Kitteh's Gaming Corner

[Terra_Inc]

Hello and welcome to Kitteh's Gaming Corner!

Like every respectable SciFi kitteh, I tend to spend a lot of time in fictional worlds. I especially enjoy free and open-source games. Not only are they friendly to your budget, they are usually labors of love. And often enough, you can tell that someone was motivated by passion rather than money to make a sweet game. I find that many of these games, old and new, deserve more attention than they get, and I'd like to share them with my fellow MSFC folks.

Every now and then I will post here a review of a free or open-source SciFi game I have played. I will give you a summary of what the game is about and how much I enjoyed playing it. For those who like to mod, I will also write how much and how easy it can be modified. Feel free to add your own comments and experiences, and recommend games for me to check out and review.

If that sounds interesting to you, stick around and let's game!

 

[Terra_Inc]

Transcendence

Alright, let's start with a classic. The recipe of Transcendence is simple: Pick a ship and make your way to the galactic core. Kick lots of enemy butts on the way, fight in the service of various factions and, of course, continuously upgrade your ship to keep up with the ever increasing power of your foes.

The whole game is set in a fascinating universe, featuring lots of interesting factions, awesome starship designs and an mysterious overarching storyline. The technologies you'll be upgrading your ship with are also cool and diverse, ranging from simple titanium armor plates, laser cannons and rocket launchers to the massive carbide carapaces and archcannons of the endgame.

There's a large number of things you can do to earn your upgrades. Apart from destroying and looting the hostile ships and stations you encounter, you can for example go and escort freighters in pirate-infested systems, buy and sell items that are in high demand, mine the asteroid fields of the galaxy in search of precious ores, transport and sell not-so-legal cargo for the black markets and fight in the war against the Ares Orthodoxy.

In true roguelike fashion, the solar systems you are playing through are randomly generated, so no game is exactly the same. Bought that sweet kinetic cannon from the arms dealer in the third system? It's not going to be there next time, and neither is that station. Instead, you might find an awesome shield generator in a pirate ship you destroyed. It's a lot of fun piecing together your equipment and hunting down rare and powerful items.

Unfortunately, this is also the main drawback of the game: Although the random generation helps to keep things fresh and interesting, much of the content becomes samey after you've played it often enough. The game also seems a bit too random at times, when it doesn't generate sufficiently advanced stuff to defeat the enemies you're up against without breaking a major sweat. You can play permadeath if you want, but it's not required and if you're not looking for a tough challenge I wouldn't recommend it.

Transcendence uses a combination of XML and Lisp for programming its content, leading to very high moddability. There is a large number of mods available at its mod database, although many of them are outdated due to the game's constantly changing and improving API.

The game is available for free. It's released only for Windows, but has official Wine support. I've been running it through wine for a while and didn't notice any problems. There are also two expansions you can buy for a few dollars, if you really like the game or want to support its developer. It's certainly not required, as the core game has enough content to keep you busy and continues to be expanded.

All in all, this is a great one and I absolutely recommend playing it!

Rating: 5 out of 5 kittehs

Link: transcendence.kronosaur.com

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