PC Game Fun Time

I’m a huge fan of space shooters. I have been ever since I played the first TIE Fighter game on my dad’s 386 when I was still in elementary school. I played that game with a joystick plugged into the computer’s game port (Anyone remember those? The game port was analog). The genre has unfortunately declined since then, though my love for it hasn’t. I even have a modern USB joystick now, which I bought a year ago without even a specific game in mind out of a sheer sense of nostalgia for the genre. Alas, the last great space shooter I think I played was Freelancer, which came out over five years ago.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found out about the X3 series, which is a modern space shooter series created by German developer Egosoft. I decided to give the latest entry in the series, X3: Terran Conflict, a spin. After several hours of playtime, here’s my take.

X3: Terran Conflict is ultimately defined more by its flaws than by its successes. My major reaction to the game is a sense of sorrow over the potential of what could have been, a potential that tries desperately to shine through the game’s thick veneer of buggy execution. I guess we’ll start off on a high note and look at what the game does right.

The graphics are excellent, and really help to set the mood of being in space. I do have one minor quibble though: the asteroids don’t scale up the number of polygons composing them as you approach them, so while they look fine from far away, when you skim along the surface of the bigger ones you’re typically flying over triangles a kilometer to a side — not cool. Considering how detailed all of the rest of the models in the game are, with the exquisitely crafted space stations and the planets with multiple shading layers for atmosphere, terrain, and city lights, this is a very curious oversight.

The music, which I’ll roughly describe as ambient techno, really fits the theme of flying in space, and I enjoyed it a lot not only as a complement to the game but also simply as a fan of the genre. I guess it’s a good thing the developers are German, because it was evidently very easy for them to find talented techno artists to work with. The combination of the graphics and music sets an authentic mood of being in space, and I found I had the most fun when I simply turned down my engines and cruised through the stellar systems at a leisurely pace, taking in the sights and sounds.

But everything else about the game left me feeling a bit disappointed. The plot is so far completely forgettable, seeming to serve as nothing more than a way to introduce one to all of the star systems in an orderly manner. The voice acting is incredibly atrocious (every character sounds like they’re voiced by a German developer who doesn’t quite possess mastery over the English language) and the poorly animated comms portraits don’t help establish connections to the game’s characters in the slightest. The missions are bizarrely paced, with one early mission requiring me to follow an enemy moving at a slow pace through several stellar systems before following him from the terminal jump gate to a pirate ship that was really far away. Even with the game’s built-in time acceleration turned up to its maximum of 1000%, it still took me something like an hour to complete this completely trivial mission. It didn’t help that the autopilot would occasionally drive me right into another spaceship, forcing a reload from the last space station — oh, did I mention that there’s no quicksave/quickload? Gahhh!

And I know this is more of a difference in design philosophies than a flaw, but I don’t like the game’s exclusive emphasis on freeform exploration and trade. I’d rather have something that also allowed me to play through some self-contained missions just like TIE Fighter did over a decade ago. As it is I never even use missiles in X3 because they’re so expensive that I can’t justify spending the money on them that would better be spent on permanent upgrades to, say, engines. The game apparently has a robust trading economy, which doesn’t do me any good because I can’t get into it at all. I want to shoot things, dammit, which proved remarkably hard to do in the early game, because the main story’s plot has so much schlepping from place to place and so little actual fighting.

The game also has some bugs that need to be worked out. At one point, I found myself unable to dock, a situation caused by the autopilot cutting out after less than a second of being activated no matter what I targeted. And since the only way to save the game is while docked at a space station, I couldn’t recover from the bug; I had to load from a prior save. Another bug I noticed was that communications with a plot-related individual seem to start up automatically somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds of docking with the space station where the individual resides. If you open up the comm screen on your own before that happens, the game gets into a confused state and does not display the picture, or more importantly the captions, when the individual does contact you. I don’t quite see how the QA testers missed this one.

The game’s controls are kind of confused. I can use the throttle control on my Saitek Cyborg Evo joystick to set my speed, but the game only registers changes in the throttle position, not the actual position itself. So every time I come out of a jump gate, the game sets my speed to zero, and I have to nudge the throttle (which is still set to fully open) just a little bit to get the game to recognize that my speed should not be zero. This brings up another point of contention I’d like to mention: the game deals with maximum velocities, which make no sense in the context of travel through frictionless space. What you should actually be seeing are maximum accelerations with no upper limit on velocity (which is relative anyway!). Of course, every space game gets this consistently wrong, and I’m not even sure the realistic way would make for a good gameplay experience, so I’ll let it slide. Likewise, I’ll let the poorly thought out stellar systems slide as well. Suffice it to say that they were not put together with a thought for orbital mechanics.

In the end, the control scheme that I settled on was to use the joystick with my left hand for flight controls (thank you, Saitek, for making this joystick ambidextrous) and the mouse with my right hand for shooting. It doesn’t seem like the mouse is well-intentioned for shooting, because it has a pointer instead of a targeting reticle, and right-clicking shoots while the left mouse button does a sort of bizarre auto-slewing of the ship to where you’re pointing, but using the mouse for firing really is the best way of controlling a space shooter I’ve ever used. It takes some coordination, but shooting with the mouse is incredibly accurate and it alleviates the most common frustration with flight sims, that of trying to swivel a targeting reticle nailed to the center of the screen with a joystick to align with a target. Having where your ship is flying be independently controllable of where you’re shooting opens up so many new possibilities that I haven’t yet uncovered all the ramifications. Suffice it to say I’m now an extremely deadly dogfighter.

So those are my impressions of X3: Terran Conflict. The graphics and music are great, while many of the other aspects of the game are lacking or downright buggy. The most enjoyable way to play it is with a joystick and mouse, though you will occasionally need to migrate over to the keyboard for some extended commands. As for whether I would recommend buying it, I really can’t say. I am having fun with the game despite many of its flaws simply because the game makes flying around in space, and especially blowing up enemies, so enjoyable. And it’s not as if you have a lot of other modern space shooters to choose from.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:02 am by Cyde Weys and is filed under Reviews. Keywords: Tags: bugs, joystick, review, space shooter, TIE Fighter, X3: Terran Conflict. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.