Games That Do Stuff, Really Well

Anything else
Zantalos
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Games That Do Stuff, Really Well

Post by Zantalos » Wed Aug 02, 2006 4:56 am

Games that do something really well, preferebly free games you can show off to us.


Ok first one, this has to be the best open-ended game I've ever seen. It's this seemingly do-whatever-you-want game that takes place in the Star Trek universe. Maybe you've played it because it was on the top ten list for Flashportal.com and has been hosted there for quite some time (it was submitted in 2005 I think). Anyways, this game is big, you pick your race, along with their alliance, and then the game starts you off with a small ship. You're always in your ship with a constant top down perspective (remember to use <, > to zoom)

The amount of stuff you can do in that game is crazy. You can dock at nearby trade stations and they have little deals there for you to run, they pay you this much per ton, to deliver this certain amount of stuff to somewhere else. Your negotiating skills increase as you do this, allowing you to get better deals if you're good enough (or something like that, I'm not entirely certain how). You can colonize empty planets or send down away teams that will hopefully accomplish something good for that planet. Or you can wage war on them by destroying there buildings and any defending ships there, you slowly (very slowly) take down the planet's strength and when it hits zero, people start evacuating it until it's empty, for you to colonize. You can also build stations benifiting these planets and you gain prestiege points, sometimes, governments will ask you to be their leader if you've helped them enough. Planets will generate huge amounts of money for your empire, it's great you can build buildings that increase their population, strength, and profits. You can mine asteroid fields or build mining stations that mine for you. Every ship you encounter has commodities for sale and commodities they are willing to buy. There are just tons of things for you to do.

There are a total of 7 skills to build upon, ranging from away team experience to how good of a tactician you are. You build these up through applying yourself in the world or by getting educated at an academy.

As you make money (by exploiting other people's trade offers of course), you buy ships for you, and your fleet. Your fleet has a string of commands, they can be ordered as escorts, destroying a targeted ship, seek and destroying all enemy ships, and massing around the planets, ships are good for defending planets and helping you destroy other galaxies (...sort of). But there are two commands that are perticularily awesome, telling them to explore, and making them conduct trade runs. On updates, you are notified of which galaxies your ships are exploring, how much profits ships have made, or if they had to fight ships along their journey, it's cool that they report to you (they also tell you if any building were finished, nations at war, how much you've mined, stuff that gives you the impression of being a small part of the big picture).

This game has the coolest ideas for an open-ended game that I've ever seen. However that's not to say that this is the best game I've ever played. This game is flash, meaning it frequently gets buggy, and simple battles with 5 or more ships can create a quite amount of lag (zooming out is laggy and messes with your speed). Alot of the main gameplay is tedious (like taking out a galaxy with 4000+ strength), so you probably won't have the time or patience to play this to the end. But in all, really good flashgame, it's a bit too complex for flash, but the ideas are solid and great to have, I wished more games would be innovative like this.

Oh right, it's called Flashtrek: Broken Mirror.
Created by Ver (or Vex) Xiang. - http://www.vexxiang.com

Play the most up-to-date version mirrored from his site (he's working on the sequel right now).

I got tons of more games to talk about (like 3...), go ahead and post another cool game you've played too.

Vib Rib
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Post by Vib Rib » Wed Aug 02, 2006 5:34 am


Noctis IV

You want open-ended? Noctis is a freeware, indie game developed by a single person: It is an entire digital to-scale galaxy the player can explore, and it's less than 2 megabytes in size. There are literally billions of stars and systems that comprise the digital galaxy of Noctis.
In Noctis, the player pilots a special interstellar spaceship, a Stardrifter, which can easily cruise from star to star, system to system, using a built-in touch-pad-activated on-board system located on the main viewing window of the Stardrifter. The system is capable of interstellar drive as well as scoping for Lithium (your ship's fuel, emitted by some stars), scanning local space for various statistics and data, and various smaller touches like on-board lighting, polarization (makes the ship a nifty see-through), and sending out distress calls.

When cruising through deep space at a rapid pace, exploring the vastness of the digital galaxy and undoubtedly enjoying the many sights along the way, the player will inevitably encounter star systems with planets, moons, gas giants, and various unstable stellar objects. Your ship is equipped with a landing capsule, and you can actually land on the surface of planets, with varying colors, geographic features, atmospheres, gravity, and even native flora and fauna!

Further, the game features a vast "Guide" system which allows you to name and label various systems, stars, and planets, and then write your own notes, observations, and findings on the various entries and locales you encounter. These notes can then be mailed in to the master database and will be added to the next update and prime download. You'll notice, especially around the starting area, that many local systems and planets have already been partially explored and labelled by previous explorers. If you like, you can also read from the volumes of notes that have been parsed over these entries -- there's a wealth of information to be found.

The game features roughly a dozen types of star systems and various metaplanet styles, and every planet and system has been randomly generated from a fractal seed, so every planet is unique in topography, atmosphere, and so on -- no two planets are identical, and neither are any two landing coordinates on one given planet.

The only real downsides to the game are that for one, it can be intimidating, control-wise, if you don't first read the included readme, since navigating with your on-board system can seem complicated at first. The only other possible weak point of the game is the graphics -- admittedly a bit outdated and low-res, but these effects are counteracted by the vistas you will encounter in your journeys, both on the ground and in space.

There is no way to win in Noctis; no goal except to explore to your heart's content.
You have an entire digital galaxy to explore. Every single spot of light can be travelled to, every (solid) planet can be landed on, every moon can be walked across, every canyon and mountain can be climbed.

I recommend it thoroughly. It has kept me entertained for years.

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MacWiggy
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Post by MacWiggy » Thu Aug 10, 2006 11:14 pm

I didn't read that whole Flashtrek rant, but I do know that Diablo 2 is the most badass thing ever.

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Renegade_Turner
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Post by Renegade_Turner » Fri Aug 11, 2006 10:10 am

No.

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Post by AiglosCelt » Fri Aug 11, 2006 10:43 pm

Vib Rib wrote:An extremely long post

...wow...that looks really incredible. I'll be sure to check it out.



My favorite game of all time is Savage. It's not free, but it was published independently by the good folks over at S2games. It was and is the best combination of RTS and FPS that has ever been, and ever will be...with the possible exception fo the upcoming sequel :D

http://www.s2games.com

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MacWiggy
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Post by MacWiggy » Fri Aug 11, 2006 10:52 pm

Oh hell yeah. Savage has to be the best Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever. Although that's not saying much, considering it's the only Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever.

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Post by Renegade_Turner » Sat Aug 12, 2006 12:40 am

AiglosCelt wrote:
Vib Rib wrote:An extremely long post
I found what you did there humourous.
MacWiggy wrote:Oh hell yeah. Savage has to be the best Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever. Although that's not saying much, considering it's the only Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever.
You said Diablo 2 was the most badass thing ever. You can't really talk. :P

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Post by AiglosCelt » Sat Aug 12, 2006 12:54 am

Renegade_Turner wrote:
MacWiggy wrote:Oh hell yeah. Savage has to be the best Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever. Although that's not saying much, considering it's the only Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever.
You said Diablo 2 was the most badass thing ever. You can't really talk. :P
This time he's right though...Savage kicked major bootay.

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Post by hdlsa » Sat Aug 12, 2006 12:55 am

Renegade_Turner wrote:
AiglosCelt wrote:
Vib Rib wrote:An extremely long post
I found what you did there humourous.
MacWiggy wrote:Oh hell yeah. Savage has to be the best Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever. Although that's not saying much, considering it's the only Strategy/FPS/Hack n' Slash game ever.
You said Diablo 2 was the most badass thing ever. You can't really talk. :P
Diablo 2 was the most badass thing ever.

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Post by Albab » Sat Aug 12, 2006 3:15 am

Never played any of those, though in relation to the flashtrek thing, it sounds a lot like escape velocity. I love those gamess... Blrrreeeeeegor. It's fun to build up to a great ship. I got a manticore in nova once. I was so proud of my self, and then I sold it since is was so damned slow. Whee.

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Post by Renegade_Turner » Sat Aug 12, 2006 10:43 am

Sure it was, hdlsa.

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Post by BunnyWithStick » Mon Aug 14, 2006 1:36 am

Ah yes, I've already got Flashtrek: Broken Mirror, and yes, it is a lot like escape velocity (Which I also have), and I really wish that some great sounding games that run on a mac will appear here, and I suppose I should put in a game here, so…

Oolite!
Yet another space sim, it's based on Elite, spans multiple galaxies, about 5 I think, each one containing quite a lot of systems
It also runs on a mac, and also has ports to windows and linux

Zantalos
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Post by Zantalos » Mon Aug 14, 2006 2:36 am

Damnit, it takes so long to get to the first planet of Zaonce, friggen spaceships stopping me from zooming. The instructions said ZOOM I want to ZOOM!!

......

Okay I just got blown up. Apparently I shouldn't be shooting lasers at yellow dots.

Zantalos
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Post by Zantalos » Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:37 am

So instead I got bored and decided to try Noctis again (because the first time you play, everything confuses the frigging hell out of you.
All you know is
1. you move with the mouse, and
2. the 'up' button takes you out of the ship)

Anyways, after downloading the update, I learned I could type "inbox" on the side panel and wait roughly two hours for the whole 685 kilobytes to update my star map.

Then the next day I found out you had to double right click to select your target planet (this is when I ran out of lithium, twice). I sailed around a ton that day.

Then later I discovered I should fly to a star, hit the emergency button, scope for lithium, and then make a sandwich.

And just now, I finally figured out how to land on planets! Now of course, the first 3 times were crap, because I kept landing onto nearly pitch black planets. But the fourth time, yeah! I landed on a bright forest (which had unique trees by the way, they were very polygonal but they looked like they were grown just like Lugaru 2. All unique and stuff, though I'm not sure about soil and sunlight :P ) Also, the place was up in a thunderstorm so there were flashes of light and rainy weather. Even more, I was on top of a hill, so all the water looked like it had poured down and made a bunch of ponds at the bottom, not sure if it did, but there weren't any "out of place" ponds at the sides or anything.

Best of all, I found wild life! first it was just a few birds and stuff, but then I found this really cool jumpy thing. So I did what any planetary tourist would do, I chased it around, (it swam a bunch) and took like a hundred pictures with my helmet cam. It was tight yo.
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Post by Renegade_Turner » Mon Aug 14, 2006 8:29 am

David should go and apprehend some for use in Lugaru 2. :P

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