X2: the Threat - Mac

I purchased this game based on a review which stated it was a 3D version of Ambrosia's Escape Velocity on steriods. That much is definitely true. More ships, more wares, more complexity to the economic model, and there's just so much further you can go with this game. Unfortunately, it seems (as of 7/20/2005) that there are still quite a few bugs to work out, and I've found that I restart the game every other hour or so. I still recommend the game, but it may be wise to wait until a new patch is available to work out some of the quality problems.Update 1: The first update has been released which solves most of the stability problems originally evident in the game. The only annoying things are that: the stability problems are not completely resolved, and that there are points where the game slows down dramatically for a few seconds (where, I presume, it used to crash). The latter problem gradually gets worse over time, but it can be remedied by periodically quitting the game and restarting.

I really tried to like this game, but after two days in the game, I was still spending all my time parking my Boron Dolphin in Silicon mines. This game is a time sink, for a couple of reasons:- Even with the patch, it crashes every two to three hours on my laptop.- Cut scenes (slow, boring cutscenes with badly rendered characters badly voice-acting inane dialog) always happen after the automatic saves, so every time the game crashes you have to go through the whole slow show again. There is no way to skip the cut scenes.- Even with x10 speedup, you spend most of your time in the early game waiting for your spaceship to go from point A to point B. After you get the automatic pilot and engine enhancements this gets a little faster. Unfortunately there is no enhancement to skip the ride between the docking port and the ship's berth, so now you spend all your time floating through claustrophobic corridors to get to your parking space.- A jump drive cuts down travel time a lot, but why the unnecessary countdown ? After jumping a couple of dozen times the novely wears off and the countdown just becomes one more tedious pauze.Trading is slow, fighting is near impossible with either mouse (too brusque) or arrow keys (only stepwise control), building is even slower and reminiscent of a real time strategy game played at a glacial pace.The one thing that this game has going for it is the beautiful design of its spaceships, especially the Boron Shark and other ships which look like deepsea creatures. The role of space tourist is the only enjoyable one. All other roles turned into tedious stepping through menus, some of which are very badly designed, like for instance the monitor system which has overlapping but nonidentical commands in two different parts of the menu hierarchy. I have gone crazy several times figuring out that auto-targetting in a monitor can only be set through the "option" menu, while all other monitor configuration setting goes through the "ship" menu.Too bad. Somewhere in this tediousness is hidden a beautiful, wonderously exciting space exploration game.