I'd describe it as a game that's more like Star Control 3 than the actual Star Control 3 was.

It's available for OS9? That is old.

It's a great game though.

Mac editions for games make me happy.

that was pretty cool idea. might need to play it a few more times. i got a -1001 score the first time.

It's free and people like it.

Downloading.

Haha, just figured out how the purple stuff works the hard way. returned waaay too late. This game kicks ass! Reminds me of EV Nova, but nerdier!

Ive been hoping another space exploration game would come along one day, since two of my all-time favorite games were Star Control 2(Ive probably logged hundreds of hours on that) and NOMAD(really old pc game. Like, incredibly old. Floppy disc old). But...

I dont like this game.

Alien contact is one of two things. The one race that likes trading, and the rest of the galaxy that wants to kill you. There's one exception but only if you managed to find the survivor of their race before you run into them. Running from contact means you've lost all the time spent getting there, will probably have to spend <i>more</i> time getting to the next planet, and that's one planet you wont be getting anything from. As for fighting them...

The combat system is a joke. The weapons you start with cant take on <b>anyone</b>. And the chances you'll find one of the super-weapons sprinkled across the galaxy that turns combat from instant-death to instant-win is remote. Unless of course you encounter...

The trade race. And more to the point, the trade system. There's no levels of value to items. If you encounter them you can trade all your utter shit for their, most often, UBERGEAR at a 1:1 ratio. Here's my shitty chemical engines, I'll take those Photon Repulsors. Oh, you've got the 20x Light Speed hyperdrive engines? I'll trade my 6x for them. And here's a pair of dinky lasers for the left and right fists of an angry space god. Good doing bussiness with ya. What, you've got something that makes all my already tweaked out systems even better? Awesome, here's a fucking spiderbat.

Randomization does make for infinite replay, but that doesnt count for much when quite often the replay is shit. When the outcome of the round depends 98% on how soon you encounter the trade race, your system is bent. Imagine playing an FPS where your starting equipment is a pellet gun, there's a 10% chance you'll find an actual weapon before encountering the enemy, and that enemy is a squad of T-300s programmed to hate the very idea of your un-lasered face.

It's not a terrible game but it does too much wrong for me to really enjoy it.