The first job today is to collect all the bounties on Menesche. I’m in the same system as Lynch so I call in there first. He isn’t paying me but he offered to wipe out my record will the various factions in the Gemini sector. I didn’t realise quite how useful this would be beforehand. The only groups that attack me now are the retros & kilrathi. This means I don’t have to cope with endless attacks from pirates and hunters as I have been doing the rest of the game and the vast majority of nav points are now non-hostile.

Next up its Edom to collect a not too impressive 20,000.

Next its Perry to collect 40,000. This gives me enough cash to buy the speed enhancer. This ups my speed by 18.5% which is pretty unimpressive for all that money. All these upgrades are nice but seem to be entirely unessential – I guess that too large an improvement would completely unbalance the game.

Goodin also has another mission for me helping out Confed against the Kilrathi. I have to fly off to a nav point and get instructions there.

I meet up with a confed cap ship at the nav point. I get to patrol 3 nav points and meet up with them at another while they hold the jump point to Kilrathi space. Suffice to say there are loads of Kilrathi to kill in this mission.

One of the Kilrathi decides to give away the plot while attempting to kill me. The new retro ships are being supplied by the Kilrathi who are using the Retros to weaken Confed. This makes some sense and the new ships look sort of Kilrathi (although a little too cute).

I clear the points but when I meet up with confed again they are under attack also and not doing too well. I just about manage to keep them alive although the cap ship is badly damaged.

That completes the mission so I just have to fly back to the base.

On the other side of the nav point, is a Kilrathi cap ship + escorts. I mess this fight up and am only kept alive by the new armor + some afterburning.

Back on Perry, I’ve impressed the admiral enough that he wants to see me again.

The confederation want to shut down the retros and kill off their new leader. The know which quadrant he is in but no more than that so are recruiting volunteers to help in the search and cover the area more quickly. I get to search the not so pleasant sounding systems of death, war and pestilence (passing through famine on the way). These are a long trek away so I have to stop at another base on the way.

I search the systems and have to cope with a large number of enemy ships but otherwise I come up empty. I’m out of fuel by this point so I just head for the nearest base. Before I land a pirate tells me his employer wants me to meet up with him at Drake in Capello. The admiral was adamant about returning to see him after the mission so I head to Perry first.

The search has come up empty so far for everyone else also. The admiral puts an 80,000 credit bounty on Jones head which would be the single largest payout I’ve had in the whole game. By this point I’ve got everything except the advanced repair droid. Since I rarely take enough hits to need repairs this really doesn’t sound very useful.

I head to meet with the mystery employer at Drake and its the informant who handed over the coded documents earlier in the game. This guy is full of information. He is actually high up in the church of man but due to circumstance we are on the same side. He has discovered that Jones doesn’t actually believe in the retro cause and is simply using the church as a tool to take over the sector. On that basis he wants me to go to the church headquarters using a secret jump point and kill him. Even if I tell Confed the location he still considers the destruction of the base a reasonable price to pay to remove Jones. He promises he will destroy all the Steltek guns if I complete the mission although I still don’t get my gun back.

Its a long haul to get to the retro planet. I stop off the system before to get a chance to save my game as I’m anticipating it will be tough. On the far side of the jump point I’m attacked by the Kilrathi/retro ships this time armed with steltek guns. These definitely hurt a bit more but its not like the alien weapon was that much better than other alternatives so they aren’t too hard to handle.

I land on the retro’s home planet and head to their temple. I was expecting the place to be a bit more hostile but they just assume I’m a new convert and I manage to learn that Jones is heading for their gray moon.

I fly out to try to catch up with him. I’m not sure at the time if I’ve got the idea right but I point my ship at the moon and afterburn towards it. The moon is just a background image and not a real object so I’m not really expecting this to work.

I’m suprised when this tactic works and I locate Jones. He is guarded by an insane number of Steltek armed ships which seem to keep warping in as fast as I can kill them. I have to cope with the bug from the original game where if you enter a nav point in normal flight your shields get wiped out. This means I start with no protection and have to be careful for a bit.

After killing off 8 or so he tells me his guard cannot be defeated. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if he’s right and they will just keep respawning indefinitely.

I finally kill the last ones off though and now have to chase Jones down. Hes 30000m away by now so I afterburn to him as quick as I can. What I don’t realise is that he is in the middle of an asteroid field and I manage to smack straight into one at full speed. This isn’t going to make the fight any easier.

Having said that, I’m pretty surprised this final fight is in the middle of an asteroid field. The opposition in this game don’t have a clue about how to fly in them and usually end up blowing themselves up. This guy is no different although his ship is obviously very tough and he also has steltek guns. Its not a hard fight – he just takes a little wearing down.

After he dies another retro appears and attempts to take revenge. He appears right next to a jump point that isn’t on my map and is very obviously only put in the game to draw my attention to it.

This secret jump point saves me a long trek back and drops me straight in the Rikel system.

I head straight for Perry to collect my reward from the admiral. In the same manner as the last game he also gives me end credits if I talk to him again.

That completes Righteous Fire – there was no end cutscene but I didn’t really miss it too much. In fact I’d say the games story improved enormously in this final days play and its left me a lot more impressed than I thought I would be. I like the idea of visiting the retro world – expanding on this sort of thing and being able to explore the planets in more detail would have been fun. You could even add an adventure game element and get a bit of the complexity of Space Rogue.

I’d say Space Rogue was my highlight of this entire blog so far. Something similar using the Wing Commander engine with the Ultima 7 engine tacked on to explore the planets/space stations could have been fantastic. Privateer and its sequel are great games but there isn’t much incentive to just explore systems as despite minor cosmetic differences nearly every planet and station is the same. The gameplay is closer to the much older Autoduel than it is to Space Rogue in many ways.

Next: Metal Morph