Colony Wars (PS1)

The PS1 is yet another platform I pretty much missed out on. I owned one, but only very briefly indeed, and of the few games I owned for it, I only really got to play a couple at any length. So this is a system that's prime for blogging...

One of the games I can remember owning but not playing was Colony Wars: Red Sun. I only bought it a couple of days before I had to get rid of the PS1, so never really got to find out what it was like. I saw it in Cash Converters (where else) and it rang a bell, but before I bought it I looked it up online and discovered that Red Sun is actually the third in a trilogy. So I decided to buy and play all three for the blog... eventually. I've got the original and Red Sun - Vengeance will follow courtesy of eBay.


Your sights are locked, but I wouldn't go attacking something that size...

The first thing I spotted was that this game was produced by Psygnosis. I was a touch surprised... they're well-renowned for their 16-bit classics, but I'd thought they were defunct before the Playstation era. Shows what I know. Anyway, it gave me a little extra edge of anticipation prior to loading it.

Colony Wars starts with a sweeping narrative, which anyone would swear is by James Earl Jones, adding an amount of grandeur to proceedings. Research suggests that nobody is clear as to whether this is James Earl Jones or just a very good impostor. Let's pretend it is. It just feels better that way.


In space, everything except you is enormous.

The game is a massive space-opera, where you play a single lone starfighter pilot, battling against a gigantic evil Empire. Of course! Your ship, thankfully, is simple to control. You can accelerate and decelerate with the shoulder buttons, and switching between different weapons is easy. I can be put off from space games very easily if the controls are too convoluted, but this is nice and simple.

It's difficult to judge how good this game is from my time with it. It's absolutely epic, and huge, and I haven't even scratched the surface. What I can say is that the ship handles pretty well, blasting things feels satisfying, and there's a genuine sense that you're part of a grand quest of righteousness... in spaaaaaaaaace! I imagine this impressed the hell out of people when it was released... I don't know if I'll be able to play the trilogy enough to do the games justice, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.