Thursday, March 04, 2004

Vendetta? I see... I see!

It's a simple life: Fly around looking for cargo to sell and, if you can't find any cargo, blow stuff up until you do. Of course, if you don't like to put your life in danger as much as I do, you can buy some cargo from the station in your sector and fly to a sector where it's more in demand, making yourself half an assload of cash in the process. I was on one of these very missions, flying through the lonely space of sector 5, when I had to think to myself: "How could I ever have thought that this was a bad game?".

Maybe it was the barely readable pink menu screens, or maybe no one was playing on the first day I tried out Vendetta, maybe I just should have read the fucking manual first. Whatever it was, I read over at Happy Penguin that Vendetta had been updated to 3.3.19. Since Vendetta updates itself, I just launched the updater and sat back for a few minutes while it updated.

When the game itself first started up, I noticed that the ugly, unreadable, pink menu screens had been replaced with a nice, black, "I look like I belong in a game set in space" style. It helps a lot being able to read what you're clicking on, let me tell you. I got to the station, picked the free ship (affectionately known in the Vendetta community as "the bus") and went off in to space. This time, people were there. Who knows, maybe the first time I tried their servers were down, or I had some network malfunction I didn't know about. This time, it was PACKED, and I got killed a lot... at first. You just get better, it's the only way I can put it, and it's a damn satisfying game once you get past the learning curve. Although the game is limited at this point (Guild software still stresses that this is an engine test and that's about it), there's a lot to do. You can kill bots, kill other players(something I've yet to do), capture one of the other nation's flags, or my favorite: just explore. I've never encountered a game where you could just knock around space (as long as you're good at dodging/fighting bots/other players), and it's really cool.

Completely disregard everything bad I said about Vendetta in my earlier post. I might even pay for this one...

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