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Make sure it's what you want...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 30 / 33
Date: May 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Battlecruiser Millennium is a specialist game in the sense that you have to want to play it for it to be enjoyable. You start by choosing your name, sex, race, profession, asset (based on profession), gear (based on profession) and then go. Professions include star fighter pilot, capital spaceship commander, and marine. If you are a fighter pilot, you choose your fighter; if you are a capital ship commander, you choose your battlecruiser or carrier; you get the idea. There are campaigns that give you some structured missions but most go for the Roam option. Once you complete a campaign you revert to Roam in fact. The beauty of the game is that you are limited by your imagination. I say this because if you are a carrier commander you can jump into a fighter while your AI crew fights your carrier and attack your enemies in the fighter, land and jump into a shuttle and pick up some wreckage of your vanquished foe, pilot that shuttle to a planet, drive off the shuttle in your ground assault vehicle, head towards an enemy base where you dismount and lead your team of marines in for the final assault. Or you can do all this from the comfort of your command chair in your star ship with your red shirted ensign having all the fun. Or just fire your missiles from space (if you can afford them) and destroy the base that way. You are limited by your imagination and understanding of the controls. Yes, there are a lot of controls, but given everything you can do, what do you expect? Right now you will probably want to play as a fighting (military, police force, insurgent, etc) profession (caste) but with the multiplayer traders and others will be in high demand. You trade some graphics for gameplay, but are you playing the game to look at the graphic or are you playing the game to immerse yourself into a game where the sky is the limit? The graphics look good and certainly add to the feel that your marine in space is tiny compared to your ship compared to the starbase, compared to a planet... If this is the kind of game you want, you will love Battlecruiser more and more as you figure out how to play - because it will take you awhile. If you ever wanted to command a starship, pilot a fighter and shuttlecraft, drive a planetary vehicle and lead a team of marines all at the same time, this the game for you.

I personally enjoy it, but it is a very specialized game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: December 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

There are a lot of people who play this game and hate it, and there is a reason for that. The nitch for this game is very narrow and people outside of its nitch will either be so frustrated with it that they give up, or simply outright hate it.

If you are thinking about this game you should understand that the game involves a lot of micromanagement. You WILL need to read the manual to do almost anything in the game, and there is a LOT to read up on. You end up managing almost every aspect of your craft when you play down to the individual assignments of your crew. Later on things get a little easier when your command staff get skilled enough to automatically have things done for you, but overall you will need to do everything that needs doing.

If you are not the type of person who is into this sort of micromanagement then stop reading this review right now. Nothing else I say will make this the game for you. Go look someplace else for something fun.

People who either enjoy or don't mind micromanagement may like this game, so here is the rest of the review:

Graphics:

They arn't anything to wow at, but the game is so massive that I get the impression that making them any better would cause the game to run slowly or crash. They are decent and look good unless compaired to the best we currently have available, and that is what matters.

Sound:

The sound is honestly a bit outdated. For some aspects reminds me of something you would hear in an older arcade type game.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is very involved. It is likely that you will spend a while learning how to do anything, and even some basic operations may take you a little bit to figure out how to do in a timely manner. Once you figure out how things work the control scheme begins to make sense and you will find that overall gameplay is seamless.

Works with WindowsXP if you use a BAT!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

When I first bought and installed this game, I kept getting an error message about spyware - after some frustration and fiddling I found out the problem; apparantly the open movie on the DVD uses a Macromedia Flash copy protection that does not like virus scanning software. Here's a quick and easy fix to this problem...

1) open up NOTEPAD or another plain text editor (NOT Word) and write the following line into it:

bcm.exe -n

2) SAVE this single line of text in the same folder that Battlecuiser installs into, by default, it will be

C:\Program Files\DreamCatcher\3000AD\Battlecruiser Millennium Gold

when you save the file, save it with whatever name you find handy, BUT BE SURE TO USE THE EXTENSION ".BAT", as in this example

boot battlecruiser.bat

3) Now to play, simply make a link to this "bat" file, then double click your link and you are off and running!

The bat file (a/k/a batch file) forces WindowsXP to open a command line box and run the primary game file (bcn.exe) using what's called a "switch", in this case, the switch we are using is "-n", which means, "start the game but skip the opening movies". After doing this, my copy of Battlecruiser ran perfectly fine in WindowsXP.

AS TO THE GAME ITSELF: I've been playing one version or another of the Battlecruiser lineage for nearly 8 years now, and while it is the most realistic space craft simulation you will find out there, you have to remember before you buy it what that means - for example, our "real" space craft of today, the Space Shuttle, is the single most complex piece of equipment on earth. It takes 3 computers to operate it properly, and shuttle pilots spend HUNDREDS of hours in simulators just learning how the systems onboard work - and the space shuttle doesn't even fly to our own moon, let alone other planets. The Battlecruiser in this game is not anything nearly as complicated to operate as the real Space Shuttle is, but players should not EXPECT to be able to just plop down in the commander's chair and be able to do every little thing right out of the gate. This game has a very severe learning curve, and very little in the way of tutorial help - but in defense of the game's design team, the universe of Battlecruiser is so open ended a simulation, with literally hundreds of planets and thousands of npc ships all running about at once, that writing a step by step tutorial wouldn't even be practical - like trying to write out Mapquest directions from Los Angeles to New York City - it would take a book the size of a Oxford English Dictionary (you've seen them in a library - those huge reference books so big you can break someone's foot with them if you drop them) to write out all the things that you can do, and that can happen to you, even in the very "easy" to use "roam" mode.

This game is for those who are hard core into simulators - who enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from learning how to use a complex piece of machinery (the Battlecruiser) and how to interact in as near to real world a simulation of interstellar space flight as you're likely ever to find out there. This is a game for someone who wants to invest a few MONTHS of their life, not just a few hours on a weekend.

For those few, the rewards are definately worth it - as close to actually going to space as most of us will ever get.

Seriously, Don't

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 19
Date: November 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Okay, I cut my teeth playing Omnitrends Universe. Which was at the time of its release the most complicated, difficult to learn game in history. (also a totally amazing open ended space sim circa 1988). I would say that Battlecruiser follows very closely in that genera, a very indepth open ended space sim, built on technology .

So if you're into the genre, I mean really *into* it like willing to study and memorize the manual before you ever even install the game, willing to accept that the so called training missions are nothing of the sort (they are simply instant action missions where no one will kill you, they serve no educational purpose at all).

Still don't buy it.

Seriously. Because you will have problems, (I couldn't even get it to run for over 5 hours), and the president and CEO of 3000AD, (who also apparently is the head of tech support) is the rudest person I've ever had the displeasure to know. Instead of being helpful to people who are struggling to get this piece of 1990's circa technology to work .
I don't have a personal grudge, we've never spoken, but I encourage you to check out (http://www.3000ad.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi ) his forums to know what type of person you'll be dealing with if you ever have any kind of problem at all. The Man proudly flies this quote in his signature:
"Squirrels with very cold paws have less trouble getting into peanut
butter than the average uninitiated Homo Sapien has in getting into a
Battlecruiser game. - Tim Stone, PC Gamer UK #133 Review"

Seriously the only people who should be buying this game are parents who want their kids to stop playing games forever.

Wasted money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 21
Date: April 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I see why I'm the first review. I'm the only one stupid enough to buy it. Way too many controls to have to try to remember. An airline pilot has less. (I've got a simulator)

much more work than fun

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: November 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

After buying this and feeling the weight of the package I should have known that there was going a massive book explaning how to play the game.It is way too complicated to have fun without researching for hours. I blame myself for not looking at the reviews first for if I did I would have known not to buy it.

I Don't.......

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 15
Date: August 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

For the Like of me have no idea why I bought this game. Too many controls and does't have a tutotial or how to in the game or maybe there is but have to press this or that. If you like simulators this is your game.

Nerdy Flight Sim

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 13
Date: November 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

this item was a complete waste of my money and I was very dissapointed with it, it's just a flight sim with a bunch of control s you don't know how to use.

Don't waste your money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: January 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

What a disapointment. I am a big fan of the space sim genre (X-wing, Tie fighter, Wing commander, homeworld 1 & 2, freespace 1&2 and Independence War 1&2). I bought BC3000 Gold on an auction site for $6.00. I wish I hadn't wasted my money. After 3 hours of trying to figure out how to run the ship I gave up. Too complicated. The graphics are mediocre, the sound is low quality and the music tracks are cheesy. There are no training missions to teach you how to run the ship. The GUI looks like something from 1995. I was sucked in to buying this game because Dreamcatcher was the publisher and they have had some good space games, this is not one of them.

Starforce Strikes Back

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: August 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Nevermind how complicated this game is purported to be - don't buy it just for the outrageous hassle you'll go through just trying to get it to run on your system, because of the anti-ripping technology that's spot-welded onto this thing. If I wanted to be challenged by the complexity of getting a complicated program just to run on Windows, I'd just as soon hand-code an emulator for the Apollo Space Program as try to get this thing to cooperate.

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