Science Fiction

The gameplay is simple, like a sock, and also like a sock, it can be turned inside-out. People or robots are coming down a conveyor belt. Click to slam down your machines, killing the people, building the robots. A partnership for a better tomorrow.

You can get a refreshing sense of pace out of mastering this, the efficiency you take in to maximize your score -- leave no robot incomplete or human alive. It's kind of chilling, in a totally innocuous, Habbo Hotel-esque pixel-sprite kind of way. As you the player internalize the efficiency you need to thrive, you become more roboticized. The use of complementary play modes could be extremely interesting until you realize it's the same mechanic, same dynamic, just different aesthetics. So you have to wonder, would this same vibe come from a different mechanic?

Overall, a solid arcade game with a clever subtext, with some leverage between them.

In the early 80s, hobby game publishers produced a whole series of small, relatively inexpensive tabletop science fiction and fantasy games--starting with the "Microgames" from Metagaming, and including the "Capsule" games from SPI, and games from Mayfair and many smaller manufacturers. Steve Jackson got his start in this medium (with Ogre), and much of my earlier work was in it as well (The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, DeathMaze, et al).

Heritage, mainly a miniatures publisher, produced a series of 8 titles--of varying quality, but some excellent--under the "Dwarfstar" name and the aegis of Howie Barasch and Arnold Hendrick (who later went on to a stellar career as a game designer for Microprose and IMagic). Some time ago, Reaper Miniatures, which currently owns the rights to these games, made them available as free downloads (you'll need a color printer to produce the maps and counter images).

H-Craft Championship looks surprisingly good for an indie racing game--after all, major publishers spend millions polishing the graphics for games of this type, and its impressive that a small team was able to produce something that looks so nice.

It's science fictional, in that the racing vehicles are hovercraft that apparently tool along great superhighways in the sky. Also apparently, in the future, road safety is not a major concern of the authorities--perhaps the world is overpopulated and they want people to plummet to their deaths--so that failure in steering doesn't mean, as in other games, that you go off road and lose speed, but instead lose the game.

If ever a game deserved a second chance, it's Eric Chahi’s Another World. Something of an homage to Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia, at least in terms of similar gameplay and rotoscoped graphics, Another World offers both that game's precise platforming as well as an inviting science fiction landscape. Since its release in 1991 it has survived largely on its reputation as an old favorite of countless designers--but few gamers have heard of this classic Amiga title, and fewer still have played it, largely because of its limited distribution.

From Slovakian developer Lonely Troops comes a well-conceived turn-based wargame with something of the feel of the Panzer General series, but set on a Dune-like desert planet in the throes of an emerging war. It features a nicely intuitive interface (and a good tutorial to teach you to use it), well conceived missions, and good quality music. Fans of games like Massive Assault will find a lot to like here--and gamers who like thoughtful strategy rather than the frenetic action of the RTS will enjoy it, too.

Starships Unlimited 3 has all the usual tropes of the 4X genre--a galaxy to explore, a deep tech tree, diplomacy with alien races--but with a major difference. The emphasis is, as the name suggests, on your starships. They're highly customizable, and the construction system makes each one you (or your opponents) build considerably more expensive than the last, so that even the largest civilization rarely has more than a dozen in play. This actually works to the game's advantage, because the starships become your protagonists, each individually interesting, and the missions they embark on have something of the feel of Star Trek to them, rather than being another mundane task in the long and (often) tedious grind of a typical 4X game.

Over the years, conventional RTS games have gotten prettier and prettier, until today you can have hundreds of screaming Romans running across the screen in a scene that looks like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.

Kind of amazing, really--expect that, with rare exceptions, not much has changed in terms of the actual gameplay. It's still build, turtle, rush.

What if, instead of concentrating on improving the graphics, you took the "S" in "RTS" seriously, stripped away the resource extraction and tech tree, and looked for ways to create diverse strategic challenges with each level and thoughtful use of combined arms?