Space Game General All-Platform Thready Discussy Thing :)

Hey y’all, I’m carrying over the discussion from the Compiling a List of Space Sims thread – where it’s mostly me pimping my blog – to this thread because the discussion over there has centered mostly around PC games. However, there are plenty of non-PC space games to talk about these days too, which is awesome.

Here we can – and should – talk about any space game on any platform…heck, even board games, why not? :)

So please join me in discussion about any game on any platform that takes place in space, and enjoy. :)

The game I was talking about in the other thread is Star Hammer Tactics, which is currently for the PS3, PSP and iPad, and looks pretty cool. :)

The latest X expansion showed up on Steam, and is tantalizing. Even though I couldn’t figure out the complicated joystick controls in X2, or what the hell was going on and where I was supposed to go in X3. That series is dead to me, and yet, every time they release a new game, I feel an attraction I can’t say no to once it drops below impulse purchase price point.

Btw, thanks for linking your blog again Brian. Yahoo Bookmarks is working again, so I can actually bookmark it now.

Sony should make a Colony Wars for PS3. That is all.

SolarQuest is amazing. Not too terribly balanced, but the idea of owning the solar system and fighting with space lasers was a fantastic outlet back in the day.

Is the combat in Starhammer tactics 3D? or is it only x,y?

I can’t blame you. I want to love the games but…erg…

Yay!

I actually own these for my PS3 but I’ve yet to play them.

It looks like it’s on a 2D plane.

If I were to try a board game, this one looks amazing:

http://www.amazon.com/WizKids-WZK-70332-Fleet-Captains/dp/B0059L4S3U/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3KY9IQ4P7AW8D&colid=1HCTPR8ABDLRA

If you want a box filled with broken plastic, dented cards and shattered dreams, Fleet Captains is your best bet.

Really? The writeup on RPS made it sound fantastic.

Star Traders RPG Elite is my spacey game of choice on the Android. Very 80’s throwback design but great for a hoot.

I believe I have one space boardgame (other than an ancient copy of GDW’s “Asteroid” which is more space-opera than space ship) and that is Federation Commander. It is unpunched because I have found no one to play it with.

Space Wolves 3 is pretty shit, just in case anyone is wondering. It looks like it should be fun, it has all the right parts to be fun, but then it’s full of bullshit instagib events, no random things to do other than look for floating boxes, and pirates who can skullfuck you from now til sunday if you refuse to take the instaport option to missions.

Basically it’s a shitty 3D SPAZ.

Oh hells yeah, totally love that game.

I actually liked it. It’s can be frustrating at times – it’s very puzzley in nature I think – but once you figure it out, it can be fun. It was for me anyway.

Ah-Ha! I knew that looked suspiciously familiar, it looks like there was a XBLIG version that is already available: http://www.tbstactics.com/2010/06/star-hammer-tactics-review-xblapsp.html

If you get a chance to talk to the developer, be sure to ask him if there any major differences between the versions.

I thought it was too, until I decided to try to escape by going OVER the wall of turrets in one mission because, you know, space, and then the game played a cinematic and I died.

Later on, I was asked if I wanted to teleport to some mission. I said no, so it ditched me in a system with an asston of pirates in every direction. If I had said yes (I loaded and did), I’d have to fight a capital ship and a ton of pirates.

I have no way of making money. None of the stations let me dock except for the trader ones, and they just want to sell me weapons. I’m supposed to be hunting caches according to the piss colored forums (no seriously, what the fuck http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/ who thought that was a good idea for a color scheme dear god), but that’s not a big help because I have no idea what that means.

All I really wanted from the game was the opportunity to explore and do stuff. But at every turn I’ve been rushed along to my next shitty mission without an opportunity to play with the game and figure out what the fuck is going on. It’s as if someone played Freelancer, thought it was awesome and then decided that the worst part was the part where you go around trading and doing missions in the down time between the story quest stuff.

Which is dumb. That’s the part that made Freelancer AWESOME.

I mean seriously who the shit wrote this up. They expose a ton of things in Lua, but then randomly Game Over you if you have the wrong MS at various missions. WTF?! So if you mod in new bigships, you randomly lose the game. And all the comments are in fucking Russian, which won’t even load up in my pc to be translated by google. ZEE FUCK YOU SAY YOU RUSKIES?!

Don’t even get me started on the nightmare that is adding a new perk. I did that last night because it was a trivial amount of scripting.

Except that you have to redo THE ENTIRE FUCKING UI if you do. After that I went and read dumb Russian jokes for a couple hours.

Do you guys find resource management (XWing’s energy vs. shields vs. engines) in a space flight simmy type game fun or tedious?

Fun when it happens seamlessly. Immodestly I think we did a good job of this on Subspace. Basically when you applied thrust or fired weapons it came straight off your shields which recharged Over time. So on the fly you would be juggling attack , defence and maneuver.