Starflight
FTL before it was coolGenre: adventure - overhead
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Year: 1991
System: Genesis
Gameplay Score: 1
Gameplay Notes:
Outfit your ship and crew. Travel to a planet. Scan it, log it, land on it, and loot it. Then return to base and sell your loot. Rinse, and repeat. Someone likes this sort of monotony. Not me.
Level Design Score: 2
Level Design Notes:
There's a lot to do here. Actually there's barely anything to do but you can do it in lots of places.
Theme Score: 2
Theme Notes:
You're a nameless, faceless Commander with nameless, faceless crew members. But it has an itneresting hub world where your suited up spaceman moves between doors as a means of menuing. It's a touch of personality anyway.
Art Style Score: 1
Art Style Notes:
Rudimentary. Light-years ahead of something like Star Control, but this is still an archaic looking game.
Audio Score: 2
Audio Notes:
Overall Score: 28
Review ID: 1266
Another hidden gem in that it directly inspired the Mass Effect series. However, if you play this game on a loose cartridge without the box art and the manual and the star map, your experience will probably not be a great one as it doesn’t do much to teach you how it works while in-game.
ReplyDeleteThe time to appreciate it was back in the early 90s with the starmap that came with the manual. It did capture the loneliness and solitude of outer space, and the planets were genuinely interesting to visit with their own inclement weather events (like earthquakes).
The messages that you receive at the home space station do a great job at immersing you in the game. It’s like receiving telegraphs from distant allies when that was the only communication available. They made me believe there was a living breathing universe in the game.
Encountering spacecraft was also rife with tension as not all of them are necessarily hostile. You can enter negotiations with them through a communication line. Sometimes their portraits were unnerving, like the ant-like creatures. Probably the one that was the most unsettling was a space craft that when you hailed it, it spoke to you only in cryptic numbers. Really gave me the heebie jeebies but in a very good way.
Without the game complete in box though, it is difficult to find what made this game truly interesting. Not a great game to purchase loose at a flea market and to plug into your Genesis. Complete box set (or scans of its resources) is the only way to go for this one.