SMAC and Alien Legacy
James E Sexton
alien world, and tried to set up some colonies while figuring out
what happened to the colony ship that came before you?
Just the whole idea of the planet coming to life and fighting against you
seems very familiar to me... not that SMAC stole it from Alien Legacy...
I'm pretty sure they've acknowledged that they're building off of some old
sci fi classics...
(I hated Alien Legacy... you'd send a ship off to the planet because it
would tell you the ship could make it, and then the planet would move and
your ship would be stranded... Like I'm gonna make a model of their solar
system and map out when the planet is within reach on my own... :P I
haven't had that kind of free time since HS. Never did finish that game.)
-jim
Steve Hilberg
>Anyone remember a buggy game called Alien Legacy where you went to an
>alien world, and tried to set up some colonies while figuring out
>what happened to the colony ship that came before you?
Actually, yes, I do...and now that you mention it it does remind a lot of
how SMAC is.
>Just the whole idea of the planet coming to life and fighting against you
>seems very familiar to me... not that SMAC stole it from Alien Legacy...
>I'm pretty sure they've acknowledged that they're building off of some old
>sci fi classics...
I'm pretty sure -- I seem to remember something like that from one of my
anthologies from the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" with a similar theme.
>(I hated Alien Legacy... you'd send a ship off to the planet because it
>would tell you the ship could make it, and then the planet would move and
>your ship would be stranded... Like I'm gonna make a model of their solar
That's really too bad -- I thought Alien Legacy was a very cool game, and
very immersive, but I agree, it had a few MAJOR flaws. There was the
improper transit orbit plot that you state, the fact that the exploration
was really pretty boring (talk about micromanagement -- having to explore
something like 300+ sectors on each planet to find everything there) and
the colony management was kind of cumbersome -- but the story was really
good and it's a shame it had as many problems as it did. To be honest,
though, I really wish the ending had been a bit better for the plotlines,
but overall I was very impressed with the story, if not the code.
--
Steve Hilberg <Necromancer> CCSO Workstation Support Group
<hil...@uiuc.edu> Unpublished Fiction Author
KB9TEV CCSO _still_ doesn't pay me enough to
speak for them, so I still don't.
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"And if He ever suffered, it was me who did His crying...."
-- Concrete Blonde, "Tomorrow Wendy"
James E Sexton
: >(I hated Alien Legacy... you'd send a ship off to the planet because it
: >would tell you the ship could make it, and then the planet would move and
Believe me, the plot line was the ONLY thing that kept me playing after
that truely bizarre fungus hunting part... If anyone thinks killing
fungus in SMAC is humorous, that weird arcade segment would put you in
fits of laughter.
(and I just had a horrible image of the guys who wrote the code reading
this... hey, it was an old 386 game... I expected too much, what can I say.)
-jim
Steve Hilberg
The problem was it wasn't even an arcade sequence -- there was really no way
you could lose if you weren't just stupid -- so it was all just busywork. :/
*sigh* It _was_ an old game that tried to do a LOT of things -- there was this
"arcade" part, a 4x sort of part, and an adventure game sort of part, and I
think it may have been just too much to cram into one game. If they had
streamlined the interface, gotten rid of some of the stuff that served no
useful purpose (like the alien-zapping part) and concentrated on the good
things, like the story and exploration stuff, the game would have been really
cool. If I could make a game, really, Alien Legacy would be the type of game
I'd like to do -- only better, of course.