Begin - A Tactical Starship Simulation

A tactical starship simulation from 1989 — and you immediately know what you're getting into. It's not an animated action accelerator with blinking buttons, but a cold proving ground for people who wanted to play admiral without the romance.

Begin puts a starship under your control and a real problem in front of you: you need to get it from point A to point B, while enemy units fly around you, fuel evaporates, and the computer plays the role of your coach. It's all about correctly distributing energy between shields, engines, and weapons, issuing orders to individual ship modules, and reading enemy positions on a black screen of dots and numbers. Graphics? Text-based. Animation? Minimal. Atmosphere? In full flow.

Playing is, in its own way, meditative — you press keys, watch numerical values, make a decision, and wait to see what happens. The controls aren't particularly intuitive; the game took the liberty of explaining a few things to you gradually, and during the first few minutes you feel more confusion than control. But once it clicks, you start understanding the logic — energy doesn't divide itself, sensors have range, firing costs resources. It's not an arcade game, it's a turn-based game masquerading as real-time.

As part of early PC gaming, Begin has a peculiar charm. There were no contests for the most popular simulations, and this game keeps its distance from everything else. There are no compromises toward fun — there's a pure vision of what a computer-simulated starship commander should do. Has it aged? Technically not at all, since it never had anything to age. Graphically? It never had anything to age. Gameplay-wise? That's a question for you — do you want to play a general, or do you want an explosive show.

Today it's played mainly by veterans returning to the nineties and fans of strategy without distraction. If you enjoy thinking strategy without animation and you're bored by chasing effects, Begin is like an old military manual — content you read, not watch.