Farscape Updated Preview

With the decline of Star Trek and the disappearance of Babylon 5, it seems the fan favorite among sci-fi shows these days is Farscape, the hit TV show from the Jim Henson Company on BBC and the Sci-Fi channel. Notwithstanding Enterprise, Farscape is arguably today's most innovative and beloved space opera show on television. It's only natural then that Farscape should take Star Trek's lead and make the jump to your desktop. This June, Simon & Schuster will publish the first Farscape computer game, simply titled Farscape: War and Peacekeepers. It is being developed by Red Lemon Studios, the developer of Brave Heart, with input from Jim Henson Interactive.

Many characters from the show, which will run for another two seasons, make an appearance in the game.

Farscape the show is the story of a human astronaut named John Crichton, who passes through a wormhole into a strange new universe. There, he encounters a cast of alien renegades aboard a sentient ship called Moya, or the Leviathan. Among them are a brutish alien warrior named D'Argo, an exiled and arrogant alien ruler named Rygel, a roguish alien thief named Chiana, a creature named Pilot who is organically bonded to Moya, a humanoid plant-based organism named Zhaan, and a former Peacekeeper officer named Aeryn Sun.

In the universe of Farscape, Crichton finds that a powerful force of law and order in the region is called the Peacekeepers. But they aren't the good guys. They are after Moya and its crew, and in the opening sequence of the game, a squadron of Peacekeeper fighters assault the ship. During the raid, several of the crew manage to flee in escape pods, only to be shot down over a nearby planet.

Character interaction is a big part of Farscape, so the game will have banter and quips between various party members.

The production qualities for the game look high, and the intro cinematic unfurls like the opening of a Farscape TV episode. The game begins after you crash-land on the planet surface. You first begin play as Crichton and Chiana, who walk away from the crash with little more than the shirts on their backs. Your first mission is to locate a nearby town and then eventually equip yourselves, find any other surviving crew members scattered about the planet, and finally reclaim Moya.

The game itself is an action RPG. The controls boil down to simple pointing and clicking. It is reminiscent of Diablo, so character control is easy to grasp immediately. However, there isn't really a concept of leveling up. The RPG aspect really comes from finding new items, equipping your characters with more powerful weapons, and interacting with different characters. Red Lemon couldn't give the show characters new abilities, so it is faking character advancement by tying your growing power to better and better gear. In addition, you'll unlock player characters as you advance through the game, in similar fashion to other RPGs.

In Farscape, you can have up to three characters in your party, although you start off initially with two. Letting you have multiple characters in a party, as opposed to giving you a single character throughout, was important for Red Lemon, since Farscape features a lot of character dialogue and interaction. Thus, you'll get to see player characters interact in a limited way. However, you can directly control only one party member at a time. The other characters who aren't under your control simply follow you under AI direction. They'll automatically acquire enemy targets to attack unless you tell them otherwise. This is sometimes problematic, especially when you have a melee fighter who wants to rush up to enemies instead of letting you pick them off first with your laser pistol. Thankfully, you can give limited instructions to your party, including telling them to hold back.