I have a funny relationship with Starflight. It's an awesome game and I love the tone, plot, and gameplay of it, but...I never have the attention span to actually get very far into it. Out of determination to actually finish the damn game, I decided to bust out the old Genesis and play it authentically. I quickly learned several things about TVs of the late 80s/early 90s thanks to trying to figure out how to hook up my Genesis(there were about 5 different varieties of anntena setups, a few that said you could use them "if you have cable tv", almost as an afterthought, and there were setups for the (now standard) audio/video cable hookups...that requited optional components that you had to order from sega. Seeing as I didn't have those cables and I somehow doubt Sega is still selling them, I went the cable tv hookup route, which I couldn't quite get to work on my nice big-screen TV. After trying it out on my crappy little TV just in case, I figured out that...I didn't have the cartridge in firmly enough. And the power cord has to be in juuuust the right place to work. Bah! On the bright side, the Genesis is the lightest gaming console known to mankind(as are its controllers. The power plug, on the other hand, is GIGANTIC), so moving it around was easy enough.

With everything in working order, it was time to actually play the damn game. As it turned out...there was still a save on it. Electronic Arts must have put some damn nice battery backup in there for the save to survive for well over 12 years! Despite the fact that I never played Starflight that much as a kid(my dad was the one who played it most of the time), the only save there had my name on it. Funny how that works.

So how far did 6-or-7-year-old me get into the game? ...not very far. I did have a full crew(all with amusingly short, simple names. Bob, Andy, Dot, Roy, and Al? 6 year old girls aren't very creative, I guess :P), mostly humans with one veloxi(what, elowan weren't good enough for me?), and my ship(the ISS Mother? Really?) was outfitted with a full 16 cargo pods, but that was it. I had only played through one in-game day! Which means that once again, I'm stuck in the boring "mine EVERYTHING until you're equipped enough to go forth into the parts of space that have plot in them".

The first thing I managed to do after landing on a planet was damage my ship's engines enough that they didn't work. Horray for failure! I blame it on the fact that I have to press the buttons on the Genesis controller very hard if I want them to respond. Or maybe I've been spoiled by modern controllers with their responding-at-a-light-tap capabilities. I did manage to not go bankrupt and to get the engines repaired, but still.