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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