Friday 24 July 2009

Blasting the Past

Lately, I've been playing some games, I'm running out of time to make a post this week, so lets talk about them, feel free to feign interest, it's all the same to me.

First off, I've been playing some of Freelancer's multiplayer, something I've mentioned in passing before. For those interested my server of choice is the void (look out for IcedInferno, as usual), not for any reason other than it was at the top of one of the server lists I looked at. The Void has a pretty cool sounding mod tied to it, although I haven't seen much of the new content. The only two things I've seen so far I encountered within minutes of play. Immediately after launching from the starting planet I was greeted by a giant space billboard welcoming me to the void, the second thing was a gargantuan warship, roughly the legnth of the average planets' radius, doing battle with a number of rogue ships. This ship, was player controlled, and I was sure as hell glad that it was on my side. I also found out that I could dock with it, essentially using another player as a resupply base, that is inherently cool.

The other game, which is simultaneously very old and a little old, is The Ur-Quan Masters, a port of Star Control 2 from Dos to modern operating systems. Star Control 2 is a game that does nothing to alleviate my belief that as time has passed the quality of story telling in games has gone down, and that only recently people have restarted making decent attempts at even narratively justifying the events in their games. Star Control 2 is really deep, the graphical quality may be exactly what you'd expect from something originally intended for Dos, but the hours and hours of recorded dialogue and heart and soul poured into the universe more than make up for that. You know what else? It is completely free, so you have no excuse not to try it.
The only caveat is that the game doesn't do a very good job (read: any) of filling you in on the controls. Oh, and also, it is as hard as balls.

That is all.

I just need a little therapy