Heavy Gear
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Heavy Gear is a game universe published since 1994 by Canadian publisher Dream Pod 9. It includes a tabletop tactical wargame, a role-playing game and a lesser known combat card game (Heavy Gear Fighter). The setting is better known through the PC-game incarnations published by Activision in 1997 and 1999, developed after Activision lost the rights to the Battletech/MechWarrior series. It also spawned a 40-episodes, 3D-animated TV series in 2001, which featured a much simplified version of the universe developed in the role-playing game.
The background universe of the game is extremely detailed: several million words have been published to date in more than a hundred books and game accessories. A continual epic storyline runs throughout all of the game's material, with new publications moving chronologically along the timeline.
As the name implies, Heavy Gear is best known for its humanoid combat vehicles (or mecha): the 'Gears' and 'Striders' used by the military forces in the setting. Its mecha designs are typical of those found in the Real Robot anime genre; they are most similar in size and tactical role to those in Ryusuke Takahashi's 1983 Armored Trooper Votoms anime.
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[edit] Storyline
Heavy Gear begins on a distant planet called Terra Nova, around 4,000 Earth Standard Years from now (6132 AD). Terra Nova was once the crown jewel of the United Earth Government's colonies. However, an economic collapse forced the Terran government to abandon Terra Nova and all its other colonies centuries before the period depicted in the game setting, leaving Terra Nova in a dark age. Eventually, City-States rose from the ashes and either through treaties or tyranny, united to form national unions called Leagues. These Leagues would in turn ally (again either peacefully or forcibly) to form the superpowers that dominated the temperate southern and northern hemispheres of the planet.
As of 6132 AD (TN 1936, local calendar), the Confederated Northern City-States (CNCS) and the Allied Southern Territories (AST) are recovering and rebuilding from the War of the Alliance, a brutal (and failed) attempt by the new Earth government to regain control of its colony. Despite a common enemy, the polar superpowers have great fear and animosity for each other, while the independent City-States of the equatorial region known as the Badlands simply try to survive the crossfire.
The storyline behind the game eventually moves off-world, as Terranovan special-ops teams are sent to try and regain contact with the other human colonies in order to unite them against the fascist government controlling Earth.
[edit] Art
The Heavy Gear books are notable for their heavily illustrated content, above and beyond most of the games of the same period. Each book featured highly-detailed plans and cutaways of the machines, along with flags, insiginias, maps and other visual information to help players' immersion. Most of the art was done by illustrator Ghislain Barbe, who was also responsible for the art of Jovian Chronicles, another Dream Pod 9 game line with similar anime inspirations.
[edit] Rules
Heavy Gear uses Dream Pod 9's own Silhouette game engine. The latest edition of the Silhouette rules is sold separately as a book titled Silhouette CORE Rulebook, which is needed to play the third edition of the Heavy Gear roleplaying game. The wargame uses the Silhouette CORE Heavy Gear Miniature Rules, also available separately. The latter is played using miniatures and tabletop terrain, although some players prefer to use hex maps and paper counters.
Both the RPG and miniature games are built on the same basic rule mechanics. Silhouette is a realistic, simulationist system that defines characters in terms of 10 base attributes (agility, knowledge, etc.), 5 derived attributes (health, etc), and a variety of skills. Skill rolls make up the backbone of the system, which focuses on effect-based speed of play over grainy detail. The core mechanic involves rolling a number of 6-sided dice, taking the highest result and comparing it to a set threshold number. If the result is higher than the threshold the test is a success; if it is lower the test is a failure. The margin by which the test succeeded (Margin of Success, MoS) or failed (Margin of Failure, MoF) helps to determine the final outcome. Combat is handled by the same system, with characters taking penalty-inflicting wounds rather than depleting a set number of health points. As a result, the system can be lethal, especially on inexperienced characters.
[edit] Computer Games
Activision acquired the computer game license in 1995 after they lost access to the Battletech/MechWarrior property. The story of the first game, Heavy Gear: The New Breed, followed the crew of a CNCS landship (an enormous hovercraft carrier) as they played a cat-and-mouse game across the Badlands with a rival landship from the AST. The game was made for the Windows 95 operating system and was partly based on existing MechWarrior 2 code.
An on line playing demo version of Heavy Gear 2 was available for some months before the official demo, it was an incredible well done product and had a large success in the mechwarrior community, unfortunately the game that go later in the market was a different product with several problems, even the demo was something else. Once the online demo server was shut down, one of the best on line game of ever was lost forever.
In the second game, Heavy Gear 2: Black Talon, an atrocity caused by the New Earth Concordat (NEC) leads to a formal cease-fire between the Northern and Southern Leagues. A team of elite Special-Ops pilots from across the planet, equipped with advanced prototype Gears, are sent to the planet Caprice, the nearest NEC base, to find out more and strike back at the enemy. The game was made for the Windows 98 operating system, though a Linux version was also released later on. Unlike the previous title, it used an entirely new game engine, which was also used in Interstate '82 and the Dark Reign RTS.
[edit] TV series
In 2001, a computer-animated TV series titled "Heavy Gear: The Animated Series" was produced by Mainframe Entertainment and Adelaide Productions for Sony Pictures Entertainment. The series lasted 40 episodes (though two of these were "recap" episodes). It played in syndication in various markets worldwide.
DVD releases include two volumes released in North America in 2002 by Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, each with five episodes edited together into "feature length" stories. 2004 saw a UK two disc Season One set released including both "feature length" stories and three standalone episodes, which collectively held the first thirteen episodes of the series in one form or other, but lack the bonus commentary tracks present on the 2002 North American releases. Also in 2004, Anchor Bay briefly released a very cheap single disc release in Canada with another five episodes from later on in the series. Columbia Tristar's releases are anamorphic widescreen, whereas Anchor Bay's release is letterboxed widescreen, both of which are preferable to the cropped fullscreen versions seen on most syndicated broadcasts.
The Dream Pod 9 creative staff had very little input in the series' content, and the animated universe differs significantly from the game's. The show was aimed at an audience much younger than the one the property had previously targeted. The producers' original intent was to start the series with a mecha-combat tournament held between the Vanguard of Justice and the Shadow Dragons (representatives of Terra Nova's Northern and Southern armies respectively), but after the resolution of the tournament storyline rising tensions would lead to war between the North and South, which would in turn be followed by an invasion from Earth trying to reconquer its old colony planet, forcing the North and South to join forces for their own survival. Worries that having the bad guys from the early episodes (the Vanguard characters) suddenly working with the good guys, and shifting from a tournament-styled competition to all-out mecha warfare, would have been too confusing for their targeted age group led to a decision to not use the war storyline. What ended up happening on the show was that they ran the tournament storyline as planned but even though the tournament had been 'won' within the first dozen or so episodes, the two teams just kept having exhibition matches and the like for the remainder of the 40 episode run.
[edit] External links
- Official Site
- Dream Pod 9 (Publisher)
- Screaming Korpse Kollectiv - The Heavy Gear Game Community
- Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear Links Page
- Paradox Entertainment (managers of Heavy Gear licensing)
- Marc A. Vezina (Line Editor 1994-2003)
- Ghislain Barbe (Lead Conceptual Artist 1993-1999)
- Hermes 72 - Heavy Gear Web Community
- MobyGames' entry for the Heavy Gear Series
