Out in the emptiness of space sits the Nemesis, a ship that cannot be destroyed, and its pilot desperately needs your help. Every time it should be the Nemesis' turn to explode, space around it explodes instead, taking everything in the vicinity with it. The only way to stop this from happening is to keep the Nemesis from exploding, and the only way to do that is to destroy other ships and harvest their parts.
Sounds interesting, doesn't it? That's the premise of Captain Forever, a Flash game with a simple goal: survive. How? Up to you. Log in and get moving, pilot.
Fun Times
I thought I was aware of most of the top Flash games of the 2000s, but this list has shown me otherwise. I guess I was more familiar with the earlier hits than these later showpieces, and luckily for us in 2021, after the death of Flash on the web, efforts have been made to preserve this content for use offline.
Firing up an old version of Flashpoint Infinity that I still probably ought to update, we're able to play the freeware version of Captain Forever, a game of Asteroids meets LEGO, I suppose.
Captain Farbes needs our help in keeping the Nemesis alive. Every time it explodes, bad things happen. To stop it from exploding, we need to constantly rebuild it, and that comes at a price - fighting for our lives and, in turn, harvesting parts from those that fought and lost against us.
An infobot explodes in front of us, giving up a few basic ship parts. Blocks to form a hull, lasers for going on the attack, and thrusters to move around this black void, all with their own characteristics that affect their effectiveness against other parts, and their weight and how it'll affect your movement through space. Or is it mass that we need to worry about?
Anyway, after admiring the ASCII stylings of the HUD, and magnetically snapping bits and bobs into a rough ship shape, our version of the Nemesis is ready to head out and fend off anyone who looks at it the wrong way.
That happens pretty much immediately. We're not in a safe region of space here - we are, after all, the cause of everything exploding. Once we've WASD our way around, the space bar can be pressed to fire all the weapons we've got, each with their own firing rates, but I never had to worry about ammo or anything.
Each ship has a core; destroy that core and the ship is done for, exploding into whatever parts remain, as individual parts can be shot off too. Captain Forever is one part shooter, one part builder, and you're never quite safe to build in peace, so slap something together quickly.
Like Flow, or the early stage of Spore, there's always a bigger fish to worry about. You can confidently stomp on the little ships with weaker parts than your own, but come up against a stronger target and you best have a good approach.
I actually won this encounter, despite losing most of my ship, and weapons along with it. My reward was upgraded parts to survive that little bit longer.
That's pretty much Captain Forever. Move, shoot, rebuild, repeat. You can see how other ships are designed to try and emulate it with your own salvaged parts, or, knowing how easy it was to tear a certain ship design to shreds, know how to not rebuild next time out.
How it all works together is quite nice. You might find yourself struggling to turn and realise that your thrusters aren't optimally placed on your hull, or that you're simply missing one, or even that you've not balanced the weight evenly and are pulling one way or another.
The more you destroy, the more you'll have to play with, and you don't just have to survive - you can go out on the hunt, too, looking for bigger ships with better parts to really beef up the Nemesis.
Sadly for the captain, I didn't pick my fights wisely, succumbing to a bigger fish and taking a section of the universe with me in an almighty explosion. The Nemesis strikes again.
Anybody could play for free, but pay a little to register an account and you'd get a graphically more impressive version of the game, and more user-perks to have fun with. It's a model that still persists to this day: The now quite old Captain Forever is free, but it's sort-of sequels and reimaginings and tweaks are behind a pay-wall of one form or another, including a Steam re-release and remix, replacing the ASCII art with an 80's cartoon flavour.
For me, though, a respawn was enough. The Nemesis doesn't get destroyed. The Nemesis can't ever get destroyed. Keep trying, for all our sakes.
Final Word
I like Captain Forever. I'm not sure I like it enough yet to dip my toes into the other games, but I think it probably does deserve a look for sure.
It's a simple game that most players can get behind, with few controls to worry about and simple gameplay to follow along with. There was a lot of downtime where I would drift through space looking at nothing at all, but there is some sort of navigation mechanic going on somewhere - I guess I need to learn how space co-ordinates are written.
Subsequent versions of the game look much better, but this Flash original has a distinct charm, and I'm a bit of a sucker for ASCII stuff like this, even if I don't understand it all.
The Nemesis has outlived Flash thanks to the folks who keep piloting her. Make sure you play your part in keeping her from exploding, eh? Even if it's just once.
Fun Facts
The blurry background you see is supposed to be an image of you, the pilot, reflected in a screen, and can apparently be changed to an image from your webcam.
Captain Forever, developed by Jarrad Woods, first released in 2009.
Version played: Flash, 2009.