Space Rogue

1990 KevätOrigin, familiar from the Ultimas, decided for a change to put swords and magic in mothballs and leap into the Far Arm star cluster, whose everyday life includes princesses, Imperial star cruisers, the Merchants' Guild and strange civilisations threatening humankind.

The Far Arm cluster comprises eight solar systems, with all sorts of sights to see. How about the nebulae of Arcturus, the antimatter fields of Narsee or the twin stars of Bassrut?

In between the travelling it's nice to pop into the stations, shown from a top-down perspective, to get acquainted with the locals and wet your whistle at the bar. The crumbs of information gleaned from conversations are important, since from them the great task awaiting the hero begins to take shape, one involving political skulduggery and dark forces in the Star Wars style. In the bars you can also play Hive. It's an arcade game that shows off humanity's innate hatred of the ant-like Manchi.

Interstellar travel is handled by a light Sunracer-class patrol ship, which its previous owner christened the Jolly Roger. Navigation within solar systems takes place on a two-dimensional navigation screen, but if you come under attack or mean to dock at a station, the game switches to a three-dimensional view which is, believe it or not, drawn in filled vector graphics. The speed of the graphics is at a perfectly acceptable level, which is an incredible achievement for the C-64.

Warp drives haven't been invented yet, even though this is the 2300s, so to get to another solar system you have to use the wormholes left behind by the ancient Malir civilisation. In this, the dullest section of the game, you simply fly through circles.

You can't get by without money, since the ship needs maintenance and better equipment. The ways of fattening your bank account are familiar from Elite: besides honest trading, you can take up pirate hunting and plundering merchant ships. The goods on offer vary from one solar system to the next: mining centres may have cheap dilithium (Star Trek strikes again) and space stations sell supercomputers and other refined products. Hauling freight isn't risk-free, since organic cargo spoils easily, ionising storms can wreak havoc in the hold and some stations have a nasty habit of confiscating dubious goods.

The Jolly Roger's armament consists of a feeble garnet laser, plasma torpedoes and two types of missile, the more powerful of which are fitted with nuclear warheads. The laser can be swapped for a better one, but the most powerful weapon is the particle cannon, which breezes straight through enemy shields. The missiles seem terribly clumsy at first, since you can only hit the enemy with them at close range. The trick is that later on you can fit the lasers with automatic control, which makes it more comfortable to lie in wait for the right moment to fire.

The ship's gunsight is more cleverly done than usual. You can lock it onto the target of your choice, whereupon arrows at the edges of the screen let you work out the enemy's position even when it isn't visible on screen. Another smart solution is the control panel's tactical display, which shows the enemy ship's type, distance, manoeuvres and the extent of its damage.

Space is sailed by a selection of different kinds of ship, whose behaviour and attitude towards the player vary greatly and may also change as the game goes on. Pirates and the alien race of the Manchi are a pest from the very start, but the freighters belonging to the Merchants' Guild are content to send friendly greetings. The Imperial cruisers leave the player alone too, but their curt "stay clear civilian" warnings are worth taking seriously, because a Titan-class cruiser is a frightening opponent. So it's a truly heartwarming experience when, in the middle of a pirate ship's furious attack, a couple of Imperial cruisers turn up on the scene. Even the most hardened pirate is then in a hurry to tiptoe off to other parts.

If you turn pirate yourself, you inevitably end up on bad terms with the Guild. It's not worth making trouble before you've got better equipment, since a player with a bad reputation gets shady bounty hunters on their tail from pretty much every direction.

Space Rogue's plot isn't especially complicated, but unravelling it gives even an experienced player plenty of work. Then again, you may be left with the aftertaste that once you finally get to grips with the plot, the ending comes along too quickly. Another thing that kept bothering me was that the space battles aren't very tightly tied to the twists of the plot. A couple of hefty search-and-destroy missions certainly wouldn't have made the game any worse.

The game's worst weakness lies in the playability, since every last scrap of text is loaded separately, and switching to the navigation screen means waiting about half a minute. What gets your brain steaming most of all is the game's tendency to start up properly only on every second or third attempt on average. That wouldn't matter otherwise, except that the same torment awaits every time the player gets destroyed.

Laborious play is depressingly typical of Origin's products, but they usually turn out to be worth the trouble. Let the shortcomings be forgiven this time, for Space Rogue is such a unique game that its programmer ought to be awarded a Star Fleet decoration.