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One shot wonder

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is not really a replay game for me, but for the price I paid for it. I got every penny! This game has a lot of fun for us "sim" fans. There are a few flaws in the design (combat is horrendus) but other then those few, this is a great game! Consider when it was made and compare it to games today. It still stacks up in there!

Home run!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

A simulation and strategy game that is both amusing and graphic stunning. I would recommend this game to anyone who like simcity games.

Still a Favorite

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

A sim game set on an alien space station, StarTopia also has a great Douglas-Adams style sense of humor.

The player takes the role of an administrator, responsible for gaining revenue (in the form of energy) by convincing guests to spend money at the station. To do this, the player must keep the station running and build plenty of attractions for the guests. The station is divided into three decks - the technical deck where the more business-like events take place (housing buildings like Sick Bays, Research Laboratories, Docking Bays, and Security Control), the recreation deck where you will put most of the buildings that you want your guests to spend money at (such as various stores, hotels, and bars), and the biodeck, where you can conform the terrain to match your guests' particular preferences. There are a multitude of alien species (no humans, which is fairly unique). These range from the standard Gray aliens to the piggish Groulien Salt Hogs to the monk-like Zedem. Each alien race has a unique specialty - the Grays are best at medical pursuits, the two-headed Turakeen are great researchers, the Salt Hogs will do the dirty work that other races disdain, and so on. You can hire a guest (the more skilled he or she is, the more expensive he or she will be) and they will staff whichever building they prefer racially.

Most of your structures and equipment comes in pre-packaged boxes. Right clicking unpacks these boxes and gives you a blueprint. Some blueprints are solid structures that can't be changed, while others are modular rooms that can be made larger or smaller and must be filled with equipment to work. When laid down, the building will be constructed by your Scuzzers - maintenance droids that, depending on their model, will either walk, roll, or hover. You don't have control of the entire space station at first; it's divided into sections on each deck that you must pay energy to access (by opening the giant bulkheads that separate the compartments). Rival factions (which may be rivals either in a peaceful, financial sense or in a more violent and hostile sense) may exist on the station as well, and these rivals will have their own bulkheads in separate parts of the station.

There is a story mode, a sandbox mode (with many changeable variables), and a multiplayer mode (though whether or not it works with GameTap is questionable). There aren't a lot of recurring characters except for Arona, the greedy, swindling merchant who you have to rely on at certain points in the game.

The graphics have held up pretty well despite their age; the aliens and the design of the structures are still pretty neat looking and well done. As a sort of neat touch, the station is curved slightly (the entire thing is a donut shape) which can be kind of seen as you move through the various segments. The sound is really well done as well; there's a separate "voice" for every alien race, and the music changes depending on which level of the station you are on - quiet and serene on the engineering deck, wild and exciting on the pleasure deck, and on the Biodeck there's only ambient noises.

Out of all the "tycoon" games that I've played, this one is still my favorite and still the most unique. I would definitely say it is still a fun and viable game.

9/10.

One of the best games in the past few years!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 29 / 29
Date: July 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I knew before I brought the box home that I'd probably love Startopia. I love the Sims, I love the Dungeon Keeper series, and I'm a huge fan of science fiction. This seemed to combine my favorite game styles, adding in gorgeous graphics and a bevy of interesting aliens. I wasn't disappointed!

To start with, you get this GREAT send-off of 2001. If you haven't seen 2001 yet, rent and watch the DVD, and then watch the opening cinematics of this game. The graphics are incredible, and the whole thing is really funny. That's just to start!

The game gives you bulding power in a space station - you're trying to make the most interesting, hospitable and money-making space station around. You build power boosters to supply the raw energy for your structures. You get to build sleeping, eating, gaming, health, and other kinds of areas for your visitors. Taking it one step further than Dungeon Keeper 2, instead of just building a 'lair' for creatures to sleep in, you build the base sleeping area and then add in as many beds, lava lamps, and other items as you feel works well for your target audience. You even build recycling plants, turning litter and waste back into energy!

Each creature that comes to your starport has its own background, hobbies, skill levels, and more. You can hire people that seem interesting, and buy new items from travelling salesmen. Individuals can have criminal records that you can take into account. You can click on each creature and find out exactly how hungry, tired, bored, etc. it is at the moment, with cool animations.

The graphics are *beautiful*. Every room and item has its own animations which are very well done. Every race looks completely different from the others, and has its own characteristics. It's easy to get started, and as you go, you get space and more options available. The progression is very well thought out. Your robotic helper talks you through each stage with great deadpan humor, and helps out if you get stuck.

There are SO many little extras in this game that it would take hours to talk about them all. The security screens have us falling out of our chairs laughing, never mind certain character interactions, and a certain fuzzy pal/parasite, and much, much more. This is a game you can play for months and still be absorbed and finding new things.

HIGHLY recommended to any sim or Dungeon Keeper fan, and I have to believe that *any* gamer will find some aspect of this to hook you!

Wow! This one is worth having!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: July 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

....

The Game: In Startopia you are the manager of a torus shaped space station. Your responsibilities start out with some simple constructions and progress to more demanding arrays of resource management and defense/attack strategy. Concurrently, you must see to your alien's needs for love, fun, nourishment and rest.

Your station has three levels: the tech-deck, entertainment deck and biodeck. The tech-deck is where you build your industrial, medical and research structures and your most important item, your energy collector. Energy is the galactic currency and everything is traded in terms of energy value. The entertainment deck is where your aliens will go for fun and recuperation. There you will want to build pleasant diversions such as discos and casinos for your aliens to enjoy. Better entertainment facilities will attract more visitors. On your biodeck you determine the shape of the landscape, temperature and soil-moisture with a sweep of your all-powerful hand. Your workers will plant trees, bushes and cattails to name a few. You can harvest your plants for supplies that you can use or sell at a nice profit to a passing trader. Every plant yields different goods so there is plenty of experimenting to be done.

In addition to roaming the station to fill their needs, your aliens will provide you with an endless stream of humor. Security guards play asteroids on the security center screen and monks walk on water, to name a couple. Also, if you see a criminal being escorted by a security robot, do click on him to view the details of his crime, they are terribly funny!

Once the missions are completed, the gameplay doesn't stop but begins. The sandbox mode presents unlimited replay-ability and allows you to play against AI opponents. In both sandbox and multiplayer modes, you determine what the game's goals will be. You can opt for technologic advancement, total station segments, money or total score. You can pick one goal or a combination of goals. Truly, it is a very smart design.

Graphics: Startopia allow you to move the viewpoint anywhere in 3d space or view through the eyes of a roaming alien. There is a lot of detail on the stations' structures and creatures. Startopia's aliens are very smooth, colorful and detailed. Startopia lets you decide how much detail your pc can support with an array of video toggles and, you can run Startopia in any resolution from 640x480 to 1600x1200! The image artistry and video controls are superb making the views in Startopia delicious and smooth-flowing, simultaneously.

Sound: The sound is excellent. Sounds are localized to a region and fade outward allowing you to tell how far you are from an event by its volume. Position yourself in the middle of the busy entertainment deck for a moment and listen: nearby, love nest visitors receive a transcendental love experience, disco dancers boogie to a dance beat, the din-o-mat cranks out dinners for the hungry with vending machine precision, passing aliens converse, hilarious sounds radiate from the lavatron(restroom), and a bomb explodes on the tech-deck below you. In Startopia you get as much information from the sounds around you as you get from the sights in front of you.

Interface: The interface is smooth and attractive. A mini-station map in the upper left corner allows you to move to about the station with one click. You can view and interact with your staff and visitors from this menu. All the game menus are easy to use and self-explanatory. Startopia also features a brilliant 3 slot autosaving system that cycles through the slots and saves the game every few minutes. Its a great design that gamers will want every game on the market to feature once they have tried it.

now for the bad: Fortunately, there is very little bad to mention. There are a couple bugs but, I can't remember a game that didn't have any. The CrashToDesktop bug has affected many players who suddenly find themselves staring at their windows desktop. This has happened to me too but I found that simply turning the sound option down one notch to "medium" reduced the frequency of the CTD bug to very rare. When it did crash it didn't lock up my pc or require any reboot. All I had to do was restart the game and thanks to the brilliant autosave I lost only 1-3 minutes of gameplay. The other bug I found involves the pattern buffer - the place you beam items into for easy transport. Occasionally, an item gets stuck in the buffer and causes a CTD. Again, it didn't cause any grief because I just loaded the previous autosave, avoided the trigger, and carried on with the game.

To Mucky Foot's credit: I sent a save game with the one pattern-buffer bug that I experienced to Mucky Foot. To my complete shock and amazement I received a personal response from a real-live Startopia programmer in under 3hrs! ....

Making it perfect: A Mucky Foot programmer informed forum readers that the patch due out around July 25th will include the ability to map movement to the WASD keys and fix the couple of bugs known to exist.

Overall: In sum, Startopia is a beautiful, witty and original game that will deliver many hours of laughs and great gameplay at a very modest price. It will be very hard for competitors to top this game and very hard for gamers to stop playing it. With all its virtues, I can without reserve recommend Startopia with a hearty thumbs-up and a smile.

Experienced on an 800Mhz-AMD-Athlon, 256MbRAM, Voodoo5-5500, RoadrunnerCable, Windows98SE and latest drivers for all components.

A top-notch title ... so where are all the fans??

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: June 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game isn't getting nearly enough attention. I mean, I could understand if the game wasn't all that great ... but this game is AWESOME! I downloaded the demo a few weeks ago, and that's what got me hooked. I went out and bought the game that same day, and I haven't left the computer since! It's very challenging, while still being enjoyable. I've been playing for about 4 days, and I still haven't completed all of the 10 missions yet. There are 3 different modes in this game. Mission mode (where you can try to complete all 10 missions), Sandbox mode (in this mode you can start from scratch and build freely without any objectives), and Multiplayer mode (where you can test your skills against other players online). With so much to do, this game will keep you interested for weeks ... even months! Bottom line: If you like games like The Sims, Pharoah, Age of Empires, SimCity, Dungeon Keeper, SimTheme Park, Theme Hospital, and Black & White, then you will LOVE this game! It mixes all of the best elements of the games listed above, plus a lot more. If you've read all these reviews and you're still not convinced, I suggest you go to www.startopiagame.com and download the playable demo. Be careful, though. This game is very addictive!

A wonderful game from underappreciated talent!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game's Achilles' Heel is the stealth marketing campaign being perpetrated by its publisher, Eidos Interactive. It is unfortunately quite likely that you haven't heard of Startopia (until now, that is) or seen ads for it anywhere. Your local software retailer probably hasn't heard of it either. This is a shame because Startopia is a MUST HAVE for any fan of similar Bullfrog games such as Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park and Theme Hospital.

Startopia was created by Mucky Foot Productions, a UK-based company founded by ex-Bullfrog talent (not to be confused with Lionhead, another Bullfrog spinoff). They brought with them an amazing sense of game play and humor and produced this "glistening jewel" of a game. There isn't much innovation here, but this game excels at what it attempts to accomplish. It has a great combination of familiar concepts in a delightful new setting.

My biggest complaint so far is that the built-in missions are over just as you begin to feel that you've mastered the game. On the other hand, there is trumendous potential for fan-created scenerios and network play. Now I just have to get my friends hooked on this game too...

The kind of game many of us have been waiting for.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Most games of the strategy genre have two strong leanings: either to total design games (for example SimCity), or to games which focus entirely on individual elements (SimPeople). Although Startopia is clearly a design game, more elements of individual development (such as the aliens which come aboard your station or technologies which can be researched) are stressed. This compaires somewhat to SimAnt from years past, which itself did a fair job of mixing both the macro and micro in gameplay.

The graphics are wonderful, but a slower machine with older equipment will feel the bite for it. Even on faster machines, when action gets too hot and heavy and all of your physical memory gets used up, the time for memory swap-out to your hard drive will be noticable. Even so, gameplay itself is affected to the minimum. There is little that needs to be done so quickly (within a second or two) in the game.

The sound is good, too, but there are a total of about 7 tracks of music in the game, making for a bit of repeditiveness. A tad bit more variety would have helped, or even the ability to add one's own music to things. A minor point at best, but still a consideration for a future version.

Overall, this game is sure to please anyone who plays strategy/sim style games. Management and editing are two areas which have been made both easy and dynamic, allowing for a large variety of possibilities.

Excellent, fun-filled game.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: August 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

You are the manager of a torus-shaped station is space. You can play missions to have specific objectives ( There's 10 missions ) and then once you finished them, you can play the random map system ( sandbox ) to have more fun with the game. As i write this review, patch 1.1 is out and fixes loads of bugs and adds some nice things. Also possible are user-made missions for StarTopia. Sure, you need to learn how to do them, but that's still a great thing which could very well increase the fun of the game further!

I truly reccomend this game. If you liked Theme Hospital, you'll certainly love this game. And even if you didn't play Theme Hospital, i still fully suggest this game.

Great game, if not a little predictable...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: February 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This was a very interesting game. It was kind of like Dungeon Keeper 2 but with more interesting items. I only wish that there could be a wider variety of objects that you could place in the houses and bars. I was surprised at the running speed of this game. Many of the games I have purchased have been as slow as anything, therefore significantly taking away from the excitement of the game. Not this game though... it ran really smooth until I put tons of buildings in my space station, and then it only slowed down a little game. Great Game for those that don't like gory monsters jumping out from every corner. Highly Recommended!

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