Privateer: ASCII Sector
Homepage | Download (2.2 MB)
Version: 0.4.7
License: Freeware
Rating: 
Today, after a considerable hiatus; today, on 1234567890-morrow; today, on the 1,740th anniversary of the burial of St. Valentine of Rome — Penguin Sightings returns!
And with it, an invitation to enter a galaxy of danger and adventure, a realm where fortunes are made and spaceships are sunk, a place where typographical symbols masquerade as interplanetary vehicles in a vast world of science fiction: the ASCII Sector!
Privateer: ASCII Sector is a space shoot-and-trade game, an open-ended experience where you complete missions to gain wealth and buy yourself better stuff. ASCII Sector is similar in many ways to the old Wing Commander: Privateer DOS game (right down to the names of the factions), but, besides offering a wider selection of equipment and quests, has one major difference — the graphics are all ASCII characters! I myself am a great fan of all ASCII stuff, but to those of you who prefer modern graphics, I say that the design choice of the game’s developer works quite well; as you’ll soon see.
Because this is a freeware game, rather than open source, there’s no need to compile anything. As long as you have the SDL and SDL_mixer libraries installed, all you need to do is extract the archive and run the binary entitled asciisec!
It begins with a decidedly non ASCII-looking menu, with a starfield background and the game’s distinctive title text. Merely click New Game, and you’re ready to begin. After entering your character’s name and gender, you’ll see a brief loading sequence, and then the text-based panorama opens around you to reveal the city on Basin, an earthlike planet in the Loye system. The flashing green dot in the lower left corner is you, and the green hashmark next to it is your spaceship, a battered old Tarsus. To move yourself around, use the arrow keys or numpad. Bumping into things or people (represented by other dots the same size, but of different colors, than you) allows you to interact with them. Walking into your ship, for example, allows you to take off — but don’t do it just yet, because there’s more to see and do right here.
Up the street leading away from the spacefield you’ll see a number of buildings of various description. Some places have a few more, and some a few less, but pretty nearly every planet in the ASCII Sector contains this same set of institutions. First, there’s the Shipyard. Here you can purchase better spaceships from the ship dealer (if you’re rich enough), or, using the Shipyard’s computer interface, you can buy and sell upgrades for your ship and repair damage received out in the wild universe. At the Exchange up the street, you can purchase various commodities — ranging from food, minerals and robots to illegal items like slaves and Brilliance — and then sell them on other planets for a profit, if the market is going your way. If you take a left you’ll come to the Autodoc, where you can have yourself stitched up after a fight, and then Equipment, where you can buy weapons and armor. Across the street is the Hotel, a capital place to spend the night for only a few credits.
But sleeping and hand-to-hand combat make up fairly small portions of this game — what you’ll likely be doing most of the time is receiving missions and then carrying them out. The next two buildings down the street are the Mercenaries and Merchants Guilds. Membership only costs a few thousand credits, and provides access to the most lucrative jobs available. However, you don’t have enough money on hand when starting out to join either of them, so you’ll have to find a few odd jobs, first, to get ahead. For this you go to the bar, in the northeast part of town. Many of the townsfolk and pilots you’ll meet aren’t much for conversation, and mostly want you to leave them alone. But some, known as “fixers,” have messages to give and mysterious parcels to send, and will pay you to run errands for them. If you press the ‘L’ key while on a planetary base, the game will pause and the name of anyone you hover your mouse cursor over is displayed. Fixers in bars have their title appended to their name, making it easy to know who to talk to and who not.
Once you’ve got a mission, you’ll probably want to start off and complete it right away. But first, press the ‘C’ key on your keyboard. This brings up your Quine4000: a personal computer that keeps track of pretty much everything for you. Here you can see your relations with the different factions of the ASCII sector, your reputation with various organizations, how much money and cargo you have, and what missions you’re working on now. You can also save and load your game from the Quine. I highly recommend doing so at every planet you land on, because it’s a rough world out there, and death is fatal.
And then it’s time to set sail. After buying an afterburner at the Shipyard (it allows you to double your ship’s speed by holding down ‘Tab’, at the expense of a little energy — a must have), walk into your Tarsus and take off. You’ll find yourself in outer space, with the planet Basin beneath you. Here you navigate by steering with the left and right arrow keys, and accelerating and decelerating with the vertical ones. Pressing ‘Home’ sets your engines to full blast, and ‘End’ shuts them off. You can communicate with other ships and planets (for requesting to land) with the ‘C’ key, and shoot your laser gun with the Spacebar.
And you’ll likely have to do a good deal of fighting: Retros, Pirates, and Kilrathi will kill you on sight, and outrunning them is pretty much impossible, unless there’s enough other, friendly ships nearby to distract them. The trick is to get as close as possible, hit them as often as possible from one side (I like the rear), and don’t let them shoot any one side of your ship too much. You can tell which way a ship is headed by the little plus sign in front of it — if your frontal shields are running low (you can see how they’re doing by looking at the indicator in the upper left corner) and the enemy is coming your way, steer to one side to let them hit you somewhere else. Your shields regenerate over time, so as long as Pirate ships don’t totally destroy a shield and start taking hits at the armor underneath, you’ll do alright.
But if you’ve accepted a mission, you’ve got places to go. And part of the fun is figuring out how to get there. While in outer space, you can press ‘N’ to bring up your navigation computer. This will show you a map of the current quadrant, with all its systems and their interconnecting paths. Hitting the Quad/Sys button will change the lefthand panel to show the current system, with its planets and jump points, and the Nav/Mis button swaps the displaying of navigation info and your quests, in the upper panel.
The planets are too far apart to travel between them manually, so your nav computer comes to the rescue. Click on a navigation point in the left-hand screen while in system view (or an adjacent system while in quadrant view), and your autopilot will target it. Then, after closing your computer and returning to the view of space around you, fly sufficiently far from the nearest planet that the AUTO sign on the left lights up. Now press ‘A’, and you’re on your way! The autopilot will take over, accelerating time, and returning you to manual control whenever you near another ship or reach your destination. If your mission takes you to another system (and it probably does), you have to steer your ship to a jump point that takes you there — or a jump point that takes you to a system that has a jump point that will take you there. When over a jump point, you can press ‘J’, and you’ll zap to the next system.
Then you can meet up with the ship to whom you’re carrying the message and talk to them (by means of ‘C’), or land on the planet where the person you’re supposed to meet is located, and find and talk to them (by walking into them). Collect your pay, and you’re on your way!
So that’s what Privateer: ASCII Sector is all about. Traveling, making transactions, and treating the enemy forces to a taste of your firepower. As you gain skill and wealth, you can buy new stuff and take on harder missions — it’s practically endless.
But there’s more! You can even write your own quests (stories made up of interconnecting missions, dialogue, and things like that), enriching the game further. Armed with a text editor and the Quest Maker’s Manual (found in the quests directory), you’ll soon be making exciting quests of your own. Press ‘Q’ any time you’re on a planet, and the quest dialogue will be brought up, where you can choose which quest to play. ASCII Sector includes one quest, as an example: run it, and then talk to any bartender to begin.
Privateer: ASCII Sector is a deceptively complex game, and it can take a while to figure everything out. But you can press ‘H’ at any time to see what commands are available, examine the player’s manual that comes with (some first rate documentation, folks), or even ask for help on the forums when you’re stuck. And with as active development as this game has got, it can only get better!
