Starpoint Gemini 2! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Part 2 - First Impressions

I have 227 unfinished video games in my backlog, across all platforms. I also want to do more blogging and writing. My solution: randomly sort my list of unfinished games, then play them in that order and write about them! I won't move on to the next until I've finished my current one or given it a fair run for at least a week. Inspired by Decadent Gamer!

Previous: Dragon Age: Origins DLC "Witch Hunt".

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For as big of a part that space sims and SF dogfighting games played in my adolescence, it surprises me how infrequently I play them these days. In junior high, I played the heck out of Star Wars: TIE Fighter and its expansions, and even remember dialing up to a multiplayer matchmaking service (whose name has vanished to memory) to go head-to-head in Terminal Velocity. In part it's simply been supplanted by newer genres that got their hooks deeper into me, like Diablo-esque action RPGs and turn-based tactics. And I get the impression it's become something of a niche genre in the broader marketplace, beaten out by the wider appeal of land-based FPSes. Games that resemble flight simulators, however thoroughly arcade-ified, tend to attract only specific flavors of nerd.

Along comes Starpoint Gemini 2 on my backlog shuffle. I had to search my email inbox to figure out how I'd even obtained it: turns out there was a Steam giveaway for it that IsThereAnyDeal alerted me to, so I nabbed it for free and promptly forgot about it. Who knows when I'd have gotten around to trying it, if ever, had I not thrown my fate to the whims of the RNG?

The game makes a number of little missteps when I first fire it up. Attract video of shiny spaceships blowing one another up plays behind the main menu, and of course there's an intro cinematic, but these stutter and jerk, dropping frames left and right. I see this all too often. What kind of crap codecs do game devs use for their FMVs, that video stored on my hard drive performs worse than if it were buffered and streamed over the Internet? Perhaps it's that I have an AMD graphics card, and the game has Nvidia splashes. Always the second-class citizens, we Radeons. The intro is a bewildering gallop of factions and planets and wars, no doubt a recap of whatever the original Starpoint Gemini game was; I don't think I would have gotten much out of it even if it weren't a slideshow.

Beats me what's going on here, but it must have been important, because it froze on screen for a full 30 seconds

 
Starting gameplay isn't much less obtuse. I get a barrage of tutorial windows, one after the other, showering me in more hotkeys than I could possibly remember. As a bonus, some important keys start out unbound, leading to the bizarre instruction to press "button NA" to bring up my tactical HUD. Visiting the options and resetting keybinds to default fixes that problem, but why weren't the defaults in place already?

Once I've got control, I try getting a feel for game mechanics. I always home in on three things, with spaceship games and movies, to see how daring the vision is with respect to the realities of outer space: 1) Does sound transmit through the void? 2) Can I maneuver in all three dimensions? 3) How is speeding up and slowing down handled? Starpoint Gemini is pretty conventional on these counts. Sound travels like there's atmosphere; you have full 3D movement, but points of interest on the starmap fall on a two-dimensional plane; you have a top speed, and immediately decelerate if you reduce the throttle. These are comfortable conventions, however unrealistic. Some day I'll see a hard SF game where you can only hear sounds from your ship's hull inward, your map is spherical, and you can accelerate indefinitely but have to back-thrust to slow down--I guess nobody's figured out how to make that enjoyable to play, yet!

I visit a planet, blow up a nearly defenseless tutorial pirate ship, and discover that while I was running errands some mysterious bad guys blew up my father. The protagonist swears that he will "KILL ALL OF THEM!!!" I'm sure you will, Cookie-Cutter Spacebro, I'm sure you will. The game then gives me the opportunity to abandon this nascent story and go into "Free Roam" mode, for at least the second if not the third time. This does not give me confidence in the depth of the campaign mode, but Minecraftian open-endedness bores me to tears, so I stay the generically vengeful course. I need to spend time buying and selling vegetables and performing flavorless fetch quests to level up enough to progress the main story anyway; it's not like I'll be missing out on roaming freely.

When I left off this session, I'd come to realize that I shouldn't be hiring on extra crew just yet. They chew up money on a regular basis in exchange for percentage-based boosts to my ship's stats, so having them on board is slowing down my progress toward buying new vessels for a benefit that would be more substantial if I'd already bought said better vessel. Next time I sign in, I'ma sack them.

...to be continued!