2494: Space Rogue

0493_001

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.

2397: No Man’s Sky

0397_001

I dutifully downloaded No Man’s Sky at 6pm this evening when it became available on Steam and, aside from a break for dinner, I have been playing it all night.

It’s very good indeed, with a few caveats.

The first is that it is not a game for the impatient. Before you can even get off whatever planet you get dumped on at the beginning, you have to repair a bunch of your ship’s systems, which involves gathering a selection of resources, some of which are harder to find than others. (Pro-tip: zinc can be found in yellowy leafy plants, and heridium can be found in large blue-black rocky monolith-type structures. You’ll thank me for those.) It took me a good half an hour of wandering around (including becoming lost in a rather labyrinthine network of caves that I mistakenly thought might be a shortcut to the heridium deposit my scanner had helpfully found for me 15 minutes’ real-time walk away from the crater my spaceship had deposited itself in) before I assembled everything I needed to get going, but it was absolutely worth it; lifting off for the first time in No Man’s Sky is one of those watershed moments in gaming, like coming out of the sewers for the first time in Oblivion.

The second is that it is not a game for those who like to have their hand held, particularly in the early hours. While the ship-repairing process acts as a tutorial of sorts, the game literally starts with you waking up next to your crashed ship with absolutely no context whatsoever, and from there you have to determine exactly what you’re supposed to do.

There are supposedly three main “routes” through the game, one of which is simply “do your own thing and see what happens”, so wandering around aimlessly trying to scan all the indigenous life on the planet you’ve found yourself on is absolutely an option, but so too is following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the mysterious “Atlas” system, which has distinctly sinister omniscient, omnipotent being undertones (and, appropriately enough, this route was apparently penned by one of the writers of Deus Ex).

It’s a game that encourages experimentation. Arrive in a new system? Scan it and see if anything shows up, then go investigate. Wander around a bit outside to dig up some minerals and perhaps even find a few alien relics that help you learn the words of various languages. Found some weird technology? Disassemble it and incorporate its components into your suit, ship or multi-tool. Found some shiny glowy things? Sell them off for vast profit at your friendly neighbourhood space station. Met a malfunctioning cyborg bartender who wants nothing more than to shake hands with you? Make sure you have more than one health point before doing so, otherwise said bar will find itself adorned with a rather obtrusive tombstone for the rest of time.

There’s a frightening degree of customisation in the game, too, though you have to balance this with your relatively limited inventory space, since upgrades for your various pieces of tech occupy valuable inventory slots or cargo space in your ship. Upgrading your multi-tool is probably the most interesting so far, because by doing this what starts as a simple short-range mining laser can become a machine gun, a plasma launcher, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, a long-range scanner, a lifeform analyser and all manner of other things besides. You even have to consider the layout of the components in your tool, because upgrades and modifications unsurprisingly work better if placed adjacent to the parts they are tweaking.

The thing that’s struck me so far is how incredibly absorbing it is. The whole game has the look of Tim White’s cover art for Isaac Asimov novels, with a touch of Roger Dean here and there. The worlds you’ll visit are varied and interesting, despite their randomly generated nature; there are hills, valleys, caves, seas, deserts, mountains, canyons and all manner of other landscapes to explore, and, assuming you don’t piss off the local Sentinels or the indigenous life, exploring it is an enormously relaxing pleasure. Indeed, at one point this evening as I stepped out of my ship onto a tiny island, then dove beneath the ocean waves to see what lay beneath, the Zen-like atmosphere of it all made me feel more at peace than I think anything else I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory. Then I started to drown, so I had to cut my underwater exploits short, but for a short period it was bliss.

Thus far, No Man’s Sky looks set to be a really interesting take on sci-fi that is a far cry from the usual “space military”-centric angle we tend to get in video games. Its dreamy, mysterious narration (all in text, no voiceovers) is written with a similar tone to Asimov novels and lends a suitable air of, appropriately enough, otherworldliness to the whole affair. I’m not sure if I’ve locked myself into one of the three “paths” as yet, or if that continues to be a series of choices you make as you progress through the game, but so far everything I’ve encountered with relation to the lore is fascinating and intriguing, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. Well, I know that — the centre of the universe — but why? What happens there? Who are you, the player? Why is it so important you follow this path that has seemingly been set out for you?

I can’t answer any of those questions yet, but I’m looking forward to seeking some answers. It’s early days yet, but so far this feels like the space game I always wanted to play. Fly a cool ship, land on planets, wander around, shoot stuff like a badass, become embroiled in metaphysical crazytimes, possibly find out that you/your ship/the weird thing on the cover is God or something.

2209: Exploring the Cosmos

0208_001

Been playing a bit of Elite Dangerous: Horizons this evening and realising the “dream” of something I’ve wanted to do since I started playing: hop in a ship, point it in a particular direction and just go see what’s out there.

I haven’t got that far yet, to be honest — I’m still in populated space, albeit getting down to the dregs of the tiny factions rather than the warring empires of the PowerPlay system — but I can see interesting things on the galactic horizon, and I fully intend to check them out and see what’s there.

The nice thing about Elite is that you can do this and it’s a viable way to play the game. Its exceedingly freeform nature — more freeform than pretty much any other game I think I’ve played outside of Minecraft — allows you to play how you see fit, and enjoy it how you want. If you want fast-action combat dogfighting, it’s there. If you want to run courier missions, that’s there. If you want to collaborate with other players to strategically expand the influence of one of the major powers in the galaxy, that’s there, too. Or, as previously mentioned, if you just want to hop in a ship, point it in a particular direction and just go see what’s out there… well, you can do that too, because the galaxy is one hell of a big place.

Exploration gameplay is relatively straightforward. Equip a ship with the appropriate scanners — basic versions of which come as standard — and when you hyperspace into a new system, you can scan for astronomical objects. Once you’ve located some, either via your scanners or visually, targeting them and flying close-ish to them allows you to run a detailed scan of them and record the information in your ship’s computer. You can then sell this information when you get to a suitable space station or colony that is at least 20 light years away from where you acquired the data — it’s assumed that most areas are familiar with the region immediately around them — and profit accordingly. It’s a valid career path with its own progression and the opportunity to make your own distinctive mark on the game universe: whenever someone visits something that you were the first one to discover, they’ll see your name there, proudly recorded for all time as the first person to find that thing, whether it’s a big burning ball of fiery sun, an unremarkable lump of rock or a spectacular planetary system.

I haven’t travelled far enough to be one of these pioneers as yet, I don’t think, but I’m already getting into a region of space that is less populated, both with the computer-controlled factions and players. The station my ship is currently parked at as I type this has seen just 12 player-controlled ships pass through in the last 24 hours, compared to the hundreds or thousands the more “core” stations in the centre of the populated area see every day.

I find the exploration aspect inherently satisfying for some reason, despite the fact that objectively speaking it’s quite boring and repetitive — although I did get interdicted by an unpleasant NPC called “Starquake” earlier, who battered my ship about a bit before I was able to activate my Frame-Shift Drive and jump away from him — but mostly I’m curious to see what’s out there, if anything. The original Elite had some strange things going on in the far reaches of the galaxy — most notably the spectacularly irritating Thargoids, who had a habit of pulling you out of hyperspace and killing you horribly — so I’m curious to see if there’s anything interesting hidden in the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

There are a bunch of places I’m just curious to see, too. The “Coalsack” area looks most intriguing, what with its ominous black cloudiness, and, of course, the immense density of the galactic core is surely worth trying to see. Of these places, the Coalsack is probably reachable relatively easily; the galactic core perhaps less so, but I’m interested to see how far I can go. Theoretically, my current ship has infinite range thanks to its Fuel Scoop hardware, which allows me to refuel by harvesting the gases of appropriate stars, so as long as I don’t get stranded in a region with crap stars and/or blown up by pirates or aliens who are hiding deep in “unpopulated” space, I should be good to go for quite some time. And think of the money I’ll make when I eventually get back to human space to sell all this exploration data.

Oh, God, I have to fly back as well, don’t I… Maybe I shouldn’t go too far…

2095: Exploring Space

I’m starting to get a bit interested in Elite Dangerous after chatting about it with a friend the other night. It sounds like the ongoing, active development of the game is starting to pay off a bit with some actual Stuff to Do, albeit Stuff that gets a bit repetitive after a while, from what I understand. There’s a great deal of potential there, however, and with the status of Star Citizen a little uncertain, Elite Dangerous is starting to look a little more like the “safe” choice for next-gen space opera action.

I’m a little loathe to pay full price for Elite Dangerous at this point, however, since the thing I’m particularly interested in — the Horizons expansion, which adds planetary landings to the mix — costs about the same as the base game of Elite Dangerous and, in fact, comes with a copy of Elite Dangerous included, too, meaning that if you want to play Elite Dangerous now and enjoy Horizons when it comes out, you effectively have to pay for it twice, which is a bit poo, but that’s not what I’m going to get into today.

Anyway. The point is, while I was looking at Elite Dangerous and willing the price to magically drop by itself, I spotted some “related” games on Steam that looked intriguing. One in particular caught my eye: Rodina. I became even more interested in this after reading a user review that compared it favourably to 16-bit classics Starglider and Damocles, so I decided to check out the free demo this evening.

Rodina is a game that prides itself on seamless exploration. And for once, that isn’t an exaggeration: you start the game on foot on an asteroid, follow a signal to find your spaceship, hop into your spaceship, wander around inside your spaceship, take off, fly around the asteroid, find some bits to make your spaceship better, take off again, leave the asteroid, start flying around the solar system and start investigating planets for a mysterious alien menace that appears to have thwarted humanity’s attempts to colonise the stars.

Rodina is technically in Early Access at the moment, but it is possible to “finish” it already, apparently, by seeing through the whole story. The story is primarily told through text boxes that appear through a combination of messages you receive on your ship’s communication system and data crystals you find scattered around on the various stellar bodies around the solar system. It’s an intriguing little tale with some good writing, though seeing interactions between people depicted through this rather cold medium makes the game itself feel like a rather lonely experience — doubtless intentional.

The premise is intriguing enough, to be sure. The execution… well, it’s difficult to make a fully informed judgement based on just an hour of the demo — take note, Mike Diver of Vice and your atrocious Senran Kagura 2 review, no I haven’t forgotten about you — but I have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, it’s cool to see a game with such a great sense of scale; the solar system in which the game unfolds feels big, and stellar bodies feel like more than bitmaps you fly towards until they suddenly, magically become a 3D planet surface. There’s a cool atmospheric re-entry system where you have to wrestle with your ship’s controls as you descend, and successfully popping out of the bottom of this is always a satisfying moment.

Trouble is, like many games of this type, the scenery is a little bit bland, or at least it has been in what I’ve seen so far. Everything, be it planet or asteroid, appears to be variations on “coloured ground with procedurally generated mountains”; there aren’t any real geographical features to speak of, so don’t expect something like No Man’s Sky from this. This takes a little bit of the fun out of the exploration; a key part of space exploration simulators — and what I’m hoping Elite Dangerous: Horizons will nail later in the year — is allowing you to discover all manner of weird and wonderful things around the galaxy. Rodina has plenty of things to discover, for sure, but for one thing, they’re all signposted with waypoints when you get close enough, and secondly, everything I’ve discovered so far has been nothing more than a few randomly scattered crates and barrels and one or two data crystals. While the story these apparent crash sites was revealing was interesting, by the end of the demo it was already starting to get a little bit tiresome to track down these logs.

There’s a lot of potential, for sure, and just as I was finishing the demo, the game was starting to open up a bit, suggesting that I travel to the actual planets in the system to deal with the alien menace rather than just finding log after log. It sounds as if at the present time, there aren’t really any friendly NPCs to interact with, which is a shame, but it’s something the developer intends to include in the future.

I’m not sure I liked the demo enough to want to drop 11 quid on the full game just yet, but it’s certainly an intriguing little game with a great deal of potential that I’ll probably keep my eye on to see how it develops. I’m all for more space games, since we’ve been deprived of them for a good few years; hopefully this is the beginning of a renaissance.