Dos/Win95 space game
 

Kudos for such a fantastic website and community!

I've been searching for days for a PC space game that somewhat defies classification. I don't recall details precisely, but I will try to give as much detail as I can recall.

The game was graphical and set in a spaceship of some description. I would say the graphics were VGA and the game was likely late DOS or more likely Win95 era.

The concept behind the game was that you had to keep the spaceship going by assigning resources (I don't recall if this was energy, training, robots or crew) to various parts of the ship as they suffered damage, to try and get the levels back up to nominal.

The game was fast paced and pretty much unwinnable. I recall it being criticised because its diversity and gameplay was so limited.

I vaguely recall there was a panel to the right showing levels of things like shields/engines/whatever. Gameplay consisted mostly of clicking on various boxes and pressing "assign x droids to blah" or something similar.

I also vaguely recall there was a 3D view screen to the left, in which you could see the ongoing battle and progress towards your destination. But the graphics were fairly basic. They weren't raytraced for example.

I kinda remember you had to train robots or crew, but I might be getting it slightly conflated with Starflight.

It was virtually impossible to reach the destination before being destroyed, no matter how quickly you assigned droids/energy/crew to fix the damage to the ship.

The whole thing might have just been a playable demo for a bigger game (which was presumably never released).

I played the game in Australia and it likely came on CD with PC World or something similar.

For extra credit, does anyone recall a DOS game which (before its time) had polyphonic sound on startup, through the PC speaker, which played what sounded like pipe organ music, possibly Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I thought it was a car racing game, and on the title screen a yellow or red car zoomed onto the screen and the game title popped up, which said "something II", where obviously I don't recall the something. But I am really unsure of this one, and don't recall any further details, so not worth opening a separate thread for it.

This something II?

I don't think that is it. It's possible I played that game once, but it's not ringing any bells with respect to the game that had the polyphonic music. On the other hand I'm so unsure of the details of the actual game in that case that it could have been anything.

As for spaceship game, StarBlade comes to mind, although I think it is kind of slow, not fast.

StatBlade is not ringing any bells for me at all sorry. But it is a space game I haven't seen yet, so thanks for the suggestion.

The extra credit DOS racing game... well, it is not exactly racing, but that sound effect reminded me of Quarantine, when you start the game. I still remember that one. There is a sequel also, worth a look.

Well, it has cars in it!

Yes, you drive yellow cab in cyberpunk city. Awesome game. Could it be what you look for? Or was it plain racing game?

No, it is definitely not the game I remember. It has no polyphonic music at the start sounding like a pipe organ. That is the one definite feature I remember about the game. *If* it was a car game, it was just a racing game.