![]() ![]() Most significantly for new players it has an (optional) in-game tutorial, demonstrating some of the basic game concepts. If you own the latest version, you can install plugins to play ports of the previous versions.īut EV Nova has some improvements over the earlier games that make it worth trying first. For anyone who hasn't played any of them, the differences aren't truly significant: simply put, the three games have nearly identical game mechanics, but tell different stories. There have been three major revisions of EV: the original (now called "Classic"), EV Override, and the current incarnation, EV Nova. Suddenly, the Galaxy gets a lot more complicated. Perform enough of these, and not only do you start visiting remote corners of the galaxy, but you start making friends - and enemies. Often, this work will be on behalf of one of the various political factions in the game. And as you develop a reputation as someone that can defend themselves, an interesting thing happens: people will start approaching you in the spaceport bars, and offer you more interesting work than the standard missions. Occasionally, your defenseless ship might come under attack, and often you'll see that system's police force swoop in to save you.Įventually, though, you might feel brave enough to blow up a few pirates by yourself. If you want to be a simple merchant, plying heavily patrolled space lanes, you can do that. Star systems may belong to a given political entity, which will enforce the local laws. One of the exciting things about Escape Velocity, to my taste, is that there is an ongoing galactic conflict beyond what the player is involved in doing. In the early stages of the game, you'll make money by trading commodities, ferrying passengers from one star system to another, or by performing "special deliveries" of certain cargos to a certain star system within so many days. In order to upgrade your ship, you'll need to make money. You can only carry so much cargo, mount so many weapons, and take so much damage. In practice, you'll find it somewhat limiting. This little ship is, theoretically, capable of going anywhere (as long as it can find a place to land and refuel) and doing anything. Your shuttlecraft has a hyperdrive, some space for cargo, and a small gun that, on a good day, could be used to frighten very small children. You begin on your home planet with a little bit of money and a little shuttlecraft. More significantly, there are "total conversion" kits that allow you to purchase the most recent version ( Escape Velocity Nova) and effectively play the first two games in the series, gratis.Įscape VelocityHere's a brief walkthrough of the beginning of a typical game of Escape Velocity. First, it means that when you're finished with the game, you can install user-written add-ons. Escape Velocity uses an extremely extensible plugin architecture.EV today looks pretty much exactly like it did in 1992. Escape Velocity, on the other hand, is rendered in an isometric perspective where individual objects have a somewhat 3D look, but the gameplay itself is unapologetically 2D. I remember seeing the Wing Commander games in the public computer cluster at CMU in 1991, and people would gather around to gape at it. Privateer was, at the time, jaw-dropping. Escape Velocity intelligently separates graphical glitz from gameplay.They are software heroes, and they deserve some recognition for it. This little company has been putting out great, fun, innovative games every year. I have a soft spot in my heart for Andrew Welch's Ambrosia Software, ever since using his Easy Envelopes utility back in the early '90s. It was published by a small, independent publisher.The attributes which make Escape Velocity significant, to me, are: But that's only a small part - if it was just a matter of picking the earliest possible still playable game, I'd be out here pushing Galactic Empire on you, which I'm not. Part of it is that the EV games were published a bit earlier. After spending some time reviewing the genre, I've come to the conclusion that Escape Velocity deserves the nod, instead, for a few reasons. The port is good enough that I was considering designating it a Playable Classic. ![]() It's a cool project like The Ur-Quan Masters project to revitalize Star Control, the Privateer Remake project lets you play this ancient game on your modern Windows, Mac, or Linux machine. I started thinking of EV when I recently learned about an open-source project to remake the classic Origin game Wing Commander: Privateer. ![]()
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