A long time ago, a company called Virgin Interactive put out a beta of a game. The game was an online 2D space fighter. It was pretty cool for its time. It could be a pretty massive online game. Usually, there were 40 or 50 people in a given room. The general concept was that you would go around killing each other. There were several ships to choose from. Each had its own specialty. Combine that with a lot of upgrades that you could pick up, and it was a pretty good game.
I originally got the game on a CD with my PC Games magazine. I started to play and really enjoyed it. It really was a fun game.
A couple years later, Virgin tried to sell it. After giving it away for free for so long, the $30 price tag certainly hurt. The game suffered with only a couple rooms open to those of us who weren't paying. Honestly, I had stopped playing much by this point. I knew it was coming (even as a teenager) and stopped playing as much.
In college, I was a bit unusual. After my first co-op, I had a solid job that I could do from home. It paid well, and I could actually spend money on things. I decided to look and see if Subspace had come down in price at all. I couldn't find it anywhere. I started looking around online and found that it had completely flopped. Some users had effectively taken over the game and created some patches. On top of all that, they were working on a new version that was branded under the name Continuum.
The early versions of Continuum had some bugs. All in all, it was pretty stable for the version number it had. I really don't know how much was rewritten. In any case, they're up to version 0.40 right now. It plays like a full release. I don't often have problems with it.
Another thing that came up after the original game flopped was the growth (or creation...I don't really remember) of specialized rooms. There are several different types of games that you can play. The most popular is "Trench Wars". This room is a capture the flag game with most ships having some form of one-hit kill. It's a lot of fun. The map is very small compared to how big it can be. People tend to really try to play as a team. The map is also very well-refined. It is basically impossible to employ a strategy to hold onto the flag forever. If the other team coordinates a bit and tried to get the flag, it will probably only take a few tries. The turnover of players in the room is also fast enough that a team will rarely be overpowered (skill-wise) for long.
In addition to the nice standard play in the Trench Wars room, they also host strange games with even stranger rules. I've played a naval battleship version of the game in there. They changed all the tilesets and ship images to make it like a naval battle. It was pretty cool.
The best thing about this game is that you can play it for a couple hours or you can hop on for 10 minutes. I've never felt any real urges to play it. It has always been something I do to kill a certain amount of time. Depending on who's playing, you might get bored, but I've rarely found that to be the case. It's a great game to check out.
