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Lord Thag -> Falling in love with space again (6/17/2010 5:50:05 AM)
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Long, long ago, in the Time of Bad Garage Bands and Grunge Music, I had a game called Master of Orion. It was permanently etched into the hard drive of my trusty 486. I played it for several years until I managed to cobble together a rickety pentium 90mhz from extra parts(held together with duct tape, and spray painted black no less) so I could play it's sequel, Master of Orion 2. Between the two, and a little known Windows 4x game known as Stars!, I happily crushed all life in the galaxy under my iron fist, in a nice, friendly, 'I'm sorry, was that your planet?' kind of way. Life was good.
And then, the Powers that Be fell of their collective toilets one morning, and hit their collective eggheads on their collective grungy sinks, and forgot completely how to make a good 4x game. Not that they didn't try, of course. They made galaxy spanning economic simulations that were as fun as watching paint dry (lookin' at you GalCiv), and RTS style games that tried to fake real depth, and spreadsheets with nice graphics that required micromanaging to the point they made accounting seem fun(Space Empires). And don't even get me started on the Galactic Mega-Turd that was MOO3. I'd hate to be THOSE guys when the Antarians show up. Yikes.
And so I plum forgot all about a genre I once truly loved.
Until two days ago. Dunno why I bought Distant Worlds. I've hated everything since Stars! and Moo2. But I did. For some reason. Something about it ... just looked right. Found it by accident after buying the Operation Art of War last week.
[X(]
It was like falling in love again. The music was right. The graphics looked exactly how they should with none of that camera-rotating 3d BS. It had it all. Ship design (finally!), freakin' huge galaxies full of interesting stuff, tens of thousands of worlds to explore, and all of it is superbly managed so that all you have to do is concentrate on what's really fun: exploring, designing, and then conquering everything you see. All of the annoying economic BS is automated too, thank gods. And it had some genius too. The empire management screen thingy. Clicky click and you colonize, build ships, mines and everything, and then get right back to exploring. Finally, someone GETS it.
So I was sitting there, playing, and I got this feeling I remembered from a long time ago. It's the kind of thing that once made me sit up until 5:00am for 'just one more turn.' The kind of feeling that only a few legendary games have given me.
So here it is. Distant Worlds is one of the best games I've played on the PC in a decade. Hell, I stopped even playing PC games about 5 years back.
Nice to know that at least one developer still gets what once made PC gaming so much better, and a tip of the hat to Matrix games for publishing it.
For now the galaxy will tremble again at the sound of my approaching battleships. And life, is once again good. Well, maybe not for the squid-y looking alien blighters on the third moon of Cygnus 12. They're kinda fun to pop from orbit.
Welldone Codeforce. [&o]
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