Starship Traveller (Standalone)

The year is 1986. You're ten years old, and already inclined to be geeky. The One Geek Pastime to Rule Them All is Dungeons & Dragons, along with its burgeoning army of competitors, and you're desperate to roll some polyhedral dice and track your hit points. The problem is, you live in a small town. There is no local gaming group to join, and you don't know how to start one. And then you discover Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. They're like the popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" titles, but better! They have stats! Hit points! Dice! All the elements of prepackaged escapism that you've been longing for, and you can have them while sitting alone on your bedroom floor, with nothing more than a piece of lined paper, a stub of pencil, dice stolen from that old Monopoly set in the basement, and a dog-eared paperback or two! It's heaven. However, what makes a good experience for a geeky ten-year-old in 1986, doesn't necessarily make for much of a PC game. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were necessarily limited in their content by the paperback format, which seems pretty pitiful compared to what your PC can do. Blinging it up with a few images, some sound, and a sci-fi font still doesn't bring it up to the level of a worthy PC game. For certain people (guilty!) a Fighting Fantasy gamebook is a fat dose of nostalgia, but a PC-based simulation of it isn't good enough to create the nostalgia, at least for me; I need that dog-eared, yellowing paperback with its cheap, coarse pages to be in my hand if it's going to pull me down Memory Lane. Seeing the same words displayed on a flatscreen monitor just does not recreate the experience. So this incarnation of "Starship Traveler" is too limited and boring to be worthwhile as a computer game, but not sufficiently authentic to the original experience to be nostalgic. That leaves it with, well, not very much.

This is how game books should be made into video games! Much more polish than the competitors I've tried (and there are a flood of them on Steam). I won't spoil the story, but suffice to say that Commander Shepherd, Miranda, and Garrus have had several adventures, in the 3 or so hours I've played so far, and each time the outcome was different - just like the good old days when I read similar books as a kid (I don't recall seeing any Fighting Fantasy where I grew up). The menus are nice, and the game is customizable, so if you like a different font, or want the text smaller or bigger, you can do that. It's nice, and I picked up Forest of Doom as well, and can't wait to get into that one (I'm more a fan of the fantasy setting, to be honest).

Starship Traveller, Is another adaptation by Tin Man of a "Create your own adventure" book. Basically this is a good thing, but how did it work out? -The presentation is nicely done in a overall blue tone and provides a solid sci-fi feeling. -The difficulty checks and other rolls are well animated and create a bit of tension when you're hoping for a "good" result. -The writing is okay, but isn't of the best and during the second playthrough it becomes rather boring. -Each adventure starts out the same and that is a big negative thing. The planets and things you encounter are always at the same spot and there's no variation in this. That makes Starship Traveller a strong game during your first game and a very boring one as soon as you start a second or third game. Would I buy this game if I knew about this? Well, yes, because I'm just the kind of person who likes to read and always liked these kind of books.

A pretty interesting game but be warned it will get very repeatitve very early on...starting each mission follows the same text and it will start to get boring after a short while. Most of this is due to luck though so sometimes your mission may go on for quite a while or ends very quickly. Overall the appearance is pretty good though but no flashing graphics and just one sound wave most of the time. Its a good alternative to other action packed games and a lot of love was spent in making this but due to having to repeat many stages in the game (visit the same planets etc knowing what may lie ahead) then I cant recomend this which is a shame.

I've just come from playing "Forest of Doom" and thought I'd finally get round to playing this one by comparison as it's one of the few sci-fi books in the series, and actually the very first they ever did. It was written by an outsider, and it shows. The tone is completely different, and whilst it has the standard Skill/Stamina/Luck attributes, there's some other stuff going on too. It's also short. Very short. A standard FF gamebook had 400 "paragraphs" and this only had 340. The "correct" path through the game involves skipping over huge chunks, whizzing past most of the planets, and only actually landing on three of them. And at one point you have to just keep rolling dice randomly in the hope that the RNG lets you out of a maze. You don't even get to choose which way to go - it's all decided by the roll of the dice. And you HAVE to go that way, so it's possible to fail entirely by luck, even if you know exactly what decisions to make. It's also possible to win without having a single battle, whether hand-to-hand or ship-to-ship, which makes the "Fighting" part of the title somewhat tenuous. However, I did like the somewhat dark sense of humour that has been injected throughout. First of all, the game says "Using advanced technology, the console will determine your base values"...followed by a pair of dice being rolled. And when a crew member died, you're given a button to click to mourn them... Tinman have done their best to dress up the game with exciting music and a fun interface, but it's all for naught. You can choose the name and gender of yourself, and also do the same to your crew if you like...even naming the ship's cat...but it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to the story. It also crashed a few times when I was playing it.

If you like star trek and grew up reading choose your own adventure books i don't know how on earth you won't dig this game. The whole "bookmarks" working as game saves is a cool feature. Pretty solid hour or so branching story where you get to send away teams and figure out ways to get your ship and crew back across the galaxy thru a blackhole. Not the greatest space saga but an enjoyable and not overly complex journey. The combats are fairly basic but the conversation skill checks are almost more rewarding...except when you fail. never saw any ship combat like is shown on the store page but guess i'll need to replay to find out. To bad i never got to kick my ensign "wesley crusher" off the bridge though--DLC please!

Mir hat das Spiel Spaß gemacht. Ist natürlich schon ziemlich Retro, da das Spiel dem Original Fighting Fantasy Spielbuch aus den 80er Jahren entspricht. Ich habe es parallel mit der deutschen Übersetzung in Form des echten Spielbuchs "Das Universum der Unendlichkeit (Goldmann Verlag)" gespielt. Das funktionierte ganz gut, weil die Weiterleitungen / Auswahlmöglichkeiten im deutschen Buch und diesem Spiel absolut identisch sind. Wer also noch über das Buch verfügt aber des Englischen nicht ganz so mächtig ist, kann das Spiel trotzdem sehr gut spielen.

True to the original, there seems to be no link between the choice made and the outcome.

Космический Путник - цифровая адаптация легендарного боевого фэнтези, или точнее НФ в данном случае (fighting fantasy - жанр игровых книг), 1983 года. Написана Стивом Джексоном, одним из основателей Games Workshop, конторы принесший нам много хорошего (один Warhammer чего стоит). [h1]Язык и геймплей.[/h1] Игра текстовая. Язык здесь английский, причем не самый сложный, ибо изначально эта серия книг публиковалась в США в издательствах подростковой литературы. Но все же для полноценной игры, языком желательно владеть хотя бы на среднем уровне. По геймплею это боевое фэнтези. Что это значит? У нас есть текст в котором мы выбираем на какую планету нам полететь, и что там делать. Но при этом есть статы которые определяются рандомно броском "костей", этими же "костяшками" у нас проходят бои, кто больше выкинул, тот бьет. Бои есть космические, и командные на планетах. Минус - каждый раз надо долго вводить имя капитана, пол, генерировать статы. Это несколько раздражает. Другой минус - ачивки могут багать (особенно ачива за сбор всех артов), это лечиться переустановкой игры. [h1]Сюжет.[/h1] История во многом навеяна Стар Трэком. Мы начинаем молодым капитаном корабля, отправившегося на банальное задание, но из-за аварии, попавшего в параллельную вселенную. Так что придется искать путь домой, среди неведомых звезд. В целом это хорошее твердое НФ, очень напоминающее вышеупомянутый Стар Трэк. При этом для того чтобы вернуться домой, надо либо найти верные координаты, и для этого [spoiler]посетить только 3 обязательных планеты Cliba (получить предмет в метеоцентре), Jolsen-3 (координаты) Terryal-6 (координаты)[/spoiler], или же забить на любые координаты, прыгнуть в конце рандомную черную дыру, бросить кости, и молиться богам Хаоса. Сюжет хорошо. [h1]Графика и звуки.[/h1] Текст, стилизация под книгу, плюс достаточно качественные олдскульные НФ-иллюстрации. Кто читал старую фантастику, тот в курсе. Музыка приятная. [h1]Как итог.[/h1] Боевое фэнтези (фантастика) от создателей жанра, что уже говорит о его качестве. Книга по своему легендарна, адаптация неплоха, хотя есть и косяки. Любителям НФ-книг и фанам Стар Трэка, знающим английский, категорически рекомендую! 6 координат черной дыры из 10 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1126011506 [i]P.s: если этот обзор был для Вас полезен ставьте лайк, а также добавляйтесь в друзья и подписывайтесь на меня как куратора - [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/28776273/] Обзоры онлайн [/url][/i]

I did not read this book as a child (unlike several of the others currently available), having less interest in a "Star Trek" type of adventure book than a D&D type. I'm surprised to see how little I missed. Of all of the FF gamebooks I've read, this is by FAR the worst one. You visit many planets in this book, but only two matter; You can literally finish the book in 5 minutes flat (without a single combat) if you know which planets to skip. The graphics and sound effects aren't the worst in the world in so far as gamebooks are judged, but the story here is extremely weak and unsatisfying. Recommended only if they bundle these books together again (the method in which I purchased them several years ago).