Starflight 2: A New Realm of Nostalgia Awaits!

I've been playing Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula over the last week or so (I did finish Starflight - I just never finished posting about it.  I'll get back to that and finish the story ... eventually).  Though I had never finished SF1 during my original plays back in the eighties, I found it fairly straightforward to get to the end of the story.  Starflight 2 seems more involved.  As one might expect, I never finished SF2 either, in 1989.  But I've been giving some thought to running a tabletop RPG set in the Starflight universe, so I thought I'd best finish the second game so I knew what the heck was going on. And honestly, do I need another reason to go back and play Starflight 2?  Naaahhh.

Care to haggle?

Starflight 2 added what was one of my favourite aspects of the game: trading.  I really enjoy bartering for some reason.  I like the challenge of knowing what style of bartering the alien race uses and in squeezing out every single Shyneum Penny I can without ticking them off.  Not that that always works.  And playing late at night when I should be sleeping is also ill-advised, as unfortunate episodes like accidentally agreeing to sell something for, say, 290 SP/cm3 instead of the intended 2900 SP/cm3 can occur.  Eheh.  Nothing a quick launch-n-land won't cure.

"The things are also people..."

I also enjoy the additional races in Starflight 2.  I think my favourites are the Humna Humna.  I always seem to favour the races that have weird or silly modes of speech.  The Humna are extremely redundant, and reading their transmissions always makes me smile.  The Dweenle are so very pitiable.  I want to hug them and tell them it'll be alright ... until their continual depressive chatter makes me want to boot them into the nearest neutron star.  Love-hate relationship there.  And of course the Tandelou crack me up with their silly religious messages. I'm paraphrasing, but they say things like, "We realise that our religion does not make sense, but that does not bother us.  In fact, we prefer that it does not make sense."  Hilarious.

There are some races in Starflight 2 with whom you must converse in certain tones.  Until you work out how to defeat the incredible weapons and defenses the Spemin have come up with, you have to grovel before them.  No, really, just trust me.  And yes, it sucks.  They will end you.  Their battle teleport technology (stolen, of course) prevents you from fleeing an encounter, so avoid them best you can, or be prepared to fork over shyneum fuel when they demand it. (Don't carry extra - they ask for a percentage of your total.)  Darn Spemin.  The G'nunk must be dealt with from a hostile posture at all times.  They believe that they must constantly challenge each other and everyone else in order to promote growth and strength, so you have to destroy twenty of their ships before they'll even talk to you.  And don't forget to keep your shields up and weapons armed: even if they've decided you're worth talking to, they'll quickly get angry if you approach defenseless.

"Life...forms... you tiny little life... forms..."

That's to say nothing of the huge variety of lifeforms (now identified by species), the new tech available at Starport, the time travel.... Starflight 2 has a lot to offer.  I'll be delving back into Nostalgia-O-Rama with the help of DOSBox and the ever-helpful information at starflt.com.

Unfortunately my Starflight obsession has to compete with my Dwarf Fortress obsession, and DF just released a new, jam-packed-with-Fun-goodness version this week. I shall do my best to make regular, if infrequent, postings on Starflight, though.

Heroine Rids Galaxy Of Threat: Uhlek Brain World Destroyed!

It was time to finally deal with those nasty Uhlek once and for all. Working on information gained from the Spemin (yeah, I know), I made my way deep into Uhlek space, jumping at every stray encounter. There was only one, and I was sure I was dead. But it was only a Minstrel. Pesky poety thing, shoo now! You scared me half to death! You should be ashamed of yourself. Anyway, on arriving at the Uhlek Brain World (not Brian World, as the codewheel program would have it), I scooped up as many creatures as I could. Let's face it: nobody was gonna see them in their native environment again any time soon. I dropped one of my black egg devices, then got back into the ship and lifted off.

Once back in orbit, I took a last look at the Uhleks' brain and waved farewell. I received a countdown from the black egg, and then... no more Uhlek! Do the happy dance with me! Due to technical difficulties I can't present a screencap of the fateful moment at this time (Silly VLC player! You do not play nicely with screencapping!). Now I don't have to worry about anyone brutally murdering me or my crew. 'Cos I can take the rest of the races in this game. Me an' my ship, bristling with weaponry. Grr. Next stop: the Crystal Planet!

My God ... it's full of ... cosmic junk!

It was more or less at this point that I realised I had too much crap in my inventory. There's a glitch or oversight that caps the number of items you can hold in your ship's cargo manifest. I have a cubic buttload of artifacts I've been meaning to pawn off on the Thrynn, a stack of messages recorded on various planets, and more lifeform data and specimens than I probably should. *Insert Data singing 'Life-forms!' from the TNG movie here* This, my friends, is what sadness looks like. A hold a quarter empty with too many entries for the ship's computer to handle, and a screen teeming with Spemin vessel wrecks. All that Endurium, wasted! *sob*

Speaking of Endurium, the City of the Ancients is a sight to behold. To a Starflight player, at least one who hasn't spent too much time smashing Gazurtoid to bits and getting really really loaded up on Endurium, the sheer amount of fuel in the City will take your breath away. Holy Hannah. I had to go back twice to pick it all up. Well, I used to have room in my cargo pods for stuff... oh well. Back to Starport!

Enter the Spemin

I spent some time mining and recommending colony worlds and harvesting the flora and fauna of neighboring worlds for a while until I could equip my ship properly. It was about that time I bumped into my very favourite race in Starflight. They're blue, they have antennas and an ego the size of the Cloud Nebula. They're the blobbies you love to hate: give it up now for the Spemin! The comic relief of Starflight, the Spemin are not much of a threat. After a while, if you're anything like me, you'll tire of bowing down to these wee blobbies and of listening to them spout off about themselves and how disgusting you humans are and just start smashing them out of the sky. A few encounters' worth of that and they'll come crawling to you: "Pleeeeease don't hurt us! Think of our little blobbies back home!" Or, my personal favourite quote in the entire game: "We were only kidding about blowing you to pieces. Smerg, smerg, smerg, wasn't that a funny joke?" I've been off travelling elsewhere in the galaxy, finding artifacts, making trouble, avoiding getting horribly killed by the Uhlek, and now I've returned to Spemin space in a ship bristling with weapons and devices that pretty much ensure the blobs have a snowball's chance in the heart of a Class O star of standing up to me.

God, it's fun to atomise them. I made an attempt to get onto their homeworld, thinking the City of the Ancients was there. While they're easy enough to swat, they call for a lot of backup, and though the backup is as easily dispatched, I could never seem to actually get to the homeworld orbit. I destroyed every ship I could see, moved off, and ended up outside orbital range again. Anyway, it turned out the City of the Ancients is not on the Spemin homeworld. Which is good, because I think the artifact located at the City is one you can't complete the game without.

It Begins...

In my excitement I unzipped the files and started the game right up. Oh, how I had missed the beep music of Starflight's theme song! I quickly realised, however, 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.

Let the adventures commence!

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!