Nexus: The Jupiter Incident 2

Sign the petition! Buy the original version on Steam, WE NEED TO HAVE A GAME ENGINE LIKE THIS RELEASED ITS FRIGGEN AWESOME

Sign the Petition Here

A demonstration (The good stuff begins half-way through ):

<object width='425' height='350'><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BhZQEvg1V0Y"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BhZQEvg1V0Y" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width='425' height='350'></embed></object>


The original BlackSun engine was amazing (Max settings DX9 game on a mobile 6400, shadows on everything by everything, e.g. ships self-shadow, passing in front of an asteroid casts a shadow etc.)

 

Never heard of the first one, might look into that.

It seemed pretty cool, but I actually get annoyed with all the sound detail that happens in space.....since that doesn't happen. I guess I can just pretend the ship has a system that is creating sounds to make it seem more realistic...heh.....

 

Lol, that should reduce costs... shutting down the sound FX department... But the Blacksun engine is like I said, amazing, you can get Nexus: The Jupiter Incident on Steam now...

 

The original was an ok game. It was fun, but also made it difficult later on to complete missions and just became frustrating. That's the problem when you have a talented group, but no resources to give it a full beta proveout and tweaking.

Hopefully if this game does get released, then it will be a different story.

 

Gotta agree with the dificulty bit, in the later missions it was getting harder to complete the mission in one go... but not to the point where it got frustrating... maybe I got lucky in my loadout choices lol

 

I loved the original game. I've yet to find a tactical space game that matches the same level of fun. The graphics were pretty interesting too. I REALLY enjoyed the story. Good Sci-Fi there.

 

mmmm... Good Sci-Fi games are hard to come by nowadays or games with good stories uberhaupt lol) but the fighter sequence looks just as good as the opening sequence in Star Wars 3

 

It's on Steam? I may have to pick it up.

 

Nexus: TJI 1 is available on Steam for $17.95 I think, tis a great game that couldn't afford to market its greatness. The main criticism is the steep learning curve though... Then again the fact that it runs on DX9c with 4× AA at max settings on a 1.73GHz Pentium M and a Go 6400 speaks of the quality of the engine (although with large battles the fps does drop when AA is on). It's the Source of spacesims

 

I just picked up the first one, I gotta say it's a great engine. It runs extremely smoothly (on lowest settings) on an Intel 855GM and PM1.7GHz.

 

Wow, do you dtill get shadows on the lowest settings?

 

Well, the deal about it being a great engine and running good on low end cards too is because its a space RTS.

Any graphic games in space tend to be lower on system demands as less of graphics needed to show empty black backgrounds translating to less graphical power needs.. That in turn enables game developers to concentrate on better unit details with much minumum graphical load then 'normal' RTS.

 

Yeah, everythings absolutely lowest, and with the patch it doesn't require hardware T&L, so it works fine. On my 12" screen even low resolutions look good, so it's a great game to play while waiting in an airport or something.

Yeah, that's why I like it so well. Similar RTS' run like crap on my D400, this one runs well, and I don't really miss all the fancy backgrounds.

 

That is some very gorgeous stuff there!

I must admit, I've never heard of this game, even though I'm a big space sim buff! (Played Freespace, Freelancers, EVE Online, etc, you name it, back in the days!).

What exactly happened to the Jupiter Incident 2? After creating that gorgeous tech demo, they couldn't have simply canceled the game, could they?!?!

 

We don't know... If you are a big space sim fan then you've got to get a hold of Nexus: TJI, I only hope that if they did cancel the 2nd installment that someone uses the BlackSun2 engine...

 

Yea, I can't remember who it was that suggested the game to me when I was complaining about no good space tactical/strategy fleet-type games in between homeworld 1 and 2 and sins of a solar empire, but this game is amazing.

It's such a shame that it didn't get the recognition it deserves. Glad it's on steam now though...hard game to find.

 

Alright, I'll try to grab it off of Steam, even though I don't use Steam at all . I'll see how it goes.

 

My biggest problem with the game (and the one that's making me hesitate paying even the $10 for it) is that I've no clue how to play it!

I beat the demo - somehow - but I've absolutely no clue how I did it.

One of these days, I'll reread the README file and try the demo again and then see if it makes any more sense.

Or maybe I should just buy the game anyway ($10) and figure out how to play through the tutorials and early levels there....

 

Read part of one of the walkthroughs on GameFAQs, (I read the description just for one of the missions). That's what I did to understand exactly what I was suppose to do before and during each mission - up till then I had absolutely no idea about configuring weapons or squadrons or anything.

 

So I finished the game. Thanks for the suggestion odin, that helped a lot. To anyone turned off by the demo, the game actually scales up the learning curve over a few missions too so you're not overwhelmed like the demo mission. So don't judge the game by the demo!

It was a great game. Definitely for a niche market, but it did what it meant to quite well. You definitely get the whole experience of commanding a capital ship with multiple subsystems and then a fleet of capital ships with multiple squadrons.

Game balance was quite good too. Micromanagement is key - although you can get pretty far without doing as much micro if you really wanted to depending on ship configuration. Still, even though you get a "super ship" and your fleet steadily improves, you never get the feeling that you can simply click at an enemy fleet and watch your ships mop up. Getting annihilated is a very real danger in just about every single mission. At the same time, your enemies don't miraculously gain technology over the course of mere days. You actually meet stronger and stronger alien races with very plausible explanations for increasing difficulty of each mission, while at the same time keeping the game fresh.

There are also multiple play-styles too - you could go the whole destructive route and overwhelm a ship's shields with energy weapons and then switch to destructive hull-breaching weapons to tear the ship apart. Or if you prefer to see huge explosions, you could load your ship up with all sorts of bomb, missiles, torpedos and other artillery and blast other ships from a distance. Or you could load your ship with lasers and pinpoint enemy subsystems with surgical precision, disabling everything from life support to engines to generators and of course weapons and shields. You can load your ship with squadrons of fighters, bombers, gunships and commandos and capture other ships. You can even go into stealth mode (think cloaking), sneak up on unsuspecting ships and then blast them while their shields are down.

And of course, since you end up commanding a fleet of several ships, you could do any combination of the above to your ships and assign them to specific roles based on that.

I've actually always wanted to go back with my fleet after the 2nd to last mission to the first mission just to overwhelm those puny humans with all the new tech Ah well...

My only real complaint now is that it wasn't long enough. The campaign progresses the plot through narration and even time skips now and then and then fills in rather important plot details afterwards, making it feel a bit disjointed. This probably could have been fixed by adding a lot more missions. There is a huge number of different ships in the game, but because you gradually get introduced to them, by the end of the game, you still feel like you wish there were even more variety!

All this just really makes me hope for Nexus II to be released, even though I guess that probably won't happen.

Ah well...maybe I'll go buy the Homeworld series while I'm waiting for Sins of a Solar Empire to be released...