Game:

Future Wars (1989)

Duration: 3:38

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8

I prefer Operation Stealth, but this one is not bad.

Future Wars, subtitled in Europe as Time Travellers and in North America as Adventures in Time and known in France as Time Travelers: The Menace (French: Les Voyageurs du Temps: La Menace) is an adventure game from Delphine Software International, released in 1989. The game is mainly the work of Paul Cuisset (story and programming) and Eric Chahi (graphics).

The game was supposed to be the first of a series of adventure games revolving around time traveling but later episodes were never made.

The player starts the game as a window cleaner who is in the middle of cleaning the outside of a skyscraper, which is evidently part of a bustling metropolis, however the player can only see the surrounding scenery (a cityscape at sunset) by observing the reflection in the glass windows of the skyscraper. The year is 1989, which when Future Wars was first retailed could be reasonably understood as being present-day.

The window cleaner the player controls is a figure dressed in white overalls who is standing on an electric elevator platform attached to the outside of the building. The game begins with another character referred to simply as 'Ed the boss' opening a window directly above the players character, only to reprimand him for slacking by banging his fist against the window ledge and appearing to be shouting a fair amount of verbal abuse with some vigor. (The game is entirely mute throughout apart from some background music and the occasional sound effect).

The game takes the player to the middle ages, where the hero has the chance to jeopardize an alien plot to plant a long-delay time bomb and where he meets Lo'Ann, a special agent from the future sent there to do just that. The player is then taken to 44th century - Lo'Ann's home-age to meet the council. After a minor mishap and subsequently having to make his way through ravaged city of Paris II, the hero eventually gets aboard a shuttle that would take him to the council's home city, only to be kidnapped by Crughons - the aliens. Later, he is accused of collaboration with those aliens and only saved from execution in the very last minute. He and Lo'Ann then travel to cretaceous period to foil aliens' yet another attempt at planting the time bomb. Failing to arrive on time, the hero must board an alien spaceship and travel to their headquarters to neutralize the bomb from there. The game ends when, after succeeding in detonating the bomb long before the humans even appear on the surface of the earth (and providing quite a convenient explanation for the extinction of dinosaurs), the hero returns to 44th century to fight further battles against the cruel alien race.