Space Rangers Comments by Kieron Gillen
Old Firm battles with Space Celtic ensue.
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Poster
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Excellent. Another game that Mr Gillen talks about that I end up parting with money for (Mount & Blade being the previous one). This is becoming a habit sir!
Keep doing it though, these games are a breath of fresh air to someone such as I, who often feels jaded with certain other 'mainstream' games. |
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It’s almost as if someone escaped from the Wario Ware design team, snuck off to Russia and performed a putsch at an unwary strategy game developer.
Hehe, nice one. That sounds excellent. Except for the bit where it says PC. Can we expect a console version anytime soon? If you pay the royalties? ;) Sounds intriguing, I can't say I ever heard of this one before. |
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deepmenace
05/10/05 @ 10:18
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This looks a bit like Captain Blood on the ST...
or Sundog....what a game that was, first properly immersive game i played
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 05/10/05 @ 11:15
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groovychainsaw
05/10/05 @ 10:55
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a pleasant surprise.... might see if i can pick this up somewhere....
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President Weasel
05/10/05 @ 11:02
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All right then.
If you've taken a couple of extra weeks to make sure it's worth recommending and then given it a 9, and if it really is some sort of cross between elite and pirates, then SOLD. |
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The "Purchase" link in game info is wrong it should be Space Rangers at Play.com.
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StarchildHypocrethes
05/10/05 @ 11:36
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Ooooooh, sounds excellent. Cheers for the heads up EG.
Consider it ordered. |
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BremXJones
05/10/05 @ 11:46
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"Laptop here you go... some fun for you!"
This was one of my thoughts too. Its a perfect laptop game. KG |
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"Laptop here you go... some fun for you!"
This was one of my thoughts too. Its a perfect laptop game. KG Hmm.... Just bought this from Game based on this review. I've recently bought a Dell XPS2 with nVidia6800pro video card to play F.E.A.R at work. Installing this it says the highest resolution is 1024x768. Oh well gameplay first eh? |
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TheDifficult3rdAlbum
05/10/05 @ 13:26
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> "Thank God that Nintendo saw fit to release the most exciting gaming news of the year recently too."
They're thinking of making another Mario? |
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Anyone ever played Escape Velocity on the mac? It's pretty bloody old, but it was excellent at the time I played it, many moons ago. By a shareware house called Ambrosia (whom you'll certainly have heard of if you were playing Mac games at the same time I was).
I think they released one of the upgrades to EV on the PC a few years ago, not sure how well it turned out or indeed if it was as good as the original... Anyway, this one looks interesting and I fancy a change from the norm so I may well check it out on the strength of this review. Nice one EG. |
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tincanrocket
05/10/05 @ 14:46
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It would be interesting to see how many orders Play received within hours of this review being posted, as I too have ordered it - sounds great and a snip for less than £20. Mr Gillen, you don't happen to have shares in Play or something??
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tincanrocket
05/10/05 @ 15:53
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There's a very detailed discussion about the game over at: http://www.octopusoverlords.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14837
&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=space+rangers&start=40&s id=9653923a0563a2ed09ac251c7d10e186 (wow, craaazy linkage ^^) Nabbed this long very good post from there (I would never type this much myself): credit to "flying j" ___ Here are my impressions cross posted from Qt3: Ok, here's some extended impressions from about 6 hours play: The game so far is excellent. It is like Escape Velocity meets Star control 2, but with the polished presentation of the latter. Planets move along orbits, comets and meteors have newtonian trajectories (which makes mining them a bit of a challenge). It is also turn-based while in space... which makes it a lot more strategic than Escape Velocity. There are some great UI conventions introduced which enhance the experience a lot. For instance, while on planets, every information screen has a little "i" button at the bottom of them. If you press this button, it will make a new "i" button at the bottom of your interface... almost like a taskbar. If you mouse over this new "i" button, it will display the entire contents of the screen as a tooltip. This is an extremely effective way of making a personalized journal, and invaluable when comparing buy/sell prices at different planets for trade. The customizing of the ships seems extremely deep as well, with many different ship types and components. There are also a lot of loot-type items that can be used to enhance existing components, give overall stat bonuses, etc. The universe is extremely dynamic. The overall plot point is that there is an alien race (three, actually... three different types of aliens all working together) trying to take over the galaxy. There are frontline areas where these aliens are expanding, and large battles that take place between the occupying sentient races and the invaders. There are also all sorts of military, trade and pirate ships duking it out all over the place as well. To go into these dynamics further: One time I was flying to the edge of a sector when I saw about 6 friendly ships circling eachother. I hailed one of them, and he said that in 5 days they were launching a counter-offensive against a neighboring system that was recently attacked... and said I could join them if I wanted. I passed turns for 5 days, and then the whole attack fleet warped into the neighboring system and commenced the attack. It was a great battle. Another example is that I got jumped by two pirates. There was a neutral transport in the area. I hailed them and asked for help. Because my charisma was high enough, the transport decided to aid me, and we beat them easily. In addition to general loot you get from blowing up enemy ships (you can also salvage a LOT of good stuff if you see a battle in progres by swooping in and grabbing debris while the combatants are distracted) there is another layer. The enemy alien races drop "nodes" which can be brought to a science station and researched. It appears there is a bit of an XCom-type research tree, where you invest these nodes into technologies, which get researched over months eventually resulting in a new piece of alien technology that can be used. Next up is the RTS segment of the game. Every once in a while, a government will ask you to liberate a planet's surface from the alien invaders. This loads up a complete 3D RTS engine. It definately doesn't compare to warcraft III, but it is fun nonetheless. I generally don't like RTS games, but this one has a cool feature: you can take direct control of any of your units at any time, using WASD and mouse to attack. The units you create are made up of several components that you can pick for every unit. These include chassis size, weapons loadouts, special items and leg type. All the units basically Mechs... One of the nice features is you can pause and give orders to some extent... it seems that you can only give orders to units that are grouped while the game is paused for some reason. Ungrouped units can't be given orders. Yet another aspect are "away" type missions you sometimes get from planets. These are like "lite" text adventures you go on, and are pretty fun. The only one I've done so far was a sort of "pod race" where I had to select the type of pod racer I would use (fast, protected or maneuverable) and then it would present me with a piece of terrain I was on and how fast or cautious I wanted to drive on it. This would decrease my overall shield, but may give me a lead if I'm aggressive. There is definately potential for some of these missions to be really interesting. The final type of gameplay that I haven't tried yet are "blackhole" fights. In these, your ship is sucked into a blackhole and has to fight against an alien ship. The big difference here is that all the action is realtime, and from what I read plays just like Star Control/Escape Velocity. Another thing to note is that the entire universe is randomly generated each time you play... giving this some incredible replay value. There is even a "top 20" scoreboard once you die. That's not to say the game is short by any means. It looks like it would take a good 40 hours to win a game. You can also save anywhere (except during the RTS fights... you can only restart those). It also comes with Star Rangers 1 on the disc, which is a completely different game. The only difference is that I believe there are no RTS planetside battles in the first one. So, there you have it. I REALLY like this game so far. EDIT: sorry for the presentation order of features, it was mainly just train-of-thought. Another thing I forgot to add is that you can actually mine planets as well. This is a pretty cool feature and it works like this: You can buy planetary probes from various vendors. You can then fly to an unihabited planet. The planet will have a certain percentage of mountains, plains and oceans. Each probe has the ability to scan one or more of these. So, while in orbit, you can drop one or more probes into various orbits around the planets. Depending on the quality of the probe, it will scan the planet's surface for any resources over the period of weeks or months. You then return to the planet and can collect any found resources. The UI comes into play here as well... there is always a bubble at the bottom of the taskbar that lists all probes and stored items, and their location. So you don't have to write down where you left probes scanning stuff. |
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