X3 Reunion Demo

Don't bag on the game too harshly. It's a really fun game once you learn what you need to do and how to do it. Admitedly the learning curve is fairly steep and it's even more difficult without the booklet of a manual that comes with the X games.

Srsly though, if you're in the mood for an open ended space sim sit down and play around wiht it for awhile, and read all the hints that are given to you. The game is gorgeous and once you get into it the game really starts to be a lot of fun. I haven't had the chance to do any combat yet, but if they reworked it from x2 a bit then it should be pretty awesome.

This is basicly Eve Online w/o the online. Don't knock it till you've given some timem to it to learn it a bit more.

Starforce!

Yeah I picked this game up last week.

The game has a terrible learning curve early on, but it is an absolute blast once you figure it out. I've never played a space game as immersive as this.

So here's the selling points:
* Blow up any ship, station, etc.
* Own any ship, station, etc
* Crime! Spacejacking in this is awesome! You actually have to get out of your ship and spacesuit over to the one you disabled to steal it. Plus there's smuggling, pirating, and a great combination of all three.
* Beauty. Yeah it's pretty. Real Pretty.

The story is crap, and extremely confusing at points. Until you figure the game out, it is also unforgiving. 25% damage to your hull? 100,000 credits to repair. Too bad you start out with 5,000 credits. My buddy learned that the hard way.

Once it gets going though, hella fun. Just be a criminal early on, it speeds up the money earning process drastically. Plus it's wicked fun.

It's an excellent game, imagine Freelancer * 100

Yeah, I don't mean to rip on the game, I'm sure there's a lot there to like, I just didn't have the patience to learn, and like I said, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was hoping for more of a simpler interface / action game, but it's obviously much more involved than that.

I DLed this last night... man, it wasn't what I thought it'd be.

Talk about a steep learning curve. I thought this was a 'fly around and shoot stuff and upgrade your ship' game, but apparently it's more of a fleet management game. Not that you can't fly around and shoot stuff, but the first thing I did was somehow select a ship that I wasn't actually piloting, and started flying it by remote. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't moving, then suddenly I see this freighter come careening in from the side of my screen. I had to hunt around in the menus for about 10 minutes to figure out how to pilot my own ship. I know this because the game sends 'waves of aliens' at you to keep things interesting, and the first wave is 10 minutes in. I barely figured out how to fly around in that time. Luckily the first wave was super easy to dispatch.

Then I slowly started figuring out how to control my other ships, but it still took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to dock with a space station to upgrade my ship, and once I had, I couldn't figure out how to buy or install anything.

The game looks great, and I guess it could be fun, but the learning curve was totally prohibitive for me. I mean, the 'e' key rolls your ship clockwise, but apparently also ejects you from your ship, which is apparently one way to change ships, but I could never figure out how to make the 'e' key eject me instead of rolling the ship. A lot of keys have multiple uses like that and I could never figure out how to activate alternate menu functions.

Besides which, the game seems very 'flight simmy' like, once I figured out how to dock with a station on autopilot, it took about 4 minutes of just sitting and watching the screen while my ship slowly flew toward the station, then past it, then turned around, then flew toward the station, then slowed as it approached, then I accidentally turned off the autopilot, and I couldn't reengage it for some reason, so I had to turn around, fly away from the station, turn around, click on the station, was still too close, then turn around, fly way far away from the station, click on the station, activate the autopilot, sit with my hands folded so that I didn't turn off the autopilot accidentally again while the ship slowly pulled up to the station and docked, and then I couldn't figure out how to upgrade my ship or anything, and I must have hit 'esc' one too many times while trying to figure out the menus, and my ship undocked, so I called it quits. :(