"Space is pretty cool, I guess. Ships, you know. Guns and aliens and cargo smuggling and intergalactic rebellion and all that. But you know, there's an awful lot of it. People kind of forget that, I think." Pat Miller muses on the emptiness of space, and the perfection of Escape Velocity in My Own Private Galaxy.

My Own Private Galaxy

Hear hear!

You're right all the way down the line. EV is a great game, and it's the sort of game that spoiled me with its scale, scope, simplicity, and open-endedness. I've always wished for some sort of huge, sprawling, networked, massive modern space game based on the EV framework, but so far, the original will have to tide me over.

For a truly Enourmous Galaxy, comprised of litterally thousands of star systems, each with dozens of planets, moons and asteroid fields to exploit, a deep player based economy that actually works, and shared by thousands of other players, I suggest checking out Eve Online. When I first started playing this game I was truly blown away by the sheer size and scope of the game. Worth a look.

WoW,

I started reading this weeks issue, and as I read past all the articles mentioning Wing Commander, X-wing, and other space games I thought, "How could they write an issue based on outer space games and not mention Escape Velocity". To my suprise contributer, Pat Miller cools my jets with a piece about the game I used to play on the old macintosh. Escape Velocity had such depth that you actually felt as if you were out in space calling the shots. It was an aweomse game, no doubt

I tried EV once because it looked like EVE Online without the monthly fee or shiny graphics. I was most pleased, but then I got shot by pirates, and then I started again and was subsequently paralyzed with indecision.

It hadn't really occurred to me until after I read the other articles in this issue that EV didn't just do an amazing job of creating space...it did it in 2D. Unlike the other space titles that people wrote about, EV's controls aren't that much more complicated than those of Asteroids.

Come to think about it, maybe that's one of the reasons I like it so much. I'm still having a hard time getting used to that third dimension.

Bongo Bill:
I tried EV once because it looked like EVE Online without the monthly fee or shiny graphics. I was most pleased, but then I got shot by pirates, and then I started again and was subsequently paralyzed with indecision.

That keeps happening to me in EVE too :)

- Z