Customer Reviews

Terminus

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Terminus looks like a simple Space-Sim, but it has several excellently executed features which place it ahead of the competition. It's most noticeable features are the Newtonian Physics model and the ability to configure your ship. Newtonian physics means that if you keep thrusting, you'll keep accelerating. It also allows for some amazing maneuvers to be performed such as sliding and circle-strafe firing patterns. The ships in Terminus are fully configurable, allowing you as a player to decide what weapons and what systems you want on your hull. However, the most impressive features of Terminus are beneath the surface. One is its NPC modeling. The characters you interact with remember your actions and can become staunch allies or bitter enemies. It also has a persist ant universe, meaning that things keep happening in other parts of the game even when you aren't present to see them happen. These two together mean that if you make an enemy early on, he'll remember you and may well come after you later. But if you saved another NPC and she's in the area, there's a chance she'll swoop in and save you. These features are outside of the scripted campaign series that's included. There's also a multi player mode in which you can fly the campaign missions (from any of the factions perspectives), fight in a death match, play space-hockey or just start the universe and let people fly trading missions, pirating runs or mercenary hits. Overall, this game stands out for its excellent play control (once you've got the physics model down), HUD, sound and eye-candy. See www.stationterminus.com for more information on the game and download locations of the demo.

Terminus was a brilliant idea. To create a space flight simulator that relies on true Newtonian physics is intriguing; it provides a more realistic experience regarding what piloting a spaceship would actually be like. For a time, it is fascinating to rotate your ship freely without changing your velocity, and use fuel only for acceleration and decelleration. However, after playing it this way for a while, you have to ask yourself: is realism really what you want?

The largest effect of the true physics model is to force you to rely very heavily on your navagation computer and systems. Stopping your ship is now done by touching a key and letting the computer handle it. Docking your ship is similarly computer-controlled. Even in combat, you fight through the computer's guidance systems: it provides a lead line and aiming cursor for you to shoot at, and the position of the enemy ship soon becomes irrelevant. The challenge of fighting becomes your precision in aiming your weapons inside the little circle drawn by the flight computer. Often, you get the impression that your PC would be doing a better job flying the ship without you.

Another much-lauded feature that has mixed results is its persistent, active universe. Events occur whether or not you are presant, and your presence in many battles and missions is not key to their success or failure. Realistic? You bet. Fun? Well, not really. When your actions become unimportant, you play a more minor role in the game, and you experience far less enjoyment. It is more fun to have the thrill of leading the great assault on Battleship XYZ than it is to fire a couple missiles while the computer-controlled ships do all the work.

There is a good side to this openness: the freedom of choice. If you strongly dislike linear games, then Terminus may be ideal for you. You can mine asteroids in a remote section of the Solar System as easily as you can fight for Earth or be a pirate. Your path is up to you. Remember, however, that because each of these paths is so open and unscripted, you will not experience a rich storyline if you take advantage of this freedom. Your adventure is what you make of it, and no more.

Another feature that had the potential to be great was the ship editor. With this interface, you can purchase components and construct your own ship part by part. Unfortunately, the rules for which parts can go in which ship slots are often unclear, and you may find yorself filling slots with unnecessary pieces. Additionally, there are a variety of energy, fuel, and systems components that must be included in our ship designs, but it is easy to forget one because they do not have an easily apparent function on gameplay. The game will simply tell you your ship is not complete, and leave it to you to guess which part needs to be added. The process of testing different combinations of parts in various ship slots is a waste of time (and credits) that could have been avoided through better documentation on how to build a ship.

There is a long manual included, containing more info than most game manuals do today. However, there are so many controls and aspects of Terminus that even a manual of this hefty size is incomplete. As noted above, it leaves out the details on how to build ships, and you will find numerous other game functions and controls that you wished were better-documented in the manual.

Terminus is a multi-platform game, and each box contains everything necessary to get the game running under Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, one way this is done is by making the game's music into standard audio tracks on a separate CD. To play music while you fly through space, you need the music CD in the drive. This means that all game data must be copied to your hard drive to leave the CD drive open for music. This, the minimum install takes up over 700 megabytes of space, an incredible amount of data copied to you disk. The advantage is that you do not need a CD in the drive to play (if you don't want music), which is a rarity among large modern games.

Multiplayer support may be the strength of this title. Wandering around a universe that proceeds, indepedent from your actions, is much more fun when you have companions to wander with you. You can cooperate with other human players to achieve greater results and have a greater affect on your world. Alternately, you can fight with other human players, or one person can become a merchant and the other a pirate.

Interactions with real people become all the more essential due to the flat, lifeless nature of the NPCs. Anyone you talk to in a starbase or elsewhere never once seems alive, or to be really conversing with you. Rather, it is like a series of little speeches that they deliver, and you select the speech you want to hear from a menu of choices desguised as your responses to their words.

The version of the game in the box has a significant number of bugs, but they are almost all addressed by a patch currently availible from Vicarious Vision's web site. Downloading the latest patch at http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/downloads_frame.htm and installing it should deal with most issues you may encounter.

Terminus is an interesting game, with several new features and concepts that are unusual to the genre. There are many controls and you have an interesting flight system. However, when all is taken into account the game is not much fun. It does not really seem like a game. Instead, it seems like an experiment in creating a realistic flight engine and a realistic persistant universe in which the player is mostly irrelevant.

This is, hands down, the most detailed and realistic space combat game I've ever seen. The movement and physics seem completely true to a zero G environment. Add an evolving political story that's affected by your actions, or inactions, and you've got one immersive enviroment. I dropped one star due to a few bugs to be worked out, but the company is fixing them as they're being reported.

When I first loaded the game it did not work, it took a lot of reading the Terminus website to understand. I figured out that I had to select a different option to play the game. Once I started playing the game it was great. Graphics and interface or top notch, the best I have seen. After awhile the game gets boring just flying around and mining stuff, so you pretty much have to start wasting other ships, and doing the missions, or even play the story line. Again the Graphics are GREAT! All in all, I lost intrest in the game, because you just do the same stuff over and over, but it is a great game and takes up alot of time. And for me it is the best space game I have played. It is a game to buy so you can play it on those rainy days.

Excellent install! I'm running Terminus under Mandrake 7.1 with 3dfx video & a SBLive board. The glide driver works great (2.x) for the graphics. One note however; you will need the latest creative drivers for linux to get the sblive sound to work right, AND get the latest Terminus patch. The patch provides better sound support. VVisions provides excellent support and have definite winner here for the Linux community. Have fun and enjoy! (I don't do windows!). The game play is great!

Terminus isn't a new game. Let's be clear on that, up-front. Let's call it "mature." Still, since the whole "space sim" genre seems to be in hybernation at the moment, this remains one of the better products still out there. The graphics may not be up to the potential that 2010 graphics might provide (were there any new space-sims coming out these days) but they're perfectly acceptable. The "extras" in the game aren't what you might get from a full-hollywood-cast Electronic Arts extravaganza, either... and yes, the game would have been helped out a bit by inclusion of some of that "Wing Commander IV" style gameplay-framing... but if you've got a good sense of imagination, it's entirely acceptable.

I originally bought it to run on a Linux machine I was building at the time, running Redhat 7.2. And that's one of the more notable aspects of this game... the game, as-shipped, provides for Windows (32-bit), Linux, or MacOS installation. The game comes on three CDs. The first is the installer for the game (with all assets, and the three different executables), the second contains the videos (again, not "Wing Commander IV" level stuff, but worthwhile anyway), and the third contains some nice, atmospheric "space sim" music on a standard music CD. The sim accesses the music from this disk during gameplay, in a pre-established fashion... but if you leave the CD out, it will simply play without music (which is my preference anyway, honestly).

The game's narrative isn't as well-established as Origin and Electronic Arts managed with the WC3/WC4/WCP games. You don't get Mark Hamill and an all-star cast explaining what's supposed to be going on before each mission. So, for those who don't like to read, or to think... and only want to be "spoon fed," they'll become frustrated. But in real life, you seldom get the sort of "you're the new arrival, here's a full-motion video of you and your cool friends, now go save the universe on your first day" experience, do you? So I find this refreshingly realistic. You need to read the "newspapers" to follow events...

As with all games of this sort, you have missions which have been written in advance, but you also get some "auto-generated" ones, useful for gaining experience and for developing your reputation, but not critical to the overall plotline. "Reputation" is handled slightly differently in this game than in most similar games... it's not "per-faction" necessarily. Yes, if you repeatedly attack the police forces or the military forces, you'll end up seen as a hostile by that entire faction, for example, but it's far more specific than that. Every NPC pilot in the whole "dynamic universe" remembers your interactions with them. So a character you go out of your way to rescue early on in your career may end up coming to your aid when you need them most later in your career... and conversely, a character who you treat badly will remember that as well, and will either ignore your pleas for help, or may actively attack you. And these characters don't remain static, either... a low-ranking character on a small, weak may be in control of a much powerful ship later on.

The physics are VERY nice. I know that some people want to fly spacecraft as if they're world-war-2 fighters... but this is just wrong. This game addressed this issue very nicely, and while other games have tried the same general approach, I think that this game's "Newtonian physics model" is probably the best out there. While some games provide basic "aircraft-style control" but patch in a few "pseudo-newtonian" effects (like the Wing Commander "slide" manuevers), the only other game to handle Newtonian physics on a par with this would be the original "Independence War" (and that's flying a larger vessel with a full crew, not a small fighter, patrol craft, or freighter, so it's quite a bit different style of gameplay). I put "I-War" and this game on very much the same level of "outstanding space-sim modeling."

It's not what you may be used to... but once you get the hang of the "reality-based physics," you'll discover that it permits you to use totally different tactics and flying styles than you may be "pre-programmed" to think in terms of. A really good HOTAS-style joystick system (stick, throttle, rudders, and lots of buttons and additional axes) will come in VERY handy, by the way...

Yes, this is a SIMULATION... not an "arcade game." So if you have no patience, and just want to "blow things up real good," don't bother. Yes, there's plenty of combat in this game, but it's the sort of combat where you need to use your brain, not just your trigger finger.

If you buy this... you'll want to go to a site called "terminus point." Run the game once... yes, the video's audio will "skip". Get the 1.81 "official patch" first, and run the game with that... again, the sound will "skip." At this point, either use compatibility mode (Win98 compatibility works, though you're better off doing a custom compatibility fix using Microsoft's Application Compatibility Toolkit, setting "Single Processor Affinity" and "Win Race Condition Fix" fixes with no other "Win98-related" fixes in place), or better yet, get the "Terminum Point Edition" patch.

Go to the "Terminus Point" website (google it). There are four Windows versions... I recommend the "plain" Win32 one with no CPU-specific optimizations, though there are three "CPU-specific" versions there as well. Install the TPE version, and get rid of the old start-menu shortcuts (you won't be running the original executables again). This requires no "fixes" of any kind, resolves a few other minor bugs as well, and give you updated online-play capability (if you want that).

Is Terminus "Perfect?" NO, not by a long shot. But a decade after it came out, it's just gone back onto my computer, and I'm about to start playing again... and the number of games that I can say that about isn't a particularly long list! I wish that there were more current releases in this genre, but until the remakes of Lucasarts' "X-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" games see the light of day, I suspect that this genre will continue to hybernate. And that means finding the best older games.

Terminus remains one of the best.

Play the game. Love the Game. Live the Game. That is a simple rule for anybody that plays any form of RPG.

It's really a very nice game. Although most people THOUGHT they were decived by the RPG, it has great Role-Playing value. Especially if you are insane! MOST of you people think that an RPG means that you start with a character at level 1, and through the course of the game gain levels and EXP. This is true for Terminus too, except the character gaining levels is YOU. the person you play is changed and changes by how you play. And, if you have two or more computers hooked up with freinds over, you can talk for hours and hours about how you missed the Caution light for hitting the Gate! (Ouch...)

This game is the best game i have ever played in my life. It was totally woth the money!!

This game was not worth the money. The "advanced physics" in the game only make it harder to manuver, although it does have options for how realistic the physics are ... but they don't work. The action in the game isn't great, it's pretty slow, plus you can't tell enemy ships apart from ally ships. The is just pretty slow. The graphics aren't even all the impressive. For all you gamers out there... this game isn't worth ...bucks!

I give this game one star; not because it's a terrible game. In fact, if you're looking for a boring space/flight sim, then this is the game for you. I give it one star because on the box it's billed as "an epic space combat rpg." Notice the "rpg" in that sentence? Guess what; this is NOT a role playing game. At least, not in any meanigful sense. I bought the game to enjoy an immersive role-playing experience, but this is just another "pick a mission, fly around shooting things up, and then come back and pick another mission" game. Another problem is that the game doesn't seem to really work well with Windows ME, so if that's your OS, beware possible problems. I bought this game today, and I'm returning it tomorrow.