This gives you a chance to zoom in and admire your bombers as they flit about, and keep an eye on your capital ships as they meander towards their targets. Your remaining units transfer from one campaign mission to the next, and reaching your mission objective takes additional time. There's a dreaminess to commanding your resource collectors to mine the nearest asteroids while you cue up your build order and scout out nearby space. This progression is entirely suitable for Homeworld. Action wasn't typically immediate World in Conflict hadn't yet been made, and the action-first mentality had yet to overwhelm the genre. It's a sensibly measured start, given the state of the RTS when Homeworld was released in 1999. Just as the soundtrack slowly unfurls, so too does resource collection. You may say that it is the gameplay that matters, but this collection's look and sound is vital to each mission's overall feel. This is iconic audio, immediately recognizable to anyone fortunate enough to play. The hushed groan and persistent beeps that arise when you press the spacebar to view the overall map emphasizes your place as a commander, drawing parallels to undersea exploration by evoking its sounds. Entering and exiting hyperspace emits a sustained, pulsing buzz that becomes the series' call to adventure. Individual sound effects take on similar meaning. The Turanic battle music remains a highlight: Rhythmic drums and nasal reeds pierce through droning electronic tones, impressing upon you the otherworldly nature of your newfound foes-quite a feat given a setting that is, by nature, already otherworldly. The game's true sonic successes were the work of composer Paul Ruskay and an audio team that created a wondrous sound that far surpasses the science fiction New Age cliches that occasionally plague games set in space. The song by Yes that closed the original Homeworld is gone, though I hardly miss it. This sense of mystery is paramount to Homeworld's success. It is a place to live, but it is not a home. At least, that's true of the original's mothership Homeworld 2's vast vessel fills in architectural spaces left open in the original, and looks more structurally sound and elegant, prizing practicality over mystery. It creates a striking parabolic silhouette against the starry background, and its center pylon, which is covered with individual light sources, looks like it must house a vast network of engineers and operators. The mothership-your base of operations in any given Homeworld mission or skirmish-is a particular wonder. You can still play those original versions in this remastered collection, though the vibrancy of the newly textured ships and sumptuous backgrounds are an inescapable lure. Like many games set in space, Homeworld and Homeworld 2 remain attractive even through a modern lens, though directly comparing them to their remastered versions reveal their ages. The Homeworld games-and the original in particular-are not just classics in our mind, but classics in practice, standing tall beside any strategy game that dares draw comparisons by being set deep in the cosmos. Returning to this universe in Homeworld Remastered Collection illustrates the series' timelessness. Yet Homeworld refuses to be outdone, beautifully capturing the loneliness of the black void, and then disturbing its eerie allure with the light trails of starfighters engaged in conflict. Outer space has been famously referred to as the final frontier, but it's a well-worn setting in video games at this stage-even in real-time strategy games.
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