Rock, Paper, Shotgun

While the kneejerk reaction to this is obviously one of mild incredulity, I can see why Egosoft have chosen to release this “benchmarking” version of X3 as a demo. It must be remarkably frustrating for people who build wide-open, sandbox titles and then find they can’t adequately promote or explain their game with a demo version. Perhaps there’s no way to chop out a chunk of the universe for people to play, and there are obvious problems with putting out a time-limited version of a full game. I guess this keeps the download size down too. If you want to see how your machine renders Terran Conflict’s pretty-pretty spacemobiles then you can get it here.

I didn’t really get on with the X games. Even by my high tolerances for videogame tedium among the stars, X3 seemed to be taking the piss a little. The scope and ambition of its Elite+++++ delivery is commendable, but there was something about its humorless space trudge that put me off. I do feel like I should go back, and plenty of my space-gaming chums chide me for my lack of appreciation. What I can say that is that I am not immune to its prettiness, and this battle-trailer for expandalone Terran Conflict certainly looks fantastic.
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News reaches us that Egosoft have announced the fourth chapter of their X: Beyond the Frontier series. It’s called X3: The Terran Conflict. While details are sparse – the screen’s from the original X3 – the lack of a “4″ implies this is a standalone expansion “thing” rather than a true sequel. Egosoft have promised more missions than ever before. This is good. X fans are well known for their love of missions. We exclusively predict a high incidence of conflict in the region of Terra.

It’s at times like this, RPS wishes they still had the MP3 of “I am Elite” from the Adrian “Ian’s Brother” Bell-penned Elite musical to listen in celebration, but we’ve long since lost it. Has anyone out there got a copy? It really is a thing of wonder. Anyway – it’s looking at a third quarter release, which leaves plenty of time for X-fans to get excited in the comments thread.