Recently, for no readily apparent reason (other than random chance and a good healthy dose of nostalgia), I set Starflight up to run on my laptop. The result has been a modern relapse into the old addictive space exploration game I loved as a teenager. Starflight is just as apt at taking over my life now as it ever was.
I've been playing slightly less than a week at this point and, with the help of
Starflt.com's helpful tips, a memory for previous plays, and a couple of late nights, I'm close to the end of the story. But I won't spoil it for you. I'll be posting about the game in general until I (hopefully) beat it and start again. Then will come the specific details.
I was surprised to see I'm not the only person playing Starflight (and actually telling the Internet about it)! A fellow called Anthony Salter has been posting
video blogs of his Starflight experience on his blog, GameDevDad. They're entertaining and fun, and while I keep calling backseat driver comments at my computer while I'm watching them ("Dude, there's nothing else on Earth! You got all the important stuff! It's okay!"), I can't wait for the next one.
Starflight was released in 1986 by Electronic Arts. It came in a pressboard folder that contained the two 5.25" floppy disks, a manual, and a code wheel that was necessary to play the game for any length of time. Old-school copy protection. It was better than having to look up a word in the manual, as some other games of the time required, every time you wanted to leave Stardock. Starflight, I feel, was ahead of its time in science fiction games of its type. Everything from the music and sound to the thought and detail put into the alien races in the game made it irresistable. I never beat the game in part because I always spent so much time exploring the galaxy and discovering creatures and places and talking to the alien races! "I think I've visited almost all the systems in the game by now! Well, except for the Uhlek systems. They're scary. "What do you mean Arth has been consumed by the flares? I don't have time for that: I have to save all these poor innocent creatures that are going to be consumed by the -- oh, oops. Heheh, sorry about that."
So look for more posts about my Starflight Adventures coming soon!
er, that even the old hand-me-down Pentium laptop was too much processor for Starflight. Certain of Starflight's aspects run perfectly fine regardless of processor, but others, like exploring in your terrain vehicle planetside or, heaven forfend, encountering hostile alien vessels in space, quickly led to an ugly doom. A bunch of green bees buzzes around your ship for about half a second, then you see "HULL DESTROYED - GAME 
OVER". Bummer. Fortunately, I had a copy of DOSBox handy. After turning down the CPU cycles a bunch of times, the theme music stopped hiccuping and settled down and I knew I was ready. Since I played this game in the old days and I am Nostalgia Woman (TM), I set the speed to fairly close to what I remembered it being when I originally ran the game on my Tandy 1000. This seems to be somewhere between 600 and 1000 cycles, give or take. I tweak it every time I load the thing up so I don't remember what the best or most authentic number might be. I
tested the speed planetside first, just to be sure. I'd rather lose a crew member than my entire ship! A bit of tweaking later and I was ready to go talk to the Veloxi. Give them tribute indeed! I told them to shove off! They didn't take too well to that. They still don't like me, six game months later. Well, who can figure insects, anyhow? But the speed settings were fine for space combat. I decided to spare them my meager wrath (I'd only just started out, after all!) for the moment and made a hasty retreat. Withdrawal. Fighting withdrawal. I went away. Darn Veloxi. Don't listen, Orlash.
Posts
