By Alec Meer on February 8th, 2011 at 8:22 pm.
Battlestar Galactica (the original) is famous for owing a debt or two, or three, or four, or five, or six, or seven to Star Wars – cheekily dashing to cinemas before Lucas’ could sequelise his space opera. The tables have turned this time around though, with Battlestar Galactica (new version) Online getting, well, online before Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic does.
Today, in fact. You can join the human vs Cylon war for free, and quicker than you can say “by your command.”
Actually that’s a wee lie, as access to Bigpoint’s free-to-play space combat MMO offer currently entails short queues. My nose at the tutorial didn’t have my hanging around too long, at least, and once in the game had the good grace to almost immediately show me a pitched battle between the Battlestar and a couple of whopping Cylon Basestars.
The tutorial’s all I’ve had a chance to look at so far, but it’s certainly an impressive use of the Unity browser engine. The space battle looked instantly recognisable, my ship steered fluidly and recklessly bombastic use of the BSG soundtrack veered between stirring and irritating. Despite being a free to play browser thingumy, it seems to offer a full raft of keyboard and mouse controls and didn’t seem too shy about letting me play with iconic stuff right off the bat. There’s a micropayment system in there to buy bonus toys, but I’ve yet to explore that.
It went a little wrong come the end of the tutorial and the first look at blodgy browser-people, but given the speed of loading and the good looks of space I suspect that’s a worthy sacrifice. I’ll take blowing up spaceships within seconds of logging in over being able to see Admiral Adama’s pores any day.
I’ll go back in again soon to try and take this free MMO’s measure a little more – in the meantime, sign up here and do let us know what you make of it.
Also, this reminds me – I am now 100% convinced that Jim is a Cylon. I don’t have concrete proof just yet, but I’m getting closer to it. Don’t trust him. And that book of his? Codeword-filled hidden propaganda, designed to trick you into betraying humanity.
08/02/2011 at 20:29 Deston says:
So say we all.
08/02/2011 at 22:19 DigitalSignalX says:
There are many browser games. And they have a plan.
09/02/2011 at 11:31 jon_hill987 says:
When this game fails after less than six months can we say “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”?
09/02/2011 at 13:05 battles_atlas says:
+1 on the fail. I don’t understand the appeal of this at all. BSG was great, and it finished. Move on. Had no interest in Caprica, not because it was rubbish (which it was according to my sources), but because the BSG story had been told. Any addition is just going to tarnish the memories. Let it die with its dignity intact.
08/02/2011 at 20:48 Navagon says:
Jim? Cylon? I thought he was R2D2?
09/02/2011 at 06:07 DalamarNL says:
R2D2 is a Cylon. Obviously.
09/02/2011 at 17:15 Saiko Kila says:
Early model, obsolete now, soon to be recycled (to meet RoHS requirements), filled with anxiety and anger… Yes, there is something to fear.
08/02/2011 at 20:50 WMain00 says:
Do i get to have naughty sexual relationships with Starbuck?
08/02/2011 at 20:54 Navagon says:
No, but you do have the opportunity to have your leg shagged by his sidekick.
08/02/2011 at 20:55 Marshall Stele says:
I’d never turn down John Candy
08/02/2011 at 21:21 WMain00 says:
Everyday I miss him :(
08/02/2011 at 23:23 Navagon says:
I know, guys. I know. But John Candy wouldn’t want us to be glum. Let’s just remember the good times we had together!
08/02/2011 at 20:51 patricij says:
Nonsense, I’ve read the book and I’m yet to betray humanity..I’m too busy playing Minecraft now, so as long as Notch keep pushing updates out, humanity is safe *evil laughter*
08/02/2011 at 21:25 crainey92 says:
Amen. Say who else is looking forward to Notch being on the live stream with Seananners on Machinima Realm this Friday? Should be a jolly good time.
08/02/2011 at 23:26 Saul says:
Minecraft? The main plank in Jim’s Raft of Doom. You’ve walked right into his trap …
09/02/2011 at 13:00 battles_atlas says:
I get that you can walk into a plank, but if that plank is part of a Raft of Doom, surely its a very prominent object, and hence poorly suited to act as a trap?
08/02/2011 at 20:53 Andy_Panthro says:
But can you talk to the cylons?
09/02/2011 at 11:14 Xercies says:
Fortunately they decided they weren’t going to go for the crap ending of season 4…
08/02/2011 at 21:01 Rath says:
There must be some kind of way out of here.
09/02/2011 at 12:31 Jsnuk says:
I was not fond of how downright bizzare BSG had got by this point.
09/02/2011 at 18:21 Lightbulb says:
Yeah kind of like a pen and paper RPG. Stories made up on the fly never really work that well do they? Still enjoyed BSG – even the ending.
08/02/2011 at 21:06 Bungle says:
Edit: Google wasn’t showing me how to get there. Now it is.
08/02/2011 at 21:13 Mark says:
That’s odd. It’s first in the SERPs for me. :/
08/02/2011 at 21:09 Mark says:
Playing the tutorial made me wish they had gone to the effort of making a real space sim. Technically impressive given its constraints, sure. Still boring to play.
08/02/2011 at 21:23 enshak says:
The original batlestar TV, show really was shit. with the most annoying robot personality ever created.
then again most american TV shows from that era were nearly as bad. How did their TV get to be so good now? I remember seeing a film trailer for a battlestar film showing the earth being attacked by the cylons and our two hairsprayed twats come to rescue the day on flying motorbikes, very exciting looking it was. It’s a pity they didn’t have the budget to show this , so they explaned away the Cylon attack in the first few minutes by a signpost pointing the wrong way to earth at alpha centauri or something along those lines. Robbed I was ROBBED.
08/02/2011 at 22:40 boldoran says:
Well I don’t know about american TV being “so good” today but I recently watched the old BSG episodes and they sure don’t stand up to the modern show.
The ironic part is that I only took it upon me to watch the old show because I remembered that I saw one episode as a kid where Starbuck befriends one of the cylons. I wrongly assumed that some of the other episodes from that time might have an equally interesting plot. Turns out the episode I saw (and was hoping to rewatch) was the last of the entire classic series (and it wasn’t even any good now that I have seen it again).
That will teach me to see value in something that was made before I was born ever again.
09/02/2011 at 00:17 dadioflex says:
That episode, or the Enemy Mine episode as it is popularly known, was one of my favourites. I think Hell in the Pacific was the first example I saw, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_the_pacific, but the exact same plot was also in an episode of the Gerry Anderson show UFO.
09/02/2011 at 19:31 MadMatty says:
@ Dadioflex
The plot is from the Michael Ende book, also called Enemy Mine i think…its been filmed in the 80´s with some success.
Michael Ende wrote the great “Neverending Story” amongst others, great book, real bad film versions- the author didnt like the films either.
08/02/2011 at 21:28 geldonyetich says:
So, in terms of game quality, better or worse than X-Wing, a 1993 game?
09/02/2011 at 00:22 dadioflex says:
Yes!
09/02/2011 at 02:18 P7uen says:
I disagree.
08/02/2011 at 21:29 crainey92 says:
I saw a tweet by somebody that this game was letting people in and just hit it up for 30 minutes, obviously there isn’t much you can do in 30 minutes but on very first impressions I’d say it looks rather interesting, not exactly competition for a game such as Swtor I imagine ha. Speaking of which, SWTOR is gonna fail miserably it will be most amusing.
08/02/2011 at 21:39 Bungle says:
I was automatically banned from the in-game chat because I said “shit.” Guess who won’t ever be going back into that game?
08/02/2011 at 21:42 Bungle says:
For the record, I was trying to say “I can’t see shit.” Which is another problem the game has.
08/02/2011 at 21:49 Torgen says:
Sounds like they…
(/sunglasses)
Bungled their chance to impress you.
08/02/2011 at 22:41 boldoran says:
Fracking ridiculous…
08/02/2011 at 22:43 Kid_A says:
YEAAAAAAAAAAH
08/02/2011 at 22:44 westyfield says:
I wonder if frak/frack is filtered in the chat. If they made it so that ‘fuck’ is automatically changed to ‘frak’ they might score a few points…
08/02/2011 at 22:46 Witrim says:
Perma? Doubt that.
Edit: well i actually checked the forum and it seems they REALLY hate bad language so just saying things like omfg will get you a temp ban.
08/02/2011 at 23:23 Veracity says:
my ship steered fluidly
Not an Independence War successor, then? Not that I’m realistically expecting anyone to make one, but if they were going to this licence would’ve had more hope of carrying it than most.
08/02/2011 at 23:47 Tagert says:
Oh IWar, how I miss thee. Such an awesome space sim that needs to be revisited.
Plus, who can go past a 15 minute intro video?!
09/02/2011 at 19:07 BobsLawnService says:
As a big space sim fan I tried playing I-War 2 last year since I never got a chance to play it way back when.
My verdict is that it is no coincidence that the genre died at about the same time it was released. It’s ridiculously difficult. The first fight takes place in docking range of a space station so you are limited to a small fraction of survivable speed and just get pummeled. They sucked the fun out of it. To give you some perspective I fired up Frontier Elite 2 for comparison and even that combat was more fun.
I’d rather a Tie Fighter or Freespace 2 MMO thank you very much.
09/02/2011 at 01:32 Scandalon says:
Wouldn’t take my google OpenID url, registered manually, started tutorial, attacked drone, then everything but the starfield background disappeared…
It did put me in the mood to start the BSG soundtrack, prob. season 2, while I get back to searching through samba logs…
09/02/2011 at 02:39 bill says:
Recently installed Unity and some of the games are surprisingly nice looking and playing.
But i run into 2 problems:
- keys sometimes seem to conflicy with browser ones and i’ve suddenly jumped out of full screen,
- i have way too many tabs open in firefox which doesn’t help performance/memory
09/02/2011 at 06:44 jalf says:
You know what would be awesome?
The RPS overloads getting together to play the BSG board game. And reporting from it, of course.
Just sayin’
09/02/2011 at 08:34 ckpk says:
Anyone playing this want to make an RPS clan (or whatever they’re called in game)?
09/02/2011 at 12:56 WJonathan says:
“OK, which one of you jokers left the big brown coil in the hangar deck?”
09/02/2011 at 14:58 Paravel says:
Well, I was enjoying myself until I received a two-day ban for dropping the F-bomb to a friend in a private chat. There was no warning, no filter, just an immediate ban.
09/02/2011 at 15:24 jon_hill987 says:
That is really pathetic. More so when they could just filter every swearword to frack/fracking/fracker as appropriate.
09/02/2011 at 15:27 KillahMate says:
That second picture, in space, looks properly impressive. Maybe it’s just the angle and the lighting because the third picture looks like X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, with the original graphics.
09/02/2011 at 23:48 Thunderkor says:
Blargh. I didn’t like the flight controls at all. I don’t like this autofire business, and I like even less the fact that I couldn’t perform a loop. Every time I try, it does this infuriating flip and changes my orientation. I guess they want “up” to stay “up” even in space. Feh.