Excellent, I'd love another Colony Wars, maybe G-Police revival as well, I don't see a shot in hell of the Destruction Derby franchise being revived, and fingers crossed they don't make another Formula 1 game for years to come WipeOut needs a massive recreation, I like the idea of combat hover racing and technically the last game was beautiful in it's fluid design and fast pace, but the gameplay I feel needs to be improved upon I personally would like to see another Colony Wars game. Space combat games have been rare in recent years. Last one on consoles I can think of was Project Sylpheed, which was just okay. The brief bit of space combat we got was such a tease in Halo Reach, it made me realize that visually if someone wanted to devote a lot to such a game they could come up with something pretty great on next gen systems. Maybe it'll finally be the kick in the butt to get EA to develop a X-Wing vs Tie Fighter game now that they have access to Star Wars rights through Disney. Colony Wars and Shadow whatever sound like crappy PC exclusives.

Colony Wars: Vengeance. Release DateNovember 4, 1998.

Colony Wars is a boring RTS and Shadow a crappy indie side-scroller with artsy medieval based retro graphics.Gue1Do you know what you're talking about? Are you referring to a different Colony Wars game? Because the one I know of was a damn EPIC space shooter on the playstation platform that was way ahead of its time when released. If true and they revive this series on the PS4 well I'm not gonna lie.

That would be megaton-ish news for me. I LOVED the Colony War games. By the way I wish the space shooting genre would just hurry up and make a comeback on consoles. QUOTE='lamprey263'excellent, I'd love another Colony Wars, maybe G-Police revival as well, I don't see a shot in hell of the Destruction Derby franchise being revived, and fingers crossed they don't make another Formula 1 game for years to come WipeOut needs a massive recreation, I like the idea of combat hover racing and technically the last game was beautiful in it's fluid design and fast pace, but the gameplay I feel needs to be improved upon I personally would like to see another Colony Wars game. Space combat games have been rare in recent years. Last one on consoles I can think of was Project Sylpheed, which was just okay.

The brief bit of space combat we got was such a tease in Halo Reach, it made me realize that visually if someone wanted to devote a lot to such a game they could come up with something pretty great on next gen systems. Maybe it'll finally be the kick in the butt to get EA to develop a X-Wing vs Tie Fighter game now that they have access to Star Wars rights through Disney. Darkstar One on 360 was quite good.

Though repetitive. QUOTE='lamprey263'excellent, I'd love another Colony Wars, maybe G-Police revival as well, I don't see a shot in hell of the Destruction Derby franchise being revived, and fingers crossed they don't make another Formula 1 game for years to come WipeOut needs a massive recreation, I like the idea of combat hover racing and technically the last game was beautiful in it's fluid design and fast pace, but the gameplay I feel needs to be improved upon I personally would like to see another Colony Wars game. Space combat games have been rare in recent years. Last one on consoles I can think of was Project Sylpheed, which was just okay.

The brief bit of space combat we got was such a tease in Halo Reach, it made me realize that visually if someone wanted to devote a lot to such a game they could come up with something pretty great on next gen systems. Maybe it'll finally be the kick in the butt to get EA to develop a X-Wing vs Tie Fighter game now that they have access to Star Wars rights through Disney.

The last good space simish (not full on x3 style ) game I remember was freelancer and dark star 1 (which wasn't good). Ms disolved the freelancer team ugh. I would love to have a freelancer, elite, Wong commander, x-wing type game in modern graphics, not 2000 era per shader graphics. Bit it will probably never happen, star citizen is our only hope.

I adore WipEout, but sometimes I think I'm most captivated by what isn't in it. Critics often observe that the franchise helped establish PlayStation as a brand by ingesting the sexier bits of 90s pop culture, seizing on them as furnishings for coruscating slipways of chevrons and weapons pads. It's a convincing line, but it also implies that WipEout's world and fiction are just edgy graffiti, a blaze of album cover iconography aimed at kids who were far too hip for the SNES and MegaDrive.

That's not how I saw it. As a teenager - very definitely not too hip for video games - I'd have paid no small amount of money for a game set beyond the track, in the cities that glint above every murderous chicane or plunging straight. Touring 2097's Gare D'Europa, I'd take potentially suicidal time-outs mid-drift to brood over billboards and the skybox. Who owns this blimp, cheekily posed at the top of the first ramp to remind you of an impending hard left? Where is that train going? And why does everybody in the future drink Red Bull? I'd tried the stuff and thought it tasted like deodorant. What did these trendy future-people know that I didn't?

Mind you, perhaps the point is not to know - both because anti-gravity racing demands your complete attention, and because a universe you actually experience can't help but fascinate less than one that's held out of reach. This also seems true of Psygnosis's other great science fiction opus, Colony Wars, a deft compromise between space flight sim and arcade dogfighter, released for PS1 in 1997. The two franchises couldn't be more different in most respects - WipEout's artistic debts are to glowsticks, trashy corporate motifs and bass you can feel through the soles of your feet, while Colony Wars is a big soppy love letter to George Lucas. But in hindsight, they both make dramatic play of the tension between what happens inside and outside the playable environment.

An interview with Chris Roberts (no, not that Chris Roberts), formerly graphics programmer on Colony Wars and now working at Firesprite

Which aspects of the technology and development process behind the Colony Wars series are you most proud of, in hindsight?

The nicest thing about PS1 code was that it was fairly simple and compact - this meant that you could invest quite a lot of time in optimisation. Pretty much all of the graphics effects in Colony Wars 1 and 2 were hand-written in assembler and there was some nice code there for things like engines, lasers, even the star fields, that were very optimised and hadn't been done before on PS1.

What would you do with Colony Wars if you had the opportunity to make a sequel for the latest consoles and PCs?

I'd definitely like to see a more open world mechanic and a lot more progress and development of the player's craft, although that could start treading on the toes of some of the other space combat franchises out there. Graphically, I think a modern day Colony Wars could be stunning, especially with VR headsets.

Do you look at the procedural planet generation in No Man's Sky, or the sprawling pre-defined world of Elite: Dangerous, and think, yes, that would make sense for Colony Wars?

Procedural content is a really obvious route for space sims given the potential scale of the environment, with the precedent being the original Elite and its pseudo-random galaxies and planet descriptions.

I think a blend of procedural content with hand-crafted elements would work best for a narrative game like Colony Wars. I suppose the goal would be something like Skyrim in space - fairly open-ended with plenty to explore, but you can complete it.

WipEout's claustrophobia stems mainly from its choice of genre, of course. With Colony Wars it seems like more of a technical problem - as graphics programmer Chris Roberts and other project veterans noted a few years ago in a Gamasutra post-mortem, fitting all those ships and effects into memory was a struggle, and part of the game's brilliance is how it turns this into an advantage. Colony Wars gives you the claustrophobia of being a speck in the murk, ignorant of what the wider black is about to throw at you. The sense of insignificance that ensues is reinforced by the branching storyline, which treats the player's nameless character as a cog in the machinery of interstellar war.

Often, the threats in question would be nothing more terrifying than a trio of Imperial Navy fighters - the missions are perhaps a little over-reliant on paltry shoot-outs with such flotsam, though the hefty handling ensures that even these routine encounters feel exhilarating. Every now and then, though, the tides of infinity would wash up bigger prey. Perhaps my favourite mission in the original game occurs early on, with the player defending a gigantic, faceted bauble of a starbase while engineers labour to close a wormhole. It's one of your first few tangles with a Navy cruiser - a fearsome perversion of the USS Enterprise, with its dish-shaped hull and pristine blue-white engine nacelles.

Lumbering into the middle of the combat zone, the cruiser proceeds to leak death from every hardpoint while you buzz around it, shaving away at its defences with lasers and missiles. When the interloper finally falls, the rewards are noisy and considerable. Light gouts through fault lines for a beat, just long enough for your jaw to drop, then the entire model puffs apart like an Airfix model tossed into a jacuzzi. Psygnosis was the graphical powerhouse of its era, even prior to its association with Sony, and few things speak to the studio's mastery of PS1's GPU like the spectacle of a capital ship biting dust in Colony Wars.

Revenge of the Titans: Soundtrack About This Game At first they came from the skies, and we repelled them with hired spaceships on a shoestring budget! Now they’re back, and they’re sending their ground troops to destroy our bases – thirty-ton monsters with glowing eyes and slavering jaws! And we still don’t have any money! No one does retro chic like Puppygames. They are masters of this particular art. Total Biscuit. Puppygames has absolutely nailed the retro-chic vibe. Revenge of the titans.

Linger for too long over the cruiser's fall, however, and you'll miss the bigger bang further afield. For a second or two, a nightmare out of Lovecraft can be seen inside the wormhole, a Cthulhu-esque anthill of discs, spokes and portholes. Then the dimensional chasm snaps shut, the approaching behemoth vanishes, and you're briefly surrounded by super-accelerated debris. 'Warp hole has been closed,' somebody chirrups from the space station, clearly amused by your discomfiture. 'Navy Titan has been crushed.'

Popular now

Enable 2FA now.

But can't say 'exactly how many..can be supplied'.

But that hasn't stopped the fanart.

Capital ships are the chthonic deities of Colony Wars, the monsters that go bump far off in the game's endless night. They aren't just there to blow you away, though - they're a means of anchoring players in desolate, direction-less play spaces. 'One of the challenges with making games like this accessible is grounding the player in the environment,' Chris Roberts told me by email (he's now technical director at Firesprite, a studio founded by Sony Liverpool veterans). 'We always tried to give players a sense of 'up', so most of the large ships stuck to the same orientation in the same general XZ plane.'

The same thinking applies to many of the game's supposedly cosmetic touches, such as the interstellar particles that fly like spray from your own ship's prow, or the way light and shadow travel across the beige fronds of your cockpit, with its cleanly laid-out shield and hull health bars. The Colony Wars team's most lasting achievement is perhaps how these scene-setting elements add up into something nerdily in-depth, yet intuitive. They pull off the minor miracle of making a featureless void seem negotiable and almost tangible, without resorting to the spidery numerical distance and orientation read-outs of an older sim.

The glory of the individual assets themselves has, of course, waned as graphics technology has advanced. Modern space sims don't have to worry quite as much about that barrier between play space and wider universe, either. Armed with the latest engines and several hundred times the RAM, interstellar epics like No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous can show us things older titles would only hint at: the inside of the space station you're defending, or the ocean fauna of a planet that in Colony Wars would have served merely as a navigator's handhold.

Still, if the developers of these projects aren't obliged by technology to hem their visions in, I hope they'll remain mindful of what games like Colony Wars achieved by keeping certain things at a tantalising remove. It's great that we can now explore entire, procedurally generated galaxies without a break in flow, but we need our horizons, our hard-to-traverse or even outright impassable regions, if exploration is to carry any sense of risk or drama at all.