HarshGame
Refusing to give up gracefully, with Terra a mere cherished memory among
glowing particles of radioactive space dust, the pilot of the lone remaining
Starfleet gunstar vows to go out in a blaze of glory, reducing as many Kreel
Deck fighters to galactic debris as possible.
Or, otherwise put, another game in which a solitary human-controlled spaceship
fights overwhelming alien, computer-controlled forces in space combat. The
player pilots the U.S.S. ButtKicker , a VF-1 “Valkyrie”, fully equipped with
HarshCannon, HarshNukes and a HarshShield — not as exciting an array of
(harsh)armaments as it may sound, amounting to a single gun and the ability to
sustain several hits before dying.
The interstellar dogfights take place on a flat 2D field a la Spacewar! ,
abstracting the third dimension right out of things. Enemy fighters can be
monitored on a radar screen of sorts until they are sufficiently near to
engage in close-range combat. In the interests of survival, the player is
recommended to maneuvre such as to engage only one opponent at a time, to
which end the ship is capable of thrusting forward and backward as well as
more fine-grained turns. The U.S.S. ButtKicker has a finite amount of
shields and energy, but the latter can be diverted to replenish the former as
the player takes combat damage… energy then slowly accumulating again for
later further shield supplementation.
There is no happy ending to this game — every time a Kreel is destroyed, a
new one WORPs in to replace it. The goal is quite simply to take out as many
of them with you as you can.
HarshGame