Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Was it merely clunky, or did it have a few twisted charms of its own?
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Both. It was beyond clunky. It was, from any rational point of view, damn near unplayable.
Fortunately, when I picked it up early in high school I wasn't approaching it from a rational point of view. It was a glorious bricolage of every pre-cyberpunk outer space sci-fi trope you can imagine (
Star Wars, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, space cops, space spies, cat-aliens, dog-aliens, space merchants, all the major player of WWII and the Cold War in space, etc.), with something for everybody as long as you didn't pay attention to how the individual bits and pieces made no sense when you put them all together. It's what I played for years until switching to
GURPS.
I still have my collection of
Space Opera books in the proverbial box up in the attic. I'll have to look over it again some time and see what useful things I might pull out of it.