Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 30th of its kind. Coming to you from across the Atlantic Ocean, unless you are actually in real life sitting behind me. Quietly. In which case: can you hand me my theme tune please? Thanks.
THEME TUNE… BUT ONLY FOR THOSE LISTENING, EH? GO ON CLICK THE BUTTON IN THE AUDIO BIT - IT’S FUN!
GAMES NEWS
I was drawn to a headline from the London Evening Standard via Yahoo this week:
Star Citizen: You can now try the most expensive video game ever made for free (yahoo.com)
I wasn’t aware of Star Citizen. Apologies. Apparently, it is the most contentious game ever made, according to the London Evening Standard. Well, well, well… NOW I am interested.
It was supposed to be the final word in space exploration games. That’s a good ambition. It’s made by Chris Roberts without whose Wing Commander games I would never have got to meet Mark Hamill and Tom Wilson on the set of Wing Commander 3 in LA on what was the greatest day of my life. I owe that guy BIGTIME!
So, I go to a trailer for the game.
As part of it, the trailer says what you can do in Star Citizen. This includes the following…
Mine. Haul. Trade.
Jeez. How much like hard work does all that sound? Mine. Haul. Trade. To me that doesn’t sound like the most exciting videogame ever, it sounds like clearing out the basement before a house move then trying to sell your stuff on eBay. Then it continues:
Be a mercenary, be a bounty hunter, be an outlaw.
Been there. Done that. In other games. The problem is I don’t think there is anything in a space exploration game that hasn’t been done by Elite, Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Mass Effect, Civilization and Dorkum’s Odyssey. And yes. One of those titles I did just make up.
Then I find out this game was actually announced over a decade ago, it crowdfunded half a billion dollars and it hasn’t been completed yet, but players can already spend more than £1,000 on a “starter pack”, which includes ships, in-game currency, and insurance. I think the insurance is there if your ludicrously expensive ship gets twatted.
This is excess run amok. But do you know what? Part of me loves that level of crazy ambition. That almost reckless abandon. My day job involves hosting a radio show that plays classic rock, the music genre that defined recklessness. So, part of me does think this is way too much money to be involved with on every level and has me thinking back to games on cassettes written in bedrooms by boy geniuses. Back when all this were fields. Simpler times. But there is another part of me that says: if videogames want to be the biggest entertainment thing on the planet, they have to act like it and pull on their silly reckless wanton abandon pants. It’s actually Ok for Star Citizen to be the videogame equivalent of Guns n Roses or Van Halen. Overblown, out there, out of touch with the real world.
We need that level of crazy in games.
However, there is another level of crazy involved here. I watched a video of a YouTuber – and that lets you see how serious this is, that it would get me watch games stuff on YouTube – whose family got death threats because he criticized the game. For fucks sakes, kids. When did you all start doing that stupid shite? That’s mental. I hate all that pish.
With that in mind, though, I would like to make it utterly clear that in my humble opinion Star Citizen is, was and will be the greatest game ever and everyone who has spewed money at it are geniuses. Obviously.
If you want to get involved in this world it’s only available on PC, you need to have 83gb of disk space 16gb RAM and a 3gb RAM graphics card. Then you go offwards and create an account at the Roberts Space Industries website.
I’m not touching this with a bargepole, cos of that whole toxic death threat thing. But then again, I am the guy who really loved playing an Apple Arcade game recently where all you did was move blobs of paint along a screen. So, I may not be the best judge of this kind of malarkey anyway.
And on that confessional bombshell that is it for your free teaser version of Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column. As usual the PAID PALS version is 4 to 5 times larger than this one. But you have to pay for it. Basically, less than 4 quid a month which works out to less than a quid a pod. Bargain.
Otherwise, I will see you in the free teaser next week. Until then? Keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple!
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #30 FREE VERSION