[MeetTheCryo]

I might still have somewhere an archive of issues of "The Ambrosia Times"; before my family had a connection to the Internet, reading and rereading the Bitwise Operator column of The Ambrosia Times was my window into programming which went beyond what was taught in Dave Mark's "Learn C on the Mac" (although most of the content in those columns went way over my head, and I never programmed a game for the classic Mac OS which wasn't programmed either in Klik & Play or, later, in METAL BASIC).

> Escape Velocity

A game I recently described as "Poor Man's Sky" ; )

"Escape Velocity Override" is the only game in its series that I never completed, because of the registration "incentive" – "register or Captain Hector will steal X% of your credits (even before the thirty day trial period has elapsed)" was a surprise that left a nasty taste in my mouth, and I never went back to the game after that.

I still have a pilot file from an early (I think the first) version of "Escape Velocity Nova" which featured a "bug" which enabled me to play multiple contradictory plot lines to completion...

> Asteroid

Don't you mean "Maelstrom"?

And don't forget "Barrack"! Or "Apeiron"!

[astrange]

> "Escape Velocity Override" is the only game in its series that I never completed, because of the registration "incentive"

Really? You should try it if you can, it's great. There were also a lot of great mods, like one total conversion called Frozen Heart. Of course they'd make the game crash all the time.

Now, the third one had problems. They added all this… story… but the story lines liked to start with you getting kidnapped and drafted into a space army, so you pretty much couldn't do anything fun for most of the game. It's still available for Windows though.

> A game I recently described as "Poor Man's Sky" ; )

Elite Dangerous is pretty much exactly EV but with modern graphics and VR, so that's nice.

> Don't you mean "Maelstrom"?

Yeah, that one!

Also want to mention Realmz which some people are trying to clone, and TaskMaker which nobody is.

[MeetTheCryo]

> Really? You should try it if you can, it's great.

'Override is on the list of classic Mac OS games I intend to play or replay, just behind an awful lot of others.

> Now, the third one had problems.

I liked 'Nova a lot – I liked that the world felt (ever so slightly) more alive, I liked the scope of the world, I liked the number and variety of the craft and outfits, I even liked various outfits requiring government approval to purchase and government craft opening fire on your craft if they detected that you were using unauthorised or illegal outfits...

...but I agree that the Vell-os plot line was an awful idea, and I wonder how many players abandoned 'Nova – and how many registrations Ambrosia lost – because of players thinking that the Vell-os plot line was all the game had to offer. The only time 'Nova "offered" the Vell-os plot line to me, I fled to Aurora space and didn't look back...

> Also want to mention Realmz [...]

I never liked Realmz – I think either I was too young to understand it or its gameplay was incompatible with my tastes – but I completed a lot of scenarios for Spiderweb's "Blades of Exile", and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the original "Exile" quadrilogy is now freeware.

[astrange]

Spiderweb /does/ keep their games up to date, and remakes them all every so often. They get bigger every time, which is kind of a problem actually.

Exile/Avernum is on its second generation of remakes, and the first two games are out on Mac/Windows through Steam, plus iPad.