Zzap


Starflight
By Electronic Arts
Commodore 64

 
Published in Zzap #61

Starflight

If you want Starflight's full scenario, take a butcher's at Zzap! 59 (page 22). However, for those too lazy to do even that, the basic plot involves you and your selected crew planet hopping and mining for minerals and artifacts to sell for profit to enable you to improve your ship (and to better train your crew) so you can travel father afield to make even bigger profits.

You also need to find out what's wrong with earth's sun before it goes nova... it's what any decent space hero would do!

The Starport section - where crew recruitment, commodity trading, and ship upgrading take place is visually very different (but much funnier) than the Amiga version. You're depicted as a spaceman in a gleaming space suit who struts horizontally along a corridor of ting very smartly before entering modules. He also taps his feet impatiently if you don't interact with him for a while.

Most other sections, such as decking out your ship, space flight, searching planets and so on, are similar to the Amiga game although minor (pun intended) differences such as having no SCAN or LOOK option to examine planetside objects and the use of coloured blocks instead of icons for object identification exist.

Starflight's depth and massive play area is maintained on the C64 (270 star systems and 800 planets) and music and FX are at least as good (bad?) as on the Amiga. It's only graphics (and their animation) that are actually worse (hard to believe) on the 8-bit machine. However, as Starflight involves trading, communication, and strategy, graphics take a back seat (more like locked in the boot actually) to gameplay.

The C64 version gets a better mark than its Amiga counterpart because, for it to be such a close downgrade, the creators (Binary Systems) couldn't have been trying very hard on the 16-bit game.