Holy crap! I just saw that my last post was from july 25th! That means that I’ve been badly neglecting my very own website! Shame on me!

Anyway, this post is going to be a legendary one as it is about a game that some people, including me, have created for the PGD Annual 2009. It’s called FUR and it’s a very, very, very fast arcade racing game.

We all know games like WipeOut, Extreme G, Roll Cage, Starwars Episode 1 Racer, F-Zero etc… etc… And some of these are very fast indeed. If you’ve ever played Roll Cage you’ll know what a very fast racing game is all about. We thought: let’s take this speed to the next level and create a bad ass racing game! And so we did.

There are 3 cars and 3 tracks in this arcade style game. With arcade style I mean that everything is arcade style. The driving is ridiculously fast, there is no form of realism whatsoever, the menu’s are extremely simple and there is even a coin-op system.

There are 2 game modes which are single race and championship. Single race costs 1 credit and champion 2 or 3 depending on how well you race. There is a time limit in which you must reach the next checkpoint or the game will be over. Each checkpoint adds a certain amount of time to the time you have left. So if you’re driving very good this time will expand to a point where it’s barely possible to lose on this point anymore. But if you’re driving like a slob you won’t even last till the first checkpoint.

Take a look at this page: http://www.necrosoft.nl/?page_id=653

This is the game’s page on my friend’s website. Here you’ll find some screenshots, a very cool promo movie that I made and a downloadlink. Go check it out and let us know what you think!

When you have checked it out, keep the following in mind before giving negative feedback on performance:

• This game is very heavy on physics, so a decent CPU is a must.
• This game is fairly heavy on graphics, so an integrated videochip like most laptops have probably won’t run this very well. You should at least have a GeForce 7 series card (with dedicated video RAM, no shared video RAM) or ATI equivalent.
• Although the game does run on Windows XP, I’d recommend Windows Vista or 7. I don’t think that the GeForce 7600GS in my old computer is causing the weird lighting, but it’s just that Windows XP is too old. But I could be wrong on that count. If so, I’d just recommend a GeForce 8 series graphics card or ATI equivalent.
• Use the config tool that is included to configure the controls and scale the performance.
• Make sure that the framerate will remain above 30 FPS at all times. If not, the game will become unplayable due to laggy input.
• The best way to scale the performance is to set the resolution to a lower level. If that doesn’t help enough, turn off the motion blur effect and if the game still doesn’t run you should go to a store and get a new computer.

Now… Go and click the link above and check it out and let us know how great this game is!

…End of line.

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Well, allthough I have written something that might resemble a review in my previous post, I have written a review on Gametrailers.com that is somewhat superior to the one I had posted here, so I’m just going to copy-paste it on here as well. Even though I scored the game a bit higher on that review I still think that this review is superior to the last one. So here you go.

EA seems to have listened to a lot of the criticism on Need for Speed Pro Street by taking this game back to the streets, but on the PC this is not as good as it sounds. I hope for console owners that their versions are at least not as bad as the PC version.

Like Most Wanted, Undercover is played during the day. Even though the effect of driving straight into the sunlight looks nice and fairly realistic being blinded and such it’s annoying to no end, because you can hardly see where you’re going. You can sometimes see the sun move sideways for no reason that I could explain and shadows of stationary objects seem to folow your car when you pass by. Shadows pop up out of the blue almost everywhere in the levels. The reflection on the cars as well as the road reflections flicker from time to time, but it’s even worse that the entire screens flickers occasionally completely blocking your view. The cars look nice and shiny though, but even that is nothing special as we have seen that before in earlier Need for Speed games. I even dare to say that the cars used to look better in earlier games in the series. Added to all this, the city you’re driving in looks empty, dull, bland and boring.

And now I have yet only spoken of the graphical nuisances. Let’s continue with the gameplay. Well, this is also bad. I mean, if a game looks bad because of glitches and bad design it can still be saved by solid gameplay. Even though Need for Speed Undercover has some nice gameplay elements, nothing seems to work out just the way it should. The races are easy, short and nothing coming even close to a challenge. The short races can be rectified by saying that they are so short to keep the game at high pace, which is true more or less, but it’s the longer races in the previous games that really did it for me as it can be tough to stay focussed for a long time at very high speed which also adds to the challenge. The is one race type though that would have been really cool if the controls weren’t as bad as they are and that’s the out run. In this race mode you have to either stay in front of your opponent for a set period of time or get in front at a set distance and you have to do this on a very busy part of the high way at high speed. These races are actually quite fun despite of the horrible controls. All the other races are more of the same as seen in previous games in the series. Another fun addition are the so called jobs that you have to complete to get further into the story. In these jobs you have to get a car from point A to point B without crashing it and while avoiding the police for example. This all sounds like great fun, but in practice it’s annoying and frustration to no end. The horrible controls added on top of the bad handling of these special cars cause you to crash into about everything, including police vehicles. They won’t easely bust you, but they will total your car and then you’ve failed anyway. Added to that is that in one mission I’ve played it was completely impossible to avoid the police as they had a helicopter in the air that would magically pop up right above you and it even sees you while you’re in a tunnel or otherwise obstructed from sight from the air and the car is too fragile to trigger persuit breakers and not fast enough to outrun the police and you can tell by this that it’s at least very frustrating to play this job.

I was talking about bad controls earlier, let me explain this. In Need for Speed Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted and Carbon the controls were responsive and quick and the cars handled quite well with the few exceptions of the really crappy cars. In Pro Street the controls felt somewhat unresponsive at times and most cars handled really bad. This was probably due to the fact that EA didn’t raelly know whether to make this into a racing sim or an arcade action racer and then created something in between that didn’t really work. Need for Speed Undercover is an arcade racer for sure, but the controls don’t occasionally feel unresponsive, the feel unresponsive, slow and inaccurate all of the time. I play racing games with my Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 with two analog sticks that work great with any racing game I own, except for Need for Speed Undercover. It feels like it’s steering has an on/off switch instead of smooth analog control. It’s either steering to the max or not steering at all and this makes it nearly impossible to keep your car in a straight line on the road. Especially in those fun out run races this gets really annoying as you often have to push your car through tight spaces between the other cars on the road and you will almost always hit them, simply because you can’t get through in a straight line causing you to bounce in between them. So that’s why I say that the controls are bad, or even horrible.

I haven’t talked about the sound yet except for the music. Well, the sound is nothing special. The crashing sounds don’t give you the feeling of a crash, more that of some grinding or scratching and the engine sounds aren’t really top of the line either. Some cars sound like lawnmowers.

I also had a few crashes, a few times during races and once while I was pimpin’ my ride. Not as many as I’ve seen in some other games before and I’m not going to bitch too much about it.

The bottom line is that this game is very, very bad. The bad controls, tons of graphical glitches and the boring design all add up the how bad this game really is. Some ideas are nice, like the out run races and the story jobs, but it all doesn’t work out and this game is by far not what it should have been. The music is nice though and the cars look nice. And now I haven’t even mentioned the terrible live action cutscenes. They aren’t so bad that it’s good, no, they’re so bad, going past good back to bad again.

Graphics: 3
Lot’s of glitches and boring design.
Sound: 4
Nothing special and some cars sound like lawnmowers
Music: 7
Good soundtrack adds to the racing feel, if it was there
Stability: 7
I had a few crashes, but not enough to be really bitchy about it
Gameplay: 1
Can’t score it any lower. Horrible controls, races and other events are either too easy or horribly frustrating.
Story: 1
As far as a racing game needs a story, this one has a story that isn’t just bad, it’s also being told in a very boring and annoying way through horrible cutscenes.

Score: 3.8 (average)

So do yourself a favor and don’t buy this game. Don’t even bother downloading it, it won’t be worth your time and it’s illegal on top of that.

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For everyone who thought Need for Speed Pro Street was bad… This is even worse. And that said is actually allready enough. The Underground series has been going from Need for Speed Underground up to Need for Speed Carbon. Then came Need for Speed Pro Street in which they tried out something new by taking to street cars to the legal organized racing events. A nice twist, but it didn’t work out. The controls were bad lingering between arcade and realistic driving and that doesn’t work too well combined with horrible driving physics which makes it even a challenge to keep the cars on the road in a straight line. Even though Undercover has dropped the whole “let’s try to be somewhat realistic” driving in favor of total arcade driving in which you barely ever take your finger of the gas, keeping your car in a straight line on the road is near impossible unless you happen to exit a corner just right to put you in a straight line on the road. Personally I think this is unforgivable as the controls are by far the most important aspect of a racing game. Graphical glitches can sometimes be forgiven is the rest of the game is solid, but that is most definitely not the case with Undercover. Need for Speed Most Wanted and Carbon featured cheesy, yet amusing live action cutscenes to tell the story. The story was never very impressive, neither needs it to be impressive, but the cutscenes added to the fun of playing through the single player carreer mode. The cutscenes of Undercover are a whole different story. Where the cutscenes of Most Wanted and Carbon were so bad that they were good, I’m going to have to use a quote of one of the best movies on this planet to describe the quality of the cutscenes in Undercover. It’s a quote from the movie Ghostworld: “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.” And yes ladies and gentleman, that is an accurate description of how bad the cutscenes in this game are. They are cheesy in the purest sense of the word and not ammusing or fun to watch at all. Even worse is the fact that you can’t skip those annoying race intro’s either. They are fun the first time, but they get old real fast and you want to skip them and start racing allready, but no, you have to watch them over and over again which is especially irritating when you have to retry a race if you fail and trust me on this one, this will happen more often than you’d like. Most races are easy, very easy and maybe even too easy, but occasionallly there are races that are critical to the story and somehow these races can get pretty difficult in a way like this; your opponent sticks to your bumper and you make one error and you’ll lose. It’s impossible to overtake him again and you have to restart to be able to win the race. Or you have to deliver a car undamaged to the other side of the city without cops on your tail while the cops have a chopper in the air that even sees you when you’re in a tunnel and then there are so many cops on your tail that losing them is impossible when there is also still a chopper in the air that always sees you no matter where you go. Added to that is that the car is totalled in no time thanks to the horrible controls of this game. This causes these so called “jobs” to be no fun at all and the best way to get past them seems to be cheating. But I haven’t yet searched for any cheats or trainers to remove the cops or make the car invincible or something to get past those annoying jobs.

Ok, that’s enough whining about the gameplay, how this game is unplayable and all, but there is more bad stuff going on in this game. One of them is the graphics. Yes, the graphics suck. On the screenshots and in the official movies it all looks great. And it does look great in game too, if it weren’t for the tons of graphical glitches in this game. A shadow of a stationary object following your car, random flickering reflections, total screen flickering occasionally, shadows popping up out of the blue, other objects popping up out of the blue and so on. By all these things I can tell that this game was released far before it was done and for console owners I hope that those versions at least don’t suffer from these graphical glitches as they most likely can’t be patched to clean this mess up. On the PS3 it would be possible to patch it as all PS3’s have a hard disk, but not all XBox 360’s have a hard disk, so patching a game on that system is impossible. And for PC gamers who have bought this game I hope that these problems will be cleaned up with a patch in a near future as well as a tuneup of those horrible controls.

Talking about the controls, I use a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2. I don’t have the Logitech tool installed as it’s not available for 64 bit Vista so the rumble function doesn’t work. So I can’t tell if the game makes good use of that, but it surely doesn’t make proper use of analog controls. It feels like there is an on/off switch for steering even when using an anolog stick for steering. It’s  either no steering or steering all the way, nothing in between.

There is something good too though. You don’t need to drive around the city all the time to find the races, just jump to an event you like using the map, saves you a lot of time backtracking and such. The cars look good, just like in any other NFS game. They look detailed and they can be customized with spoilers, hoods, exhaust tips, body kits and that jazz, but the game even managed to crash when I changed the rims a few times. And it even crashed directly to my desktop without any error messages or something, it just stopped working as Windows calls it. And ofcourse this game has a nice musical score. The music quality is good and the songs really add to the experience, just too bad the experience is so horribly awfull.

The bottomline is, stay away from this game. When you see this game in a store, pretend it’s not there or something, even when it’s in a bargain bin, it’s not worth whatever you would pay for it. I give a 3 out of 10, because the cars look good and the music is nice, that’s it, no points for gameplay and polish, because this game plays very bad and is completely unpolished overall. This game sucks. Maybe I should do a videoreview of this game sometime, just to show off how bad it is.

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With FlatOut Ultimate Carnage the FlatOut franchise returns to the PC. But it does so in a manner that if any of the following FlatOut games on the PC are as good as this one that noone will probably buy any of them.

I didn’t make any screenshots of it, but if you want some I suggest checking out various game sites like gamespot.com or mobygames.com 

It’s bad
So is FlatOut Ultimate Carnage bad? I say yes and there are three main reasons for it being bad:
1. Performance
2. 100% equal to XBox 360 version
3. Cheat AI

Performance
Let’s begin with the worst thing, the performance. This game does have slightly improved graphics over FlatOut 2, but these minor enhancements are not even the main cause of the game’s horrible performance. I used to run Flatout 2 on my PC Slashdev before the motherboard had been replaced with a newer one when the old one died and before I upgraded it with a new graphicscard and before I doubled the RAM. It still has the same Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, but instead of the GeForce 6600GT AGP it now has a GeForce 7600GS PCI-E with 512MB and now it has 2GB of RAM instead of just 1. FlatOut 2 always ran perfectly at 1280×1024 with 4x anti aliassing, 16x anisotropic filtering and all in game details set to the highest possible setting and it looked great. If I’d play it now I’d still say that it looks great. But now there is FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. From the screenshots it seems that it looks about the same as FlatOut 2, which it does, with a few minor enhancements. The cars look slightly shinier and there is a nice looking Need For Speed Underground like motion blurring which really adds to the sensation of speed in the game, weren’t it for the slow frame rate. In fact, the frame rate is so bad that the game is hardly playable. This was ofcourse at 1280×1024 (monitor doesn’t take any more) and 16x anisotropic filtering. I was kind of surprised by the fact that there is no anti aliassing available here. So then I started tuning down the graphics a bit. I set the details to medium and tried again. But I noticed no difference at all. So I set it all to low. Still no difference. Then I turned down the resolution to 1024×768, still running on low details, but still no difference in performance. Still the same low frame rate, but now looking a lot worse than before. SO I tried setting the resolution to 800×600, but still no difference and now it was starting to get on my nerves. So I decided to set the resolution to the lowest possible setting (640×480) and now finally there was somewhat of a difference, but still the game suffers from a highly unstable frame rate and hickups are more common than smooth gameplay. I assure you that on this setting the game looks nowhere near as good as FlatOut 2 on the same system.

Ported
The second bad thing is that this version is literally the same as the XBox 360 version. Well, you might say that that is normal with a port and I say yes to that, but is it also normal to have the tutorials and menu’s completely unchanged? I mean, it says Press Start, but I don’t even have a Start button on my keyboard. It also says X to continue, Y to cancel… Well, I can push as many and as hard as I can on X or Y but nothing happens. Yeah, Press Y for a tutorials or press X to start. Neither key on my keyboard does anything there. You might expect from PC gamers that they know which keys to press at certain times, but even then, this is unacceptable and just plain awfull. As for the rest of the game, it’s ok that it’s the same, I mean, it’s a port after all.

Horrible AI
And lastly, the horrible cheating AI. The AI in FlatOut 2 wasn’t completely fair with it’s catch-up system, just as seen in many other race games. The one with the worst catch-up AI was the first Need For Speed Underground game. In which nearly every car would exceed it’s maximum speed just to stay close to the player. The same thing happens in both both FlatOut 2 and FlatOut Ultimate Carnage, but in FlatOut 2 it’s just not as obvious as in FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. No matter what you do, you are always being overtaken. You take a corner with the fastest car on the field with maximum speed and minimum speed los and the slowest car on the field just comes by and takes you over. It’s ok that I am being overtaken by an opponent, but not like this, it makes no sense and just feels plain unfair.

Some good things
However, there are also some slightly good things to mention about FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. There are some new cars, new tracks and new race modes. The cars really aren’t new, but they are remakes of the cars from FlatOut 1. On a console that didn’t have either FlatOut 1 or 2 on it, this is ok, but really, as a new game on a system which allready has both, this does seem a bit uninspired to say the least, but still, it has some more cars, which is good. New tracks are really new as far as I know. Which is also good, more tracks equals more fun. And there are some new race modes. One of them is Beat the Bomb, which is actually nothing more than a time trial with a time limit. When the limit is exceeded, the car explodes and the game ends. Then there is the Demolition Deathmatch. Pretty much the same as Demolition Derby races in FlatOut 2, but then with multiple lives and powerups. Not much of an addition in my opinion, but still it’s good fun. And lastly there are the time trials. These are rather dull though as you can drive only one lap and then the game ends. In most games it’s the way I like it, just drive a few laps as fast as you can, maybe add a ghost car so you can see how you are driving compared to the record. It is cool however that there are more cars on the track in this game then there were in FlatOut 2, which should provide for more intense racing and crashing action, if the game would run a little better.

Carnage Mode
And then there is the Carnage Mode. This is some kind of challenge mode in which you must win challenges to unlock more challenges untill you have beaten them all. I think this can be really fun, as it can really test your skills, but due to the horrible performance, most are impossible to beat, but I think that on the XBox 360 these challenges can be very cool.

The Sound track
FlatOut 2 had a really nice, rocking soundtrack. Ofcourse this is not everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s impossible to say that FlatOut Ultimate Carnage has a soundtrack that even comes close to being good. Most songs are dull and uninspired and don’t fit the game at all.
The sound effects on the other hand are good, but overall the sound effects just sound the same as FlatOut 2. If only the musical soundtrack was even somewhere near as good as the soundtrack of FlatOut 2.

The bottom line
If you have FlatOut 2, then there is absolutely no reason to buy the PC version of FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. If you don’t have FlatOut 2, then there is also no reason to buy the PC version of FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. If you have FlatOut 2 and you are really desperate for more, then this is a good time to consider buying an XBox 360 and get the XBox 360 version of FlatOut Ultimate Carnage with it, or just get the XBox 360 version if you allready have an XBox 360. If you don’t have FlatOut 2, then get that one instead or consider getting an XBox 360 with the XBox 360 version of FlatOut Ultimate Carnage or just the game if you allready have an XBox 360.

Basicly, all I just said is this; avoid the PC version of FlatOut Ultimate Carnage at all costs. I´m not even going to give this one a score.

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It is now that I really want to say something about one of the greatest games of all time. You see, I have finished it again yesterday (all 3 endings) and again I have seen things that I had never seen before. I’ve finished it so many times allready that I lost count at 20 or something and for those who do not know what Deus Ex is, here is a link and another one.

I would think that the things I’ve seen on this run are probably all documented on the internet somewhere, but I still find it amazing that after all these years (it was released in 2000) and all the times that I’ve run through this game I still notice things that I hadn’t seen before. First thing I noticed was that you can actually fight two bosses twice. I allready knew about Anna Nevarre. You can just run away and get captured by Gunther Hermann when you get out of the subway station in Battery Park or you can fight her, but not kill her. At a certain point she will just start running around, like all damaged enemies do and then you can let her live and continue to get captured. Later on, when you get back to Unatco HQ you will face her again. I found that out on the first run I ever did, so that wasn’t new. But it is also possible to run into Walton Simons for a fight twice. First time is when you have retrieved the schematic for the UC from the ocean la. Pretty much the same happens as with Nevarre, he will start running around like an idiot when you hit him good a few times and then you just leave him. The result is that you will run into him again when you get to Area 51. I did a quick search for this, but I didn’t find any articles that confirmed this, but I’m still pretty sure that I’m not the first to do this, but if you didn’t know it, now you can check it out for yourself.

And the last thing was really stupid actually. At the missile silo where you get to reconfigure the missile launch to hit Area 51 instead of X51, you can find a datacube sitting on a table in the guard shack with names on it of killed scientists and 1 captured scientist. Then later inside the launch facility there is a little bathroom where the scientist is locked in and gives you some useless information.

Just too bad I didn’t take any screenshots of these things… Should have FRAPS running for cases like this… Maybe I’ll do that some other time, but for now it’s going to be Deus Ex: Invisible War once more, so that I finish that one again before Deus Ex 3 is released. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to buy that one as soon as it’s released and I’ll most likely write a very extensive post about it whenever I have played it to tell you all how awsome it is.

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Hey everyone, I just felt like posting today really. It’s odd, I don’t have anything new to show off to any of you, but that doesn’t matter. I would like to talk about EvE Online today and since I’m ill I don’t have anything usefull to do anyway.

So, for anyone who knows what MMO games are, but don’t know EvE, click here. That is a link to the EvE Online homepage.

You may think something like this: “Well, EvE online is just another MMO game”, but I think differently about that. I’m not going to say that EvE is the only decent MMO game out there, but it surely unique when compared to most others. Unlike most MMO games, which have a more or less medieval-ish setting, EvE is a futuristic sci-fi space set game. Most games use a level based character system. For example in World of Warcraft (WoW) you create a character and grind it up to max level (70 at this point I think) and then it’s all over. It’s more or less a single player experience which has a very clear goal and once that goal has been reached it’s over. You can continue playing in the world ofcourse, but you can’t build up your character anymore, or you must eliminate certain skills to make room for others and more or less start over. Or you can create a new character and do the whole thing just once more. I picked WoW as an example here, because it’s one of the most well known MMO games out there. I figure that games like Guildwars and City of Heroes/City of Vilains aren’t very different from that same concept, but EvE Online is different.

Like in any MMO game you create a character when you start playing EvE. You choose your race (there are four) and then you choose your bloodline, background, ancestry and all that stuff and you answer a series of questions. This will result in a list of skills you will start off with. But unlike other MMO games you don’t level up your character. In other MMO games you will get experience points (XP) by running errands for non playable characters (NPCs) and killing NPC enemies and things like that. In EvE you can’t gain XP by the so called grinding I just mentioned. Instead of grinding there is a learning system. You have five attributes: charisma, intelligence, perception, memory and willpower. There attributes determine how quick the learning will progress. You buy a skillbook on the ingame market en start training a skill. Depending on your attributes this will take a certain amount of time. The first level will usually take only up to an hour to complete, but the final level (level 5) can take several days, or even weeks to complete. This may seem long at first, but it’s something you get accustomed to very quickly and it will put you up against important decisions like: “Am I going to wait 3 weeks to get 5% extra damage on my guns, or is it not worth the wait and should I continue with another skill?”. Even though 5% may seem just a tiny little bit, the percentatges of upgrades and skill level percentages will often result in this little 5% making a big difference.

While playing you won’t really get to see your character though, but you can customize it’s portrait which will be visible to anyone and will be something of a trademark for you character. You will create this portrait just before you will enter the game for real the first time. This can be done only once, so you must be really sure that it is just as you want it to be, because the possibilities of deforming, morphing the face are nearly endless and you can add accesories like sunglasses and doodles like face tatoos and weird haircuts which makes it even fun to play around with that for a while. Here are some examples of character portraits. I’ve sized them down a little though, because the captures you can make in game are pretty large.

The first one (top left) is my character, which is a Minmatar Brutor male, the second one is a Minmatar Vherokior female, the third one is also a Minmatar Brutor male, then an Amarr Amarr female, then a Minmatar Sebiestor male and lastly a Gallente Intaki male. Now since I have started talking about the names of races and bloodlines I might as well tell you which ones there are. The races are Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar. I’m not going to tell everything about the bloodlines and such here, because you can read the basic information about this here.

As you can see the variety in possible portraits is huge, even the two Brutors look distinctively different even though the base of both was exactly the same. In most of the footage that I have seen from other MMO games like WoW most characters look basicly the same anyway, so not being able to customize the rest of the characters looks which you don’t get to see anyway doesn’t matter in any way. At least, not to me. Something that would be nice though would be the ability to customize your ship’s look. So a bunch of 50 Rifter class frigates will all look exactly the same. But this lack of customizability is greatly compensated by the sheer number of ships available for you to use. Beginning at the frigate class which are small and fragile ships mostly used by beginning players in the protected empire space, but also used by experienced players as cheap expendable ships to use to tackle bigger enemy ships so they can be taken out by the larger craft in the fleet. All the way up to the Titans which are the largest of the largest ships in the game. In between are ship classes like destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, dreadnaughts, carriers, motherships which are all more or less suitable for combat. Besides that there are also ships that are not suitable for combat, but are industry based: industrial, mining barge, capital industrial. And then there are tech 2 variants of many of the ships, like assault ships which are stronger versions of frigates, heavy assault ships which are superior versions of cruisers, command ships which are specialized versions of battlecruisers to boost a fleet’s abilities and so on… The protected empire space I mentioned earlier is more or less the controlled environment of the game. The is police here in the form of Concord ships which are ships that are not available as playable ships. The come as frigates, cruisers and battleships and customs, which are ships that are available as playable ships. In this space you can mostly fly around safely without the risk of being attacked by another player, but the possibilities to develop your experience are somewhat limited. On the edge of the empire space there are the low security systems. These do still belong to the empire, but there is little to no Concord or customs here to protect you so it’s a potentially dangerous area. But it also enhances your possibilities. For instance capital ships (dreadnaughts, carriers, titans and capital industrial ships) can’t enter empire, because they can’t use stargates and need to use so called cyno fields which can’t be raised in empire to lock their jumpdrives on to jump into another system. And then there is also the 0.0 space, which doesn’t have any form of control by customs or Concord at all and is mostly dominated by alliances made up of actual players who really control the space there and enforce their own laws and rules. Of course this space offers the best opportunities in the game as it is here where you’ll find the most valuable ore as a miner or the best NPC enemies to fight as a so called ratter. Also if you’re looking for intense fleet warfare this is the space you’ll want to be as it is here where the big fights are taking place to conquer or protect a piece of space against the enemy, which is not NPC controlled in this case. Ofcourse you can join an existing corporation (corp), which is more or less the same as a guild in WoW for example, or you can create your own and start building it up and then you can either create or join an existing alliance to protect your assets or to create a bigger operation for yourself as well as your members.

And then there is the market, this is really something completely different as seen in other games as it is almost completely player controlled instead of NPC seeded. You can build ships and other items and offer them for sale on the market. The prices fluctuate just as they do in the real world and good ore prices for example can make you very rich if you play your cards right. The entire economical system is watched by guy with a ph.d in economics and he even releases regular reports on the game’s economy and the developer only interferes if things are getting really out of hand. But that is really something that you’ll have to see for yourself.

Anyway, I think I’ve typed enough for now. I haven’t told you but a fraction of what you can do and see in this game and talking about it like this can fill an entire book I think, but you’ll just have to see it for yourself. And why not try a mere 14 day free trial. Not that you’ll see that much as even some features are locked during the trial period to protect the game’s balance and all that kind of jazz, but it can give you a very good impression of the game’s possibilities and the great community behind it. As a last thing, here are some screenshots I’ve taken over the past few days. No combat is displayed in it, as I’m not a combat player, but you can see how great this game looks while the interface is hidden. Please note these shots are fairly large (1680×1050).

Now, after seeing those images you’ll surely want to play, so click here and set up your free 14 day trial

And if you’re looking for me ingame, my character’s name is Zhooibaal

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