Cold War makes for intriguing gaming

Pssst! Hey, you over there. The one running Linux. Maybe you can help me. I’m a freelance journalist by the name of Matt Carter. It’s 1986, at the height of the Cold War, and right now I’m stuck inside the Kremlin with a Soviet secret agent by the name of Grushkov. If we don’t escape, we’ll be killed. At least that’s the story as I got it from Mindware Studios and LGP.It’s been a long time since I’ve played a commercial game on Linux, probably since the fall of Loki, but the long dry spell is over now. I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Cold War lately, and I’ve missed this kind of gaming.

Cold War is not a first-person shooter. It’s more like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade than it is Quake III Arena.

The game allows you to play in one of several modes: Story, Time-Run, Pacifist, or Ghost. All of them are in story mode, but the last three each have a twist to them: Time-Run requires that you finish each level within a certain time, Pacifist means you can’t kill any of the bad guys, and Ghost limits the number of alarms you can raise while you’re sneaking around. You do a lot of that in this game — sneaking around, I mean.

You move your character around the screen using a combination of keys (the W, A, S, and D keys move you forward, left, back, and right), the mouse, and the track-wheel. The mouse changes the view from the camera that’s tracking your character, and the track-wheel increases or decreases the speed at which you move. Speed, by the way, is a critical part of the stealth you have to employ while moving. The faster you go, the louder and more visible you become, and bad things happen when you are noisy or visible. In the beginning, you’ll probably get killed a lot for exceeding the stealth speed limit.

You interact with objects — opening doors, picking things up, etc. — through the use of an Action Menu that appears in the upper right corner of the screen when the context of the game requires it. The right mouse button activates the menu, then you can scroll up and down the list of choices to select the choice you want. When you release the mouse button, the highlighted item from the menu is executed.

The keys to the game

During game play, the Escape key brings up the main menu. From there, you can start a new game, continue the game, load or save a game, set the options, or exit. If the W-A-S-D movement keys, or the default action/inventory keys, are not to your liking, use the Options menu to remap them to your taste.

Some of the function keys come into play, too. F1 displays your objectives for the current level; F5 does a quick save of the game; and F9 does a quick load. But the F2 key is the most interesting of the lot.

F2 brings up the Assembly screen. If you’ve picked up items as you’ve worked your way around the Kremlin — things like rags, ether, plastic bottles, and so on — and have the requisite number of “Tech points,” you can assemble special items. You accumlate the Tech points by picking up folders containing blueprints. The items you create can then be used in game play, to take out or escape from the bad guys; they include non-lethal rubber bullets for your standard issue pistol, diversionary devices, and so on.

One of the most important keys during game play is the Caps Lock key. It locks you into a crouched, more stealthy, position, or returns you to a standing position, if you are already crouched and need to move fast.

Getting started

Level one is really a training level. You’re taught how to use the Action Menu to do things like open gates, knock out a guard, search his body, pick up a body, or drop a body. You’re also taught the value of moving with stealth by crouching, moving slowly, and hiding in shadows or behind objects.

Before actual game play begins, you’re given the story background, and see the nefarious no-goodskis plotting your character’s demise. Of course, in the game, your character won’t know that part, but you do. It’s very much like watching a Saturday morning matinee when you knew what the bad guys were up to, but the hero didn’t.

At various points throughout the game, game play pauses while you view events or conversation designed to let you know what’s going on. In level one, for example, you are taught to use the Action Menu to open the first gate. At the end of level two, after you’ve managed to escape from the Kremlin, you are run down by a car filled with bad guys and trundled off to prison. At the start of level 3, you find yourself in a secret KGB prison with Grushkov, the Russian security officer. You’ll have to work as a team with Grushkov to escape the prison alive. I can’t spoil anything else for you, because that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Requirements and pricing

To play the Linux version of Cold War, you’ll need to have kernel 2.2.x or later, glibc-2.1 or later, X 4.3.x or later, a 1.4GHz CPU, at least 450MB of RAM, 1.1GB of disk space, a hardware-accelerated 3-D graphics card with at least 64MB of memory, and an OSS- or ALSA-compatible sound card. You can buy the Linux version of Cold War through several different resellers associated with LGP. Tux Games and StormFront Ventures both have it for around $45, a savings of about $15 over the LGP price. But even at $45, Linux gamers are paying about $15 more than Windows users for the game.

After eight hours, I’m still playing the game on my first time through the levels, and I am really enjoying it. Cold War has high-quality graphics and sound and intelligent design, and is a welcome relief from the steady diet of kill, kill, kill FPS games I’ve played in the past few years.