The thing is, I've never even encountered The Smart's rantings or ravings. I just got BC:M from a friend who knew I was into detailed simulations. Seriously, you can see glimmerings of excellence in there. This game really could have been the game to end all games. The concept alone sounds like a space-sim fan's wet dream.
But it's just a concept.
The execution was for crap. I can live with the poor modelling; I actually liked several of the ship concepts. I can live with what has been described as "very bad midis". I actually liked some of those too. I can enjoy uberdetailed simulation; if I enjoyed playing Falcon 3.0 with detail all the way up, or Outpost as originally designed sounded cool, detail ought to be a plus.. But dammit, the game is falling apart. The interface is clunky. The interface defines clunky. The keyboard shortcuts are so numerous that when I actually decided to give it a second try and memorize the important ones, I ended up with a list almost a page long. I memorized it anyways. The interface isn't just not intuitive, it's actually counterintuitive, a charge often leveled by reviewers at games they don't like, but only justified in my mind for this one game. The keyboard shortcuts don't always work. The interface doesn't always work. If there's a button there on the screen, and you click it six times in a row, and nothing happens, something is seriously wrong. Even more damnable, the failures aren't predictable. I was never able to figure out a specific set of circumstances which would reproduce any of them.
And a stable game? What's that? Can I eat it? I actually saw a Blue Screen of Death five minutes into the game the first time I played it; I hadn't seen one of those in years, I didn't even think Windows XP had a BSOD. BC:M has an annoying habit of crashing to desktop at roughly thirty minutes of playing time since you last started it up. Not exactly thirty minutes, though, oh no, that would be predictable. Instead there's a variety of times within a ten-minute range in either direction.
Even so, even with all this, I actually enjoyed playing the game. But to play a game, it has to be actually playable, which is a rare event indeed with Battlecruiser Millenium. I put, at best guess, 72 hours of time into it, and got perhaps 12 hours of actual playable game time.
Thus, even though when it worked I enjoyed it, BC:M must be considered the most craptacular game it has ever been my displeasure to install onto my computer. I leave it there now, as a little reminder to me that no matter how deeply I hate Relic, or Valve, or the folks of the SCP (sorry guys, but bugs are bugs), or whoever else's game is currently screwing up on my computer for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable, whatever is frustrating me now isn't actually too bad.
