Today’s game is quite a large download as free games go. It was originally a commercial game and was converted to freeware several years ago to make way for more ambitious projects. Despite its age there is some brilliant game play to be had out of this gem of a free game. . I’ve previously posted a mention of the game in the space shoot ‘em ups thread, but its never been included in the free games for the weekdays project.
Its rare that you get a space sim with atmospheric flight and ground manouvers all in one game. This game effectively gives you three games a shooter, a flght sim and a space sim. I've posted more than my usual several images to reflect this aspect of the game. Sorry if your pages were slow in loading.
Battlecruiser Millenium (230Mb)
Spaceflight simulators have been around in many forms for over 15 years now, and for the most part they generally take on one distinct form or another. Some games are linear and have the player complete missions in order to advance the story, and others are privateer sims where the player has freedom and the object of amassing wealth and a powerful space ship. Battlecruiser Millennium, on the other hand, allows you to do so much more than your average space sim. If you've ever dreamed of commanding a capital ship complete with its own crew, then BCM is your game. Commanding ships aren't the only thing you can do; you can instead choose to play as a fighter pilot or marine.
As commander, you are given your own capital ship, either a carrier, transport, or cruiser (ship classes are dependent by race and caste) and are responsible for the ship and its crew. Based on your caste (military, explorer, paramedic, commercial, trader, etc), you'll have different things to do to serve your people and government, and you'll see more or less action based on your initial choices. You can take your ship anywhere in the galaxy via jump points and wormholes, though you won't always meet friendly faces. You are not limited to the coldness of space; you may enter the atmosphere of planets and moons and land on their surfaces as well. Many planets and moons in Sol (including the moon), as well as in other systems can be visited, and they all have their own unique climates and topography (just don't attempt water landing...). Some planets and moons are empty, while others have cities and bases on their surfaces.
Commanding a starship is the most complex aspect of the game. Your bridge crew help control ship operations, and your personnel work to keep the ship and its crew in good shape. Medics help your crew recover from injuries, while engineers repair, replace, and upgrade vital ship components. Marines are used to defend your ship against boarding parties and to prevent prisoners from escaping, or they could be sent to attack enemy bases on planet surfaces or capture space stations. As a commander, you are not limited to the bridge of your ship; you could choose to pilot a shuttle, fighter, or ATV (typically used by marines on planet surfaces). If you want, you could even walk around on the outside of your ship or fight on a planet's surface.
Your starship has many important facilities and systems on board that can be damaged in the course of a battle or in hostile environments. If your medbay is damaged, wounded personnel may not be able to recover as quickly. If turbo lifts are disabled, your crews may not be able to get from place to place quickly. Some facilities and systems are more important, such as life support or nuclear reactors, while others can wait until later, like research labs. Your starship also requires fuel to power its systems; radine is needed for nuclear reactors, plutonium for shields, and irridium for cloaking devices.
When you command a carrier, you have fighters that can fly in space and in atmosphere, and are used to protect your carrier as well as seek out enemy targets. Carriers are slower and have less firepower than cruisers, but they make up for it with the increased marine capacity, a cloaking system, and the presence of fighters. Both cruisers and carriers can carry shuttles, which, though unarmed, are good for evacuating personnel, deploying mining drones to collect minerals, rescuing other units, and towing ships.
If you choose to play as a fighter pilot or a marine, the game is much less complex. Both may be deployed from carriers, space stations, or planet bases and engage threats to their assigned base or conduct strike missions against enemy targets, depending on what type of pilot or marine you are. All marines are assigned jetpacks.
BCM is best played in a roaming campaign which permits you the ability to travel the universe and do what you want. BCM also features a number of scenarios to help you practice playing in different situations, and a full campaign (though the missions are incredibly difficult, even for seasoned veterans of the game).
The only real problem with BCM is the incredibly steep learning curve. The best way to learn BCM is by playing as a cruiser or carrier commander because it offers you the ability to try everything the game has to offer. A copy of the manual is also important. Another problem, albeit a minor one, is that certain castes don't play very well in BCM, such as science, police, or explorer. Everything in BCM is in real-time, so you may have to let your ship land on some uninhabited moon somewhere while your mining drones harvest minerals or your crews rest; nothing will happen while the game is not running, so you'll have to keep it active during that time. BCM does not take to being minimized very well, so you'll have to use another computer to do things if you want your ship to continue operating.
Features:
• Ground Breaking Seamless Space and Planetary Terrain Engines, Graphics Support up to 1280 x 1024 in 32-Bit
• Advanced DirectX Support Including Hardware T&L for Supported Cards, Roam, Campaign, Instant Action and Training Scenario Play Modes
• Fully Freeform and Dynamic Universe, Huge Universe w/More Than 200 Planets and Moons In Over 100 Space Regions. Space, Planetary and Vehicular Combat Options as well as 1st Person
• Choose From 6 Careers, Incl. Combat Pilot or Space Marine. Choose From 12 Races or 13 Castes, Including Military, Assasin, Trader. Choose From 9 Carriers, 10 Cruisers, 8 Transports, 24 Fighters On Planets and In Space.
• Choose from 4 Gunships and 7 Ground Combat Vehicles on Planets, Over 60 Space Stations and 50 Star Bases to Trade With, Defend, or Capture. Various First Person Weapons Incl. Sniping Arsenal. Orbit to Planet Bombardment.
More Images:
You can see around 35 images of the game HERE via a slideshow, the marine images show the game to be quite old by today’s standards, but others such as the space flight images look nearly as good as you see today
Download:
The game can be downloaded via the developer’s home site. You’ll find several mirror links HERE
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Strange Adventures in Infinite Space:
Campy posted this a few months ago. I though I’d add it to the free games project as well> (thanks again for the heads up on this one Campy):
Quote:
Cheapass Games is known by board-game aficionados as a publisher of simple, fast, and surprisingly fun games with fairly low production values and very low prices. Strange Adventures in Infinite Space translates almost everything that is fun about this type of gaming to the computer without feeling like a computer port of something you'd have found 20 years ago in Dragon magazine. Paradoxically, the concept and mechanics of Strange Adventures are very similar to those of the old magazine games. The graphics are extremely dated, and the sound is minimal, but the basic idea and implementation are outstanding.game's concept is simple: You're presented with a playing field of roughly 15 stars. Your task is to explore as many of them as possible in 10 years, bring back as many valuable artifacts and exotic life-forms to your home planet as you can, and defeat as many aliens as possible along the way. Traveling from star to star is measured in days, and passing through nebulae significantly increases your travel time, so you have to plan your travels somewhat. Once you reach an unexplored system, you are presented with an encounter. It can be an alien race, an artifact, a new life-form, or perhaps a friendly starship that will join your flotilla. As you proceed from system to system, you collect your findings and fight (or trade with) aliens in preparation for bringing your booty back to your home system.
Your starship has upgradeable components that you can improve as you find new items in your travels. Many of the things you find will be useful to you on board your craft. Early on you have basic weapons, shields, and drives, but after a few chance encounters with some new ships, as well as the acquisition of a new weapon or two, your little armada can become quite formidable. Because this is completely random, you'll find some games where you're completely on your own, and others where you're a miniature fleet admiral. Part of the fun of the game is taking advantage of opportunities to fight when they're presented to you by chance.
Starship combat involves a pause-able real-time system that takes weapon ranges, ship speed, and component types into account. There are a number of alien races you can encounter, and there is even a combat simulator in which you can test out various weapons and strategies against different enemies. One of the most amusing episodes we experienced was the sight of a ship being harassed by a single tiny fighter. Because the ship was only armed with slow missiles, it could never get them to hit the fighter, which kept outmaneuvering the attacks. However, the fighter could not inflict enough damage to punch through the larger ship's shields. The result was a standoff that was as whimsical as the game itself.
The randomness of the game makes it difficult to plan a strategy, since so much depends on what your encounters present to you. If you're lucky to find an improved interstellar drive early on, you'll likely be able to explore most of the planets and get a high score. However, it's quite possible that at some point on your return journey you'll run into a previously undiscovered black hole and have to choose between turning back and going a different way or proceeding and possibly being blown up. Since the game penalizes you heavily for taking longer than 10 years to carry out your mission, you'll seriously hurt your score if you retreat, so you have little choice but to proceed. These types of random encounters make Strange Adventures seem a bit like an adventure game, where you don't quite know what's going to happen and are in a sense just along for the ride.
The game's short length is what makes it so engaging. In a longer game, the random nature of the encounters and lack of player input would become frustrating, but since you can finish a game in five to 15 minutes, you can always just start another one immediately afterward. Strange Adventures is an addictive little game much like Bejeweled or Tetris, but instead of being a puzzle, it's a little adventure that you can lose yourself in for a few minutes at a time. For $15, it's a great buy that will end up being one of those games you keep running in the background and fire up for a while when you need a break. Designers Rich Carlson and Iikka Keranen have managed to capture the feeling of "what will happen next?" that marked gameplay in very early computer games, with a style that is attractive today.
Reference accessed HERE December 09
Download :
You can download the game HERE
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