Support NeoGAF

[WasabiKing]

It's pretty rare in this day in age to find a shareware game that captivates your attention span for more than a week. In fact, it's hard to find shareware games, period. But damn near impossible to find is a shareware game that has both PC and Mac versions.

Escape Velocity: Nova is actually the 3rd game in a long-running series Mac gamers have had the pleasure of enjoying for several years. You are a low-life shuttle jockey ready to embark in the journey of your life. In EV:Nova, you have the opportunity to participate in up to 6 branching storylines involving 6 different factions.

You fly from galaxy to galaxy involving trade, and saving money to buy the rig of your choice. From there, you can customize your ship to be a battle ready fighter plane, or just shuttle cargo from planet to planet. Gaming is pretty open-ended, you can just be a trader or pirate and plunder anyone with no discretion.

I believe the shareware game lasts for about 30 days. You can still play, but there are ships out there that will bother you, haha... For just $30, you get total conversions for the first two games as well...

You can get the game at http://www.ambrosiasw.com/

 

[Deku Tree]

EV: Nova is awesome. Played it to death a few years ago. Lots of cool user mods.

 

[WasabiKing]

EV: Nova is awesome. Played it to death a few years ago. Lots of cool user mods.

It was nice of them to make a PC port. I didn't want to go buy a low end Mac just play this game.

 

[RiZ III]

I played the original on a friends mac a long time ago. Loved it. Played Nova a few months ago but couldn't get into it. Things are never as good as you remember them being.

 

[WasabiKing]

The game gets way better as you progress down any 6 of the storylines. I've got a nice alien cruiser flanked with 6 escorts and 12 fighter pilots in my carrier bay.

 

[WarPig]

I just downloaded Nova the other day when I found out the Windows version was out. Better than I remember. The expanded storylines and stuff are a ton of fun.

I played a hell of a lot of the original Escape Velocity on the Mac years ago -- I think I managed to pretty much subjugate the entire galaxy in that version. It was great when you got to the point where you were basically invincible, I completed the entire Rebellion storyline and wound up with access to their top-of-the-line capital ships, so I could just stroll around conquering every planet I came by. Ah, the memories...

DFS.

 

[adrockthekid]

Yay!

For someone who grew up into the gamer he is today off of old sharewares, it warms me heart to see that it's still around.

Pararena 4 lyfe!

 

[WasabiKing]

EV:N is definitely not as easy as EV was. One of the galaxies has somewhere close to 5000 ships defending its planets before they finally give up. But yeah, getting tributes in excess of 500,000 per day was pretty awesome.

I was primarily a Mac user in my youth, but there were some great great games that were released, and most by Ambrosia Software. Avara was a great 3D game that had the qualities of Deathmatch, running over 14.4Kbps lines. But Ambrosia, for the most part, made clones of classic games. It wasn't until further on down that they decided to publish/create some awesomely creative games.

DFS: you'd love the total conversions, for the most part, very faithful to the originals.

 

[WarPig]

EV:N is definitely not as easy as EV was. One of the galaxies has somewhere close to 5000 ships defending its planets before they finally give up.

Ah, too bad. I'm stuck at the "tool around in your shuttle" stage still anyway, though, I won't have any heavy firepower for a while yet.

DFS.

 

[WasabiKing]

Oh, I forgot to show off my current armada:

 

[EviLore]

EV Nova is really fun. Finally a game that truly captures the whole Privateer genre properly in the modern day.