Operation Overkill II
Operation Overkill II or OOII is a multiplayer, role-playing door game for bulletin board systems set on post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 2060.
In a 2016 retrospective, computer historian Benj Edwards called OOII "viscerally descriptive" and hailed it as "one of the deepest and most complex CRPGs available" on bulletin board systems.[1]
In OOII, Earth has been invaded by a group of aliens called Hydrites, led by a commander known as "Overkill," in order to seize the Earth's supply of "water crystals."
The player's character is a soldier in the human resistance. The goal is to survive by finding food and water crystals, to battle mutants and other creatures, and eventually to eliminate the Overkill commander.
The game's interface consists primarily of textual menus and maps in ANSI color.
The combat mechanism in OOII is unique, in that it is timing based, and tests a player's reflexes. The player is supposed to hit his spacebar at the right moment as a textual "gauge" scrolls across the screen. The player's accuracy determines whether the character registered a hit or a miss in combat. [2] While this system was novel at the time, recent reviewers have criticized it as "bereft of tactics" and "action-oriented in the weirdest possible way" making fights tedious.[3]
In addition to playing through the traditional BBS interface, OOII could also be played using a standalone front-end terminal called OOIITERM. This program could display the ANSI graphics nearly instantaneously -- important for users with slow modems -- and it included sound effects.
Dustin Nulf released the earliest betas of Operation Overkill II in 1990, listing Tom Hazel as a co-partner. From v1.00 in late 1993 through v1.10 in 1996, Nulf is the sole credit. Bryan Turner of Vagabond Software is credited with Nulf on the v1.12 and v1.20 releases in 1998 and 2001.
Nulf has written that he sold approximately 3,000 copies of the OOII during the years he supported it. [4] The game was originally called "Dark Wasteland," but Nulf renamed it to "Operation: Overkill" prior to beta-testing it. Nulf was forced to rewrite the game from scratch after a catastrophic computer crash, and so he added a "II" to the title.[3]
Combat during a game of Operation Overkill II.
Break Into Chat blog articles
References
- ↑ Benj Edwards (14 January 2016). "The Forgotten World of BBS Door Games". PC Magazine. Retrieved 6 June 2025.
- ↑ "Operation Overkill II". GiantBomb. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bolingbroke, Chester. "1990 Loose End #2: Operation: Overkill (Final Rating)". The CRPG Addict. Retrieved 22 April 2017.
- ↑ Dustin Nulf. "Dustin Nulf, Experience". Archived from the original on 2016-07-06. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
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