There is a hole…an unfulfilled need in my life that I’ve tried to fill. I want to do things in video games that I can’t do in my everyday existence - explore, blow stuff up, be some nobody shmoe and create something awesome through my own resourcefulness. This may sound reasonable enough, but I want to do all of these things in space and in the future. A few games in the past have come close to satisfying my fantastic desire--Wing Commander Privateer, Freelancer, Freespace, the X  series, and closest of all, Westwood’s Earth and Beyond—but none of these have done the job fully. I routinely hope that a game will one day come along to completely fill this void, and after playing Jumpgate Evolution at GDC 2009, my hopes now fall squarely on NetDevil’s space combat MMO.

Several of you are probably already scoffing. “I hate MMOs,” you say, “I hate grinding and if I wanted an MMO in space, I’d just go play EVE.” First off, outer space is about the only thing that JGE and EVE have in common. JGE is an action MMO game, which means there are no activated skills, no cool down periods, and no randomized damage; just a player in direct control of a ship with his/her skill determining how many shots hit their mark.

 Given that players are in direct control of their craft – and also directly responsible for landing hits or evading enemy fire – responsive controls are a must. JGE’s controls will be immediately familiar to anyone that has used WASD in the past, and even more so to any Wing Commander vets out there. Within ten seconds of sitting at the keyboard, the game’s intuitive controls allowed me to fly around like an elite space captain. Hardcore space jockeys need not throw out their $200 flight stick and throttle just yet, as JGE supports almost every peripheral under the sun and even caters to the sim crowd by allowing them turn off the game’s “inertial dampeners” to give their craft more realistic vectored momentum when flying around. Imagining blasting the engines, cutting them to cause your craft to drift off in its initial direction, and then thrust-turning to the side for a strafing run along the fuselage of a capital ship. That’s just one Rush album short of the coolest thing ever, and Windows Media Player can always run in the background to help with that.