Homeworld: Remastered Collection

One of my first loves…apart from chocolate

Barber’s Adagio for Strings is one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music. When it’s accompanied by a full choir, it’s a solemn, yet beautiful song. In Homeworld, it’s used to maximum effect when the Mothership jumps back to Kharak, only to find that everyone in your civilisation has been annihilated.

It’s one of the most powerful starts to any storyline in a game. Even though there are only sixteen missions, the gravitas of these first few chapters of Homeworld, plus the very pretty designs made it a classic in many a mature gamer’s heart, whether you love strategy games or not.

The game has been revisited by the polarising Gearbox Software, known for its ability to simultaneously make awesome and shi!thouse titles. No matter, they’ve done a wonderful job remaking Homeworld and its almost as awesome sequel, Homeworld 2, by making the best bits better, and taking some of the more annoying things away. Thus, the essence of what made these games so great has been preserved.

One of the most annoying aspects of Homeworld was having to refuel your fighters and corvettes, especially in the nebula missions. That’s gone. Thank Sajuuk! Gone also is the awkward interface of the original, leaving behind a well organised and simple visual interface. Taking elements from Homeworld 2 and blending the best aspects of that into the remaking of both has really helped to breath new life into the games.

The new graphics are also gorgeous. The ships use the same basic design, but with new textures and more complex shapes, they look more realistic than ever. Even little details like pipes, once flat textures are now complex three dimensional entities. Of course, Homeworld 2 still looked pretty good for an eleven year old game, and the graphics refresh hasn’t made too much difference.

You know what? I don’t care. The single player campaigns of both games are so well executed, with the correct amounts of tension and awe that I’m going to relive this all over again. Life be damned!

Reminiscing on Homeworld

There’s only one way to describe Homeworld. Haunting. Epic. Exhilarating. Grand. Most importantly, genius. Released in 1999, Homeworld had everything a geeky teenager could want: big space ships, big guns, a truly 3D battlefield and spectacular graphics.

Homeworld admittedly doesn’t have the most fantastically original story. A bunch of exiles on a desert planet search for a way home with only a stone tablet to guide them and many enemies in their way. Putting aside the obvious biblical references and numbers of enemies though, the game’s main coup de grace was the fully 3D space in which battles were fought. It was a deceptively simple concept that was in reality very difficult to master.

In the 3D space that was Homeworld, you could actually pull off some properly great strategic moves with your fleet and reserves. If your frigates were baiting some other capital ships, you could pull them into a pincer trap where your heavy bombers could attack them from behind, above or below. Hell, you could hyperspace jump a bigger ship into the fray if you had the resources to do so.

I maintain that the best part of any computer game should be a rich and well written story, whether that story provides background – such as in MMORPGs like EVE Online – or as part of the action like in many strategy games. Despite the story not being especially original, the score, the voice acting and the cutscenes themselves are spine tingling. While your battles are all done in rich colour with fantastical backgrounds like enormous, dead superstructures in space or the diffuse glow of a nebula, the storyline cutscenes between missions are all done in barely animated monochrome. It gives the feeling that you’re part of an intimate story of survival and homecoming, rather than just watching and playing an interactive movie.

While a true sequel to the not quite as good Homeworld 2 is yet to be made, good news has come from the blokes that now own the rights to the Homeworld universe. They’re remaking and remastering the two canonical originals so that they can run on modern computers. This should be utterly sweet. I can’t wait to play the games and hear the roar of the ion cannons again with better graphics.