Free games for my Clie TH55: that is what I decided I wanted. Today I spent most of the day in a large meeting, at the back of a room where the wireless access was good, and so I was able to find what I needed.
I found three games. Two were by Astraware. One was Biplane Ace, a top view dogfight game which didn’t really do anything for me. In fact I began to worry that I would end up wearing out the buttons on the pda before I got anything like enjoyment from it. The controls didn’t seem precise enough, and the playing area seemed too small, even though it was a good game. It was smooth and fast and the graphics were pleasant indeed. The second was Round Up, a puzzle game in which you have to move marbles into the correct squares in the smallest number of moves. Now that was good. It was exactly the kind of thing I like to waste five minutes with.
However the third game kept me up until late in the night, because I couldn’t stop playing it.
I found Space Trader, a game in which you roam the galaxies buying and selling, dodging pirates and police ships, upgrading your ship, and hiring crew. It is all done in an illustrated text style that is distinctly reminiscent of adventure games in the 1980s. This one is a little like Elite, but without the wireframe graphics I disliked so much.
As in most similar games, you begin with a tiny, almost powerless ship, and little money, and have to begin moving things back and forth to earn profits. You need to read the local papers, and check the average buying and selling prices in the local system, before deciding what to buy and where to take it. In space pirate might attack, and you then fight or flee through making a set of dialog-based choices.
The most interesting thing about this was the fact that it turned out to be completely suited to the screen of a pda. Where it might appear too sparse on a laptop, on the Clie it felt just right. I actually got completely absorbed into it, and when I lost my ship and almost all my money about three hours into the game after an over-confident attack on a pirate ship, I was mortified.
I was smugly happy that I had bought an escape pod, though, because the game has no save function. When you die, you die – and you start the game all over again. Without an escape pod I would have lost everything and given up and gone to bed at a sensible time.
The star systems are generated randomly at the start of each game, and later I found a small system where one planet had a need for robots and paid an enormous profit, and two other stars nearby manufactured robots quite cheaply. I therefore spent a couple of hours trading locally and by the end of this period I was enormously wealthy, and in command of a top-of-the-range ship with lasers, shields and a cloaking device.
By this point, when I definitely should have been asleep, I equipped my ship with crew and started being offered quests. However, one of the things I was offered was the chance to buy a moon of my own and retire, and so I turned down an offer to fight space monsters, bought the moon, travelled to it, and retired happily.
I will return to this game at some point soon. I have no doubt of that. There are so many ways to play the game, and I would like to explore some more of them. I played it safe by trading, but I could have played more dangerously as a bounty hunter, deliberately seeking out pirates and fighting them for rewards. Or, suicidally, I could have smuggled guns and narcotics and become an outlaw chased by pirates and police.
What a neat game!
Space Trader was created in 2003 by Pieter Spronck, who is a researcher in artificial intelligence at Maastricht University, and last updated in late 2005. It is licensed under the GPL licence. That means that other people have worked to create versions for PocketPC and for Windows, and that the code is available for anyone who wants to produce another version.