The Collection Chamber: Q.A.D. QUINTESSENTIAL ART OF DESTRUCTION

Your mission is very simple - rescue the Good Guys from the Bad Guys and follow the age old teachings of the Quintessential Art of Destruction - if it moves, blast it!

Speed across strange landscapes, encounter weird creatures and take a split second to decide whether to Save or Destroy. Deploy awesome firepower. Attempt to make sense out of weird stuff happening across 30 challenging levels. And at the end of all that senseless violence, remember... It's just a game... Isn't it?
Created by award-winning programmer Jon Ritman, whose games have sold more than a million copies.
Based on solid, pure and classic gameplay, QAD is one of the most addictive, blister raising shoot-em-ups ever.
Hundreds of weird enemies on screen simultaneously, ranging from the standard massed alien hordes to kamikaze killer pumpkins.
Revolutionary real time 3D fractal landscape.
2 player action with modern and network play.

~ from the back of the box

Back in 1996, Cranberry Source unleashed a peculiar beast upon the PC gaming world; Q.A.D. Quintessential Art of Destruction. Published by Philips Interactive Media, this oddball mash-up of dogfighting, hostage rescue, and unrepentant sabotage was meant to come to the PlayStation and Saturn too, but those ports were quietly axed. With its weird architecture, SEGA's Saturn couldn't keep up, and the PlayStation version ended up looking like a cut-price mash of badly rendered polygons - enough for the publishers to get cold feet. So, PC gamers alone got to experience this bizarre cocktail of interstellar warfare and civilian trafficking.

Behind the mayhem was Jon Ritman, a name ZX Spectrum veterans will remember fondly. Ritman cut his teeth programming on the ZX81 with Namtir Raiders (his surname backwards, naturally), before giving us Bear Bovver and the Match Day football games. Then came his pièce de résistance - Head Over Heels (1987) - a glorious isometric adventure where two characters with complementary abilities solved puzzles in a surreal menagerie of rooms. It's still hailed as a Spectrum masterpiece, and benchmarks in the annals of British game design history. It's recent remake is well worth picking up. Fast forward a decade and Ritman was at Cranberry Source, working on projects with Philips - including Q.A.D., which proves he hadn't lost his taste for unusual mechanics, even if this time the puzzles were hidden beneath a hail of missiles.

So what's Q.A.D. all about? On paper, it's a noble mission to rescue civilians from a merciless alien threat in far-reaching war-torn star systems. In practice, it's more like a game of "who can shove the most people into a taxi before the other guy does". Each mission begins with a pod factory plonked somewhere in the middle of the map. You fetch a pod, drop it among a crowd of waiting civilians, watch them pile in, and then lug it back to your base. Sounds easy, but the enemy is trying to do exactly the same thing. And unlike most rescue operations, the quickest way to success might be blowing your opponent's pod (and its contents) into space confetti.

Choose your loadout before each mission. You can enter your Base mid-action to replenish ammo and health (left).
In the heat of battle, you can enter a Pod Factory to buy upgrades pods and weapons (right).

Yes, morality in Q.A.D. is as expendable as your fighter craft. If your rival is leading the scoreboard, why not shoot a few hostages before they can be saved? It's grim logic, but effective, and the game gleefully rewards such villainy. You're not just a pilot, you're a saboteur. A pirate. Kidnapper... Occasional murderer? Whatever you are, the Geneva Convention clearly doesn't extend to this galaxy.

Of course, this interstellar arms race wouldn't be much fun without a menagerie of alien ships to spice things up. Nimble fighters flit about like caffeinated mosquitos. Heavier cruisers lumber across the skies, shrugging off damage until you batter them into pixel dust. Ground-based missile turrets lurk in valleys and ridges, happy to ruin your rescue run. Some enemies belch out volleys of homing missiles, others act as airborne fortresses. The result? Every inch of sky feels like a fireworks display designed to kill you.

Luckily, death is little more than an inconvenience. Blow up, and you're plonked back in a shiny new fighter, ready to rejoin the chaos. The match only ends when the last hostage is claimed or atomised. Until then, expect a cycle of frantic dogfighting, desperate pod-runs, and the occasional bout of opportunistic theft which unfortunately gets old incredibly quickly.

Hostage scatter around the map just waiting to be shot. Or more likely a pod to escape to (left).
Drop a full pod near your Base to rescue them (right).

In an attempt to spice up the gameplay, you can access a weapon shop on the battlefield which lets you upgrade mid-mission. Here you can pick up homing missiles, rapid-fire lasers, or even ground-scorching cluster bombs without missing a beat. My personal favourite is the CBW Cannon which impressively splits into 6 missiles which are guided if you upgrade to the Super variant. If you have the money, one clever purchase can change the tide of the entire battle.

A single level plays out like an inter-planetary capture-the-flag mission. You grab a pod from the factory, scoop up hostages, then make a mad dash back to base. On the way, enemy fighters swarm you, missiles streak overhead, and all the while your rival will smugly float past with his own pod full of people. Do you keep calm and carry on, or do you blast their pod into atoms just to watch their scoreboard plummet? More often than not, the latter proves the best course of action, though I twinge with guilt every time I do it (and I will do it every time).

The level design - each one a mountain range the only really differ in colour - only adds to the chaos. The peaks and troughs of the ranges and cliffs force you to choose the best path to the pods. Do you follow the road for a direct route without cover, or do you risk the ire of alien craft and weave around the rolling landscape. Often the battlefield becomes a ludicrous cacophony of fighters, pods, and civilians all scattering in panic.

While your opponent cannot easily be destroyed, alien ships can. They will often leave power ups (left).
Press TAB to open the map. Like the level itself, it is made up of neatly designed voxels (right).

The campaign takes you across three star systems, each upping the ante with nastier foes and denser terrain. The difficulty curve is steep, but when you do master it's nuances you can unleash quite the frenetic deathmatch. Unfortunately, this can too often devolve into repetition rather than strategy. By the time you reach the later missions, the amount of stuff on screen leaves little time to plan an attack but by this time you'd likely have discovered the best tactic and used it on repeat anyway. Relentless escalation should force you to adapt and improvise, but I mostly found myself doing the same thing over and over again.

In the end, Q.A.D. Quintessential Art of Destruction is a decent yet flawed action game. It isn't particularly polished (or politically correct) but in spite of itself, it is memorable. That iconic front cover alone will forever be stuck in my mind. It may not straddle the upper echelons of gaming greatness, but as destruction goes, Cranberry Source managed something quite... quintessential.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 287 Mb. Install Size: 467 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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