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, howev
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.
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.
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