Wanted to enjoy this. Despite the quite dated FMW GFX and the clunky feel when first playing I persevered for a short while despite the ever mounting bugs. Most annoying initial one was painstakingly manually setting controls (game assumes you have keypad, i.e isn't laptop friendly.) it then resets them all if you accidentally click on 'controls' instead of 'keyboard' in menu. Collision detection is awful. Just awful. C64 esque. But things really unraveled come mission 3. Mid combat with 2 Birds of Prey the game just quit to the desktop, whilst still pseudo running the game. AND whilst flipping PC display to 'portrait.' Occasionally you can get the game to maximise again (by which point the ship is shafted and mission ruined), more often the game just puts the laptop in limbo - and even a restart leaves your machine in a bizarre flipped portrait desktop setting. I exercised massive patience trying to play further but after one particularly ridiculous battle (adding more power to phasers and photons led to the phasers going off line 5 seconds into battle.... adding more power to shields inexplicably led to them failing in seconds) I was close to getting somewhere, despite the game's insistence we all die, when once again the dreaded dead space appeared and I was forced to go into weird sideways task manager to quit the game. Doing this whilst your nagging, repetitive engineer audibly whines repeatedly 'we're all f**ked captain. We're travelling in a straight line blind. The life support is failing. Again.' was like being punched repeatedly in the face. I began to imagine the bridge crew suffocating but it didn't alleviate my fury at the inanity of this awful game. The greatest satisfaction from two nights of play was uninstalling it just now. A relief almost. At least the slimmed down fairly basic SNES version was fairly fun back in the day. (I even beat the Kobayashi Maru on that... although the game refused to acknowledge it and still says you've failed. :-) ) IN fairness, this Gog download might have been slightly, slightly more playable with a joystick but the overwhelming flaws would have still driven me away. Fly you fools.
