Starpoint Gemini 2 - 15/20 hours

I love maps. A great map tells a story through the proximity of landmarks and the linguistic relationships between names. I have a lot of wonderful memories of becoming enraptured by maps. The one in the end-pages of The Hobbit was probably my first, and the historical maps of Europa Universalis IV were my most recent, but even a plain old map of our contemporary Earth holds plenty of fascination for me.

Starpoint Gemini 2 has a pretty good map. It includes nebulae and asteroid fields, warp gates and wormholes, planets and space stations, and a variety of colorful region details. There are a lot of interesting labels to look at, and though the color-coded faction filters aren't very informative (due to a lack of a key), the patchwork of political borders in nonetheless suggestive of a richly developed universe.

Unfortunately, in the 12-14 hours it took me to uncover the map, very little of its complexity was reflected in the universe itself. Oh, sure, the stations all had their own names and I could spot a variety of (what I assume was) faction-specific architectural styles, but there was no culture to be found. No entertaining NPCs or memorable events. Exploring the Gemini Sector was almost purely a matter of moving from hex to hex, occasionally dodging a pirate attack or taking a wormhole shortcut to double back and sweep an area I overlooked. Starpoint Gemini 2 does do the space sci-fi thing where the void is a riot of colors inspired by the astrophysics practice of publishing false-color images of nebulae that can only be seen in infra-red, but it's a cliche because it works.

I also did a shit-ton of delivery and taxi missions, because if I'm going to be trekking back and forth on the map, I might as well get paid for it. Some of the stuff you have to transport have names suggestive of a broader world, but none of the missions I accepted had any sort of story or characters attached to them.

I'm increasingly beginning to suspect that "free roam" mode was an afterthought and that Starpoint Gemini 2 defines "story missions" as any mission that has any scripted dialogue whatsoever. I could probably survive quite well in the barren universe for another 5 hours, seeing as how I switched over from a gunship to a freighter and am now well-equipped to strip-mine an asteroid field, but I suspect that I should at least give the regular game a try, just to see if its massive map is justified by the amount of content available.