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Eagle's STARS! Abandonia Review Fri, 11 September 2009 15:06 Go to previous message
Eagle of Fire

 
Lt. Commander

Messages: 809
Registered: December 2008
Location: GMT -5
 Hi folks.

Been a little while since I stopped playing my main game... Got some time off as work begin to be a little less overwhelming, and I thought this would be a good time to work on my Abandonia review. Some of you might remember that I mentioned once or twice that I am working on this review since some time now... And knowing myself, if I don't do it soon then I'll simply forget about it. Rolling Eyes

I scrambled a few notes here and there at work and got them all into my first draft. Since a lot of players here know more than me about STARS!, and also since it will possibly also have an effect on you and this site, I wanted to share this review with you before sending it to Abandonia.

I am particularly interested to know if it would be wise or not to incorporate your site adress in my review itself or if it would be better to create some kind of text file explaining where to get to all the ressources about STARS! on the net. Or if it would be wiser not to mention Autohost at all.

Please note that English is not my first language and that I typed it all on my small notebook... Spelling mistakes and typos probably abound. Razz

Quote:

STARS! Review, by Eagle of Fire

Always been a fan of 4X games but also always been frustrated by the lack of good quality multiplayer games around? Look no further my friend. Welcome home.

STARS! is a great strategy game designed solely for the best of multiplayer experience against other humans. The mechanics of the game are not only detailed and well designed but also well balanced, thanks in part to the help of a small but very loyal player base who spots possible bugs and/or abuse and police the games officialised by their automatic host.

Loyal to the (now modern) ideology of the 4X space game genre such as Master of Orion, you are elected as the everlasting leader of a planet from which the dominant race have managed somehow to discover the secrets of space exploration and colonization. It is then up to you to guide this emerging race into the void and turn this humble begining into a mighty empire able to crush the other races in the galaxy. A small story is written in the nice ingame helpfile system, explaining how the galaxy formed and why you have limitations such as not being able to cross the borders of the galaxy map.

Created in the era of the elderly Windows 3.1, one of my greatest fear was to discover innabilities due to the antique coding. Not only did STARS! age wonderfully along with the new modern OSes, it only took me a few sessions to realize that what can be considered weak points can just as easily be turned into assets. For example, the size and the lack of entry in the registery allow you to carry the game on a USB stick and play from about any computers as long as you are aware and wary of the cheat protection. The interface and spartan graphics, reminescent of the old Windows 3.11 games, are another good example. Obviously designed with the limitation of the antique system in mind, they do both excell in their practicality. I have to admit that, in the 20 or so games that I played so far, the interface never got in my way even once. This game also do not sport music at all and barelly even support sound effects, depending of the version that you are using. Obviously done to, again, keep the file size very small, it does help in the long run to concentrate on the task at hand when playing. The game taking so little ressources on its own to run on your computer, it is also a simple matter to open your favorite music player to listen to music you actually like instead of always listening to the same boring syntethyser music. A problem which plague a lot of other older games.

The whole game core files being able to fit on a single floppy, it is easy to simply carry the game and your turn to any other computer 16 or 32bits compatible and play from there (While XP works without an itch, 64bits Vista systems are not compatible. DOSBox can be used in conjuction with Windows 3.11 in this case.). The game will simply create on the new machine a harmless
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