Retro Games: PSI-5 Trading Company
Welcome to a new series, where I talk about some of my favourite Retro games, one's I've played for many years.
Today it's the PSI-5 Trading company, Psi-5 Trading Company (also rendered as Psi 5 Trading Company, Psiรยจ5 Trading Company, Psi5 Trading Company and PSI-5 Trading Company) is a 1985 space trading game, one of the first games published by fledgling video game developer and publisher Accolade.
The game was released the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and ZX Spectrum.
The player selects the crew to man the ship. Each ship department has various candidates, including aliens and robots. Each candidate is described in a short profile. The candidates differ in abilities, for example, in their degree of autonomy, efficiency, foresight for possible imminent problems, obedience, stress tolerance, physical vulnerability and teamwork. A single "best team" does not exist, since every candidate has advantages and disadvantages. Robots are, for example, particularly obedient and stress-tolerant, but also particularly dependent and poor team players. The team members are animated throughout the game.
The game is played by a single player. The aim is to transport a valuable cargo from the starting planets through a pirate-infested space as undamaged as possible. The target planets have three different routes with different hazards and correspondingly different levels of rewards.
The player must give the crew orders to operate and pilot the ship. Herein lies the difficulty: the player must make quick decisions and set priorities in order to handle, for example, several attackers in time and fight them in a sensible manner, with the right weapons and to divide energy for various purposes, such as flying evasive manoeuvres and keeping the life support systems in operation and repairing damage with the limited availability of repair robots, etc. The cargo can be looted by pirates if they aren't fended off in time. Various technical systems can be individually damaged, so the player must often improvise. Crew members can become stressed during flight, so they start to make mistakes. Crew members can also die if the ship becomes too badly damaged.
The game is lost if the ship is destroyed beyond repair or completely looted. Victory is achieved by arriving at the target planet having at least one portion of the cargo. The player's score depends on the route chosen (difficult routes give more points), the amount of salvaged cargo and the flight time. The faster the cargo arrives, the more points are awarded.