Indie Cred: George Moromisato's Transcendence
In the beginning was Rogue. Rogue was the father of Hack, who begat Moria and Nethack. And Moria loved the Deep, but Nethack loved the Chaos. Nethack knew Chaos and begat Shiren the Wanderer, who was Nintendoed into Pokemon: Mystery Dungeon. Moria laid with the Deep and begat Diablo, who begat Dungeon Siege, who begat Titan Quest, who’s heart cried out in abandoned agony, who’s body was blown by the harsh Critical Wind into dust; only to be raised again by the gaming gods in the form of Diablo III.
One night, when Moria was very drunk, Nethack played a joke on him, and made him lay with Star Control II. The product of that unholy union is George Moromisato’s Transcendence.
Transcendence is like this: you are a ship. You are not the captain. You are the ship. You flit and fly about in 2D space, spacefaring and spacefiring your way through star system after star system encountering pirates, looters, obsessive space dwarf miners, colonists, and indestructible alien overlords.You will take on missions from oppressed colonists and liberate them. Or kill them. You will rescue slaves from their zero-g space coffins. Or be killed by their masters. You will take orders from a Federation space officer and lead men to victory. Or you will stand by and watch their fleet be destroyed by magnetic storms and alien motherships. You will fear said magnetic storms because they jam your radar. Or you will brave them because you have Iocrym plating and 4 katana blasters. You will trade ice for water and sand for acid. You will feed the poor and steal from the rich. You will find marked barrels of rice, wine, neurotoxic drugs, hallucinogens, and contraband weaponry. You will find ROM chips and autotarget ships. Or spontaneously lose all control of your ship. Or randomly jump about in hyperspace. You will find unmarked barrels and splosh their contents onto your ship, causing it to erode or harden. Or you will open them and take a big whiff and die. Or live.
You will fight these pirates. You will harass these obsessive space dwarf miners. You will annoy these xenophobic hive mind ship-fleets. You will traverse these magnetic storms. You will face these indestructible alien overlords. And you will win. Or perhaps you will lose. And then you will do it all over again.
By the end of your time as a ship, you will come away with a renewed sense of life. That life is a blank page. That the world is your very real, very own tabula rasa. You will open that can of cuke and splosh it on your car, and wonder, hey man, what the hell, plus kinetic defense, right? And the universe will answer, May Domina guide you. Hell yeah, man. Hell yeah.And then you will go here and here and here and here and discover all the rest the game has to offer. And you will love it. And it will love you back. It will love you because it is one of those games where the front page hasn’t been updated for a year, but every topic on the forum was commented on yesterday. You will love it because it has every possible possibility in a file the size of your average mp3. It will love you because it does not know how not to. And you will love it too.
And He looked, and saw that it was good. Genesis 1:31
Transcendence is a registered trademark of George Moromisato.
the text however, was written solely by me :)
