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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Captain Jameson
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Farbs steers us into the Captain Forever universe in its new RPG-esque installment, Captain Forever. What's your game called and what's it about? The game is called Captain Jameson, and you can win bonus nerd cred by figuring out why I called it that. (Post your answers in the comments!) Captain Jameson is a retro-futuristic parable about the cascading benefits of capitalism. I think. What I built was an awesome spaceship exploration/shooter game where you build your ship entirely out of modular parts, but what people read into it is up to them. Captain Jameson is part of the Captain Forever series, and you can check it out -- and play the first game for free -- at Captain Forever. What Jameson adds to the series is exploration and persistence, so instead of playing standalone 10-minute games in an arena the size of your monitor, you now explore a vast starscape for hours. Captain Forever has been called "Lego Asteroids," so I guess Captain Jameson would be "Legoland Asteroids." What's the coolest aspect of Captain Jameson? The spaceship construction and simulation is cool, and I think it embodies the coolest aspect of the game. That is, everything in the game has function, and you can use those functions however you want. You can wedge a tiny fighter into the side of a dreadnought and attack it from the inside. You can push other ships into fiery magma asteroids. You can build a collection scoop out of girders and use it to collect the remnants of your enemies. Exploring the world of Jameson isn't about strolling through a procession of pretty backdrops; it's about finding your own path through the landscape, using the stations and ships and other things that you find to help you progress.
