After we did a proper tidy and deep clean on my study the other weekend, I've been spending a few evenings actually playing some stuff on real hardware. Most notably, I've been finding myself thoroughly drawn in by a game I used to really love when I was younger: Starflight from EA and Binary Systems.
Every time I revisit one of these older "space games" like Starflight, Star Control or Space Rogue, I find myself a little sad that we don't really get games like this any more. I mean, yes, we have stuff like the X series, but that's a little different; Starflight, if you're unfamiliar, is more a sim of "being a starship captain" rather than being a "starship simulator", if you see the difference. In other words, the interface is supposed to imply you giving orders to your crew and receiving the information from them rather than involving you literally doing everything by hand.
I had high hopes for Mass Effect being a (then) next-gen take on this kind of space sim back when we were first hearing rumblings about it — the stuff with the Mako in particular reminded me very much of the Terrain Vehicle sequences in Starflight and the similar lander sequences in Star Control II — but that ended up not being the case. And that's a shame; I feel like we could do a really good "space game" these days, with a vast universe to explore coupled with an approach to controlling things that is less about "flying a starship" and more about "sitting in the captain's chair".
I'm not sure I'm explaining that clearly. But I do know that Starflight for Atari ST is still a great game that I'm having a lot of fun playing right now — so I will be continuing to enjoy that in the absence of anything more modern that scratches quite the same itch!
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