Iridis Alpha (1986)
Genres:Shooter
Themes:Action, Science fiction
Game modes:Single player
Story:A fast paced, mind-bending horizontal shoot 'em up from Jeff Minter where the player must hop between parallel planets to survive. It also has a giant smiling yak head.
Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.7
I have fond memories of getting to grips with the unique gameplay of this shooter - discovering what entropy and overload were, or how I could travel to other zones or flip to the other side of the screen. When things finally started making sense, it created this unique zen-like experience where you felt like you were spinning so many plates but still in control of your own destiny. It would be great to see it live on through a digital storefront.
FreelancerEight hundred years prior to the start of our story, bitter conflict divided all of mankind. A handful of colonists struck out on their own to begin anew - far away from the Earth and its turmoil. Several ships were launched with enough equipment and supplies to give the hundreds onboard a fighting chance - but since the area around far-off Sirius had never been surveyed, no one really knew what to expect. What they found was a new frontier of free-flowing natural resources, unexplored territories, great wonders and lurking dangers. Each ship, representing the clusters of people and their earthly place of origin, settled into different parts of the galaxy pre-selected by their ship-board computer to give them the best chance of survival.
Life was hard in the beginning, but over the 800 years the different colonies prospered and expanded their territories, claiming more and more systems for their own. Survival and propagation eventually led to growth and profit as each of the colonies developed specialties and fostered commerce. As the colonies grew and time passed their connections with their roots on Earth dwindled and they lost their memories of the conflicts of the past. Soon their attention was dominated by new, more immediate conflicts. Feelings of lost ancestral connection spurred anachronism in the look of the great cities, and created a somewhat distorted image of each colony's cultural heritage. In the ever-expanding outer edge of the territories, frontier lawlessness prevailed.
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As each ship settled and colonies began to expand, they knew little about each other and their advancing development. Finally, little by little, the individual colonies found each other and began to set up trade routes to link their systems for commerce and solidarity.
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