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Good evening gamers and gamettes! A new indie game called Starbound has showed up in a big
way this month. After its recent open beta release, Starbound has shot up to the 14th
most played game on the steam network. So what's all the fuss about? Why is a game that
has no character limit on names, bad guys straight out of Pokemon, and more game crashing
bugs than Dead Island so enormously popular? Maybe it's because it's a *** good game.
Full stop.
Starbound is usually billed as Terraria in space; it has the trendy Minecraft triad of
exploration, crafting, and destructible environments. As soon as you start you get to choose from
six different races with a seventh on the way. You've got Hylotyl, fish people who are
pacifists and excel at being eaten by the other races, Avians for those of you who regret
being born with testicles, and Novakids. I hope you like how they look because all of
your friends are going to start playing them as soon as they're released. If you're wondering
how race is going to affect gameplay the answer is that it doesn't yet, so when I play with
my friends we all pick different races and tease the *** out of each other.
You get your own spaceship right off the bat, but it's out of fuel so you have to land on
the nearest planet to go get some. It's a good thing warp-capable starships from the
future can run on wooden logs like a steam powered train from the 19th century. I don't
know what the trees in Starbound are made of but if they're capable of powering faster
than light travel you might want to be careful when you chop them down. Everything is destructible
in this game, even your ship. Feel free to punch a hole right into the freezing vacuum
of space while you redecorate. It doesn't affect you at all. So I guess if you can't
find any fuel you could always swim to the next planet.
There are loads of different biomes in this game: you've got earthlike forests, alien
flower planets, mushroom biomes, Japan. Starbound even has a questing system, and I'm betting
that modders are going to have a field day with it because the developers didn't get
much use out of it. Right now you pretty much get your starting quest out of the way before
Skyrim-like ADHD kicks in and before you know it you're on the other side of the galaxy
trying to gather up enough bricks to build a giant ***.
There just aren't a lot of quests in the game right now, and that's probably because pretty
much everything in Starbound is randomly-generated, and the engine is pretty good. Villages don't
spawn in the middle of the ocean at least, or with gravel in front of all the doors.
Seriously, villages have been in minecraft for how many years and this still happens?
What do the Minecraft developers do all day? *** Swedes.
Anyways you can dig for ages through massive underground caverns. So that's where the pit
from 300 leads. And it has huge variety of sickly sweet monsters. The rule here is trust
no-one: the cuter the monster is the more likely it'll stomp on your nuts until they
pop out your eyes. Once you get enough fuel you can duck out of whatever hellhole you
spawned in. Keep exploring and you'll come across ruins and NPC towns--some of which
are so xenophobic that they'll execute you on sight. "Hello there, my name is--BAM."
What the hell? But then some of the time villagers will trade with you, or look on helplessly
on while you ransack everything that isn't nailed down. And then mine and pocket whatever
is nailed down. Heh, later suckers.
Let's talk about crafting. Frankly in Starbound it's a step backwards. Everything shows up
in this giant list which has the advantage of teaching you what items you'll need to
make something without having to tab out to check the wiki, but it also makes the whole
system feel a lot like working in microsoft excel. Wouldn't it be nice if the game let
you arrange your materials, use tools on them, required timing or precision--in other words
turned crafting into a fun minigame instead of making it feel like homework? To top it
off anything that isn't decorative is going to require pixels to craft---a universal form
of currency that drops from every monster you kill. The fact that you have to grind
for cash in addition to materials is causing some grumbles in the community, and it does
get annoying once you're on your second or third character and you have all the items
you need but you still can't build anything. The only way to trade pixels with players
to convert them into voxels which causes a 40% loss, and if you like adventuring with
your friends your costs go up because you have to build multiple sets of equipment for
everybody. And pixels are the only thing you lose when you die, which means there's almost
always a shortage of them.
Speaking of adventuring, Starbound uses traditional mmo parties which lets you see your friends
health and comes with the unbelievably useful feature that lets you teleport to any party
member's ship. This means that, surprise, you don't have to use cheat codes just to
play online. Multiplayer characters are stored locally as well so if you want to you can
play by yourself, build up your character and then bring that same character with all
of his equipment onto a server and act like you're better than everyone. You call that
a sword? Look at that hick piece of ***. It looks like you nailed a piece of aluminum
siding to a block of wood. That sword sure reminds me of your marriage Jerry you ding-***
douchenozzle. It's great.
The combat system is about as simple as it gets. Swing delays cut down on button mashing,
thankfully, but the AI runs a typical "shortest route to target" routine with very little
variety or tactics. Sure some weapons have special, secondary effects and there are shields
and dual wielding but blocking is automatic so combat really just boils down to positioning
and smashing the mouse. There are monsters everywhere and the danger of it is exciting
at first, but it gets old quick. It's not long before your eyes start to cross from
the repetition, and it's not like you care what you're fighting since they all drop the
same loot. But that's doesn't mean it's too easy. Be prepared to die a few times when
you first get started.
Do you remember the call of duty effect, where after you got hurt the game smeared jam on
your screen and you had to crouch down and shove the controller up your bum for awhile
before the game would allow you to keep playing it? Minecraft had the same problem when Mojang
introduced their Gary Busey-stupid health regeneration system, forcing you to shove
a bushel of carrots down your throat in every fight, punctuated by standing in a hole for
so long that you began to ponder all the other things that you could have done with your
life. So at first I couldn't have been happier to discover that there is no natural regeneration
in Starbound. It certainly isn't tied to food: you have a hunger bar and if it goes to zero
you die. That's it. Of course without any benefit beyond postponing the guillotine the
hunger system is just added tedium as you're forced to mindlessly stick food in your mouth
every 15 minutes or the game will just arbitrarily kill you. Sure it's realistic, but so is doing
my taxes. The same is true of the temperature system; initially you might welcome the added
depth of being able to freeze to death until you realize that it's just another mechanic
that forces you to stand around and do nothing while you wait near a campfire to warm up.
The fact that you don't regenerate naturally is a step in the right direction, and it does
mean that even low level monsters can threaten a well-geared player after awhile. But as
it turns out it's possible, even easy to regenerate, you just have to sleep in a bed. If there's
anything that should be added to a list of things that's likely to bore gamers and should
not be included, sleeping has got to be one of those things. There's really nothing to
do except sit and wait for your health bar to fill up. And because there's different
types of beds with different speeds in the beginning healing is way slower than it is
in other, similar games, just tab out and go to the bathroom, read a book, watch the
lord of the rings extended cut and by the time the hobbits finally leave the shire you'll
be topped off (clip with subtitle: this is playing in real time, zoom in on health bar).
Which not only means that you've got to carry a ridiculous bed, including mattress and bedpost
around with you in your backpack but you've also got to rely heavily on bandages. You'll
run through more of these than the red cross did after the hulk ate new york (picture).
The music in Starbound is phenomenal. We're talking Chrono Trigger quality here. That's
important when you're starting a big building project and all you really have to attend
to is the music.
If you're trying to decide whether you should buy Terraria over Starbound, personally I
like Starbound better--this despite the fact that Starbound is still in beta. Uh oh, here
come the Terraria fanboys, windmilling their tiny swords in rage! Look, both games let
you bomb your friends back to the stone age, so Terraria is a great game in its own right,
but Starbound came second which means that it's had a chance to fix some of Terraria's
fundamental problems. They even added the ability to swim, because seriously Terraria,
what the ***? My friends and I would drown each other three times in an hour, and sometimes
it was even by accident.(highlights clip). Of courseStarbound is still buggy as hell,
and I know it's still being worked on, but they're asking for your money right now which
means that beta is just a label. Even quitting crashes the game. So does the music system--which
lets you automatically synchronize with other players and form a band. Of course someone
has already modded in the portal song. And a Youtuber with the amazing screen-name "***
Rhinoceros" took it a step further and made a raining men mod. First thing's first I guess.
It's pretty easy to max out in Starbound. I left the server on for a day and one my
friends got all the way to the endgame in less than eight hours. I suppose I'd describe
Starbound as casual-friendly, if I wasn't worried that casual friendly is a euphemism
for having less depth than a Japanese kiddie pool. Starbound does have more depth than
that of coruse; there are logic gates and cables which means that it is possible to
build machines. Even those of you who never got into redstone should know that having
it is a big deal for the longevity of the game. In fact most of the flaws in Starbound
are just due to how young the game is. Sharing levels and custom maps hasn't really gotten
off the ground yet, and there's a paucity of good mods. Although the dev team is promising
greater mod support, we have heard promises like that before. So what's the final word?
Crafting games like Starbound allow for a lot of versatility--my favorite story is about
a player who built his house around another Starbound player's house, trapping the other
player inside. He'd throw down cans of tuna whenever his prisoner got hungry, and when
the prisoner threatened to have his clan raid the structure he only responded "It puts the
lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again." And of course Reddit is full of insane
structures that players have built already. In the end though, playing starbound just
made me want to go back to playing minecraft, which leaves me with a few questions: will
there be a Sethbling of Starbound, a guy who is able to make his living by showing us neat
machines? Will this game have a design team on par with the VoxelBox? I just don't know.
But I do know that Starbound is a fun game that's already hooked a lot of players, and
that alone is worth the price of admission. Now if you don't mind I've got to go slaughter
an alien army of militant penguins.