What's the name of that empire again? Oh yes, the Terran Empire. There are so many around these days that you simply lose track. Anyway, the Terran Empire is expanding so quickly that minor wars (just a pathetic 15 million dead) look set to bring the great dynasty to its knees.
And then (as luck would have it), a group of explorers that everyone had forgotten about, arrives home and tells of ore-rich hunks of rock in the next-door galaxy.

Obviously, every budding entrepreneur in the Empire grabs a shovel and a warp-capable space ship and clears off to go prospecting. But wait, it seems that these deserted-looking asteroids are actually home to an alien race. And they are not too happy about all these Terrans turning the old homestead asteroids into Swiss cheese.

K240 is a strategy-cum-god game in the mould of Millennium, Dune 2 and Mega-Lo-Mania. You are an independent prospector with a team of die-hard labourers. Your job is to mine lots of ore, expand as far through the belt as you can and to keep the poor old disenfranchised aliens at bay.

Mine, all mine
You start the game with a likely-looking asteroid from which you start building your commonwealth. The view which you will see the most is your asteroid in all its rather quaint and rocky glory.

The game is played via a series of pop-up menus which appear whenever you click your right mouse button. At the beginning you have to start mining - in order to bring in the credits necessary to build on other lumps of rock.

To this end you plonk a few mines down on the surface, followed by a storage facility, a solar generator and a sensor array (which is like a radar, detecting other likely-looking asteroids and any aliens in the neighbourhood).

To get anything done you have to allocate funds. Your pool of cash can be invested in construction, vehicles, intelligence or missiles. Obviously the more money you inject into an endeavour, the quicker everything will get done. However, just as you think everything is going swimmingly, along come the first problems. But this wouldn't be much of a game if everything was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Fuelling the problem
The initial challenge is going to be managing your base asteroid. You'll need plenty of generators to power all your installations. These cost money and take up valuable space on the rock. Then there's the threat of contamination. This can be dealt with by building a decontamination filter (surprise) which costs money and draws power.

Out in space they get up to all sorts of jiggery-pokery. For instance while you are not looking, the employees are likely to dip their collective fingers into the till and rob a few credits off you. The way around this is to build a security centre. From this building, men in shiny black uniforms will 'discipline' your loyal employees. But those same employees need good living conditions in which to procreate. So you will have to build nice living quarters. It just never ends.

Then there are those aliens whose world you've toddled into to plunder. Needless to say there are not too chuffed at your arrival and will do plenty to arrest your progress.

Fleeting moments
The solution, of course, is to build yourself a fleet of ships to do battle with them. These fleets need commanding. Oh, and let's not forget the other asteroids which have a habit of colliding with your colonies. Dear me, it's a lot of grief.

All the problems which beset your colony are actually the really fun bit of K240. It's all very well having a laugh building things in space, but it's the crisis management which will make or break you. As in life, so in art, and it is always best to plan ahead.

The game is very well designed and I especially compliment Gremlin on the manual. This includes a tutorial which leads you through the basics of the game - so much more preferable to being dumped into the game with nothing but a list of key commands and a few illustrations of aliens.

Lots of time has been spent on making the gameplay fluid. After just an hour of play I was zipping between all the menus, allocating funds, building armadas and desperately trying to avoid all those other ram-raiding asteroids - a process which is helped by the kaleidoscopic graphics. I particularly enjoyed the Sci-Tek catalogue, an on-line database from which you can purchase blueprints to build really splendid gadgets.

The spooky atmosphere is helped greatly by the Amiga which warns you of threats but which doesn't give you much advice. The spy satellites are funky, too. Dispatch one to an enemy asteroid and it transmits pictures showing what the aliens are up to.

Giving you want you want
Recently programmers seem to have hit upon what it takes to hold a player's interest. You need more than a bit of parallax scrolling and a few stickers in the box - what's required is a decent learning curve which eases you gently into the game and a health dose of that mystical quality called 'playability'. The three games I mentioned earlier are all playable and are a lot of fun. K240 (despite its rather naff name) is up there with them.

Although I must say that I find the ethics of the game a bit dubious - why do we always have to blow seven shades of merde out of the poor blighters?
Anyway, I am running low on juice, money, living space, spaceship and patience, so back to the game. Can anyone lend me a few thousand credits and a seismic penetrator?

You know the song that the dwarves from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves sing when they're working: "You've got to dig di g dig dig dig dig dig dig DIG the whole day through"? Now if you substitute the word 'dig' for 'build' and think build, think build and think build again, you'll have obtained the correct frame of mind to play K240 properly. If you think that sounds boring, stay with me.

The game's set in an unexplored sector of space known as the Magellenic Cloud. The cloud is teeming with resource-rich, discoverable asteroids. Each asteroid consists of certain minerals and ores just asking to be mined. The statutory ubiquitous empire-in-the-background will buy any ore surplus to your building requirements.

SALMON?
Your mission Jim, should you choose to accept it, is to exploit, expand and exterminate - the three 'E's that prove 'E's are good, as I believe is the popular conception these days.

'Exterminate'? There also happen to be aliens out there. From now on I'll refer to them as Native Magellenicans. Now, these Native Magellenicans are the indigenous population of the sector. Somewhat understandably, they're going to try and stop you in your colonial expansionist plans.
So, as soon as you start laying your foul eggs of civilization, you're in a race against time; a race to preserve your should and destroy your enemy.

Just as with Sim City, you've got to build. Buld power plants to power the mines that mine the ore that let you build spaceships and missiles and as much offensive/defensive hardware as you can afford. Of course, as any expansionist dictator of grandiose all-conquering exploratory plans will tell you, in order to expand and grow you need infrastructure.

Game comparison number one time. Many of the elements in K240 resemble Sim City. Everything relies on everything else. As already mentioned, in order to mine you need to be able to sustain the life of your miners; protect and nourish, as fine a prover as you can get.

To do this, you need the four basics conducive to survival, namely: power, air, food and water. Each asteroid can initially support life for a limited amount of time. After that, depending on the state of production, you can choose to add extra Solar Generators, Hydroponics, Hydration Plants and air producing Life Support modules.

Assuming you've got the mix just about right, production will be in full swing. Unlike Sim City, you don't have to worry about connecting everything up by road and rail, that sort of magically gets taken care for you.

By this time, you'll have a load of ore stored in a storage facility somewhere. Every hundred days or so, a transport ship from the Empire arrives. IT always arrives at the asteroid with the most mined and stored ore. Sale of ore, surplus to your building requirements, is carried out with the Empire ship. Prices fluctuate, up and down, so sometimes it can be worth speculating about the price you'll be offered. That's the crux of the game - sell in order to buy things later on.

KITTED OUT
I'll also give a quick mention to Sci-Tek blueprints; they're related to the arrival of the Empire transporter, i.e. if you purchase blueprints, they arrive with the next empire ship. Aside from standard armaments and production tools such as Hellfire Missiles and Napalm Orbs, Scout Ships and Assault Eagles, standard bore mines and deep broe mines, there's some really groovy equipment to be had.

The Sci-Tek button holds the snakey promise of forbidden fruit; forbidden by price, that is. Among the many tempting technically exotic hardware blueprints on display, check out the following; multi-headed drill bits to double the output of all your mines, construction droids to hep you construct twice as many ships as before, Fleet Battleships that let you disperse your enemy like chaff among human wheat etc etc. Oh, and as a final mention, what red blooded human from the other side of the Magellenic Cloud could resist the allure of the formidable sounding Seismic Penetrator? Not me.

Interface-wise, you can place icons where you want, which helps undeniably. Unfortunately, there are still some very annoying implementations that may drive you to distraction. For example, throughout the game, information screens pop up to inform you of something that's happened or going to happen.
Fair enough, it's an important part of the game.

Unfortunately, the programmers have opted to insist that you click on a little icon that looks like a 'return' key on a keyboard. This means that no matter what you were doing before, you have to move the pointer to the return button and click. No matter what you were doing or where on screen your pointer is.

There's no keyboard override. Now, it may sound like a petty point, but when you consider that you're just about always carrying out some function or other, it quickly becomes tedious and cumulatively time consuming.

Another annoying aspect is the control of singular spaceships. Unless they're in the hangar or moored in a spacedock, you have to click on them while they orbit one of your asteroids. It's no great test of skill, but it's tedious. No getting away from it; mighty tedious.

HOWEVER
Despite the gripes, I can forgive the game. At first I resisted. It seemed too big and complex; the manual's over 100 pages long for Hara Krishna's sake. But no, the game pulls you in. There's a nice tutorial at the start of the manual that lets you access the building and mining part. You'll fart around for quite a bit, but the game itself starts teaching you what you should be doing; a progressive gameplay evolution if you like. Hang around too long not doing anything and the Native Magellenicans will take care of you.

Incidentally, did I mention that you have the option to choose from five different Native Magellenicans? No? Well, I just did, alright? Each is progressively more difficult and requires different tactics in opposition.

It's conclusion time now. I love this game. It's no great deviation form many of the god-sim-cum-strategy-wargames, but considering I've managed to resist those type of games so far, it seems to me an even grander testament to the playability of K240.

I honestly felt like crying the first time I thought I was doing really well. I had put together a couple of squadrons of spaceships and thought 'come on Native Magellenicans, make my day'. And you know something? They did attack. I witnessed a valiant defence by my home boys, the apples of my eye. But sadly it wasn't enough. The Magellenicans whacked the space fleet and proceeded to bomb my Jewel in the Crown asteroid to rubble. I was forced to look on impotently.

Rest assured I will have my revenge. I've booked two pages of tips for the next issue. It gives me an excuse to play K240 during office hours and that's definitely a good thing.

If you sat down and spent some time with our exclusive playable demo on the March 94 issue of CU AMIGA, you'll already know what a great game K240 is, you haven't seen the half of it yet! K240, otherwise known as Utopia 2, is a massive game, and one that will keep you playing for months. But what am I doing telling you, to go out and buy it, I haven't even told you what it is yet!

TIGHTEN YOUR BELT
Sector K240 is an uncharted asteroid belt out in deep space, where huge chunks of rock rich in ores move slowly through the cosmos. It's these ores that have attracted you to the belt, where you hope to colonise these mini planetoids, mine them for all they're worth and sell the lot for a whacking great pile of cash. Oh, life can be so carefree sometimes.

Except things are never that easy in real life. What? You weren't naive and egocentric enough to imagine the humans are the only race in the galaxy who would have a use for precious ores? Six completely separate races of alien are also interested in getting their hand in, and as usual, aren't prepared to sit down and discuss territorial rights.

Just the simple premise alone leaves you with quite a few tasks to uphold, namely: start and develop a mining colony, explore a massive region of space for asteroids and alien presence and win a war against the alien you eventually discover. It's a lot for one man to do, so you're going to have your work cut out.

You start the game with one asteroid, with only one building on it and a modest amount of cash. The first thing you have to do is get your mining colony up and running. For this you have to ensure you have enough in the way of housing and food for all the colonists who are going to live on your bit of rock, as well as making sure that radiation is kept to a safe level, there is enough power to keep all the buildings running, you have adequate medical and police operations running and, of course, that you have some mines actually collecting the ores. Once you have that out of the way, you can start looking at the rest of space.

Switching to a view of the entire belt, from the outset all you can see is a large grey screen with a black circle and a spinning asteroid in the middle of the circle. When I told you it was uncharted, I wasn't joking. The asteroid on screen is yours, and therefore the only one you know actually exists in the belt. The black circle is as far as your sensors reach, and any asteroids that might drift into that belt will be given a name and displayed. Somewhere out in that inky blackness is an alien, who is trying to do exactly the same thing as you, and all you need to do eventually is locate it.

MORE THAN THE EYE CAN SEE
Combat plays quite a major role in the game, and as a result you're going to spend quite a long time just building weapons and getting them ready for battle. There are various different ways you can attack the opposition, from just firing a few missiles at their asteroid to going in for a full strike with a fleet of heavily armed ships.

The sheer volume of aggressive weaponry in this game has to be seen - there are dozens of different ships, from small scout ships which go out and explore empty areas of space and record their findings to huge battlecruisers with tens of gun emplacements and everything in between. But ships take quite a long time to cover the vast tracts of the void, and a well aimed volley of missiles can sometimes do the job so much better.

Again, you have a massive choice of missiles, provided you have the funds and the raw materials to build them. There are everything from small explosives to napalm and nuclear warheads right up to my personal favourite, a vortex missile, which creates a bolt of lightning that wanders around the asteroid for a limited time wiping out everything it touches.

With all this going on, you would expect K240 to be very tricky to actually play. Your assumption couldn't be further from the truth.

A small series of icon banks, brought into being with the right mouse button, control everything in the game, and these are laid out in a logical way, and drawn in a way that makes them easily recognisable. In short, you don't really need to read the manual to get a lot from the game, just a little logical thinking.

For example, if it seems to you that you need to do some deep bore mining to really get to the good stuff in your asteroid, simply look for the build icon, which resembles a building being built, and then select the deep bore mine. Want to build a ship? Go to the spacecraft icon, and then select 'build'. What could be easier than that? To make life even easier, clicking and holding with the left mouse button on an icon 'extracts' it from the menu bank it's in, and places it out on the main display, making it much easier to find the next time you want to use it.

As I said right at the start, K240 is a huge game. There is a lot you won't get the first times you play it, and thanks to the unexpected events (see panel), the game will be constantly throwing new things at you for months. Play it for an hour, and you might as well kiss goodbye to half the year. A splendid sequel.