Game 6: Triclops Invasion (1986)

The game starts. You can control either of the two tanks stationed in your “city” or the jet plane to the right.

United States
Released 1986
Genre: Action, Real-Time Strategy
Developer: Geodesic Publications
Date Started: 22 June 2025
Date Ended: 22 June 2025
Total Hours: 2
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: 17

Oh my, what have I gotten myself into? The next game I’m playing is Triclops Invasion by Geodesic from 1986. I spent about a minute just blankly staring at the screen after starting it without having any idea what the hell was happening on the screen. Everything felt like an undecipherable mess of colors and 3D shapes, and I had no idea what I was actually controlling on the screen.

I remembered there was also another disc in my TOSEC collection that contained some docs for the game, and checking it out I found 7 “books” that explained the game mechanics, the story, and the controls, its backgrounds, and plans for the coming-up version 2.0. This at least filled me in on the basics of the game, which I will try to summarize here.

When the game docs consist of 7 “books” on a separate disc, you know you’re in for something ambitious.

First some words by the developer, Geodesic Publications. The manual states they set out “with one purpose in mind, to make the fastest real 3D animation system for the Amiga”. That sounds like a lofty goal, and it all sounds like a definitive departure from the games by hobby developers I’ve played so far, as this is more like a complete 3D engine than just a standalone game. The manual continues to sound like Geodesic was not short on ambition, praising what it considers a “World Class Mouse” control with 6 axes and all kinds of special control functions. The manual focuses quite a bit on advertising a coming-up version 2.0 of the game that would come with all kinds of improvements in terms of production quality, including a “High tech color artwork on the cover of a complete manual,” 2-player games via RS232 null modem, and more vehicle types. The current version 1.6, however, can be freely distributed.

After giving you the choice between using 4 or 5 bitplanes (the manual states it runs a bit faster with 4), the game starts by randomly generating a new 3D planet and placing your base, or “city,” as the game like to call it, somewhere on the surface. The planet is a geodesic sphere and thus is made up of triangular faces. Two rather cubic tanks are stationed in your city, with a jet plane hovering above it. You can either control one of the two tanks on the ground or a jet in the air, with the jet feeling not feeling like a typical jet plane you would expect but rather like a hovercraft that can move up and down over the terrain and can hover in the air.

You will also see the eponymous Triclops stalking about close by, some kind of robotic alien creature that seems to owe a lot of inspiration to War of the Worlds or Star Wars’s AT-AT. The Triclops will attack your city using some kind of missile weapon, and you have to fend it off by shooting it with your vehicles. If the Triclops manages to destroy your city, you lose, quitting the game. If you manage to destroy 5 Triclopsy, you save the world and win. The manual also hints about some kind of satellite, which I never noticed. Everything runs in real-time, though the pace is rather slow, partly because of the rather poor frame right, and it becomes damn near impossible to control when too much is going on on the screen.

My base has gotten a bad beating, while I’m trying to control a tank (which I never got to shoot). I like how the Triclops is standing there slanting.

Controlling your vehicles, unfortunately, takes a lot of getting used to and feels much more complicated than it should be, more like a technical exercise than a game intended to be accessible. Here are the basic controls I figured out from the manual and playing around with the game:

• Double-clicking the left mouse button refocuses the camera on the current vehicle.
• Dragging the mouse up and down while keeping the right mouse button pressed accelerates or decelerates your current vehicle.
• Dragging the mouse left and right while keeping the right mouse button pressed turns your current vehicle.
• Dragging the mouse up and down while keeping both mouse buttons pressed slopes the jet.
• Dragging the mouse left and right while keeping both mouse buttons pressed rotates the jet.
• Dragging the mouse left and right while keeping the left mouse button pressed moves the jet left or right on a horizontal axis.
• Dragging the mouse up and down while keeping the left mouse button pressed moves the jet up or down over the terrain.
• Clicking 3 times with the right mouse button stops the current vehicle.
• Clicking 3 times with the left mouse button activates or deactivates fire mode, which enables firing missiles by clicking the right mouse button.
  • Clicking 3 times with the right mouse button also seems to activate fire mode; not sure why.
• When you move the (invisible!) mouse cursor to the left of the screen to that little blue box, dragging down opens up the pilot view. This shows a first-person view of the vehicle you are currently controlling, but only displays enemies.

You can also access an application menu, but this is awkwardly integrated because, first, you again have to move the invisible cursor to the top of the screen, then click the right mouse button to show the menu. I guess I don’t have to explain that this likes to collide with vehicle controls that use the right mouse button as well. The menu allows you to change the vehicle you are controlling, change the camera view, and access a few other options.

I managed to destroy the Triclops one time using the jet, which resulted in a new Triclops being parachuted by the game (which looked kind of cute).

Trying to aim at a Triclops using the jet’s pilot view.

Oops, I managed to crash into the Triclops.

Programming:
Rather impressive for a 3D engine (not just a simple game) running under AmigaDOS, though it just gets too slow as soon as there is too much going on on the screen. 6/10

Controls:
Really hard to get into, and hard to get anywhere with it. Feels a bit like the developer was proud of their “World Class Mouse” controls, but this would definitely have been easier to control with a few keys added to the mouse controls. The second and equally large problem is the low frame rate which gets even lower if you actually try to get anything done in the game, that is, shooting a Triclops. Very annoying was how the game expected you to move the invisible in cursor to trigger some of its controls (like the menu bar or the blue button triggering the pilot view). 3/10

Vibe:
I can’t deny a slight War of the Worlds vibe, but the game feels a lot like a tech-demo and not immersive enough to create an atmosphere. 2/10

Graphics:
Somewhat impressive for its time from a purely technical perspective, but while the colored triangles give it a slight style of its own, it’s not much to look at, ultimately. 3/10

Story:
It’s not more than “defend your city from the Triclops”. 1/10

Audio:
There is some sound when moving your vehicles around, but for some reason this only worked intermittently. 1/10

Fun:
I see quite some potential, but this is just too slow and wonky to be enjoyable. 1/10

Final Rating: 17

My base is destroyed.

Overall:
Somewhat impressive for 1986 in terms of technology, but it feels more like an early tech demo for a “geodesic” 3D engine—which basically means it’s based around spheres and subdivides them into triangles, mainly for rendering planet surfaces—than a game. This makes sense, as Triclops Invasion was a freely distributable title that was likely created to showcase the capabilities of the engine and to ultimately sell their upcoming 2.0 release—which apparently never got released. The main problems are the hard to get into controls, and the game is just too slow to be fun. Another historical curiosity, as it has some interesting ideas that remind me of later real-time strategy games that enabled you to control units in a 3D space, like Battlezone 2.

There was also a DOS port; I wonder if it was faster. Some sources, including MobyGames, mention this was originally written for the QNX operating system, which was primarily used in embedded systems and real-time applications, but I couldn’t find any evidence for that, and the manual never mentions it.

Geodesic Publications was founded by Mark S. Adams and apparently focussed on pioneering 3D gaming with 3D polygonal models, fractal-generation, and offered a “geometric structure compiler” with the intention to “push the boundaries of computer graphics and geodesic theory in the 1980s”. They never released a 2.0 version of Triclops Invasion, but Mark S. Adams is credited for doing the Amiga port of Space Rogue in 1990, which makes sense given his background in 3D graphics.