Indie Luvin’ Double Feature: Privateer – Ascii Sector and Privateer Gemini Gold

I thought I’d create a new regular feature that highlights new or budding indie projects that may not have reached audiences through the regular news sources. This week I bring you two very impressive freeware indie projects, both remakes of the 1993 space-sim/rpg Wing Commander: Privateer.

The first, Privateer: Ascii Sector, is an impressive ascii-based interpretation of the original. The graphics are colorful and almost completely faithful to the gameplay of the original … minus one dimension of course. While the interface shares many similarities with roguelikes, there are many interesting enhancements that give the game a completely unique style. Most of the time I was absolutely stunned that a single developer – Christian Knudsen – built the entire game – ascii art, gigantic maps, fluid and colorful animations, and in-game economy algorithms – his work is absolutely polished. The game is currently at v0.2, and Christian is hard at work at bringing v0.3 to completion. If you play the game, please send Christian some encouragement, either over at his forums or at his Great Games Experiment page – I’d love to see a final release candidate of the game get released some day. Download it here.

The second project, Privateer Gemini Gold, is a 3d platform-independent remake of the game for Windows, Linux and OS X using the Vega Strike game engine. If you’re looking for a way of playing the original Privateer with high-res 3d graphics without running Dosbox – this project is definitely the way to go. A very large team of 3d artists, programmers, designers, playtesters and audio engineers have created a truly faithful reproduction of the original game. The development team is die-hard dedicated to the project, and respond to suggestions and comments on the forums regularly. If you were a fan of the original game, you will be immediately at home with this remake – it is probably the most detailed remake of a 3d game I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t played this classic, I strongly suggest heading over to the download page and giving it a shot.