Today a very different game, a space exploration game with a vast universe contained in just 4MB. The official description at the Noctis site is this:

Noctis: the latin word for “night”, and the title of this simulator. Night, after all, is just the word we use to describe the absence of light while the Earth is turned away from the sun, and in space, there is no light but the distant pinpricks of ancient stars. Space is a lonely place, but it harbours some truly spectacular secrets; eerily glowing pulsars, enormous red giants, glittering, beautiful nebulae, and deadly, all-consuming singularities to name but a few. For most people, the thought of going into space and exploring such sights is an impossible dream. But no longer; Noctis allows you to do just that. In technical terms, it is a fully 3D galaxy, which allows you to explore thousands of stars, their planets and moons. From the moment you first play Noctis, you’ll be hooked.

In other words, the ultimate relaxing game. You start the ‘game’ in the middle of cold lonely space, in a weird kind of spaceship. The galaxy of Noctis is 90000 lightyears in radius and entirely explorable, but luckily your spaceship isn’t bound by that bothersome ‘no-faster-then-light’ rule.

Your ship, the Stardrifter, has a big viewscreen on which all controls are accessible (something you need to get used to a bit if you start out with this game). Apart from the controls, you can view countless of stars through it. So you start by visiting solar systems, travelling to countless of stars, some with planets, some with not, and you can name any new solarsystem/planet you encounter. The ones that are already named are already discovered by some explorer before you. You can even read the comments and adventures of planets in the database, or write your own.

The variation in planets is enormous, and you’ll probably won’t find two planets who look alike. Blazing red deserts, Misty planes with lightning in the background, lush forests with wildlife running//flying about, the combinations are endless.

Once you approach a star, at a speed which would give Einstein headaches, you can set course to a more local entity, being stars and moons. You lock into orbit, set the command to deploy, and on a smaller window on the right you set the exact location you want to be dropped. Once dropped you can begin exploring the planet and take pictures all you want. If you got to the right kind of star, and the planet with the right kind of atmosphere/conditions you may even encounter various wildlife. But those are hard to find. Search for S00 type stars if you want to find planets that can sustain life.

It’s the perfect ‘game’ if you need to relax, as all the graphics, though at an abysmal 320x200 resolution, are as soothing as can be. Great timewaster.

  Noctis IV (5.1 MiB, 123 hits)

Gameplay Video: