Day 130 – Ultima:Runes Of Virtue 2

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It has to be said that the last couple of games haven’t exactly been two of Origins best. I’m expecting this trend to continue to some extent going into Runes Of Virtue 2. To be fair the first ROV wasn’t too bad – it was a simple puzzle game and fairly good fun while it lasted. There was no plot and the music got on my nerves after a while but it was a decent game considering it was on the gameboy. Attaching the Ultima brand to it was a bit on the cyncical side though.

For the sequel Origin had twice as much space on the gameboy cartridge and scaled things up a bit. They also ported the game to SNES which is the version I’m going to be playing. This was a very faithful adaptation as I understand it but with massively improved graphics.

ROV2 has an intro which is something we didn’t see in ROV1. The black knight is back and making trouble again by kidnapping all the town mayors and hiding them at the bottom of dungeons. Its a fairly silly plot but its better than nothing and it fits in with the tone of the game. I’m summoned by LB to rescue them.

The graphics aren’t bad at all – they are somewhere between Ultima 6 and 7 and are a hell of a lot better than the black and white tiles on the gameboy. The music is a big improvement also – I was worried I was going to get something on the level of Metal Morph but its nowhere near that poor.
The game appears to be set aroundabout the Ultima 6 timeline with familiar characters from that game appearing such as Sherry the mouse here.

The castles and towns are expanded a bit from ROV1 – Castle Britannia now has many rooms and secrets with loads of free goodies to be had.

I also find a crystal ball which gives me a map of the world – this place certainly looks like Britannia which is more than it did in ROV1.

The bottom level of the castle has my first monsters to fight. Combat is very simple – I can pick a weapon for each hand and I just press a button to fire that weapon. I usually tend to stick to a sword in one hand and some sort of range weapon like a boomerang in the other (when I get one).

Monsters explode when they die – there are no stats to boost by combat as such. This is definitely not an RPG. I do get stat boosts when I finish each dungeon but these simply add an extra hp or mp. Given that you are more or less forced to play the game in a certain order these just even out against more difficult dungeon levels.

I can collect upto 99 gold coins which I can spend in some of the towns. These buy me things like armor, weapons, food (to heal with), etc.. I don’t get the impression that its neccessary to buy any of these items in the towns but they can make life easier. I’ve got the advantage of save states, though, so I’ve already got it easy.

I find Nystul looking a bit different to how I remember him. He has a crystal ball which shows me a map of the castle. These can be found in a few of the dungeons also and show the people and monsters moving around as well as the layout of the level.

After searching every corner of the dungeon I find a key which opens a door to a moongate. This moongate takes me all the way to the Lycaeum and a set of moongates which I’m told will take me to any town in Britannia. I seem to be getting ahead of myself at this point. I should really be trying to clear out the first dungeon so I head back instead of exploring further.

The first dungeon is just north of the castle. The world is multiscale just like the early Ultimas. The graphics for the world are again somewhere between U6 and U7 don’t look bad at all. It has to be said that Britannia was never this small before. I’d guess that the world of Ultima 1 was larger than this. However, its only there to get me between dungeons and at least it looks like the Britannia of the real Ultima games this time.

When I enter the dungeon, there is another cutscene showing the Black Knight kidnapping the mayor of Trinsic. This formula willl continue throughout the game.

I now start my first dungeon. These dungeons are where I’m going to be spending 90% of my time and are the real point of the game. Although combat is involved they amount to a series of puzzles where I have to push things around, flip switches, find keys and the like. The dungeons are divided into loads of quite small levels – some levels have multiple exits giving different paths.

If I die in combat then I can choose to continue and I start from the same dungeon level, with maximum health. This is very useful and I quickly make it standard procedure to get killed off asap on a new level so that I can start it with full health each time.

These telport/jump arrows are a common sight and are used in many of the puzzles and teleport you in the direction they point. A lot of the games puzzles involve pushing something around then it transforming into one of these arrows when you pull a lever.

Another common sight are mushrooms of various size which for some reason or other appear to change things in the level.

The dungeon is quite small and I find the mayor in no time. Without the cutscene to show me his hiding place I might have missed him but the room is very recognisable when I get there.

The mayor follows me around from this point. There is an exit ladder which takes me straight back to the outside – why I didn’t go down this way I don’t know but its convenient to have it there now. I walk back to Britain with him and there is a big celebration cutscene which I’ll be seeing in every town after I free the mayor + I get the rune and a strength boost. I’m not sure how strength equates to compassion but I guess the usual Ultima rules don’t apply here.

I head to LB who gives me my next assignment to rescue the mayor of Trinsic. This pattern is going to continue throughout the rest of the game.

I head for the next dungeon – the graphics for this one are quite different with a watery cave theme.

After I complete a couple of missions, another cutscene kicks in with another leader being kidnapped.

A bit of exploring later and I find one of the first important items. The staff here can be used to cast fireballs which burn away spiders webs. This will be neccessary later in the game. Its guarded by a room full of mimics who make a return in this game. The monsters are all familiar from other Ultima games on the whole in fact with mimics, gremlins, gazers, etc..

I rescue the mayor and get the same cutscene again with the sign changed + another rune and stat boost.

This time LB sends me off to the dungeon near Yew.

There are a couple of new things in this dungeon including little bouncing ball like creatures who don’t hurt but bounce around trigerring switches and the like. There are also long lines of pushable pots which I can push a whole row of.

Another cutscene – another mayor kidnapped.

Beh Lem makes his first appearance of the game – hes hanging around in the dungeon for no reason other than to give me a clue about breakable walls.

Further down in the dungeon I get another key item – a magic rope net. This can be used to bridge a single square of water. These are all items I remember from the first ROV – the puzzles are new but the underlying gameplay in this title is very similar. These items can then be used to make sure you complete dungeons in a certain order.

I’m making very short work of the dungeons at this point and soon rescue the mayor – LB sends me off to kill off whatever is haunting Empath abbey next.

There is a liche at the end of empath abbey which is by far the toughest fight of the game so far. I’m rewarded by LB with 50 gold coins which I don’t really need for completing the quest.

Its back to the dungeons after this side quest. In the meanwhile another leader is kidnapped.

This dungeon has some sort of moving boulder creature which I’ll be seeing a lot of from here on. These can be killed off with a bit of effort but usually leave a pushable boulder around which can get in the way more than the creature. Being run over by a rolling boulder is painful though.

At the end of the dungeon, the mayor is guarded by a gazer. This isn’t too tough although it does have a nasty paralyse spell. I return the mayor to town and head back to see LB.

He has another side quest where I have to take a letter to the mayor of New Magincia warning him of the threat. Getting to New Magincia is the biggest problem here. I use the moongates I discovered earlier to get around this. I get another 50 gold reward for this quest.

Its back to the dungeons with the usual cutscene when I get partway down.

This time the mayor is guarded by a giant two headed creature. This guy isn’t as tough as he looks.

I return the latest mayor and get sent after the next one. This is a bit more of a problem as I need a ship to get to the dungeon.

After a lot of wandering around, I’m attacked by a ship near Moonglow.

Approaching the ship gets me to a combat screen with loads of pirates. Killing them all off gets me the ship in Ultima 3 style.

As soon as I get the ship I notice a whirlpool and sail into it. I get a cutscene here which goes on for so long I begin to wonder if I’m supposed to do something. This drops me into Locke Lake. I’m not sure I like the idea of me losing my ship so soon after having got hold of it so I restore a game and decide to come back here later if I run out of ideas. I can at least sail around a bit and find another ship first.

I head for the next dungeon instead. Another cutscene shows the final 2 mayors being kidnapped together and sent to different dungeons. The Black Knight imprisons one in the stygian abyss and gets past the guardians with some ease although he is on a quest of sorts.

I’ve managed not to take a single screenshot of the previous dungeon but complete it and get my next quest off LB. I have no idea where to find the dungeon of Pride so I head for that whirlpool I saw earlier (after getting another ship).

Sailing through the whirlpool gives me access to Cove. Cove is a ruin full of monsters in this game but after a bit of exploring I find an extrance to the dungeon I was looking for.

This dungeon turns out to be truly huge. There is a central hub level a few levels in with 4 ways down each option having about 5 levels below it. There is a particularly annoying teleport puzzle which I spend some time on.

I take the east branch from the hub first and pass through the trolls ping pong hall.

The toughest monster yet is down here – some sort of hyrda.

I also find a ping pong ball and bat. This doesn’t sound that useful but can be used to flip switches on the far side of gates.

The bat seems to be the purpose of this branch as finding it gets me access to a ladder straight to the hub level. I head north this time. There is a puzzle here where I have to push a load of the bouncing ball-like creatures onto teleports – this takes a while as they really don’t want to go where I push them.

Another puzzle nets me some magic boots. These seem to have a one off use but I’ll no doubt be seeing more of them later.

They allow me to walk through all the walls in the level straight to an otherwise inaccessible exit ladder. I complete the north and west branches and get a new shield and sword.

Terry the adventurer seems to get about in this dungeon and is also to be found to the south. He tells me about a star wand he is looking for but can’t get through the locked door. If I’m getting a clue about it, I must need this thing. He’s also next to a barrier similar to the one guarding the abyss so it would appear to be a way past this.

The wand is on the level below. I grab it and head back to the barrier. Sure enough the wand can be used to create or remove the star field barriers.

This lets me get to the penultimate mayor and I return him home for another rune and stat boost. That just leaves the final one in the Stygian abyss. If the size of this dungeon was anything to go by, its not going to be all that easy.

This game has been a lot more fun than I thought it might be and I am actually enjoying it. It’s very simple, however and more than a bit silly. It probably made most sense on the gameboy as a game you might pickup for a few minutes at a time although for my purposes this SNES release is definitely the better option. I’ve not even attempted to describe the puzzles here – there are just far too many of them. On the whole they are simple and progressing through the game is never a problem. I can’t honestly remember being stuck at any time.

I suppose designing a puzzle based game that is never frustrating is quite difficult and Origin have definitely succeeded in that respect. There is always just enough of a challenge that its not boring although I will admit the formula is wearing a little thin now I’m getting somewhere near the end. The game is sort of a spirtual successor to the likes of Boulderdash although that game was a lot tougher and less forgiving as I remember. It is a huge improvement on Metal Morph anyway and proof that Origin could turn out a half decent SNES release. The gameboy was probably powerful enough to do a game as complex as Ultima 3 or 4 which I’d much prefer to have seen but I expect this had more market appeal.

Using the Ultima brand for this is strange – this game would have some limited appeal to Ultima players but its hardly a bonafide spin-off like Underworld or Martian Dreams. It could be intended to introduce people to Ultima but I’m not sure what someone who liked this enough to chase up the rest of the series would make of Ultima 7 which has very little in common.

Day 129 – Wing Commander Armada

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This is a game I haven’t played in years but I did play a bit when it came out. I would assume it was aimed to fill the gap between Wing Commander 2 and 3 and address the issues with Wing Commander Academy. Academy was a pointless game really, I’m hoping for better with this. 

Armada uses Strike Commanders realspace engine to present the Wing Commander universe in full 3D for the first time. Instead of a new storyline it adds a strategy element to the game. You can play as either Kilrathi or Confed and the manual does a great job of presenting the history of the war from both sides.







The intro shows a very brief dogfight. Its nice enough but only lasts about 30 seconds.

Before jumping into the strategy game I have a quick go at the gauntlet mode which makes a not especially welcome return from Wing Commander Academy. Once again this is 15 levels with 3 waves of fighters each time. There is no way I’m attempting this but it gives me a first look at the new engine.

It has to be said that the graphics in this are very very nice for the time. The fully textured ships look about as good as they could in 320×200 and the 3d shield effects are especially nice. If you could only run Wing Commander 3 in VGA (which applied to me back then) this was actually the better looking engine.

I get bored of gauntlet very quickly and have a go at the campaign mode which is the biggest of the game types available. It consists of 11 sectors which have to be fought out – you are scored each time and the winner at the end gets to blow up the enemy home world.

The strategy part of the game consists of building mines & shipyards on planets. Planets have varying resources which you can mine either quickly and wastefully or slowly and efficiently. Resources also may need moving around using your carrier or a transport so shipyards have the material to build ships. You can build shipyards on any planet to create fighters. Bigger fighters take more resource and time to build so this also needs balancing. There are 6 fighters per side + transports.

The potential is there for a quite complex strategy game. You can only see opposition that are within 1 jump of one of your ships. The same goes for jump points so you have to gradually explore each system to try to locate the enemy.

If you encounter enemy forces you get to fight the battle out.



The combat certainly looks great but the enemy a.i. is really poor – they end up just flying circles and a dogfight consists of flying the same turn over and over again. I’m never in any danger of being hit nevermind killed after the initial exchange.

The strategy a.i. isn’t a whole lot better – the computer never builds anything other than the 2 most basic ships neither of which is capable of destroying my carrier. My strategy is just to build a few of the toughest ships and explore with them – I can win any combat with these no matter what + they have torpedos to take out the carrier.



When I find the carrier I just have to move a banshee onto its system and the cutscene kicks in.

We get scored on this and there are another 10 systems to go. I play through a few of these properly taking my time but the game starts to get old very quickly and I use the quick combat option in the menu. This allows the computer to calculate the result of a fight so I don’t have to fly it.

I can win any level by creating two banshees asap, docking them with my carrier, then just sending my carrier around the map until I find the enemy. This tactic is infallible and is barely even complex enough to be a tactic. Once I start doing this I can pick off each system in minutes.

After 11 systems, I get to blow up Kilrah in a very disappointing fmv that lasts approximately 2 seconds.

I can’t really call the game completed until I do the same with the Kilrathi ships.







All the cutscenes are mirror images of the Confed ones with the ships changed. The ships are very much mirror images of the confed ones also although again I just used the heaviest fighter.

That theoretically finishes off this game. It has to be said that I wasn’t massively impressed. The potential was there and the engine looks truly awesome. The strategy game was complex enough to be interesting as well – it was really let down by the a.i.

It has to be said that the game did offer the option of multiplayer and judging by the poor single player option that must have been where it was aimed. I remember playing a few games back in my student days over a null modem and it was pretty good fun but not as much as you might have expected. When you fight a human opponent you become very aware that combat tactics in Wing Commander are basically turn towards the enemy as quick as you can, shoot until they go past you and repeat. Combat was often a series of chicken runs. You also tend to end up fighting with and against the same ships over and over again. The tactics came far more into play though and the other ships became more of a real option. I’ve not even flown most of them here.

All in all its not a great game but it wasnt a bad attempt with multiplayer games few are far between back in those days. The engine deserved better though and it does have an unfinished feel about it, like it should have been worked on for a few more months. As a single player experience the most entertaining thing about it, I’m sorry to say, was reading the manual.

Next: Ultima – Runes Of Virtue 2

Day 128 – Metal Morph

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This is a game I’d never even heard of until I started compiling a list for this blog. It was actually published by FCI but developed entirely by Origin. It was only released on SNES which isn’t a console I ever owned although I did buy a copy of the game itself for this blog. I’ve never in fact owned any console system – I’ve played a few games on emulators but on the whole I always found console games to be far too formulaic, unintelligent and expensive. Its obviously a more level playing field these days although its the PC market that has become more similar to console if anything.

I’m not all that optimistic about this game because of my console predjudice but I’m going into it knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever. I’m not even sure about the genre although since its on the SNES, I’m expecting some sort of platform/shooting format.















The lengthy intro (with pinched fmv from the Privateer jump) tells how you are some somehow made of liquid metal (Terminator 2 style) and can morph into other forms. You’ve also been provided with a ship made from the same stuff. Some sort of hyperspace tunnel has been discovered and only you can survive the jump because you are made of this liquid metal. Your mission is to meet with some aliens on the other side and at all costs prevent them from gaining your metal morph technology.

Suffice to say, the moment you arrive you are knocked out and the technology is stolen leading to you having to travel all over the place to get it back again.

Its not the most promising of plots it has to be said but I’ll give it a chance.



The first level is a straightforward platform affair and its basically all my worst stereotypes of console games rolled into one. There are some slightly strategic aspects to it as aliens are always in the same place but at heart its a simple and uninspired platform game. My goal is to reach a morph pod the aliens have stolen from my ship then return back to my ship. Picking up the morph pod opens up a door back to my ship. There are a few switches that turn force fields off + my metal morph allows me to go through pipes. This is similar to Sonic in the industrial levels except in super slow motion.

The music isn’t great and its hard to believe that Martin Galway was involved. The gameplay is no better but I make it back to my ship and hope for better to come.





The next level involves flying my ship through space shooting things until I arrive at a planet. The graphics are ok I guess but aiming is near enough impossible as the ship moves way too quickly and tends to keep going. Its more a case of keeping out of the way of being hit by swapping between extremities.

When I arrive on the planet I get another shooting sequence. This is exactly the same except with a scrolling planets surface.



This gets me to a second platform level which is graphically a bit different but otherwise the same sort of thing as Level 1.



I complete this and get to fly around shooting again for a bit. Each time I get a new morph pod in the platform level I get a new morph for my ship. You can swap between these but on the whole the latest is always the most powerful so there is no reason to change.

I get to another planet and the colour scheme is truly sickening. Its even on a palette rotation to rub it in. Combined with the dirge thats playing in the background, I would say prolonged exposure to this level could make you ill.





At the end is another platform level – I know what to expect by now.






The next planet (if it is a planet) is something new as I have to shoot the four openings in the middle before I can land. As previously mentioned aiming is not really easy. The best I can do is to get myself lined up by trial and error on one axis then try to survive just using the other and hope to land a few hits in the meanwhile.





I land on this station and work my way through the platform level again. There seem to be more switches on each than the last. If there are tactics to using these I don’t appear to need them – I just throw every switch and keep going.

























Too many levels later and I’ve got all 8 pods and I can head back for the hypergate.


















I get back to earth – some unnamed person was a traitor and the aliens learned enough about my technology to come through the gate themselves at the end of the game.

I’m instructed to play again after the end credits but I can safely say I will never ever play this game again as long as I live. It is without doubt the worst game Origin ever made with no redeeming features whatsoever. Its a nightmarish combination of terrible music, nauseating graphics, desperately uninspired gameplay and an incoherent throwaway plot . I’d be hard pushed to pick between this and Escape from Mt Drash.

Thankfully with a modern emulator this only took a few hours to complete with liberal use of save states. I’d never have had the patience otherwise. At every point of the game you die with a single hit and it would be seriously difficult, not to mention maddening to cope with playing it on the original system.

Its hard to believe a game this poor was turned out by Origin. Caverns of Callisto was a more sophisticated game. I didn’t go into this with high hopes but I still expected something  much better. At least I now know why I’d never heard of this game.

Next: Wing Commander Armada

Day 127

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The first job today is to collect all the bounties on Menesche. I’m in the same system as Lynch so I call in there first. He isn’t paying me but he offered to wipe out my record will the various factions in the Gemini sector. I didn’t realise quite how useful this would be beforehand. The only groups that attack me now are the retros & kilrathi. This means I don’t have to cope with endless attacks from pirates and hunters as I have been doing the rest of the game and the vast majority of nav points are now non-hostile.

Next up its Edom to collect a not too impressive 20,000.

Next its Perry to collect 40,000. This gives me enough cash to buy the speed enhancer. This ups my speed by 18.5% which is pretty unimpressive for all that money. All these upgrades are nice but seem to be entirely unessential – I guess that too large an improvement would completely unbalance the game.

Goodin also has another mission for me helping out Confed against the Kilrathi. I have to fly off to a nav point and get instructions there.

I meet up with a confed cap ship at the nav point. I get to patrol 3 nav points and meet up with them at another while they hold the jump point to Kilrathi space. Suffice to say there are loads of Kilrathi to kill in this mission.

One of the Kilrathi decides to give away the plot while attempting to kill me. The new retro ships are being supplied by the Kilrathi who are using the Retros to weaken Confed. This makes some sense and the new ships look sort of Kilrathi (although a little too cute).

I clear the points but when I meet up with confed again they are under attack also and not doing too well. I just about manage to keep them alive although the cap ship is badly damaged.

That completes the mission so I just have to fly back to the base.

On the other side of the nav point, is a Kilrathi cap ship + escorts. I mess this fight up and am only kept alive by the new armor + some afterburning.

Back on Perry, I’ve impressed the admiral enough that he wants to see me again.

The confederation want to shut down the retros and kill off their new leader. The know which quadrant he is in but no more than that so are recruiting volunteers to help in the search and cover the area more quickly. I get to search the not so pleasant sounding systems of death, war and pestilence (passing through famine on the way). These are a long trek away so I have to stop at another base on the way.

I search the systems and have to cope with a large number of enemy ships but otherwise I come up empty. I’m out of fuel by this point so I just head for the nearest base. Before I land a pirate tells me his employer wants me to meet up with him at Drake in Capello. The admiral was adamant about returning to see him after the mission so I head to Perry first.

The search has come up empty so far for everyone else also. The admiral puts an 80,000 credit bounty on Jones head which would be the single largest payout I’ve had in the whole game. By this point I’ve got everything except the advanced repair droid. Since I rarely take enough hits to need repairs this really doesn’t sound very useful.

I head to meet with the mystery employer at Drake and its the informant who handed over the coded documents earlier in the game. This guy is full of information. He is actually high up in the church of man but due to circumstance we are on the same side. He has discovered that Jones doesn’t actually believe in the retro cause and is simply using the church as a tool to take over the sector. On that basis he wants me to go to the church headquarters using a secret jump point and kill him. Even if I tell Confed the location he still considers the destruction of the base a reasonable price to pay to remove Jones. He promises he will destroy all the Steltek guns if I complete the mission although I still don’t get my gun back.

Its a long haul to get to the retro planet. I stop off the system before to get a chance to save my game as I’m anticipating it will be tough. On the far side of the jump point I’m attacked by the Kilrathi/retro ships this time armed with steltek guns. These definitely hurt a bit more but its not like the alien weapon was that much better than other alternatives so they aren’t too hard to handle.

I land on the retro’s home planet and head to their temple. I was expecting the place to be a bit more hostile but they just assume I’m a new convert and I manage to learn that Jones is heading for their gray moon.

I fly out to try to catch up with him. I’m not sure at the time if I’ve got the idea right but I point my ship at the moon and afterburn towards it. The moon is just a background image and not a real object so I’m not really expecting this to work.

I’m suprised when this tactic works and I locate Jones. He is guarded by an insane number of Steltek armed ships which seem to keep warping in as fast as I can kill them. I have to cope with the bug from the original game where if you enter a nav point in normal flight your shields get wiped out. This means I start with no protection and have to be careful for a bit.

After killing off 8 or so he tells me his guard cannot be defeated. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if he’s right and they will just keep respawning indefinitely.

I finally kill the last ones off though and now have to chase Jones down. Hes 30000m away by now so I afterburn to him as quick as I can. What I don’t realise is that he is in the middle of an asteroid field and I manage to smack straight into one at full speed. This isn’t going to make the fight any easier.

Having said that, I’m pretty surprised this final fight is in the middle of an asteroid field. The opposition in this game don’t have a clue about how to fly in them and usually end up blowing themselves up. This guy is no different although his ship is obviously very tough and he also has steltek guns. Its not a hard fight – he just takes a little wearing down.

After he dies another retro appears and attempts to take revenge. He appears right next to a jump point that isn’t on my map and is very obviously only put in the game to draw my attention to it.

This secret jump point saves me a long trek back and drops me straight in the Rikel system.

I head straight for Perry to collect my reward from the admiral. In the same manner as the last game he also gives me end credits if I talk to him again.

That completes Righteous Fire – there was no end cutscene but I didn’t really miss it too much. In fact I’d say the games story improved enormously in this final days play and its left me a lot more impressed than I thought I would be. I like the idea of visiting the retro world – expanding on this sort of thing and being able to explore the planets in more detail would have been fun. You could even add an adventure game element and get a bit of the complexity of Space Rogue.

I’d say Space Rogue was my highlight of this entire blog so far. Something similar using the Wing Commander engine with the Ultima 7 engine tacked on to explore the planets/space stations could have been fantastic. Privateer and its sequel are great games but there isn’t much incentive to just explore systems as despite minor cosmetic differences nearly every planet and station is the same. The gameplay is closer to the much older Autoduel than it is to Space Rogue in many ways.

Next: Metal Morph

Day 126

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I complete the final Oxford mission flying to Perry base and back. Just like a lot of the other final missions, I run into a load of those unknown fighters. I’d swear flown with any skill at all, my ship is pretty much invulnerable by this point in the game so they aren’t any trouble.

I get the name and location of his contact at last and head straight there.

He’s waiting around in the bar like everyone else and also wants me to fly missions for him. The only surprise is that he isn’t going to pay me other than in information. I learn that I’m on the retros most wanted list for some reason. Before he will tell me more I have to fly him to Detroit. On the bright side that means I won’t be flying back to this station surrounded by asteroids for every mission so the relocation is fine by me.

I get a bit more information when we land, this time about the Retro’s becoming more organised under their new leader. I had noticed more retros around but then again theres more of everyone else as well. My next mission is just to fly to a particular station and get a mission off someone else.

When I land, the informant hands over some sort of coded documents and tells me to fly back with them.

I land with the documents and now get sent to clear out a nav point in the Nexus system where an ambush awaits for my employer.

I clear out a few waves of Retros and fly back with the news. I still don’t get any information about Jones but I do get a mission to kill off this Meneche character who has so many bounties on his head. This mission involves searching 5 systems and is the longest mission in the game so far. Just finding him takes long enough with me having to search around 20-30 nav points before I finally catch up with him.

He confesses to stealing my gun and selling it to the Retros in turn so that they can put it on their ships. He runs for the jump point and I get left dealing with a few waves of the previously unknown ships which turn out to be retros. I have to kill 12 of them before I head into the jump point. Up to this point all the new gadgets on my ship weren’t strictly neccessary but I would have struggled here without them. As it was even up against this many, I don’t think they ever got my shields down.

I follow Menesche through the jump point and have to cope with him in his Centurion + more waves of the unknown fighters. I manage to kill him off – by this point I’m nearly out of jump fuel so I head for the nearest inhabited system and land. I’ve got 3 bounties to collect on this guy which is the next job – I expect another mission will come out of that as I’ve no other loose ends to chase up.

I feel like I’m getting close to the end now and will attempt to finish it up tonight. It still hasn’t thrown anything new at me and the storyline doesn’t appear to be going anywhere in particular. The limitations of the game are in strong evidence after all this time – there is just enough variety to carry this mission pack but a second would have been pushing it. I’ve not been disappointed by this add-on but its not going to leave me wanting more.

Given the difficulty level of the last mission, I should probably expect to have a lot of enemies to cope with from here on out. It needs to up the difficulty a bit as it has been far too easy so far. It could get easier still as I’ve nearly got enough money for the speed boosting gadget which is the last upgrade that I really want. All that leaves is the advanced repair droid + the thrust enhancer (which increases acceleration). Neither of these sound all that useful although they are both relatively cheap.