Fed II Star - 2005 Review of the Year

JUNE

Messrs Trumble, Cruikshank & Bone started to offer their very popular remote price check service, allowing you to get prices without having to get off your barstool and plod along to the exchange.

The 'DI ACCOUNTS' command was changed so it gave five cycles' worth of figures. This was in preparation for the Financier rank, who need to be able to see the past performance of companies when making decisions about where to invest their groats.

Trading exchanges started to show some continuity; their details were no longer put back to a starting position at every reset, but instead carried on where they left off.

The brokers started to charge a fee on all share transactions. Typical behavior for big businesses, particularly those that enjoy a monopoly - they offer their services for free until everyone is hooked, and then suddenly start to charge once they have a captive market. That's capitalism!

A new bar game took Fed DataSpace by storm: Lucky Louie, a guessing game involving numbers which can be played in any bar.

The cubical asteroid Cube appeared in the asteroid belt, and the Binary space station close to Jupiter.

The Imperial Navy added extra navigational beacons to the cleared routes through the asteroid belt, to make it easier for ships to find their way through the floating rocks.

We added some "verbal" maps to the web site to help blind or partially-sighted players who use speech synthesizers. The Verbal Maps are a description, in words, of what the Solar System space, asteroid belt and starter planet maps look like.