I was wracking my brains trying to figure out what the name was of a fun space exploration game I'd played some years ago. I only played the demo, but I got a lot of mileage out of it, and it tended to have a different, more immediate feel than a lot of the micro-managey games out there.
BUT I COULDN'T REMEMBER ITS NAME!
I Know! Let's call it Super Star Empires!
Many games suffer from generic title syndrome. See if you can make some titles from this list of words (of course you can alter them if you want, as long as you preserve their roots. Empire -> Imperium, for example.):
Rebel Peace General Civilization Conquest Empire Space Star Stellar Solar Sun Fade Sin Galactic Andromeda Crusade Supremacy Wars Reach
Some managed to break of this, like the embarrassing, prurient connotations of Spaceward Ho, or the unintentionally dated-sounding VGA Planets, but I guess these words at least remind you what the game's about.
Some of them were famous, others infamous, and thus easy to find or remember. Ascendancy is a game dear to my heart, but there were some issues with it (some of which solved with the antag.exe patch that you can still find all over the place), while Master of Orion I and II still dominate 4X discussions. I'd never heard of Malkari before, and I think part of the problem may have been that the title didn't suggest enough of what it was about, regardless as to whether it deserved more attention or not.
The Personal Quest
My search took a while. I asked one of my friends who was into those sorts of games, but we both struggled to come up with a language to describe them. Here's a quote from my email to my friend:
"It had a 3/4 perspective, the tech trees were slightly different so you would have different weapon types that might not do well against certain defenses. The ship models were 3-D abstract models of different size classes. You could follow the ships as they zipped realtime from place to place... None of this makes it any easier to look up."
None of this could be used to look it up with any certainty, but eventually I figured it out by using a retrospective a friend of mine linked to me to try to help me with this particular brain worm.
I remember really liking that game, and the demo's still around if you want to check it out. The graphics are simple, it's a shareware game from a minor publisher after all, but the pace and the focus on spaceships and combat felt an exciting break from the usual. I'm still searching for my perfect 4X, though.
If you're into exploring/conquering the stars type games, what is your favorite formula? You a micro-manager? You prefer to let things run themselves so you can blow stuff up?
Edit: fixed the links
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