A thread that may be raised from the dead occasionally when I feel like reminiscing about old games.
I'll kick it off with a game that for me was so revolutionary, and probably couldn't be made today: Star Fleet 2 - Krellan Commander
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Star Fleet 2 came out in 1989 in the waning years of ASCII based games (before the Dwarf Fortress revival).
It was a game that, in its time, could have only been done in ASCII art. IT was so ambitious in its scope that the game would have required too much hard drive real-estate to be rendered in 2D sprites.
Star Fleet 1: The War Begins was a somewhat less ambitious game that set out to create a Star Trek experience in a PC game, and did a fairly good job of it for its time. It was fun, but fairly limited.
Star Fleet 2: Krellan Commander was released 3 years later and took the novel path of putting you in command of a star fleet commander for the enemy race, the Krellans (games version of Klingons). In a way, you really couldn't do a game playing Krellans the same way Star Fleet 1 played without it just being Star Fleet 1... you were already limited in ASCII art, and limiting yourself to the basic tasks of Star Fleet would just be the same basic game.
Star Fleet 2 had a huge list of new tasks and sub games to manage including land combat, ship boarding, hostage taking.. you even had an interrogation menu to manage how ruthlessly you wanted to press your hostages for valuable intel.
The game gave you a rather large sandbox to play in as an evil starfaring warrior race. I played a lot of hours in that game but never really won the game.
The game map included over a thousand star systems with planets to explore and conquer.
It would be decades before anyone really tried anything this ambitious again (if anyone ever really did), and it's mostly been lost to time because it was released during the last days of ASCII.
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