Escape velocity nova game for pc series#
With your ship as alter-ego and personal stats and skills to develop, the Space Opera RPG had a few brief shining years before being swept away in the flood of technical advances that crowned graphics king and large development teams kingmaker.įor Mac users though, isolated in their own world and largely ignored by the new commercial realities of the gaming world the Space Opera RPG continued to thrive, most spectacularly in the Escape Velocity series from Ambrosia Software. More ships, more upgrades, more depth, more adventure. The graphics were simple, a galaxy of backdrops over which roamed the colourful sprites and icons depicting ships.īut the depth! Freed from the technical limitations of 3-D graphics engines, whole universes were brought to life and gripping story-lines depicted by swathes of well-written text. This was the space opera, less of a sim more of a role-playing adventure as exemplified by such classics as Sun Dog, Space Rogue and of course, Star Flight. We were all Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, behind the stick of a thousand ships, blasting our way through swathes of bad guys and ill-intentioned alien scum.įor budding Han Solo types there was though another tradition, one that perhaps did not get as much exposure in the United Kingdom at least, stuck as we were with tapes as the storage medium, even on the mighty Commodore 64. And Elite begat Wing Commander, X-Wing, Frontier, Privateer and a host of other simulation variants. A time when game-play was king and graphics the humble hand maiden.Īnd the masses played Elite and saw it was good.
Of course this putative Age is usually when your imagination was first captured by whatever your first piece of hardware was.įor me that was the eighties, a time that truly was the dawn of commercial computer gaming, when machines whose power would have a Casio digital watch beeping derision could conjure a whole universe of imagination from a few coloured sprites or wire-frame geometric shapes because that was all they could handle. Escape Velocity Nova: A Return to the Golden AgeĮverything has a Golden Age, a time to look back on with misty eyes, when everything was, well, just better and computer gaming is no exception.
0 kommentar(er)
