Tag: origin systems

#oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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2494: Space Rogue

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I was pleasantly surprised earlier today to see GOG.com release an elderly Origin (old-school Origin the software company, not Origin the unnecessary piece of EA bloatware) title called Space Rogue.

I was particularly surprised to see Space Rogue on GOG.com, primarily because they had already released a game of the same name that had no relation to it — although in retrospect, given that a considerable amount of discussion around the newer game was along the lines of "hey, remember that old Origin game called Space Rogue?" I should have perhaps seen this coming. Still, it's a pleasant surprise regardless.

I have very fond memories of Space Rogue. It was a game from the 16-bit computer era with everything that entailed, which usually meant a box packed with stuff other than the game disks. In Space Rogue's case, there was a wonderful "in-character" manual for the spaceship you pilot in the game, complete with sarcastic notes scrawled "by hand" in the margins. I really miss this kind of thing; the only place we tend to get "feelies" like this any more is in limited edition releases of games, and those tend to be considerably more expensive than standard editions.

But I digress. Space Rogue was an interesting game for its blend of genres — part space sim, part RPG. Origin proved themselves to be masters of both over the years — with their most well-known series including Wing Commander (space sim) and Ultima (RPG) — but Space Rogue was an early example of mashing the two together, which makes it, to date, still pretty distinctive in its respective genres. Sure, titles like Star Citizen, No Man's Sky and Elite have all taken a few tentative strides in the direction of allowing you to get out of your ship and do stuff other than fly around, but none yet have captured what Space Rogue did, which was include a fully-featured "walking around" mode as well as its 3D polygonal space flight sequences.

Details of the plot of Space Rogue elude me, though there are odd bits that I still remember. Of particular note was a lengthy sequence that I was thoroughly enamoured with as a youngster in which you play messenger boy between two sisters living on different space stations. The sequence culminates with one of the sisters throwing her arms around you and thanking you for all your hard work. I found this to be a satisfying conclusion to the episode, even presented purely in text as it was.

I also remember the space stations having various different designs, and greatly enjoying the experience of landing on the one that looked like an aircraft carrier in space. Elite Dangerous does very good space station docking sequences, but 20 years ago, Space Rogue was my favourite.

I also remember the spaceflight sequences having a peculiar "Newtonian" movement option, in which rather than adopt the usual space sim convention of always thrusting forwards and simply turning the direction you're moving, you could spin your ship around and face one direction while moving in another, allowing you to, say, shoot enemies who were on your tail while running away from them.

Due to technological limitations of the time, not all of the space flight sequences took place from the 3D cockpit view. Long-range navigation unfolded from a top-down map that clearly used the same engine as the on-foot segments. While relatively primitive in comparison to the 3D graphics, it gave the game a good feeling of "context" and of moving across vast distances.

I have no idea if Space Rogue is still a good game, but I'm interested to try it again anyway. While it's not a game that ever went down in any Great Gaming History books or whatever, it's nonetheless a game I consider to be a defining experience in my youth, and as such even if it plays like a dog in 2016, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for it.