered shots of mixed quality – and very off-model characters.
In terms of writing, there are a lot of problems with the story – a lot of it is pretty childish really, the sheer amount of it can be daunting (with 60 missions, the cut-scenes are endless) and there are some truly bizarre plot twists (Velasquez suddenly gets back her son, never mentioned before, as an attempt to humanise her a little). It does its job though, and it’s interesting to see a shareware action game so committed to telling a plot. For better or worse, you do get sucked into it and interested in seeing where it’s going next – and it takes guts to pull out something like Vel’s cyborg conversion in the free starter episode. It never changes the actual action even slightly, but it has major implications for the story beyond simply being a cool twist.
Sadly, the real sticking point is the game itself. The action sequences between these scenes I remember fondly are pretty terrible, with enemy AI so weak that it usually just does loops around buildings, and very artificial means of boosting difficulty, like making you fly in a rubbish ship or scattering mines everywhere. It’s not awful, but it’s the wrong side of mediocre. Still an interesting title though, and one that deserves its small cult following. And it still lives on, in toys.
To see the story, try this comprehensive Let’s Play.
To download the game, visit Abandonia.
I loved this game! I have been looking for it for years!
Posted by kongkoro on May 1, 2010