MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy

The Good
I liked the way that skills increased the more you used them (become eligible for training for a few creds at a starport), but this doesn't seem to happen very often. Each planet has its own stance on carrying weapons, but you can usually sneak one in in your secondary slot. This game is fairly combat-intensive, I liked the way things can take a violent turn resulting in a few unexpected shoot-outs. You can even trade items which can be bought and sold at starports between systems, this helped me a lot in the early stages, and upgrade your ship with fuel scoops, purification plant, weapons etc. There is ship combat, but I never got around to mastering it. The graphics are fairly simple, the game is quite old(1990), although I liked them, the characterizations are v. good. Good plot too.

The Bad
Bugs! I have only played the DOS version, after a while, on restoring a save game icons and text can become corrupted, if you don't save when this happens, exit the game completely and reload and restore and all should be well. Also I killed some thugs which I don't think I should have killed until later (I think I actually done this a couple of times, as they respawned every visit), picked up their stuff, when it came to later in the game when I had to visit the location and retrieve an item from an npc, none of the npc's would drop anything, including ones I hadn't killed before. All the bugs I encountered were "workaroundable", just a bit frustrating. There is a fair bit of running around doing the minor quests if you choose to do this for cash, some are worth it, some are not, I've heard a high gambling skill can come in handy! Trading between systems is good for cash.

The Bottom Line
This game is based on the MegaTraveller version of the Traveller pen and paper rpg, which I haven't played, but I enjoyed this game nonetheless. Not so simple as the graphics would first make it seem, a lot of fun, although can become tedious in parts, the main quest is linear, it is pretty much up to you how you play the bits in between though. Overall good for a bit of light rpg'ing. If you liked this game, definitely check out other games by Paragon, Megatraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients, Space 1889, and Twilight 2000.

The Good
The first thing I liked with this game was the large amount of weapons that the characters could use. The second thing I liked was that you could visit so many planets in the game. And the third thing was that I never found myself in the position that I didn't know what to do next. I think that considering it came on two DD/DS discs its impressive how much they'd squeezed into the game. The libraries were you can read about the game world also adds to the depth of the game.

The Bad
The controls were a bit sluggish sometimes and in fire fights the aim of the party could be catastrophic. And bad color choices in the inventory made it sometimes impossible to see some texts (I was playing on a color TV).

The Bottom Line
A great sci-fi RPG that kept me occupied for 6 months and even though it was released in 1991 its still worth playing.