Bustikated

If you’ve seen or played Autonomous for the iPhone, you’d probably be quick to dismiss it as a cheap Space Trader knock off of Peter Spronck’s Space Trader, but you’d be wrong. Even at the introdctory price of $1.99, Autonomous is considerably more expensive than it’s Palm-based predecessor.

As far as actual features go, ‹to say Autonomous is lacking is fair. While the interface looks familiar, several key items are missing.

• Planets aren’t named.
• There are no skill points for the player character.
• You can’t even name your character.
• There is no way to compare the prices from one planet to the next.
• There are no ship upgrades
• There are no quests

Trading

Your primary role in Autonomous is that of merchant. Buy low, sell high; typical trade-based game fare.

There are a whopping 30 items that you can buy and sell in the Autonomous universe. Each planet will buy or sell any of the items. There are no special events that drive prices, and no “technology level” that determines what you can or cannot trade.

The lack of price comparisons increases the learning curve drastically. Even a simple (paid approx $X each) on the sale screen would be an improvement. The lack of price comparison would be more helpful than nothing!

The only advantage you have in trading is how easy figuring out the base prices are. For your viewing pleasure, I give you the best sale price on each item in the game. If you pay more than the given amount for the given item, you’ve gotten ripped off.

Item	Price	Item	Price	Item	Price
Water	10	Sprockets	2,000	Magnesium	15,000
Food	50	Strong N-Force	2,500	Aluminum	25,000
Iron	100	Weak N-Force	3,500	Silicon	75,000
Wood	150	Anti-Matter	5,000	Phosphorus	100,000
Gold	250	Iridum	7,500	Sulfur	150,000
Chlorine	500	Osmium	10,000	Secrets	2,500
Batteries	600	Platinum	11,000	History	8,000
Wire	800	Mercury	12,000	H-Bombs	12,000
Power Spanner	1,000	Thallium	15,000	Rail Guns	25,000
Supermagnet	1,500	Fuel Injectors	15,000	E. Horizons	100,000

Another time saver is the fact that every planet will buy each item for 90% of the price they charge. For instance, if a planet is selling Power Spanners at 1,000 they are only paying 900 for them. This tidbit can keep you from switching between menus constantly.

Also missing from Autonomous is any sort of banking. There is no debt to be paid or interest to be made (hey that rhymed!).

Travel

If trade is the meat of the game, travel is it’s mashed potatoes. As I mentioned before, there are no names for any of the planets, so if you like keeping track of where you are in the galaxy, you’ll have to take a few minutes to flick around the map. Touch the info icon in the top left to be whisked back to your current location.

Traveling is pretty straight forward, a green circle surrounds your ship, and depicts the area you can reach with your current fuel level. Tap a planet to head that way. If the game lags quite a bit when you travel, you’re likely to run into another ship. Sometimes it won’t register a tap on a planet, which simulates the lag, but doesn’t do anything.

Encounters

Zooming around the galaxy, you’re likely to run into other ships. When you do, you’ve had an encounter, and the game pops up a screen to let you know what’s going on. There are only 3 types of ships, pirates, military, and traders. You can attack anyone, but early in the game, most ships will ignore you if you ignore them.

Combat

Every vessel has shields and hull strength, and an energy based weapon. Battles are very random, and can be quite repetitive if you are trying to fight or run away. The ignore option, when present, is the fastest way to end contact.

Growth

There are no ‘experience’ points, and no ship equipment. This could only be missing due to gross negligence or rush to meet launch schedule, you pick.

Bugs?

• Surrendering just pays the military to go away. I had to pay $7350, or 73.5%! You’re better off just fighting or ignoring them.
• surrendering to pirates loses all your cargo
• the attack button becomes the done button, which makes it very easy to skip the results screen after combat
• warning when attacking civilians
• attacking civilians == reward! You recieve an ass-ton of cargo, regardless of the cargo limit on your ship, or how much cargo you are carrying. At one point I had like 250 units!
• no immediate penalty for attacking civilians or military
• after enough attacking you are attacked on sight by military ships, you can no longer ignore, but you can flee.
• When you are destroyed the game automatically restarts with 10000 credits. (Same universe layout)
• Having a gunner increases your chance of being hit! The first 2 times I was destroyed, it was with the level 9 gunner in my crew.
• Having any crew increases your chance of destruction!
• Most of my crashes occur with crew members aboard
• The game lags with crew members on board
• I have yet to get the bonus cargo after destroying a civilian ship when I have crew on board, regardless of how many empty cargo bays I have.
• This game crashes. A lot.

Well, that only took 29 days, but my blog has returned to the living!

At some point this week, this blog is finally making the migration to my web server, as my shared hosting expires early next week. Nothing like procrastination to help things get done early.

If the blog goes down, or stays down, then you know what happened.

I was looking at microformats for use in a current project, and decided that I’d like a way to export contact data as a vCard. A quick google search revealed this, which just happens to be by Derek Neighbors. It uses the VPIM library, which I found here.

Being the “There’s no way I’ll remember any of this later” person that I am, I tossed this into a pastie, and am blogging about it more for my benefit than yours.