Oh, how the old Force Feedback 2 screamed when I plugged it in, as if I was waking up a demon - and I might have been.
She was there when I went looking, the surviving playable version of JumpGate, though the install involves extracting the game from a .rar file, eliminating those that struggle with tech-literacy. To make things bearable, I had to download dxwind as well, adding another tech-literacy barrier to entry.
The squeaking and squealing of the joystick eventually died down after I ran the calibration in Windows. I launched into the sim’d sim without connecting to the server and tried to set the buttons to what I remembered having them do. Button 8 on the joystick had never worked when I got it off EBay in 2019, but it had deteriorated even further during it’s use that year.
I tried playing too many games at once by streaming the start of the Relapse to Twitch, but running the game, OBS & Streamyards alongside dxwind was just more than this computational rig could bear. This relapse might be what it takes to motivate me to get the gaming laptop repaired.
I want to credit the joystick itself to the way it immediately feels like you’re operating heavy equipment when you launch into space - something about muscle memory - something in my mind whispers. Something tells me the now-standard XBox type controller wouldn’t give someone the same feel, but a Hyperial Rising re-release would probably have people playing as the Conflux Menace (pink aliens) in VR or something.
The last time I had been present on the Server, this universe of databases of fictionalized commodities with a game-layer interface to move numbers around, represented as Space Station production centers, three and a storage station for each playable faction, and two non-playable regions of Space with their own stations - some of the fictionalized commodities floating in simulated space, where humans pretending to be spaceship pilots mine asteroids that heat up and cool down, but never move, I had docked my ship at Solrain Core with an active mission to hunt down aliens designated C5 or higher… Snails, Mantas and up.
One of the main reasons JumpGate wasn’t much of a commercial success was that they got the price of videogame death just about right. For the first several months it’s about not dying because of the expense of it, band-aid patched with full-coverage insurance for new pilots. Eventually though, it becomes a matter of time and distance that crashing your spaceship or being shot down costs you, if not your rare artifacts.
The awkward Space with Inertia however, is merciless. While ‘energy shields’ are equipped on all vessels with pilots that can afford it, colliding with any object in space at over 100v is almost certainly ship destruction and a pod-ride back to the station - and given the inertia part - that’s a real possibility every time you use the titular JumpGates to travel between sectors of Space.
I really think it was this high level of catastrophic result that makes even the simple transport missions a little exciting. My rusty controls and unfired muscle memory circuits could easily result in my pretend spaceship drifting into the pretend (pretend isn’t quite right) space station, and with a Quantar Bounty that could be quite expensive indeed.
I jumped first, (flew my spaceship to the jumpgate and pressed spacebar) into the adjoining sector, Wanderer’s Pond.
The JumpGates function like wormholes that let you skip past super boring regions of space to slightly less boring regions of space, where you’re sure to find at minimum a TRI Sensory Array beacon. These spined set of rings are the basis for territorial combat and a constant whetstone of your piloting skill. ‘Flipping’ one requires the sacrifice of a modx(flashfire) slot, and tunes it to your faction’s color.
Their functionality has increased over time, and at this point flipping one to your color provides an incremental reward over the course of the two hours or so the beacon stays “tuned.” This now also allows all pilots of your faction in that sector access to the faction’s communication channel - a color-coded chat channel that flashes across a pilot’s main display.
With no pilots to tune them, they go gray, and with hardly anyone flying that was the state of the beacon in Wanderer’s Pond.
As my radar came online in the sector, I was greeted by a horror. In my revivification for the reunion campaign, I ended up running about 6 different accounts in order to LARP 'Edgar Reece Industries’ - specialists in the harvesting of Conflux Biomass. Squid guts are what fills your cargo bay when you use ship-pirating equipment (Proudly manufactured in Hyperial) on the Alien Menace that plagues the space lanes.
Wanderer’s Pond was one of the very few sectors that didn’t have a POS Gravestone in it - A Virgin Sector after the land rush following the Universes most recent collapse (the launch of the Russian server post the shutdown of the ‘official’ TRI Universe). Many an hour and credit was spent determining which direction the launch tubes of the ERI Squidding Lounge and Company Headquarters would be, and all was magnificent.
Now, the first thing that registered on radar was another damn “arty market” POS.
Artifacts are the horribly implemented nod to ‘space archeology’ in a collapsed universe. Horribly implemented as a single one spawns in each and every non-station sector in a fixed range, and is a slot-machine reward of useless junk to varying qualities of 'unique equipment’ for your spaceship. The most coveted artifact goes in a flashfire (ModX) slot and is an “All Boost” 4, boosting speed, shielding and powerplant more than any other item in the game. Even with the playerbase down to the dozen or so around in 2019, you’d either have to spend millions or find one yourself.
In my dream implementation, wreckage that slowly drifts across space is detected by tuned beacons and the arty-hunters hire armed escorts as they extract gear from moving targets in a gold-rush for the new find.
As is, fellas set up player stations with markets and put everything they find up for sale, while they keep playing the arty-spawning slots. I stopped by his station to warm up my dock-at-a-station-without-exploding muscle memories. He wasn’t selling anything of note.
I tuned the Wanderer’s Pond beacon Solrain blue and headed over to the ERI Squidding Lounge and warmed up the docking muscles some more.
As ERI’s public in-game business is the extraction of conflux biomass and new players start at the Factional Core stations, the squidding lounge was meant to recruit and train new pilots in the art of biomass extraction.
Edgar Reece emerged as a character well after the launch of Episode 2, for which the handle of GrimGriz was being used by a clone of me the Quantar Zealots had made. Reece flew as a Solrain Hyperial Loyalist and was the first on the server to extract Conflux Biomass from a ‘Sentient Conflux.’
The pink squids and snails and such that shoot at you in JumpGate are ‘The Conflux Menance’ and the key driver of ‘official’ narrative interaction points. They’re typically low-complexity AI bots that follow learnable flawed routines. ‘Sentient Conflux’ were when the GMs flew around special versions of high-level ones and made a bunch of player ships go boom.
That Reece achieved this Historic Extraction was one of the deep hooks that allowed pouring my time and attention into fictional databases result in a sense of relevance, a relevance one doesn’t get from typing up what doctor’s say or processing the photos you drop off at Wal-Mart. Though that relevance was biographically irrelevant in the ‘meatspace’ tax-cattle world, it was significant relevance in this pseudo-community of dissociative passions.
I refueled at the Squidding Lounge, noting that it was a squad-station and had ships available in the hangar. The level 34 Ranger, the scout on steroids with a 54k radar and ridiculous top-end; a bomber fitted for biomass extraction, a cargo tow named ‘food runner.’
All equipment production is done on faction stations and the efficiency of input materials to resulting product is impacted by whether or not that station has food and water on the market. Water, coming from ice asteroids and used by everything as well as consumed by ‘station workers’ that increase production efficiency, means it’s usually not around.
Filling a cargo tow with something as light-weight as grain or manufactured foods make for 10-minute runs between station with a good XP payoff - and sometimes you need to coordinate and maximize production, in case you’re brewing chemicals that you then take to make explosive that eventually wind up in the missiles you actually want.
I left the Squidding Lounge and jumped to the next sector away from Solrain Core. Wanderer’s Pond only has the two gates, SC and Inner Lighthouse, though some of the spicier sectors have as many as 5 or 6 points of entry.
As I struggled to keep the crosshairs in place on the pink Conflux Snail that had emerged from the anomaly in ‘Inner Lighthouse’, I pondered on the name of the sector itself. Aside from the Wanderer’s gate I had arrived through, IL connects only to ‘Outer Lighthouse’ and then to the Octavian Controlled sector ‘Dark Gateway'.
What about my Inner Lighthouse? Is that what I came looking for when I retreated into relapse?