- Project Paradise Word Count: 357
- Project Skye Word Count: 1617
- Project Independence Word Count: 1723
- Project Ship of Shadows Graphic Novel Page Count: 12
As you can see, I didn’t manage to get any writing done Friday or Saturday. I didn’t even feel well enough on Friday to get out a blog entry–sorry about that. I’m still also trying to fine-tune my “process.” I think I have too many projects, especially since Summer classes are about to start and they tend to be these intense periods of “crunch” time because you’re trying to cover a semester’s worth of stuff in 4-8 weeks. I trying to decided if Project Skye or Project Independence is the one I want to focus on for May and then I’ll shift the other for June. I do want to keep working on the graphic novel in the “background” (on weekends?), but I’m not really sure when to fit this in. I’ll cogitate on it and try to decide on a course of action in the next two weeks before school starts.
Late to the Game
I’m not sure that I have all that much to talk about when it comes to Starflight published by Electronics Arts (before their rebranding as EA. This was an early space ship explorations/simulation game, heavily inspired by TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica (the OG shows, not the newer modern reboots.) In it, you controlled a spaceship and chose which worlds to visit and explore. As I recall, you could choose destinations and fly your ship there, land on planets, and (I believe) scavenge for resources and discover aliens. Just browsing through the manual, it looks like you could create, train, and utilize crew members on your ship.
Uncharted Territory
As i mentioned above, I don’t really recall that much about the game. It would probably have been one that I played and enjoyed and would have probably been one of my favorites, except, as I recall, Electronic Arts didn’t publish this on the C64 right away. If memory serves, this was a PC game that absolutely “blew up” in popularity. It wasn’t talked about so much outside of gaming circles, but from what I remember, this was “hot stuff” in the world at the time. The C64 port came sometime later and people think that modern day Ubisoft “downgrades” graphics are bad (i.e., shows an enhanced game during their presentations of the game and then “downgrades” the graphics so that the game will actually run on current hardware), but the game’s graphics were truly watered down–so much so, that my uncle nicknamed the main character sprite/avatar “Caspy” after “Casper the friendly ghost.”
More Time and Space
Unfortunately, this meant that I didn’t get the game until the very end of the C64’s life-cycle in our household. By then, CD-Rom systems like the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation were beginning to be talked about in the gaming magazines, and the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo ruled the roost at that time (if memory serves), so a hack-and-slash game like Golden Axe was more in-line with what I was playing at the time and I didn’t really devote a lot of time to “Caspy” and his adventures (even though I’m a spaceship sort of guy.). I don’t want to turn off modern gamers, but I remember it being a old-school version of No Man’s Sky (which I actually don’t think is as bad as everyone who hates on it, says it is–it’s just slow and more about survival.) I would actually have kept my copy had I not been in grad. school–I realized that even though I would be able to tolerate it and have some fun with it, but it just took too long to do anything and that I just didn’t have the time to invest in learning its systems and getting really good with them. That’s sort of how I felt when playing Starlight. Electronic Arts really should have had a port ready for the C64 much sooner–or if they did, they needed to have advertised it better so that I could have made it a priority Christmas/Birthday request. As it was, it was a good game that I just didn’t get to put a lot of time into because the “gaming” world had moved on by the time I got to it. I could only find a DOS play through and not a C64 play through.
Here’s hoping you have a good week!
Sidney
- Read Skin Deep for Free at Aurora Wolf
- Read Childe Roland for Free at Electric Spec
- Read Faerie Knight in the anthology Fae, Rhonda Parrish, Ed. or the Kindle Edition
- Read Ship of Shadows in the anthology Visions IV: Space Between Stars, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
- Read WarLight in the anthology Visions VI: Galaxies, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
- Read Dragonhawk in the magazine Tales of the Talisman, Vol. 8, Iss. 3, David Lee Summers, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
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