Indefinite Spaceout
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Cool. You grab the opportunity and get out of Dodge. What follows is a tediously lengthy, labyrinthine space opera which severely tests the notion of accomplishment plot, since all your goals are blocked by bad guys even after you've levelled up enough to take them out: There's always a trick you know about, but won't connect to the tenuous reality of the game. But the next level is not impossible — after 58 hours of play, I've arrived at Chapter Five, where the absurd difficulty level takes a huge step up.
Apparently, a lot of people don't like this game. Most of the time you're travelling through space and listening to music that got old after the first four minutes. It's still playing. You can't change the tune. You'd chew off your own left arm to change it, but you can't.
On the other hand, great literature must inform as well as entertain, according to all the best Victorian style manuals, so of course Infinite Space does introduce the bright young boy to the mysterious opposite sex and all the ways in which The Direct Approach and The Casually Witty Remark are doomed to fail. Maybe a little like Archie and Veronica, in this regard, although I never delved very deeply into the dewy depths of those slender tomes.
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All the place names, in fact all the proper nouns (so far), are Russian. (Personal names are localized, though.) Go figure. If this game had been designed by a People's Junior Entertainment Commisariat in the old Soviet Union, I'd believe it. Has it got the red C.C.C.P. decal anywhere? Apparently not, but the incongruously square-cornered "battleships," "destroyers," "cruisers" and "aircraft carriers" (and here you must imagine Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, spinning in his grave) look and feel about as clunky as a second-hand Zaporozhets. Nia's unclassifiable custom ship, the Daisy, has a few nice lines. The rest of the fleets look like they were stamped out of tin for Christmas at Western Auto circa 1950.
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Here's one of the rare walkthroughs. And another.
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Labels: Infinite Space
3 Comments:
The game isn't so bad, really. I am still playing it (Chapter 1, part 2) after 57 hours (that is after Chapter 8). The plot turns out to be engaging, and even the simplistic gameplay ends up providing many possible strategies.
I will admit that the beginning was weak, though.
Beginning wasn't very good, but after 26 hours im at the end of chapter 5 and love the game. its not that bad.
I finished the game without too much problem. When I played the game+clear, eventually I came back to the place where you have to loop through five planets (without landing) and lure the enemy out to a rendezvous with the rogue stargate... but the same method you used on the clean game doesn't work on the plus game. And no one who's seen it work can believe there's a glitch in the card. They troll-marked three different guys and marked the thread closed. I put the card on a sidewalk and smashed it with a ballpean hammer.
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