Monday, March 11, 2019

Cargo Commander is a forgotten classic

It was the laundry that got me. A neat little line strung between gantries, and pegged upon it a cap, a nice pair of space-trousers, and underpants with, of course, a heart pattern. Cargo Commander is a game that gives quite a bit of real estate over to camera control. You can use a bumper to pull way, way back - so far out your character becomes a dot and the procedural 2D mazes he runs through become unreadable. But you can also use the other bumper to zoom in, far closer than is practical. And when you zoom in you see a world of careful details: the clothes line with its laundry, paper spooling endlessly from a printer, a glitchy animated hammer working away on a laptop that's sat on the game's upgrade bench.

Cargo Commander came out in 2012 and it was a cult hit rather than a smash, which means you can return to it now without having to navigate a lot of popular thought and opinion surrounding it and obscuring it. What I find, each time I come back, is a beautifully scrappy kind of bottle universe, a chaotic, living game with some ideas that were pretty thrilling for 2012, certainly, but also a self-contained game with total confidence in its own identity. Actually, identity isn't quite the right word here. This is that rare game that has an actual force of personality. It's lost in deep space, it's orbiting a wormhole or somesuch, it's pegged up its underwear and it doesn't care who can see it.

Even now, the big stuff you can do in Cargo Commander is strangely dazzling. It's a sort of space truckers future, filled with all manner of grease-splattered blue collar types toiling away in a galaxy that feels a bit like Detroit - metal plate, lots of wrenches, nothing that can't be fixed with one of those guns that fires nails. You operate a salvage ship, which is basically a living quarters attached to a huge magnet. At the start of every game you turn the magnet on, and then--

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from Eurogamer.net
by March 11, 2019 at 01:00AM

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