#stargunner

Bookish and the Beast By Ashley Poston 

So I’ve just read Geekerella and it is amazing!

It’s a modern-day retelling of Cinderella based in a world of conventions and cosplay. Elle is excited when her late parents favoutie show is being rebooted into a movie, until she hears that her beloved Prince Carmandor is being played by Darien Freeman

Darien Freeman is seen by many as just a pretty face but is secretly a huge stargunner about live out his dream of playing the  stoic space prince. Meeting Elle by way of a wrong numbers they accidently strike up a friendship that rattles the stars.

The golden carriage is a vegan food truck.

The fairy godmother is a lesbian punk

And Prince Charming is a funny nerd who just wants to be seen for who he really is.

Also through reading this book I also found out that I am a real-life Elle;

A girl named Danielle with a September birthday with natural dark hair which is dyed red, her mother’s brown eyes who is a total nerd and makes non-stop geek references and attends a convention in cosplay.

ASHLEY POSTON I want to know how you wrote a book about me please?!

This was the funniest book I’ve ever read, I absolutely loved it and I really hope Ashley Poston comes to the UK as I’d love to meet her and get my copy signed.

Recently, I discovered that some old Apogee games I remembered from my childhood were available on the 3D Realms website. I had a lot of fun replaying Hocus Pocus and Major Stryker. Then, I noticed another space shooter game on the site: Stargunner. I’d never played it as a child, but it looked interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Mistaaaaaaaake.

I hated this game. I hated it so much that the only way to vent my fury is in a giant angry rant. Almost as if I were some sort of Nerd who is Angry at Video Games, which I’m sure is a completely original concept that no one else has ever thought up. 

Anyways, here are the problems I had with Stargunner.

Problem 1: The Controls

Stargunner has the most obtuse controls I’ve ever encountered. My first difficulty was in trying to figure out how to pause the game. This is not usually a particularly difficult operation to perform; often it’s as simple as pressing the “P” key. Not here, though. Oh no. Want to try and guess how it’s gone? I had to figure it out on my own, because...

Problem 2: The Instructions

Namely, there weren’t any. Hocus Pocus and Major Stryker both had menu options for bringing up an instruction page, telling you which buttons to press to shoot your guns, drop a bomb, fire your lightning spell, jump, whatever. Not Stargunner, though. Nope, you’re going in blind, and have to band on the keyboard until you figure it out yourself. Which might take a while, because of the ridiculous keys it uses.

Ready for the answer to the pause question? It is... drumroll pleaase... Function + Shift. Specifically, Function + Right Shift. Not the left Shift key; that’d just be silly.

Problem 3: The Difficulty

Even on the easiest difficulty setting, I was unable to complete even the very first level.

I already just know somebody is going to yell at me to “get good!” Look, it took me a long time to be able to beat the final boss of Major Stryker. Even now, I can’t do it on the highest difficulty setting. But that’s reasonable for the final boss of a game. There’s a pretty big difference between that, and not even being able to get past the first level. This game doesn’t have a difficulty curve, it has a difficulty cliff.

Why is this game so hard? For one thing, your ship has the durability of a paper airplane. You have a health bar, but I’m not exactly sure why; since, so far as I can tell, there is not a single enemy in the game which cannot kill you in a single hit. This on the easiest difficulty, mind you. I’m not sure what happens on higher difficulties; probably the game starts giving you electric shocks through the keyboard. Things aren’t made any easier by...

Problem 4: The Life System

Stargunner operates on that very annoying type of system where, if you lose one of your lives, you also lose all of your upgrades. “Ah yes, you failed to beat the boss with your weapons at full power; here, have another go, only with much less firepower. That seems sporting.”

Major Stryker also has a system like this; but in that game’s case, if you get hit when you have weapon upgrades, you lose the upgrades instead of a life. Stargunner takes the upgrades and life both, because the developers hate you.

Problem 5: The Weapons

Of course, you don’t even have to get as far as dying to realize that the developers hate you. No, that little fact becomes apparent just as soon as you buy a weapon attachment for your ship, and discover that it gets mounted on your ship at an odd diagonal angle that ensures it will never actually hit anything.

Problem 6: The Crashes

The game crashed twice while I was trying to play it. Major Stryker and Hocus Pocus never crashed even once. Was the game poorly coded to begin with, or did the programmers adapting it to run on DOS Box not bother doing a good job, because they knew it was a terrible game? Or did it perhaps spontaneously achieve self-awareness and try to save me from the terrible fate of playing it?

Problem 7: The Cheat Codes

Well, once it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to beat even the first level if I played fair, I decided to look up online if there were any cheat codes. One site offered this helpful comment:

When you get to the screen where you can buy stuff, hit the number 5 on the keypad. you will get 5,000 credits every time. This does work in the shareware version. 

Or rather, I should say, unhelpful comment, because it didn’t work. I did more research and discovered that you first need to enable cheating by changing something in the config file. Where’s the config file? What even is a config file? All the instructions are for people playing the game through Steam -- I got it from the 3D Realms website. Ah, it’s useless, it’s all useless.

I Give Up

So, having failed to be even the first level on even the easiest difficulty even with cheat codes, I gave up and uninstalled Stargunner. My final rating for this game is 0/5. I am stupider for having played it, I award it no points, may God have mercy on its soul.