Starflight 2: Trade Routes of The Cloud Nebula

Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula is a 1989 science fiction video game developed by Binary Systems and published by Electronic Arts as the sequel to the successful Starflight. It features a combination of space exploration, role-playing and strategy within a futuristic setting. The player commands a spaceship capable of traveling to the game world's 150 solar systems, communicating with or attacking other spaceships, and landing on planetary surfaces which may be explored with a manned rover for plot clues, minerals and alien lifeforms. Game mechanics and the overall look and feel closely resemble the earlier Starflight game, but many new features are introduced including an interstellar trade-based economy, new sentient alien races, and new spacecraft accessories and artifacts. The player is tasked with discovering the ultimate source of the advanced spacecraft technology and unlimited fuel supply which provide a military advantage to the Spemin, a hostile alien race threatening to annihilate or enslave humanity. A major part of the game consists of earning enough money to pay for spaceship upgrades and crew training by engaging in interstellar trade and barter with various alien cultures at their planetary trading posts.

Reviews were somewhat mixed. Computer Gaming World designated it the "role-playing game of the year" in 1990 and praised its playability and vast, immersive, scope. Some reviewers criticized the graphics and sound quality, the handling of saved games, or the repetitive nature of the situations the player encounters.

Read more about Starflight 2: Trade Routes Of The Cloud Nebula:  Gameplay, Development, Reception, Versions and Legacy

Famous quotes containing the words trade, routes and/or cloud:

    “It passes, and we stay:

    A quality of loss
    Affecting our content,
    As trade had suddenly encroached
    Upon a sacrament.”
    —Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

    “The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
    —Terri Apter (20th century)

    “Hearing the low sound
    of a cloud scattering rain
    at midnight
    and thinking for an eternity
    on his absent young wife,
    a traveller heaved a sigh
    and with a flood of tears
    howled the whole night long.
    Now, villagers won’t let him stay
    in their place anymore.”
    —Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.)