🤔 Where does the iconic conversion chant "wololo" originate from? (answer)

Brataccas

aka: Bandersnatch
Moby ID: 12297

Description

Brataccas is a game that combines exploration, puzzle-solving and combat. You play a character named Kyne, a man who has a price on his head. You must search the mining asteroid, Brattacus, to gather proof of a government plot against you and to try to stay alive. Surveillance cameras are watching you, so take any chance to disable them.

Brataccas is a place where greed and corruption rule the day. The residents are treacherous, and while they can be bribed they are not above murder, so the player has to be careful.

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Amiga version)

14 People

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 4 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.2 out of 5 (based on 7 ratings with 2 reviews)

Great idea, terrible implementation

The Good
Brataccas was the first game I played that seemed to work the way I thought adventure games should: no typing in arcane commands, no static graphics, no fixed layouts. In Brataccas, the world is alive with people walking around, guards watching on TV's, and a map that actually made some sort of sense. Everything is controlled through the mouse.

The game generally seemed highly "approachable". You could pop in the disk and immediately start playing; it was an action game with a plot. Hardly ground-breaking today, but fascinating when it was actually released.

The Bad
The problem was that the game was simply not playable, and for a variety of reasons.

The most obvious was the huge lag times that followed every action. Alone in a room things were not so bad, but if there was more than one other character with you, the game slowed to a crawl. This made actually playing the game annoyingly difficult.

Adding to this problem was the over-designed control system. Instead of simply moving when you moved the mouse, the game used a sort of gesture-based system where starting and stopping were separate moves. However, when you combined that with the lag, you ended up spending most of your time running past whatever you were interested in, often into walls or elevator shafts. Combat, with swords no less, was utterly laughable, as the contestants ran back and forth past each other, desperately trying to time the swing just right.

It might have been salvageable if not for the fact that it was also seemingly impossible to figure out how to actually win. The manual deliberately left everything out to make it an adventure, but as is all too often the case, what seemed obvious to the designer was utterly opaque to the player. I have heard that players have managed to actually win the game, but I could never figure it out.

The Bottom Line
A good bit of history, but I'm not sure you could describe it as "fun".

Atari ST · by Maury Markowitz (266) · 2007

Deep, but confusing

The Good
The freedom of movement and intense mystery of this game makes it a unique and landmark title in the world of computer games. You can simply wander the asteroid-world of Brataccus and swill with the bar flies, or you can delve into the deep recesses of the asteroid with the mob.

The Bad
The controls are extremely confusing, as the game is played only with the two-button mouse. An inovative system to be sure, but a very strange and hard-to-use one. The game's manual makes a point of being obtuse and of glossing over much of the backstory.

The Bottom Line
A simulation of the social life on an asteroid mining colony that is devoid of females. This means you'll be getting into sword fights, sneaking into places you shouldn't go, and stealing things you shouldn't steal. But hey, at least you can kill the news reporters.

Atari ST · by Bob Hucklescuckel (2) · 2004

Trivia

Development

Brataccas was originally being developed in 1984 as an ambitious game for the Sinclair Spectrum called Bandersnatch which was, according to The Purple Owl, "to come in an A4 sized box containing around 30 'goodies' including a required additional piece of hardware for your Spectrum computer (an add-on device which was planned to add more colours to the system). The retail price of Bandersnatch was expected to be around £40 and it was to be a completely new concept in computer games. Apparently 10 professional artists were working on the graphics alone."

Unfortunately, the collapse of Imagine in 1984, the company developing the game, curtailed the hopes of Bandersnatch's designers. However, many of the same designers continued the project in a new company, Psygnosis, founded by Ian Hetherington, the former director of Imagine. But instead of releasing it for the Speccy, they used the new 16-bit platforms found in the Amiga and the Atari ST.

As the history page at The Purple Owl put it, "[u]nfortunately it never quite lived up to the lofty ideals of the former game but it was the catalyst for what was to come."

Information also contributed by Chris Edgar

Analytics

MobyPro

Upgrade to MobyPro to view popularity data for this game.

Related Sites +

  • Brataccas.com Fan Site with Full Manual
    A well-done fan site with the full game manual rendered in HTML.
  • The Purple Owl -- Psygnosis History page
    A web site dedicated to Psygnosis's early games. Brataccas was Psygnosis's first game, and so is tied in inextricably to the company's early history. This page contains interesting information on the game, as well as the ambitious "vaporware" game from which it emerged, Bandersnatch.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 12297
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by ZZip.

Macintosh added by Игги Друге.

Additional contributors: Luckspeare, Martin Smith, Игги Друге, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 2nd, 2004. Last modified October 16th, 2023.