So why am I blogging? Well, I did the start the game up. An update came out for the game this morning that implemented Apple’s whizzy new anti-aliasing and I thought I’d check out the difference. So here are two screen shots, one taken before I downloaded the update and one afterwards.

Before.

After.

It’s like night and day! It’s practically a whole new game!

Ah, exclamation marks, the punctuation of the sarcastic internet tosser.

Maybe I should have zoomed in on my space ship a bit before taking the pictures. Still, the grid lines are less jagged. And… um…

NEXT: I actually play the game long enough to get in a fight, die and put the game down for another three months. Probably.

I love my space ship when it's not blowing up.

So time to dump it from my iPhone?

Well, no, because I tried it again and got sucked in. Took a while to relearn the interface, but I got there without having to restart. Still died horribly whenever combat happened, but I decided to try and stay out of fights and spread my religion quietly and without bother. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that, though. I need to try and convert people in enemy space now.

It’s a worry.

I got a lovely new ship today. Much more powerful than the one I started with.

My only criticism so far is that there’s not much penalty for dying. When you use a warpgate to travel to a new system – which you do often – that acts a checkpoint for your progress. I’ve never lost more than about two minutes of play through dying and that cuts away the tension that should be a part of exploration and combat. I’m not sure if I’d like a roguelike system of permadeath – though it does appeal to me and could maybe be added as an option, along with high score tables – but maybe some system where you lose half your money, or something like that.

You'll want to play it zoomed out, but that doesn't do justice to the excellent ship models.

You fly around a huge galaxy, completing missions, mining asteroids, buying and selling goods and upgrades and generally trying to avoid fights as much as possible in your puny mining ship. Well, that’s what I’m doing so far. I’d like to make my name as a pirate at some point, I think, but I’m a bit worried that I’ll die horribly if I try.

When you enter combat the screen swirls in an RPG-manner and takes you to another view, where your ship flies around automatically and you press buttons to fire your weapons when they’re ready. There’s an update coming to change things a bit, but while it’s not incredibly interactive it’s fine the way it is now. Just don’t expect to be dog fighting, avoiding enemy fire and using flying skills to take down ships better than your own.