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In the future, after decades of war, the Weapco corporation, using its superior weaponry and AI driven craft, defeats both warring factions and becomes the most powerful force in the galaxy. You must take on the role of rebel pilot Chris who is attempting to overthrow the corporation. There are 4 solar systems containing several planets, where each planet represents a mission. Missions can be selected in any order. When travelling from one planet to another random encounters are possible. When all available Missions of a system are finished a boss mission appears. After that the player enters a new solar system. Between missions you can upgrade your ship and communicate with your allies who inform you of the tasks that must be completed. During a mission the player controls a space craft and can head in all 4 directions freely, trying to destroy enemy fighters or collecting items (escape pods, money, upgrades) left behind by destroyed enemies. In some missions computer controlled allies are fighting along. The Game is open source and based on libSDL. Consisting of 26 engaging levels spanning four planetary systems, this classic game will entertain for hours. Unfortunately, the original Project: Starfighter used images, sound effects, and music which were not properly licensed. As such, a freeware 2012 version of the game replaces those art assets with libre art assets. But that's not all; in addition to being legally distributable, this version has several other improvements over the original: Difficulty levels - Choose from several difficulty levels ranging from easy to virtually impossible. Want the original experience? A difficulty level called "Classic" is also available, which imitates the experience of the original Project: Starfighter; Better camera handling: The camera no longer exerts a mysterious force which slows down your movement, and it no longer boxes you into an arbitrary rectangle in autoscrolling levels. Additionally, if you're not moving, it now centers on your ship (except in Classic difficulty); Improved balance - Certain changes have been made to balance the weapons much better (except in Classic difficulty). Most significantly, the overpowered Charge Cannon has been slightly nerfed and made harder to use, making it less of a must-have than it previously was (but still very powerful); Defined character traits - The characters in the original Project: Starfighter were pretty much perpetually sullen and angry. Now, each character has a defined personality which is expressed both in the things they say and in their character portraits; Improved code quality - Several instances of magic numbers and other bad programming practices have been removed, making the code much easier to read. The code has also been fully converted from C++ to C; A myriad of bug fixes. Some examples include wrap-around bugs that occurred with ammunition, shop bugs which caused the sale prices of some items to be higher than their buy prices, and bugs which caused cheats to render certain missions unwinnable. |
