It helped that no one cared about frame rates and therefore the speed of gameplay. It reminds me of the original Wing Commander, which always managed to angle its sprites just so, letting you get a sense for the shape of its spaceships. You might not see the whites of their eyes, but you’ll damn sure see the glowing blue rims of their exhaust cones.Ī lot of this is accomplished by just fudging range and distance. Sometimes they’re close enough to flip each other off through their windshields. So Rebel Galaxy Outlaw insists on the anachronistic intimacy of combatants being so close they fly through each other’s explosions. That unfettered cinematic excess is the stuff of Hollywood at its goofiest and videogames at their most gleeful. One of the least likely things to ever happen in modern distance-based combat is flying through the explosion of something you just blew up. It wants you to be so close that when they explode, you will fly through the explosions. It wants them to break apart before your very eyes as you pour on lead and, uh, tachyons or whatever. “Let me show you them,” it proclaims with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker, the conviction of a preacher, and the zeal of a mad scientist with a secret formula. Blips, specks, and reticles.īut Rebel Galaxy Outlaw made you some spaceships, and by golly, it’s not going to reduce them to blips, specks, or reticles. When things get really up close and personal, you can try to follow a reticle some distance in front of whatever you’re trying to shoot. Then when you get closer, spaceships are so fast and a monitor only affords so much screen real estate, that you’ll miss it if you blink. Is that supposed to be a spaceship? Yes, it’s supposed to be a spaceship. If you squint, you just might be able to make out a shape. Even then, you’re usually fighting specks far off in space. What’s an arcade space game to do? The best it can.
In future combat in the vacuum of space, combatants will stand even farther apart. From the bow to the gun to artillery to aircraft to ballistic missiles to remotely piloted drones. Conflict and technology has advanced in such a way that combatants stand farther and farther apart. Maybe - just maybe - they might fight against a speck far off in the sky. In modern aerial combat, aircraft fight against blips on screens.
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