Some light cheating was involved but I finished this over the weekend. There are transcripts of all the alien communications at starflt.com and I used some of those to speed things along since my note taking wasn’t completely up to scratch. I won’t spoil it here but the ending revelation was a total surprise. I’m sure there is still loads of the game I didn’t see. I never did find Earth for one.
Have to say I really enjoyed Starflight. I’d go as far as to call it a true classic of the era up there with the likes of Ultima 4 and Wasteland. If I’d played this back in 1986 it would probably be one of my favourite games of all time. When you break it down, there isn’t actually all that much to any individual part of it but it comes together into something epic. It’s the scale of the universe and getting to explore it that really make the game.
The ship combat was possibly the only weak area. I did little more than hit the space bar repeatedly. There really wasn’t much combat involved though which is in Starflight’s favour in my opinion.
I love it when games of this era require you to actually use the documentation as well. Aside from taking your own notes, there are clues you need to in the map and all those screenshots. It’s games like this that got me started collecting big box PC games in the first place.
Big thanks to Corgibuttz for choosing Starflight. Like far too many other games, I’ve had it sat in a bookcase for some years and may never have got around to playing it otherwise.
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