Hardwar

by Peter Olafson
January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST

This Elite-like blend of sim, action, and strategy is set in the city of Misplaced Optimism-a giant mining colony on the frozen Saturn moon of Titan.

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Games have long tended to treat all comers as tourists: There's only room at the inn. Daggerfall's housing market changed that. It made your presence in the game richer, deeper, more physical. Even when you were halfway across the gameworld, you were also somewhere else. You always had a place to call home.

Hardwar has that quality, too. I don't feel like a visitor; I somehow have a stake in it. That's a novel sensation-and a pleasant one. You have to like a game that allows you to buy 3D real estate.

This Elite-like blend of sim, action, and strategy is set in the city of Misplaced Optimism-a giant mining colony on the frozen Saturn moon of Titan. The corporate backers pulled the plug and left the locals to find their own way. Ultimately, the settlement-built in a series of craters linked by tunnels-coalesced around two powerful factions.

You have no special attachment to either as the game opens. You're a freelancer trying to raise money to improve your lot in life (and escape from this desolate place) because initially, with your little ship and low-end equipment, you're not equipped to do much.

As a trader, you can buy commodities low and sell slightly higher. As a scavenger, you can race to recover the wreckage of dogfights. As an aggressor, you can go after the bounty the police have placed on wanted criminals. (Hey, what about mining?)

And, along the way, you'll get wind of something strange going on.

In those capacities, you'll spend much of your time flying through a thick pink mist-in the fashion of Konami's Killing Cloud-eerily illuminated with hazy halos from the running lights of other ships and the odd lightning strike. The graphics for the 3Dfx version (D3D, PowerVR, and software versions are also included) are appropriately murky.

And you will gradually get the sense of a small world in motion with a running monorail, ships going about their business, queues to enter and leave various facilities, and shifting commodities. You can even buy a base of operations-specifically, a hangar where your ship will be repaired automatically and you can set up shop.

That ship-a Silver-Y at the start-flies smoothly and elegantly, though I did experience a speed hit over a TCP/IP connection. (Modem, serial, and IPX network play for up to eight are also supported.) You won't often have to go searching for a given building, as your nav target can be acquired with a click from emails and a built-in roster of local businesses. With the right stuff installed, you won't even have to deal with docking-though you'll still have to watch these tiresome cut-scenes play through both on the way in and on the way out.

Now, on the downside, The Software Refinery might have taken more steps to build atmosphere. You can't communicate with other people. The ability to respond to email in different ways-� la Phantasmagoria 2-or to hail passers-by might have given the game more texture.

Finally, the little jewel-box pamphlet devotes exactly five paragraphs to background. Here's a case when it would have been nice to have a novella in the box. I'd like to know what's been going on.

After all, I'm buying a house in the neighborhood.