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Stars!
developed by
Jeff Johnson & Jeff McBride
published by
Jeff Johnson & Jeff McBride
for
Windows


April 22, 1996

Back in time, when I was twelve, I was fascinated and somewhat addicted to a game called Stockticker for the Commodore 64. In it you played the stock market. Oil futures, stocks and gold would fluctuate in price and you would sell or buy at opportune moments. You would collect dividends, lose fortunes or succeed in the object of the game. Make your cash flow as big as you could. It was simple, had no flash at all and some would call it extraordinarily boring. But I was fixated on seeing my portfolio grow. I like to see things grow.

Stars! has that effect on me. This time the bigger picture is well... huge. You see the object of Stars! is to colonize and eventually dominate the galaxy as you know it. Starting with your homeworld, with limited resources and technology, you strive to reach beyond the little globe that you call home and build a galactic empire. How do you do it? Well it's not so easy and boy, will it take a bunch o' time.

You see everything that takes place in stars elapses in years. Deep Space probes take years to reach their destination and send back information as to the habitability and mineral makeup of the planet it has just scanned. Sometimes they are habitable in which case you send off a colony ship and about 2500 people to tame the unknown wilderness. Sometimes you'll need to terraform in order to make it a viable outpost. And then you'll need to mine the hell out of inhospitable planets rich with ironium and the ever rare germanium.

You see in order to reach out you'll have to do a bunch of building. Cruisers, frigates and Galleons have to be built to defend what you have and sometimes (depending on how much of a warmonger you want to be) wrestle territories away from your enemies. Transports, fuel carriers, Space Stations, they all have to be built to keep you going and they take time and resources.

This sucker is fairly deep and sometimes a real juggling act. At one point I was playing a game which was into its 300th year (or something like that). I had colonized a dozen worlds, a few of them way off in another quadrant of the galaxy (I found a wormhole) and I had a least 30 fleets in active duty . I was fending off a two pronged attack from two separate races, so I had ships patrolling the inner circle of worlds and bombers raining death upon a Kurokian outpost that was just a little too close for comfort. In the midst of all of this my original five worlds had stripped themselves of all the minerals on their planets and somewhere suffering from overcrowding. What I'm getting at is that in any one turn you may have 30 to 40 pressing items to deal with. Nobody said that running a galactic empire was a bare foot walk in the park (that cliché also happens to be the secondary title of Stars!).

What I'm trying to get at is that this is a wonderfully complex game that can hook you in for hours or days and dare I say months, depending on the size of the universe. And all of this has come out of the minds of a few basement programmers. I use that term loosely but this is the first effort from Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride. They can pat themselves on the back because they have made something quite impressive and it is all in the gameplay.

There is nothing fancy about Stars!. The interface is all windows based and without flash. But it is functional and fairly easy to use. Just make sure that you make use of some of the automatic settings. You don't want to spend too much time making sure that your freighters are making regular supply trips to the mining worlds. If you don't you'll likely find yourself mired in monotony, a easy trap with Stars! unless you use its interface well.

There is plenty to create with Stars! You can customize the game play to optimize the challenge that you wish from it. You can toggle all kinds of settings so that races of your creation are strong in certain fields of research or weak in particular traits. You want a race to be unable to develop ram scoop technology enabling you to travel long distances with minimal fuel usage, so be it. You would like race traits that enable you to colonize usually uninhabitable worlds, click and you've got it. You can choose from a variety of icons to identify your race, you can modify your fleets at will, upgrading their propulsion systems, weapons and shields. Really you have a myriad of possibilities to alter your game as you see fit, based on the parameters you set at the start. That's what keeps this game so interesting.

It truly can become an interesting turn-based game should you be hooked up to a LAN. Up to 16 players can jostle for domination of the universe. This, of course provides some real immediacy in terms of building up your defenses and making sure you have a strong resource base to feed your armadas. Another great way to go about things with a whack of people is to play a time based "race." Essentially you can turn Stars! into an "over-the-wall-boys!" rush to grab the largest chunk of territory.

If you are a strategy freak and have a few dollars and a bunch of time to spend you should definitely give Stars! a try. It's solid in its construction and loaded with enough variables and options to hold your interest for a good while. And on its basest level it succeeds in satisfying the benevolent leader or warmongering dictator in us all.

I give Stars!..........................................................................7.5 out of 10

John Shaw

Thought Drop

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