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Shareware explosion triple threat by Mischief Maker 07/24/2004, 2:36pm PDT After being disappointed by the coulda-been-great-if-only-they-hadn’t experience of Freelancer, I dove into the murky depths of the still-sorta-active shareware community in an attempt to find some pearls amidst the muck. Here’s what I found: Starscape Every review of this game you find on the internet calles it the all time #1 must-buy OMFG SPLORT indie game. Let me assure you that this is not true. A cool concept -Sinistar meets the RTS portion of Giants meets ship customizability- but it fails in execution. The main thing that shoots this game in the face is the shitty keyboard-only controls (or joystick, if you can get the damn thing to detect yours) and its choppy physics system. What then puts a few more bullets into the game to make sure that it’s dead is the fact that there’s a “right” way to build your custom fighter and any major deviations will result in you being unable to fight or running out of power after the first salvo, the fact that there are 3 pastel colors of resource crystals you need and you can end up harvesting an entire sector but still have your research stalled because you’re short purple crystals, and finally the fact that your mothership is much better at fighting than you while you are much better at harvesting, turning the game into a tiring chore of blasting asteroids hoping that this time it’ll reluctantly drop a crystal of the color you need. On the plus side, the game uses some very pretty lighting effects and looks very professional. I could totally see this game getting released commercially back during the DOS age. Price: $25 Demo notes: They do a very good job of implying something way cool will happen in the game after your 20 minute time limit is up. Lies. The boss fights are just a case of you hitting the missile key as fast as you can. The plot doesn’t get any better either. The mysterious bad guys can best be described as “Exactly like the borg, but less interesting and more prone to fits of malevolent cackling.” Bottom Line: Save your money for something better Flatspace Surprisingly good. A 2D elite in a randomly generated universe. Buy any ship, take missions at space stations, go do what you want. Be anything from a grizzled cop on the edge to a jolly swarthy space pirate. Controls are mouse-based and refreshingly smooth. Combat is fun, missiles must be avoided by dropping flares and jinking, you need to lead your shots. There’s no annoying plot to speak of, just you and your quest to find the 4 (very expensive) components of an alien galactic hyperdrive scattered across the galaxy. The thing that makes this game cooler than Freelancer or Elite is the fact that every ship in the universe is individually tracked and goes about its own business. This means no randomly generated encounters aimed solely at you to provide “atmosphere.” You’ll run across crowded clusterfucks of miners digging into a rich asteroid field, cops calling for backup and swarming pirates, and raiders attacking some other poor schmuck who, if you’re careful, won’t notice you once they’re done with him. It also means that the universe doesn’t “level up” with you, avoiding that Diablo level treadmill feel that Freelancer had going for it. Your escalating sense of power in this game comes from the fact that you really are getting more powerful compared to everyone else. Finally, there is no perfect uber-ship. You can put together one excellent for specializing in a specific job, but every ship and piece of equipment has its advantages and disadvantages and even a slight change will result in a very noticeable change in the handling of your ship. The Dagger racing ship may only have room for a dinky cannon and the slightest hit will turn it into a little poof of vapor, but it can fly circles around a hulking Battle Station and can make a good living as a daredevil bounty hunter. On the downside, the graphics are shiny basic polygons with minimal light effects and texturing. The ship and station menus are very ghetto. The targeting button targets the closest ship AND ONLY the closest ship, making it hard to find specific ships in a crowd (or in an asteroid field.) The noncombat AI still needs a little work as ships WILL NOT move to avoid obstacles/asteroids/you making for a real “watch it, asshole!” rush hour experience in crowded systems. There’s also a bug that can make space stations and their fighters accidentally start shooting at themselves. Demo notes: Since you’re only limited to weapon upgrades, the cop, the trader, and the scavenger are the only really playable starting classes as you need a (better) radar to track down criminals over the large distances in each sector. Price: $21 Bottom line: Better than Elite, more engrossing than Freelancer, kicks the ass of nethack, too. Starships Unlimited v.3 Start by reading this review of STUN v.2 so I don’t have to explain the mechanics. Even Tom Chick writes a good one every now and then. STUN3 succeeds everywhere MOO3 and Starfleet Command failed. It de-emphasizes the boring parts of Empire Management by actually de-emphasizing them instead of having a dumb-ass AI make all the decisions for you. It bring all the complexities of Starfleet Command’s “Stately capital ship combat” without making you juggle them all at once in a mad fight against the interface to keep your head above water. It makes you feel like you really are the Emperor of Space busy sending your Starships on voyages to explore the galaxy and blow up your enemies instead of the Auditor of Space nitpicking over the happiness level of the farmers on planet Bumfuck 3 of the Yawn system. It’s also the only game I’ve seen that mixes Real Time and Turn based controls and does it well. STUN 3 is a huge improvement over STUN 2 and Divided Galaxies (the one that got released in stores.) The graphics, while still ghetto as all hell, are a huge improvement. Ships now have much larger hulls, allowing you to start using extra goodies like assault pods and cloaking devices before Destroyers and Cruisers hit the scene. The economic system is even more straightforward than before. Old tricks that allowed you to gobble up huge swaths of the galaxy before the AI can reach them or let you gain a huge tech advantage over the AI are no longer possible. The AI’s smarter than before and will not hesitate to go after your homeworld when it has the advantage. It’s also a lot wilyer in ship-to-ship combat, being quite adept at staying out of my firing arcs. Because of this, putting a ship under AI control is no longer the death sentence it used to be. Speaking of which, you can now put your AI ships on specific duty, like Exploration or Pirate patrol so they stick with the job they’re best suited for. The most interesting change is that Wisdom Artifacts are now gone, replaced by a “Wisdom” percentage that you fill by sending your ships to explore the galaxy (100% wisdom = ~half the galaxy explored) and every time you enter a new age, you have to re-explore the galaxy using your improved technology, potentially finding a number of artifacts you missed last time. The ship-to-ship combat deserves special mention. (Note: the game defaults to having the computer fight the battles. Change this setting immediately or you’re missing out on 2/3 of the fun.) Every round you pick a maneuver, then your ship rotates independently of this motion to get the enemy ship into its firing arc (represented by a wireframe wedge.) Depending on what you’ve installed in your ship, you can do extra things like launch fighters, or send an assault pod full of marines to penetrate their hull when their shields are down, or cloak. If you’re in a desperate bind, you can shunt energy from your engines or shields to your lasers to get an extra shot at the cost of damaging them. Or you can ignore all that fancy crap and just build a battlecruiser with 7 plasma bolt cannons that can cripple a ship in a single salvo. As ship components get damaged, they wink offline at random inopportune intervals, avoiding that old annoyance of ships fighting at full strength until they croak. Before battles, there’s a real min/maxing strategy game of what exactly to put on your ship. If you only have lasers and your enemy is packing anti-laser shields, you’re fucked. Every new technology age adds an extra level of pro/con complexity. Best of all, if you make the right tech choices and perform the best tactical maneuvers, you don’t just get some random victory in limbo, you’ve just expanded your empire or crippled your enemy’s infrastructure or taken down his flagship! Demo Issues: I haven’t played v.3’s demo, but some of the previous demos were so severely nerfed that the game ended before you were finished exploring the galaxy and starting to butt heads with the enemy. If that’s still the case, take my word for it that the mini-battles against the biohazards, violent storms, and leftover sentry bots of unexplored worlds at the beginning of the game is a pale shadow of the real ship to ship combat that’s coming up. Price: $25 Bottom Line: Best Star Trek game since “Starflight.”

Shareware explosion triple threat by Mischief Maker 07/24/2004, 2:36pm PDT     no STUN3 review link NT by FABIO 07/24/2004, 2:42pm PDT     Don't frontpage this. I'm making it into an Article NT by Mischief Maker 07/26/2004, 11:22am PDT