Space Rangers HD: A War Apart

[rhoenix]

I saw this game pop up on steam. It's basically an HD overhaul of Space Rangers 2 (the complete edition), with reworked text missions, and several new adventures, and a new main mission: the pirates getting organized and uppity.

It's $20 on steam right now, and for a game I truly enjoyed before, I'm going to enjoy this HD Steam edition.

[Josh]

Space Rangers 2 was surprisingly kick-ass.

[Batman]

Started playing this a few days ago, and while the HD graphics didn't add much of anything, the massive improvements on the hull/equipment search engine sure as hell did. You can now filter by type, specify weight, performance and cost limits and filter out by race. Plus, all the cheats still seem to work, I can finally do the ground missions without the game crashing, and you seem to start out with a lot more money at least on 'easy'.

[rhoenix]

Oh yes - this version fixed ten thousand and one (not a real estimate) little annoyances with the game. My one and only complaint is that the sound settings set in the game options apparently don't apply to some of the missions (like the command robots to take the enemy base one). Considering everything that got fixed and upgraded, it's really a small thing.

[Batman]

And once again, cheating appears to be pretty much counterproductive. It looks like the game reacts to you cheating by increasing asteroid density in the systems. Seriously so. I've gotten asteroid densities that made the Hoth field look like it didn't exist. Think half a hundred or more asteroids on screen simultaneously, with foreseeable consequences for navigation/survival (and for those of us with low end systems and even lower end graphics cards, performance). Cheating also seems to increase solar radiation-one measly CTRL-SHFT-DEVICE and I can't go inside Venus orbit without my hull being cooked

[Batman]

Or maybe that has nothing to do with the cheats and everything with my game copy being of...dubious origin. Very interesting approach to piracy prevention Time to sort out my Paypal account.

[Batman]

Well, the legal copy's here, it originally being in russian was annoying but easily sorted out, as was Steam parking the game in its steamapps folder (which if I designated it at all certainly didn't do so on purpose). Turns out while Steam whines it can no longer find the game said game works just dandy if you put it in a more sensible location elsewhere.
And seriously, why exactly would I want to use Steam to fire up a locally installed game to begin with?
Anyway, looking forward to reexploring the Space Rangers universe without being inevitably pulverized 2 hours in

[Batman]

Oh c'mon. Yes, I'm playing on 'Easy' with every setting that would smooth my way set, but I'm finally in a position where I can seriously contemplate going up against the Dominators and they have like 3 systems left?
And is it me or are pirates a considerably bigger threat than the Dominators this time round?

[rhoenix]

Check the game notes - the pirates are now their own faction, with several ways of... dealing with them. Literally and figuratively.

[Batman]

I noticed they are (for starters, pirate ships and pirate controlled systems have their own colour now, and there's messages about 'pirates took system XYZ') but c'mon. I'm like 4 years into the game and there's maybe 3 Dominator systems left but 15 or so pirate controlled ones. And is it me or don't they distinguish between pirates/Dominators wrt the 'Waah! Our system is under attack!' responses when you ask for a mission? Because I have gotten plenty of 'You coward, go defend our system against the Dominators' when asking for a mission, only to find essentially zero Dominators but pirates up the wazzoo.