Gravitational Combat is a multiplayer strategy game in gravitational space which the author has billed as "the ultimate science-fiction multiplayer party game!"
The basics of the game is quite simple – you have to fire at the opposition ship(s) by calculating the trajectory and velocity each time you fire, not forgetting to take into account the gravitational pull of the planets. If that reminds you of the free QBasic game included with MS-DOS 5.0 called 'Gorilla' then you are absolutely correct, except that Gorilla doesn't have the fabulous graphics, etc of Gravitational Combat.
The more players you have with Gravitational Combat the better (well, certainly six is not too many!) as all of their ships are on the screen at once and you have the option of targeting any ship you like for your first 'kill'. You can even manually arrange the layout of the screen (position of both planets and ships) as long as all opponents are in agreement.
Planet size, gravitational pull, etc are controllable through the options menu and the game is really designed to be played on a 1024 x 768 screen resolution, but we used 800 x 600 and were very pleased with the results.
As we mentioned before, the graphics are excellent, as are the sounds, and the whole shebang is exceptionally well presented. The multiplayer aspect of the game is great and the gravitational effects of the planets terrific.
Gravitational Combat requires that DirectX 6.0 or later is installed on your computer and before you play the game you must set your screen resolution, color depth and if you want 'back buffering' to reduce the screen flicker (requires a minimum of 2MB of video RAM to use back buffering).
Be prepared to be impressed, very impressed! We rate this program as a '9 plus' out of 10 (and it would have got higher if the text in the graphics was a little easier to read).
Get it!
Gravitational Combat has been updated to version 1.02 with an update patch (134kB).
If you don't already have it, you need to download version 1.01 (1.78MB) first and then apply the patch – there is no single download (yet) for version 1.02.
The author advises that this new version includes the following changes: ship fading speeded up; fixed input precision (checks extended); fixed mouse flickering when scrolling; fixed midi problems; and introduced Windows2000 compatibility.
Gravitational Combat has been updated to version 1.03.
The author advises that changes in this version include: input precision extended to 3 decimals (by request); and the input now saved when pressing 'tab'.
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