Starflight™ 1+2

Starflight 1 and Starflight 2 Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, are amongst the finest examples of what the Video Game medium can deliver. They will take you on a journey of discovery, intrigue, and possibly frontier diplomacy (i.e Captain Kirk, less of the Orion Slave girls but more of the Photon Torpedoes). Each title has its own self contained storyline that you are free to discover (No hand holding here), or completely ignore. Throughout the the "Open World" of the two titles, you can go anywhere only limited by your ships capabilities... and if you pissed of an alien or two for whatever reason (Invest in a communications officer, Trust Me!). The Starflight series is a Space Opera. Some say it is a prelude of the things that came (i.e Mass Effect), but that's a lie. Mass Effect and all other title's like it including the excellent Star Control 2, only wish they could match the grandeur of this exemplary DOS title.

I love how you think you can do anything you want in this game. Explore, mine, collect exotic animals, upgrade stuff. Then the dying starts. (rather, you begin to notice it) There's a big problem and you're the only one who can solve it. Good luck winning on the first try. I was able to beat the game on the 2nd attempt. The ending. Oh My - the ending! For a simple text scroll (where you learn what's going on) to blow your mind so completely means that game has gone to special place where the classics live. Never got into SF2 so can't say much about it. But it you're into space opera and great stories, SF1 is where it's at.

I replay this every 5 to 10 years with a second computer open to record tips, missions, bank transactions, and mission reports. It is the perfect mix of storytelling with end user imagination. No universe is larger than this one and this was on 2 360K floppy diskettes! This game is an incredible piece of programming. Games these days are suffering the same problem as movies, more emphasis on graphics/effects than on storytelling or the size of the sandbox. Not so in this one. Explore how you want, where you want and make relations with races however you want. Combat is basic because it was 1986. When I first bought this game in 1989, there was a VGA/MCGA option that is not on this version of the game. I actually believe this also affected the fractals of the game allowing for more ruins and mineral deposits in that version. This game was also full of family memory for me, as middle school aged me would call up my grandfather and we would exchange tips on where we found artifacts. This was the game where I lost hundreds of hours of my childhood. Nothing but good memories! 5 star all the way.

I put in ~20 hrs into Starflight 1 & I am giving up. I am going to gloss over the positive aspects because other reviews have a better appreciation of them. The save system is cumbersome. Starflight 1 saves directly to the executable files (STARA.COM & STARB.COM), so player have to manually back up them up . Closing out while the game is in progress will ruin your current save game, & it is common for the game to crash, ruining your save game, so you better periodically save & then manually backup the executables. Unfortunately saving requires the player to end the game in progress & then restart (& the music playing @ the title screen is not fun to listen repeatedly). Progressing in the game's storyline seems fun, but the game puts obstacles in my way. The player is told to upgrade her spaceship by raising cash through collecting minerals, artifacts & alien lifeforms. When I started out, I did this a lot (which is tedious). But it turns out I did too much, & stretched the limits of the game. Now when I try to pick up stuff on planets I get an error message about "not enough storage for that function". The game is punishing me for doing what it told me to do! Walk-thrus say that progressing requires getting a clue randomly placed in alien ruins scattered on a planet (the first planet in sector 68,66). I spent a lot of time trying to find this clue, but no luck. I suspect my game is damaged & I would need to start over to complete it. Controls are awkward. This would be less of a problem were the game turn-based, but it is not. Combat situations can result in irreparable damage to your spaceship because you are fiddling with the menus trying to raise shields & arm your weapons. Exploring planets is also frustrating, because violent weather can suddenly occur, killing crew members or making it difficult to traverse terrain, zapping your land vehicle's energy and stranding your crew, forcing the player to give up any progress made since the last save.

This is one of the games where the Amiga version was clearly better. Buying the DOS version on GOG seems almost pointless when you got WinUAE and the Amiga version. The sound and graphic on the Amiga version are much nicer. Nevertheless a pioneering game among the preciously rare space-themed RPGs.