You should be playing Captain Forever
Go to captainforever.com, read what Capt. Farbs has to say, pay your $15, and strap in because space is the terrifying place.
Quickly, you will find yourself at the helm of the dinkiest little ship ever loosed on The Great Emptiness Between The Stars. Lost and alone, you’ll be both relieved and frightened when a message buoy slides into view with a pile of spare parts and the message that other nearby vessels “may resort to piracy” in desperation born of some unexplained disaster.
Grab the chunks of armor, thrusters, and lasers. Dock them to your tiny pod (“The Nemesis”) and run like hell, because that message was the truth. For no apparent reason, everyone is coming for you. Assemble your makeshift warship cleverly, fly deftly, and you’ll find that taking out the command modules of enemy vessels releases new and improved bits to tack onto your own. Carefully consider your targets and improve your hardware gradually. Get in over your head and all that hard-won junk will get blown to bits. Soak up too much enemy fire with your module and, well…
Captain Forever is mercenary space combat, distilled. The graphics are perfectly simple, with all the iconic straightforwardness of a War-Room tactical display. There is no character-building, no tech tree, and no economy. The control scheme is as old as I am and as familiar as a favorite chair. Don’t let me mislead you, though: there is no comfort to be had here. The increasing pressure of more, faster Asteroids in each successive level had nothing on a message buoy zooming up with the cheerful alert that you’ve spent too much time dicking with your gear. The pirates have noticed you, they’re en route, and your pants are way, way down.
Get shot up without any protection and you’ll learn The Terrible Secret of Space: The Nemesis can’t be destroyed. It simply obliterates EVERYTHING nearby and then regenerates. Limited lives may have made Capt. Forever’s forebears aggravating quarter-munchers, but you’ll long for the cold embrace of death in deep space when the game’s never over.
YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE: the fact that I’m telling you to pay $15 for a Flash game with no demo. I also can’t seem to get mouse-scrollwheel-zooming to work on my Mac. Huh.
The good news is that the $15 gets you out of paying $20 when the REAL game is released and this Flash game becomes the demo. This is an Indy Game Development experiment wherein an unemployed developer gets to keep eating and paying rent while he polishes something great, and I support it. If that’s not enough reason for you, hold on until the full release and try it then.
YOU MIGHT LIKE: excellent neo-classic arcade game design, through and through. It looks great, sounds great, and plays great. It underscores over and over the kind of quality that can be created by a lone craftsman when technological ambition is kept in check.
And when you need a break, want to do something free, or feel that there still isn’t enough awesome minimalism in your life, go play Canabalt.
