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I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with all the other goons here and profess my love for this game - I could play it for hours at a time when I was a teen. I still remember the opening cinematic, the narrator's and computer's voice quite well. Especially loved the details they went into with the ship dossiers; not only relevant gameplay related specs but also random tidbits and flavour text to explain their background and reason for coming into being. This ship designs in this series, both Navy and League, were also great.
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Jul 24, 2016 16:25
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Kibayasu posted:So since I was a kid with nothing to do but play video games at some point in the past I remember permanently disabling a Navy ship which was in a fight with a League ship. I brought the Navy ship down to basically no health (no health bars left but still alive) and waited. Unfortunately that's as far as my memory reliably goes but I think the Navy ship eventually died to the League beam weapon. It took a very long time because the beam does do very little damage and they fire very slowly but my brain is telling me that for sure happened. For whatever reason League ships are exactly the same size as their Navy equivalent but every other stat is cut in half, so it could be that they really don't do a whole lot of damage to begin with. The larger ships really do look a lot more threatening than they actually are as I do distinctly remember when I would screw around in dog fights or fly slowly to try and take a look at things they would occasionally manage to lock on with their anti-ship main armament and it isn't instant death. You could probably face tank a few hits if you had to. From what I do remember it's the stations that are actually a serious threat; some of the fully operational stations you go up against can really do a lot of damage very quickly if you aren't paying attention.
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Aug 1, 2016 04:16
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The command craft phasing through the Starport was something I don't think I ever saw when I first played this... the follow-up mission where you actually need to destroy the Starport is probably one of the hardest in the game and something I could never do as a kid. After first going down the route I would usually just restart from an earlier save and try harder. As far as endings go though that was was the least horrible - everyone got to live and live out their lives, even if they were a horrible lie. In most of the others it usually ends up with billions dead... As for the ships and atmospheric flight; most of the fighter craft look like it would at lease be plausible, though things like the Hydra and a few others we haven't seen yet look like they'd fly like bricks. The capitol ships, I donno, they probably use artificial gravity manipulation to hold them aloft or something. You're thinking about this too hard. Really the main problem would be not burning up during reentry, then you can worry about falling from the sky (RIP that field of kids).
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Aug 1, 2016 18:19
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As far as I can recall no ship in the Colony Wars universe is capable of FTL travel, the technology just doesn't exist. When ships need to get around they use their conventional engines for local travel or their Jump Drives for inter-planetary travel and at first sight that seems pretty straightforward but when you think about it, that's where the plot behind the game kinda falls apart. Which is honestly a little weird given how much detail we find in the other miscellaneous lore and flavour text. One of the earlier pieces of information we got in the dossier about the Battle Platforms mentioned that the upper limit of the Jump Drives when it's just a ship navigating itself is ~1,000,000 KM before they become too unreliable, but in terms of space that's not really that far. Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 KM so you'd be able to make it in one jump no problem. Earth to Mars, however, will take you about 225 jumps, Venus about 261 jumps, Jupiter 590 jumps, Saturn is around 1,200 jumps - and so on. Given that each jump takes so much energy it'll get you court martialed if you do it without permission that seems like a really inefficient way to get around. It also makes you wonder how they got from say the Solar system to Alpha Centauri in the first place since while it wouldn't be inconceivable for them to eventually build a Platform in a convenient enough place in the Sol system, it would take the ships that constructed the Platform on the opposite end roughly 425,730,000 individual jumps to get there without a worm hole. Unless of course they could just project a worm hole in the general direction of another system and just hope it got them close enough. It also makes you wonder how the two stations would then communicate with each other because FLT communications also don't exist and they clearly don't keep the hole open at all times. Would lead to some interesting tactical challenges though, as if you were to invade another system you'd have to be drat sure you captured the station on the other side in your first go or the people on the theree would know something is wrong and refuse to ever open their end of gate again. But that said, it's at this point where you realize you're just paid to fly a ship and shoot people. You can let the scientists and historians worry about the details.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:08
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I honestly think the description is written the way it was because the person or people writing some of the descriptions just didn't know any better - space is called 'space' for a reason and it would've made a lot more sense if they went with something like 100 Million or 1 Billion kilometers instead. But in reality he technology works however it needs to work for the mission your in and we're putting way too much thought into it. I suspect we also don't have to go through the whole 'capture the platform' song and dance in every new system because the game has enough escort missions as it is and that would just get repetitive. We're not the only pilot in the League after all and you'd think the rest of the team could try pulling their weight once and a while, too.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:09
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The tractor beam missions... always super fun. The ones we've seen so far are nowhere near the bullshit we'll need to deal with down the line. They're somehow even worse than the usual escort missions since you can't really progress and fight at the same time. My memory is getting hazy with time but I'm pretty sure in the sequels they manage to turn them into pseudo-physics missions as well as we try and fling things around for no discernible reason. On the topic of space info, we really didn't touch on anything new but if we continue to sit down and analyse the plot it raises yet even more questions - the crux of the problem we're faced with in the game is that the Earth has expanded and is pressing all it's colonies for everything they've got to survive and oppressing the hell out of everyone in the process, but I often have to wonder how things got this bad in the first place. It's a plot point that has been used numerous times before and hardly unique to Colony Wars but I think most people don't seem to realize just how many resources Earth has to offer and what we'd need to do to actually run out of something. Some resources here are pretty scare given our current extraction methods; gases like helium and hydrogen, which are pretty useful, are rare on Earth and some precious metals are only found in certain parts of the world or aren't often located close enough to the surface for us to be able to find or mine additional lodes. Those I could understand going into space to get and I can also understand just setting industries up in space to make use of other materials we find (like refining iron into things in orbit instead of flying back to a planet, making something then shooting it back into space). But to actually run out of a resource or run so low as to threaten our survival? That's a little far fetched. Even if you ignore the other planets and their various moons as potential sources the comets and asteroids located around us have more than enough materials to keep us going for sometime. There are several asteroids that (assuming our current estimations and modeling are correct) contain more iron that has ever been used in the history of mankind - from the earliest days of the Bronze age when we started mining until today. In fact, they likely contain so much nickel, iron and other minerals that they could keep us supplied for millions of years to come. The Navy could've spent the past 2,000 years building giant ships and driving them into the sun and I'm still not sure how we'd run out. We've obviously learned a lot of things in the 20 years since this game came out and more recently there has been a number of ground breaking missions and studies involving comets and asteroids that have taken place that paint a far more detailed picture of the Solar system and space in general so older games like this are probably based on (what we now know to be) false premises and flawed assumptions. I still have to laugh every time I see something like this though. And since we're now on the topic of asteroids, most people are surprised to find out that places like our Asteroid Belt really isn't that thick or an unnavigable sea of tumbling and colliding rocks like you see in games and movies. If you were to find yourself transported to a body in the Asteroid Belt and looked around you probably wouldn't be able to see any other objects with the naked eye they're so far spread out. That's pretty boring in an action movie though. There are number of interesting things going on in the field of space resources though. There's a company that has actually begun planning missions to extract resources from space and bring them back here for use though I don't think they've actually done anything yet. NASA is also planning a mission to capture a NEO and bring it back for further study in the near-ish future. I personally can't wait for that mission to go horribly wrong and they end up flinging a giant rock towards us. Psychotic Weasel fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Aug 7, 2016 |
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Aug 7, 2016 05:29
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This game was a fun trip down memory lane, I don't think I've played it since a few years after it's release so it's been many years since I last looked at it I do remember putting a lot of time into both this and Vengeance. They were probably among my favourite games at the time and when it comes to ship design they're still tops. The Navy gives up its obsession with Star Trek-esque saucers and instead have parts that rotate like they're trying to simulate gravity through centrifugal force instead but I still like the look. Looking forward to seeing all the things I've now forgotten, though the first 'game over' cinematic is one I vividly remember seeing over and over again... Especially looking forward to Red Sun as I don't recall ever playing it - I don't know why I never grabbed it but I guess I had just moved on by that point. But it looks interesting enough, can't wait to see what I missed.
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Aug 14, 2016 22:50
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Lunethex posted:Did you by chance regularly mess up shooting down the Comms Rig? That first mission when you enter Gallonigher is a hell of a lot harder than the tutorial missions that came before it and you have to deal with a lot more 'gimmicky' mission objectives than you did in the previous games. I remember 14 year old me having a hell of a time trying to use the tether to throw crates around and trying to wrap my head around some of the other puzzles the game throws at you. Hope Mertens loved the view from that prison cell.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:16
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That was pretty much as I remembered it - and gently caress that communications rig, it can go straight to hell.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:45
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What higher ranks than "Son of the League" are there anyway? Seriously command, stop being a passive agressive dick.
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Aug 29, 2016 23:04
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EponymousMrYar posted:That's the saddest part in the game when I saw it Shame that one game seems to be driving all the nails back into the space combat genre's coffin... I guess there's also No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous. I've not really been following either of them but it looks like they both have fairly mixed reviews and people are currently hating on NMS something fierce. There was also the X series before the last game fell flat on it's face. You know what. Maybe there's a reason the only thing left of this genre are my childhood memories...
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Sep 6, 2016 00:23
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Death by airlock - a sci-fi classic. I kinda liked the slight twist to the story here, as the game goes on it becomes less about seeking revenge against the League and more about this corrupt organization slowly eating its own tail.
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Sep 15, 2016 13:12
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I kinda wondered of Becks was framing you in an attempt to drag you to their headquarters under the pretense of a show trial when in reality she wanted to bring you in on the plot against Kron; you being branded a possible traitor and publicly dragged through the mud would be a good cover for you, he likely would've never suspected you were working for them. And Becks was some one you were supposed to have a close friendship with, before she promoted herself to leader of the Navy somehow. The plot kinda bounces around from here though with a leader who doesn't care about anyone and the briefing woman who sounds like she'd rather be doing anything else than talking to you. Makes it seem really hostile for no apparent reason. 
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Sep 17, 2016 05:06
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Oh my god - that loving crystal lock thing. I had repressed so many memories of this mission I don't even remember if I ever beat it. Please Psygnosis, I just wanted to shoot people in space. WTF is this thing even supposed to be? (edit: I should also add that 1998 was the year I first got an internet connection at home and this game predates things like GameFAQs and YouTube walkthroughs. You had to sit there and figure this poo poo out yourself)
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Sep 27, 2016 04:23
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Polaron posted:This is pretty much exactly how I see it, and it would be fully in keeping with the game's dialogue and marketing. That 20-30 year thing literally comes only from the Wikipedia page, so far as I know. It makes more sense to think that it was a century and Kron was one of the only people left with the longevity treatment after the Sol system turned into a system-wide Mad Max cosplay for 100 years or so than it is to assume Psygnosis decided to drop part of their game's backstory and forgot to change any of the marketing or dialogue to reflect this. In the final video where Mertens is ranting about how Kron deceived them all he mentioned that "generations" of people were deceived by his rhetoric about revenge against the League for what it did to Sol. So it would seem that even the people in the game have lost track of just how much time has passed. Maybe it was burning hatred that kept Kron alive all these years. Like a Sith Lord.
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Sep 29, 2016 01:46
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Well that was, uh, different... a considerable departure from the first two games to be sure. Not sure why they stuck with the Colony Wars branding on this when it has virtually no connection to them beyond the opening cutscene (so far I guess). Guess we'll see how this plays out since I never played this myself. Since there was never any follow up afterwards I imagine it didn't do as well as people hoped.
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Oct 6, 2016 13:01
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Polaron posted:G-Police (why has nobody ever LPed THAT?) I played that as well during the early PS era - I suspect no one has LPed it here because it is sadistically hard and while it looks great you probably won't be able to see 90% of the game before you just give up.
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Oct 7, 2016 03:29
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Ugh - every video so far has just made me shake my head (metaphorically speaking, I don't actually move unless absolutely necessary). I don't want to say Red Sun is a 'bad game' in and of itself because it does look good for the time and probably maybe was fun at some point, but why is this tied to Colony Wars? It has virtually nothing in common with 1 or 2 and you could've called it literally anything else and it would still work...Kibayasu posted:Nothing like saving the galaxy through murder and theft.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:28
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The people of the Red Sun game seem to be pretty forgiving seeing as how most of the organizations we were hired to kill would later pay us to do their dirty work. Guess they know you're a merc and didn't take it personally. I've also completely forgotten what we're supposed to be doing here; somehow killing all these people as we work our way towards a ship we know the location of and could just attack? It sounds like we've got at least 2 more systems to murder our way through though. Maybe the plot will become a little clearer as we move along.
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Oct 19, 2016 00:25
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"Hey - High-speed Nuclear delivery, that sounds safe." Probably the best line in the game so far. I gotta say the ship design has gotten worse and worse as this game went on (like the plot!). Our ship is now literally an up-side-down fishbowl with a recliner in it... The first game really did have the best designs, wish they would've just stick with them.
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Oct 24, 2016 01:32
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Jesus gently caress, why would you put something that looked like that in your mouth? And why would you try and cook it rare? If someone paid me or it was dare or something I'd grill that fucker until it was shoe leather to make sure nothing was alive in side. On a related note, my mother and sister used to watch Hell's Kitchen and I would occasionally catch an episode if I was around and never really caught the appeal. You can only watch someone yell at morons for so long before it stops being funny; I was never a fan of the act he put on for that. As a comparison here you can watch Gordon Ramsay act like a normal, well adjusted human being: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUP7U5vTMM0
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Oct 24, 2016 02:37
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Well, that was something, wasn't it... Can't say I'm sorry I missed it. But thanks for playing through the series and for the trip down memory lane (where applicable). Maybe we'll see this get resurrected like so many other franchises sometimes do.
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Oct 25, 2016 03:08
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