Hostile Waters: Difference between revisions

{{quote|"''Twenty years ago this was the scene of the last war on Earth. This Pacific island is where the future was built. Where the old guard, the fossilized establishment was brought down. Twenty years have been spent building a new Earth. A world of plenty, and peace. But the old guard never went away. The remaining monsters of the 20th century, the [[President Evil|death-lovers]], the [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|power brokers]], the old men who lived on theft and hate, have formed a [[Omniscient Council of Vagueness|Cabal]], with the intent to break the world apart. With new machinery, unimagined by the outside world, they have incorporated the island into a newly grown chicane of similar islands, the Earth literally forced by machines to throw islands up into an artificial design. The Cabal control their operations from the shielded island in the center of the chicane. Operations for war against a world that's given war up. It's up to the new society of two thousand and thirty two to relearn war. To revive the last of the Adaptive Cruisers. Give it the ability to lend battle vehicles autonomous controls by bonding their systems with the chip-contained minds of dead soldiers; and to send them all into the chicane to fight their way through to Island Zero... and the nightmare, waiting there to be set loose upon the planet. These are [[Title Drop|Hostile Waters]]...''"|'''Narrator ([[Hey, It's That Voice!|Tom Baker]])'''}}

* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: The quick order system, meant to let the player give orders quicker, without leaving the cockpit. The alternative is changing back to the Battle Room... [[Real Time Withwith Pause|which pauses the game]].

* [[Death World]]: The chances of humans surviving on unterraformed islands are non-existent. {{spoiler|As one of the characters realizes, that's the whole point. The aliens, having outgrown the weakness to hot temperatures, are now simply unterraforming in order to wipe out humanity.}}

* [[Downer Ending]]: A pretty hard-hitting one. {{spoiler|In the final mission, after much (and I mean ''much'') effort, your ship, converted into a makeshift nuke, destroys a structure designed to launch genetically engineered alien creatures into space. [[It Makes Sense in Context]]. Anyway, in the credits, you and your crew go down with the ship. The ship's nanotech creation engine hits the ocean floor with the alien launch platform, which promptly beingsbegins to assimilate it. As if this weren't bad enough, [[The Stinger]] shows that the aliens managed to get into space anyway. Congrats, humanity's last weapon was sacrificed for little more than spare time (which the humans won't use because they think they've won), and if those aliens decide they want to come back home, the human race is '''fucked'''.}}

* [[Fiction Asas Cover -Up]]: The Classic Flying Saucers, see below.

* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: The final mission consists simply of escorting the [[Cool Ship]], turned into a walking (well, floating) bomb, into the heart of the enemy installation. It seems to work, too. {{spoiler|Though the ending and [[The Stinger]] suggest otherwise.}}

* [[Impaled Withwith Extreme Prejudice]]: {{spoiler|The fate of Cabal leaders.}}

* [[In -Universe Game Clock]]: A day/night cycle that doesn't affect gameplay beyond giving you an excuse to use the night vision button. [[Guide Dang It|If you know one exists at all.]]

* [[Ironic Echo]]: A Non-verbal version; {{spoiler|when you get to the fake Island Zero, you can see a statue of something large and bug-like attacking a considerably smaller human, symbolizing the Cabal using the aliens to destroy their enemies. Fast-forward to when Antaeus gets to real Island Zero, the Cabal leaders, who a mission ago requested us to protect them from the now rogue alien forces, are impaled by the aliens on the beach, slowly dying, naked, in the middle of an unnatural winter, and near the center of the island, in the middle of the ruined headquarters, there stands an identical statue, with the upper half of the human missing, now symbolizing something completely different.}}

* [[Nanomachines]]: The plotline is based on nanotechnology. In the year 2012, nanotech "Creation Engines" were developed and released to the world at large. Able to dispense anything a person could want, at any time - on demand - they cause [[The Singularity|"the world to go sane"]]; revolution happened, [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|power cliques]] were overthrown and the world becomes a [[Utopia]]. The game takes place is the fictional year 2032, where the old power elites have perverted nanotechnology for their own uses, creating weapons of war with which to blackmail the rest of the world into servitude again. {{spoiler|Or so it seems, at first...}}

* [[Not Playing Fair Withwith Resources]]: Though it is fair in the sense that your methods and their methods are completely distinct, the enemy has literally infinite resources so long as at least one oil rig is intact. Bust that and they run out of resources within a minute. Of course, later on the game does tend to screw you by spawning more rigs mid-mission.

* [[Real Time Withwith Pause]]: In the Battle Room, time does not flow.

{{quote| '''Walker:''' ''Nobody'' slips through the system. We've got more agents out there than there are faction members. If there was a split, we'd know about it. For Christ sake, we ''control'' most of them. They can't take a ''shit'' without us knowing about it.}}

{{quote| '''Walker:''' Streets lined with plants that capture pollution and sequester it as the pigment in flowers, decontaminating it as they bloom. Public Creation Engines on every corner that make free food and clothes and goods and anything out of dirt and waste. Tiny organic medicines, riding the air, that heal us as we breathe. Disease-free immortality. Our grasp exceeds the moon, and we stand on the verge of greatness.}}

* [[Voice Withwith an Internet Connection]]: Your handlers at Central, Walker and Church, who are two of the only people left qualified for military operations. Their superior, Halsey, also shows up in the first mission.

[[Category:Real- Time Strategy]][[Category:Hostile Waters]]