X3: The Reunion 2.0 Review

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(More customer reviews)For those of you who have been looking for that space simulation that's actually a simulation, you've probably found what you've been looking for.

Let me start with an explanation, X3 is storyline optional. There are several different options to start off with, giving you the choice of just about any time of job, with the storyline turned on or off, creating a massive sandbox. Massive is right too, with about 120 sectors, each with an infinite navigable space, although most people will probably go about 30km on each axis. Each sector is connected to other sectors adjoining it via HUGE gates, at least 500m in diameter.

Another thing about X3 is the simulation. This will turn most people away, as the game takes place in real-time, with time compression to simply speed up time. The game literally seems to take forever. There are numerous ways to make money in the beginning of the game, and none of them are by any means quick. Money is treated realistically, with ships and weapons outrageously expensive. Prices are calculated on a supply and demand, so unlike games like Freelancer, you MUST keep an eye out for good deals, as the prices will almost never be the same at the same factory.

For example: If you buy 5000 units of argnu beef for 40cr for 200,000cr, the prices will probably be about 60cr after you buy. Then take them to another factory, and say they buy argnu beef for 50cr, once you sell they will buy for maybe 30cr, and from that trade run you make a profit of 50,000cr. The game isn't this rounded, but that's about how trading works.

Fighting is also always present. Pirates have bases in certain sectors, and will attack you sometimes, depending on how vulnerable you are, and what you're carrying. If you're empty and well-armed, they'll probably avoid you. You can, however, capture ships, pirate or otherwise. Captured ships will NOT be in the best of condition, but they will still sell for a pretty penny at certain stations.

Later in the game, you can save up and buy factories which produce products or resources. You will of course need to rent a ship to transport them, unless you already own a certain type of ship, as well as buy ships to transport goods to and from your factories. The scripting for the ship AI is pretty decent for a universe that virtually runs itself.

At first you will probably feel constrained by your equipment. There's always that freighter that makes 100x more than you, or that fighter that's faster and more maneuverable than you, or that ship that has better weapons or shields than you. Although after a few days of nursing your hoard, you'll find that you can afford some really big ships and better equipment.

The complexity in X3 is absolutely astonishing and I honestly can't do it all justice. It can be completely overwhelming for most people, but if any of the above sounds like fun to you and you have a fair amount of patience, I suggest you buy this game. For $20 you can't go wrong!

If you do buy this game, I suggest you check the Egosoft forums for some helpful scripts and bonuses, both fan-made and official.

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Product Description:
An Ever-Changing Evolving Universe with New FeaturesDVD Format and No StarforceProduct InformationX3: Reunion Version 2.0 includes the full version of the original PLUS thejam-packed addition of the: Bala Gi research mission. X3 ReunionVersion 2.0 the sequel to the brilliant X2 - The Threat gives the player achance to uncover some of the answers to the biggest questions in theX-Universe.Whilethe Argon fleet is stretched almost to the breaking point by the continuingattacks from Khaak a new enemy is stalking the X-universe. What links amysterious ship with the power to disappear the ruthless Yaki pirates and amachine left by an ancient species? It's time to strap yourself in warm upyour laser cannon and get some answers.Extensive development has gone into the X3 engine making full use of DirectX 9technology to create dramatic visual effects and stunningly realisticstarships. Coupled with the massively enhanced A.L. (Artificial Life)system X3: Reunion presents players with an ever-changing evolving universe where players'actions really shape the future of the universe. Newcomers willenjoy the additions to the already graphically impressive almost living X3-Universewhile veterans can expect new construction options and an improved physicsmodel.IncludesThe Sequel to the award winning X2: The Threat will introduce a new 3D engine aswell as a new story new ships and a new gameplay to greatly increase thevariety in the X-universe. The economy of X3: Reunion will be more complex thananything seen in the X-universe before. Factories are being built by NPCs warscan affect the global economy NPCs can trade freely and pirates will behave farmore realistically.Features:Trade your way to mogul statusFight with over 700 ships and 30 weaponsBuild an empire in over 150 huge space sectorsThink your way through the massive plotExtensive development has gone into the X3 engine making f

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Space Rangers 2: The Rise of the Dominators Review

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(More customer reviews)[last updated 11/03/06]: Note that Space Rangers 2 (SR2) is now available without copy protection [...] Instead, they use the same approach that they use for Galactic Civilizations II. I can only hope this means that updates for SR2 will be released.

By conventional wisdom, Space Rangers 2 (SR2) shouldn't be such a great game. After all, it contains a mixture of widely disparate game types:

-- 2-D turn-based space travel, including ship-to-ship combat;
-- 3-D ground-based real-time-strategy (RTS) combat among robots, with the ability to 'step into' one of your robots and control it personally;
-- 2-D 1980s arcade-style (real time) travel and combat set in a stylized "hyperspace" within a black hole;
-- text-based "choose your adventure"-style quests and challenges, some of which are quite tough.

All of this exists in a setting of sixty (60) star systems, with over 250 planets, space stations, and the like. You play a single character, of a given race (five available) and starting profession (also five available)--and you pretty much take it from there. There are another 50 or so non-player rangers zooming around the game universe in their own ships and pursuing their own paths and inclinations, as well as lots of traders, diplomats, pirates--and the dread Dominators.

And you know what? SR2 is a blast. In fact, as noted above, the longer you play, the more fun it gets. Part of that comes from increased personal skill; part comes from your character's development (not to mention your ship's development); and part comes from realizing that you're not in a "railroad game" (to use the term my friend Wayne Holder coined over 20 years ago), but that you really are free to choose any number of paths and find any number of approaches.

You can trade, gather asteroid fragments, explore planets (simple and a bit dull), hunt pirates, be a pirate, fight the robotic Dominators that are seeking to enslave humanity, or even try to get on their good side. You can trick out your ship, upgrade or swap out components, catch diseases, take various stimulants, pay for military campaigns against the Dominators, get loans, or even get a race-change operation (a good move if you've become too unpopular).

You're also free to suffer the consequences of what you do, which is why frequent game saves are a good idea. It's easy to die; it's not that hard to wipe yourself out financially; and it's even possible to get most of the known universe upset with you, as I did, inadvertanly in one game (the moral is, be careful when accepting a mission to track down and destroy another ship--some such missions are court-sanctioned, but others are simply political assassinations).

I have mixed feelings about the "choose your path" text adventures. On the one hand, it's a clever way of adding a great deal of varied content without having to come up with user interfaces to encompass situations as varied as being in prison, managing a ski resort, racing ground-based pods, competing in an interstellar (and trans-species) pizza contest, and so on. And you're never compelled to do them (except when you get thrown in prison), so you can avoid them if you wish.

On the other hand, I tend to approach new text adventures with a bit of wariness and weariness. Some can be relatively simple, but some can be quite difficult (though I have managed to eventually complete all the ones that I've actually started). And given how gorgeous the graphics are in the rest of the game, the simple sketches and text-based screens can be a bit of a letdown. On the whole, however, I'll take the content over the presentation, and I think SR2 is stronger for having these adventures in their current format than it would be if it lacked them entirely. Besides: they're a good fallback when you find yourself running low on cash and nobody wants you to carry some important object from one planet to another.

I find it interesting to compare SR2 with Microsoft's Freelancer. I had very high hopes for Freelancer and bought it as soon as it came out. Within a day, I had put it down again, and I haven't played it since. Freelancer had better eye candy and a more 'realistic' approach--but it felt far more like a railroad game than SR2 ever has. It is a classic example of the difference that good game design can make.

And that's what SR2 has plenty of: good game design. Trip Hawkins (formerly of EA and 3DO) famously said that a good game should be "simple, hot and deep." And that describes SR2. In spite of the variety of gaming styles--or, more likely, because of them--SR2 is addictive and fun.

SR2's greatest game design strength is, I think, the natural manner in which you can leverage yourself into having greater power and influence without ever losing the sense of your character being an individual. Natural (instead of arbitrary) tradeoffs keep you in line. You never command fleets; but if your leadership ability is sufficiently high, you can pay 1 to 6 other rangers to work for you for a while. While you can leverage up your ship and its components to take on the Dominators, you can still get killed if you get careless or overconfident--and there are still times you need to run away. Likewise, you may find yourself earning larger and larger sums for completing tasks and quests--but you may also find yourself spendings thousands or tens of thousands of credits in repairs and missile resupply after a single battle with pirates or Dominators.

Along those lines, your insystem-speed (including during regular space combat) is a function of the ship's size (carrying capacity) and the compnents and cargo inside. This means that a big, hulking ship, loaded with lots of weapons and other goodies, may be _more_ vulnerable than a smaller, less-equipped one, since the enemy can 'surround and pound' you. (With a fast enough ship, you can actually outrun missiles and torpedoes.)

Full disclosure: over 20 years ago, the abovementioned Wayne Holder and I designed and developed a real-time graphical space adventure game for the Apple II called "SunDog: Frozen Legacy". Needless to say, it was a constrained and primitive game, since it ran in 64KB of memory and fit (along with the operating system and all game data) on a double-sided floppy disk (280KB total). (Note: that's _kilobytes_, not megabytes or gigabytes.) Our vision was of a much richer and more complex game than we could possibly fit within those constraints.

SR2 encompasses everything that we did, attempted to do, or every wished we could do in SunDog, but with 21st century technology. It is for me such a delight, 22 years after SunDog shipped, to finally get to play the game that I have been carrying in my head for all this time.

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PROS (besides those cited above):

-- The game is rock-solid stable. In many, many hours of play, I've had SR2 crash exactly one, and it did so gracefully. This is in stark contrast to many other commercial releases (Civ4, GalCiv2, Battle for Middle Earth II, etc.). In fact, SR2 is very robust when dealing with external interruptions; twice I've had my system drop back into WinXP due to some kind of alert box from another application (unrelated to SR2); each time, the SR2 bar at the bottom of the screen change to read "Click here", and when I did (after handling the alert box), I found myself right back in SR2 where I left off.

-- SR2 does an automatic autosave every time you lift off a planet (overwriting the previous autosave). As noted, you can save your own games as often as you'd like (but: see below under Cons).

-- The user interface is very slick, very attractive, very fast, and works very well. Likewise, the graphics and music make the game very enjoyable.

-- For most actions, SR2 gives you a choice between automated and user-controlled.

-- The ground-based robot RTS battles are quite fun; the ability to take over and directly control one of your units (with a ground-based view) makes them even more so and opens the door to some more intelligent strategies.

-- E-Games/Cinemaware Marquee (the US producer/distributor) provided very useful support when I had a problem with one of the CDs on my original copy (and simply swapped out my copy for a new one). (Thanks, Nicholas!)

CONS (besides those cited above):

-- As noted elsewhere here, SR2 uses the controversial Starforce copy protection system, though I've had indications from the manufacturer that they plan to replace it.

-- SR2 was developed in Russia (and in Russian); some of the text translations are a bit obscure or confusing, though at times that simply adds to the sense of speaking with an alien whose grasp of human languages might be weak. While in prison, I did find one screen of text entirely in untranslated Russian, but it's not a critical screen.

-- The more games you have saved, the longer the save/load game panel takes to come up (though it always has eventually come up). Since I tend to save games often, this can be an annoyance. My solution is simply to delete saved games more often.

-- You can't save games at all while doing one of the ground-based robot RTS battles or during one of your text adventures. However, both of those environments give you the option of restarting should you lose or fail.

-- There are only two graphics resolutions supported in most of the game: 1024x768 and 800x600. (This is probably one of the reasons why the game is so stable.) However, the ground-based robot RTS subgame also supports 1280x1024--and SR2 will automatically switch back and forth between that resolution and whatever your chosen resolution is for the...Read more›

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Product Description:
The Dominators have risen as an ominous new threat throughout the galaxy. As part of a planet responsible for producing war androids, it has become self-aware - producing The Dominators - a mutant force which has advanced beyond their sole programmed ability. They have developed their own intellect, force of will and agenda and are now striving to destroy everything in their path and expand their own horizons by conquering the galaxy...one planet at a time.

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Homeworld 2 Review

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(More customer reviews)This game is one of the best RTS games I've ever played. the Graphics may be a little outdated but the gameplay more than makes up for it. I don't know how many times I built up a fleet, hyperspaced my fleet to the enemy's doorstep when their fleet is attacking my ally, and wipe them out. The controls are quick to learn, and very intuitive. The sounds make me feel like I'm almost in the battle myself, and the music score is good, but not the best I've ever heard. Very good game. Highly recommended.

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Homeworld 2 Continues The Epic Struggle Of The Hiigarans And Their Leader Karan Sjet. Many Thought Their Hardships Would End When They Returned To Hiigara Yet Fate Has Not Been So Kind To The Exiles.now The Hiigarans Face A New And Bitter Enemy A Renegade Clan From The Eastern Fringes Of The Galaxy Who Wield The Power Of The Ancients. homeworld 2 Chronicles The Valiant Journey Of The Mothership And Its Crew Into The Oldest Regions Of The Galaxy To Confront Their New Foe And Discover The Truth Behind Their Exile. you Will Face New Challenges And Threats To Your System Home Planet And Fleet. a Carefully Crafted Sequel That Stays True To The Epic Spirit Of The Original Homeworld 2 Delivers An Immersive And Satisfying Experience To New Players And Loyal Fans Alike. totally New 3d Enginean Innovative 3d Engine Generates Cinematic-quality Graphics Stunning Special Effects And Beautifully Rendered Ships. the Sublime Vistas And Otherworldly Splendor Of Homeworld 2 Are In The Award-winning Tradition Of The Original. in-game Cinematics Flow Seamlessly In And Out Of Gameplay As Players Command Their Armada Around Eerily Beautiful Phenomena Of Deep Space Including Giant Asteroids Massive Derelicts Gas Clouds And Nebulae Light Years Across. streamlined Interfacecontrol The Whole Game With A Few Mouse Clicks. A Streamlined Interface Lets Players Take Total Control Of Their Ships And Explore The Universe. and All-new Camera Panning Makes Maneuvering Fleets In The Thick Of Battle Easier Than Ever. zoom In To See Objects In Intricate Detail Zoom Out To Get A Panoramic View Or Rotate Your View Of Deep Space A Full 360 Degrees. a Stunning Deep-space Environment in The Dynamic 3d Universe Of Homeworld 2 The Awe-inspiring Phenomena Of Deep Space. giant Asteroids Huge Derelicts Murky Gas Clouds And Vast Nebulae Pulse With The Energy That Permeates The Cosmos. these Fully Interactive Phenomena Some Strategically Helpful And Others Fraught With Danger Add Another Dimension To Gameplay. ...

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Freelancer Review

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(More customer reviews)A strong story line made this a good game...having things to do other than play the story makes this a great game. The universe is large enough that you don't feel like you are wearing a straight jacket while it is just small enough that most locations feel unique. The mouse flight seemed a bit odd at first but I quickly adapted to it. The guns on the ships have a limited amount of pivot built in, the mouse seems to work better with this than a joystick would have.
From an interface standpoint, more of the options need shortcuts. The manual also failed to fully detail the interface, leaving out a CRITICAL piece of information...what the changes to your cross hairs mean. It also fails to give enough information on the basics of weapon systems, so you are left on your own to experiment with when missiles are locked and how to use mines and turrets.
This is clearly a remake of the Wing Commander Privateer game (which is unplayable on machines over 200 mhz because its too fast). Unfortunately, two things are missing... Wingmen (a nice to have, but acceptably missing given the story line) and an economy that MAKES SENSE! It is difficult to be a merchant when the planet/station that produces an item charges the most for it in most cases. For instance, I traveled to a station that was advertised as producing "basic alloy" figuring I could take the basic alloy to a planet that focused on manufacturing and sell it there for a markup. The reality was that basic alloy cost far more on the planet described as "producing" basic alloy than almost anywhere else by a very large amount.(like $80 per unit vs $20 a unit). I've had to learn that "produces" USUALLY means "buys for the highest price". It would be nice to see a realistic system (which has been done time and time again in games before), and even a dynamic system that if you tried to flood one system with a product, the price would go down somewhat.
Another issue I had with the manual was its description of asteroid mining. It led me to beleive that I should go blow up large asteroids in an effort to find minerals to sell. The reality is you can blast big rocks all day and not get anything, they are just eyecandy. What you have to do is look for the little ones that zip by (and cause your cross hairs to spin when you put them on it) and blow those up. If you are lucky, you may be rewarded with some bit of mineral, water, metal, etc.
Another problem with the merchant/mining road is too many of the "advanced" systems (the ones you don't get to until you've been playing for a while) seem to have "mined out" asteroid and ice fields. This greatly limits your ability to move your home base to outside of the starting area if you are trying to be more of a merchant.
This game has a good degree of replayability. I've finished the story line and still am having fun flying around exploring and blowing stuff up. The story takes you on a wide circuit of the available star systems, but there is plenty of stuff hiding in asteroid fields and what not.
This game is a great flight sim, a nice change from what dominates the action market these days (first person shooters). I'd give it 5 stars if only the economic model made a little more sense.

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Product Description:
In Freelancer, you'll have to make way in the universe, through the aftermath of interplanetary war & colonization!Explore dozens of different star systems and uncover a hidden threat to the human race Exciting LAN play for up to 16 players

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