Comments on: Battlestar Geriatrica: Homeworld Is 10

By: Kong

Kong — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:00:52 +0000

Watching my fleet manouvering while the rest of the resources were being gathered filled hours. It was great.
A shame they removed the fuel feature for figther craft. “We are running on vapor”. Sigh. They do not make games like they used to.

By: luminosity

luminosity — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:10:23 +0000

Nothing comes close to the pure atmosphere of Homeworld for me — the music, the background to your missions, the amazing settings/missions themselves. I still feel a sense of awe remembering the nebula farmed by your long lost brethren, the nova research station, the amazing capital ship graveyard, where if you don’t pay close attention you find half your fleet suddenly missing, or the crushing feeling of watching 1/6th of the remaining population of your destroyed planet go up in flames.

More games like this, please.

By: Sunjammer

Sunjammer — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:58:17 +0000

To me the best Homeworld game to date was Cataclysm. The first game was too clunky to play, the second was gorgeous but had an almost unbearably boring campaign. Cataclysm struck exactly the right balance for me.

10 years, that’s wild. Christ i’m old.

By: Billzor

Billzor — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:34:12 +0000

What I remember about HW were the cut scenes. I could be wrong, but the moving still pictures for its time were different from what I remember other games doing. The art of those pictures was just so distilled-HW that, even though they were black and white, really brought the previous and following game scenarios together. Perhaps it was because they were black and white that they were so striking.

By: kupocake

kupocake — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:32:47 +0000

People are saying ‘Homeworld 3′, but I think storywise at least, Catacylsm and Homeworld 2 showed us that giving us compelling stories post planetfall was difficult and never as satisfying as the simplicity in the original.

Given how long the franchise has been dormant, I’d prefer to see a remake of the original, taking cues from the gameplay of the proper sequel and the more interesting stuff dropped from both titles: especially the third ‘pirate’ race, the T-Mat, who were just roughed you up for no reason and the ‘Megaliths’ that Homeworld 2 was supposed to have, essentially giant space wreckage that could be used as bases. If it worked out, they could officially reboot the series, ignoring the rubbish, somewhat dead-end storyline of the second game, and no-one would really miss it.

By: Kakksakkamaddafakka

Kakksakkamaddafakka — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:00:34 +0000

Indeed. What the hell happened to the manual authors.

By: Nikos

Nikos — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:38:41 +0000

Nah, not the x-plane, that would be /so/ linear :P

By: Hypocee

Hypocee — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:39:49 +0000

SotS or SoaSE? Not that it matters much, because the same comparisons apply about equally to both, but it is funny that people still mix them up so much.

By: Casimir's Blake

Casimir's Blake — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:27:01 +0000

Hell no, 90125 and Big Generator are great… pop rock. Nothing like their 70s output hence they get called YesWest. They definitely lost it after that though!

By: Hypocee

Hypocee — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:47:20 +0000

FYI, Internet, Arinn Dembo doesn’t have much published in books – at least *ahem* not in terms of sci-fi. It looks like she’s focused on videogame criticism, journalism and development from the beginning, which is both crushingly disappointing and rather neat.

Also, I didn’t know who’d written the manual because I naively assumed it was the result of some committee of the designers who were Just That Awesome, but even if I’d memorised the credits I still wouldn’t have connected her because she wrote it under a male pen name. Quick, someone write something about the endemic sexism in videogame development! (Although I have no idea whether that was a factor)

By: Hypocee

Hypocee — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:37:27 +0000

…or to attack slow-turning forces from a vulnerable angle, which isn’t really relevant in Homeworld

Not true. Aside from getting up to 1.5x damage for shooting from astern, turret coverage is a huge factor – ion cannons alone: Destroyers turn fast but their beams are only mildly turreted, any chance you get not to soak those ion turrets on the HC is a chance you grab with both hands, and ion frigate squads are beamy death in front but pathetic sitting ducks from any other angle. Add in the fact that many ships are designed, and all ships behave, as if there were gravity (i.e. stupidly), and you get ships like the Destroyer (maybe only the Kushan?) which can do absolutely nothing for a long time to anything striking from below. Now add to those shipwise factors the fact that forces tend to have a certain organisation in space – trivially, valuable squishies like the Salvage Corvette corps go in back – and you wind up with a game where macro and micro flanking are more important than in any 2D RTS short of Sid Meier’s ACW games.

By: ShardPhoenix

ShardPhoenix — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:04:17 +0000

The last sentence should say “if you *can’t* trap them” etc.