Gateway II: Homeworld is an interactive fiction game released by Legend Entertainment, written by Glen Dahlegren and Mike Verdu in 1993. The gameplay is very much text-based, but uses a hybrid parsers with illustration and mouse-based aids. The game has a number of timed events, but the possibility of you dying outside them is rare. There are also thankfully relatively few states where you can actually get stuck.

The year is 2112 and a strange, enormous object called "The Artifact" bas been located outside the orbit of Pluto. The Gateway Corporation plans to send a shuttle to investigate, but a terrorist sect attempts to hijack the shuttle. Their plans are to use The Artifact to alert a highly destructive alien race of Earth's presence. It becomes your sole duty to launch the shuttle before the terrorists arrive, and take over the Artifact rendezvous mission, saving the Earth from certain doom.

The speedrun is a little different from runs I've done in the past, I've never tried doing a primarily text-based game before. But I really enjoyed this game and though it would be nice to share it seeing as it seems to be relatively unknown. I think the story-line is quite good, and the execution of the gameplay/interface is terrific. The command parser is also quite versatile and useful, it's not one of those frustrating games where you have to phrase things EXACTLY SO to make it work.

Obviously since this is a speedrun, I skip most of the wonderful story and dialogs, HOWEVER, I intentionally skip them (semi) slowly hopefully always allowing at least one frame to get in, this gives you the opportunity to PAUSE the video (quickly) if you are interested in following the story yourself. Also I highly recommend watching this in fullscreen mode as it makes the text significantly easier to read.

There are five more parts to the game, which I haven't recorded yet. So please let me know what you think of this and if you're interested is seeing the rest of the game.

Author: thecybercat

Keywords: Gateway Homeworld Speedrun Escape Abandonware DOS Game Computer Games MSDOS Text-based Science Fiction Scifi

Added: February 5, 2008

Posted on Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:16:43 -0800 at http://youtube.com/?v=-mEXnlLfd9Y
Author: rss@youtube.com (thecybercat)