Freeware Game Pick: Strange Adventures in Infinite Space
Digital Eel's Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is a space exploration game in which you play an unemployed space pilot, hired by a smuggler to embark on a dangerous ten-year mission in the Sector Prime system. Your employer is willing to part with handsome rewards for any discoveries that you find during this dangerous journey, but return to him late and you will be charged extra in ship rental costs.
The map is randomized every time you play, and interplanetary travel is initiated by left-clicking on a nearby star and pressing the engage button. Your ship can only travel in a straight line, and flying through the Purple Void nebula will only slow you down even further.
Combat is conducted in real-time, with information about the current ship selected shown on the left side of the screen during a space battle. The green bar indicates your shield status, which recharges automatically during combat. The orange bar shows your ship's condition, and when this gauge runs out the ship is pretty much reduced to space debris.
Both the Windows and Mac versions of SAIS are now available as free downloads, and there are a bunch of mods that can be applied to change your ship's appearance, the types of aliens populating the system, and even the effects of new artifacts that you can find during your adventure in space. Some mods like Red Planet and Even Stranger Adventures in Infinite Space act as full-fledged conversions as well, offering a new storyline, GUI and alternate objectives for the players to achieve. (encyclopedia)
Comments
This game can be sooooo simple and you can finish it within 4 years some times. It's kinda boring then. On other times, you die from the first or second planet you visit. It's hilarious then, but a bit frustrating. For some reason, I keep going back over and over to it. It's so fun to see what you'll encounter this time :D
Posted by: Anonymous | October 5, 2009 5:11 PM
Played only "Weird Worlds", but I like it! By the way here are more mods:
http://www.freewebs.com/strangefederation/mods.html
Posted by: drugon | October 5, 2009 6:20 PM
Do you know how to get Red Planet? It's not available on the digital-eel website at the moment, and the freewebs site links to the same non-existent file.
Posted by: Alsvid | October 5, 2009 8:00 PM
http://www.digital-eel.com/sais/files/RedPlanet_v0.9e.zip
Posted by: Tim | October 5, 2009 8:17 PM
This game is simply fantastic. The random encounters give the game surprising, exciting and only rarely frustrating (after all, you can always retreat) turns. Anyway, it's short enough to always give it another try. The little texts make it feel almost like a Sci-Fi short story. Thanks for recommending this.
Posted by: Groogokk | October 5, 2009 8:17 PM
I actually can't run Weird Worlds. It's got such a bad framerate problem, and I just can't fix it.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 5, 2009 9:45 PM
Anyone interested to play the mod "Urluquai Crusade"?
Don't know whether it's still available on the website.
Posted by: Exaar | October 5, 2009 10:15 PM
I remember playing a demo of either SAIS or Weird Worlds years ago. I cannot remember which, but I remember finding the game to be too random. Decisions didn't really matter.
Posted by: Billy Bissette | October 6, 2009 2:07 AM
Thanks, Tim - that link wasn't working when I posted. I've got it now, tho'.
Posted by: Alsvid | October 6, 2009 7:15 AM
to Exaar:
http://www.freewebs.com/strangefederation/mods/TheUrluquaiCrusade_1.2.7z
Posted by: drugon | October 6, 2009 1:17 PM
Good to see that my mod is still somewhere online. Hope you guys enjoy it!
Posted by: Exaar | October 6, 2009 9:56 PM
"I cannot remember which, but I remember finding the game to be too random. Decisions didn't really matter."
Given the nature of the game, that's a stupid criticism. (It's not even true, really, but that's another discussion.) Give the player too much agency and the game becomes an exercise in dull rote optimization. Any game of SAIS or WW is over in one sitting, there really isn't room there for the game to have deep strategy.
Posted by: kongming | October 7, 2009 1:37 AM
I died few times when that damn ship came alive and started killing me while I was going to board it.
Posted by: TheDerek | October 7, 2009 2:14 AM
Does anyone know if the Palm OS version of this game is soon to follow? It doesn't appear to be available for purchase any longer.
Posted by: Somebody | October 7, 2009 5:06 AM