SGJ Podcast #36: Delving into the Depths of Despai…er…Darkstar One

Ring of Boredom...
Ring of Boredom…

Hey folks, welcome to the latest episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast. This week — at Jim’s behest — we spent time looking at one specific game and talking about it’s…let’s say ups and downs. The game Jim chose was Darkstar One from 2006. Jim chose this because I’ve never spoken highly of it, and he wanted to find out why. Join us, won’t you?

You can also see the video we recorded below from the SGJ Twitch.tv channel:

We hope you enjoy either the audio or video versions of the podcast (or both, go crazy!). ;) We also invite you to subscribe to us via iTunes or RSS, and look forward to your comments below. Also, we’re opening up the floor to ideas/topics/guest you’d like us to cover, so if there’s something you’d like our podcast to cover, please let us know. Thanks for listening!

Episode #36 Show Notes:

Space Games Discussed:

Author: Brian Rubin

9 thoughts on “SGJ Podcast #36: Delving into the Depths of Despai…er…Darkstar One

  1. BTW, on the video, there is a problem with my audio being pretty loud. That’s because out skype recorder conflicted with the video recorder’s mic settings. We’ve sorted that out, so the next one won’t do that.

  2. Loved DarkStar one till I got to that one point where suddenly your in a station manning a gun with waves of bad aliens attacking. Couldn’t win that to save my life. You max out your ship to get it perfect to my design and then the station mission stops game progress. *sigh*. It is a great space game though. Periodically I break it out and try to beat it. Can’t say too many other games have stayed on my hard drive for several years….!

    1. Welcome to the comments bcasner, and I’m glad at least someone liked the game. ;)

      1. Bought the PC version when it came out because they hyped it up as a Freelancer killer. What a huge disappointment. Hard to believe this piece of crap came from the company that did Sacred 2. To add insult to injury, this game was ported to Xbox but Freelancer (a Microsoft property) was not!

        1. Welcome to the comments, Michael, and yeah, your comments pretty much mirror my feelings as well. Sigh.

  3. Well, I liked the game. Perfect entry level space/trading sim (jusy like GoF2). Still playing it. Not perfect (after a while, you follow the same pattern, in every system), but good. And very cheap nowdays.

  4. First of all, hello :)
    Second of all, I don’t get why is everyone bashing this game so hard, sure it has its problem, but it’s really fun. And the funny thing is that you bash it while praising Freelancer at the same time, and I felt that all the problems you say Darkstar One has are the problems I had with Freelancer. I mean, I am in the middle of the Freelancer story and so far the only mission type I encountered was ‘go kill pirates/the big bad named pirate/the big bad pirate space station’, whereas in Darkstar One there was at least a little bit of variety in the missions: you can kill pirates, but you can also haul cargo, escort merchants, take pictures of space and liberate systems. So does Freelancer get more variety later in the game, or am I missing something?

    1. Welcome to the comments matzieq! I think the thing with this game is that, since coming out several years after Freelancer and seeming to borrow heavily from its formula, many see this game as an also-ran, and not a very good one at that. I’m glad you’re enjoying the game, as it has a lot to offer if it clicks for someone, but for me and others, it’s just exceptionally unexceptional.

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