What is Terminus?

Some games are addictive from the moment you start them, while others slowly grow on you — like mold — until you find yourself inexplicably playing as the sun comes up. Terminus, Vicarious Visions' new space-trading and combat game, is of the latter variety — getting started is tough, but stopping is much, much harder.

Terminus is a space-trading and combat game in which players can compete as either military pilots for Earth or Mars (as in LucasArt’s X-Wing) or independent pirates or mercenaries... Unfortunately, the dual playing style isn’t always successful. The non priority missions that military pilots take on feel uncomfortably like busywork to keep them going while they wait for their “pager” to go off, informing them of the priority missions that advance the game’s plot (the nonpriority missions make much more sense as paid contract work for pirates and mercenaries). The game’s unremitting emphasis on real-time realism means that almost invariably you get paged when you’re right in the middle of combat. The focus on real-time pays off in multiplayer mode, where multiple pilots play in the same universe.

By far the strongest element of Terminus is its first-class 3D flight engine. Terminus abandons the (inappropriate) drag-based Aristotelian premise that thrust is equivalent to speed, so would-be space fighter pilots must suddenly deal with ships that take significant amounts of time to turn, stop, or otherwise maneuver. Even the most jaded flight-sim jockeys will probably undergo a few serious collisions before they get the hang of controlling their ships. In Terminus, even the simplest maneuvers are somewhat tricky, and combat is well neigh impossible for neophytes until they get used to the idea that they’re usually not traveling in the direction their ship faces. While there are limits to the accuracy of the physics model (you have to feel sorry for a pilot subjected to more than 80 Gs!), it’s easily the best we’ve seen.

The initial version of Terminus was amazingly buggy — some missions wouldn’t work (the game simply wouldn’t react when you launched probes during spy missions), users could not calibrate joysticks, and occasionally the whole system would just lock up for no apparent reason. Fortunately, the developers didn’t rest on their laurels; between the time we received the game and press time, the version number had gone from 1.1 to 1.62b. We still encountered the occasional bug, even with 1.62b — if you get the game, you should check Vicarious Visions’ Web site for patches before you start it up for the first time. Unlike most Macintosh games, Terminus lets you use multiple controllers simultaneously — you can assign flight controls to any connected joystick, so serious gamers can play Terminus two-fisted with different ships' functions assigned to each controller. The game ran smoothly on a 500MHz G4, and we could play it on a beige 300MHz G3 once we turned down the graphic detail a bit.

Terminus is an intermittently fantastic game that should appeal to flight-sim jockeys, hardcore sci-fi fans, and anyone who’s ever wanted to wield two joysticks. With enough players, the tremendously well-executed multiplayer game can give you the feel of a populated universe. If your fingers have been itching ever since you finally admitted you’d extracted every last bit of fun out of Tie Fighter, Terminus is the game for you.

Sammis, Ian. (November 2000). Terminus. MacAddict. (pg. 70).

Download Terminus for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver