Quitch
2702
If we were posting on a forum back then, sure.
Oh okay then.
Quake II, which came out a year earlier.
Baldur’s Gate, which came out the same year.
Heh. At the time I thought Baldur’s Gate was the worst intro I’d ever seen. It completely failed to interest me in the game at all since I didn’t know who the characters fighting it out were. It didn’t interest me in this supposed bad guy, and there was just no context, so it fell completely flat.
Fallout’s intro, by contrast, gave lots of context and really pulled me in the world, and that game came out a year or more before Baldur’s Gate. Much, much better intro.
I liked the I-war intro a lot because it set up the universe up well. The voice acting wasn’t great. The President was over-the-top and just weird, and the Captain of the ship we were rooting for didn’t have great voice acting either. But if you ignore the voice acting, the concepts the intro introduces you to (the core earth worlds fighting the colonies, a captain who is ambushed during an awesome space fight which features newtonian physics where he leaves behind two missiles which then destroy the ship coming after him because shields are weak in the back) are all exciting.
I watched the intro for the first time a few minutes ago, the voice acting is terrible (the president is borderline funny), but I liked it anyways. Especially when you see the dreadnought bridge and Jefferson Clay destroys those two enemy fighters and lights his cigar. Typical, but awesome. When the title appeared on the screen at the end of the intro I had goosebumps.
At some point in the first training mission I was moving forward, then I looked for a way to turn the engines off. I found a button, clicked it, turned my joystick, and the ship kept moving in the same direction but turned around its axis! I’m liking this game already.
Raife
2705
You may have to be culled for the good of the Empire.
JMR
2706
So did anyone pull the trigger on I-war? Does the GoG version support 3D acceleration and USB joysticks?
I bought it, but I won’t be able to play it until tonight.
Here’s a tip for anyone playing this for the first time: Go to Options, and click on the entry for Joystick Hat. It is set to Contacts by default. Change it to Lateral. This will make it so that your joystick hat controls your lateral thrusters, so if you put the hat upward, your ship goes upward, etc. You get much more control of the way your ship controls that way, and it’s right on the joystick.
(One of the reasons why Independence War 2 was such a pain in the ass to set up the way I wanted it is because you had to go alter a text file in order to change the controls so that the joystick hat could be used for lateral thrusters again. By default it let you operate the in-game menu/interface. That was nice, but I liked assigning that to the keyboard cursor keys, because the in-game interface wasn’t as important to me as the lateral thrusters when flying the ship).
Impressions:
-On my Windows 7 64-bit Intel/ATi machine, I just installed and ran it. And it worked!
-It starts right into the intro movie. (Unlike the original, in which you had to insert Disc 1 and press a separate button to display the movie).
-Then it launches the game.
-It runs at 800x600 Glide Voodoo2 version, I think. Though I’m not sure. Is 800x600 looking this low res nowadays? I could have sworn it would look a little better. Maybe it’s running 640x480? Is there a way of telling? Still, looks way better than software mode, of course. They’re definitely running the Glide version automagically.
-No more crashes when you hit Shift-Q to exit mission. No more crashes on ending a mission. No more crashes on starting the next mission right away. It seems like GoG fixed a number of bugs that I was getting the last time I tried the game on my last XP machine. Woohoo! Go GoG.com!
-The bad: Some of the in-game movies during the missions only display the first frame correctly, and then blur into incoherence. This really hurts the presentation, obviously. I’ll have to find a fix for this if I want to play the game.
-Number 1 tip for enjoying I-war: Press P for Pause. It will display all the controls you need to know for the game on that Pause screen. Including how to remote pilot a different vessel, how to change targets, how to set full screen view mode. The various autopilots, etc. It’s all there on the pause screen.
Now… anybody have any ideas on how to fix the cutscenes?
Finally, I-War! I’ve wanted to play this again for so long, but couldn’t get my copy to work properly. I spent a whole year without a PC capable of playing games, and I saw this sitting on the store shelf for a month while planning to buy my new PC. It reminds me of X-Wing because of that - the game that first made me buy a PC. I got stuck on one of the missions though, so I never actually finished it.
What joystick are you using Rock8?
I’m using my Sidewinder Pro. I just plugged it into this computer for the first time, and Windows 7 automatically found drivers for it. That’s one feature I really love about Windows 7.
Sadly I gave away my other joysticks when I moved away from Seattle. Including my Sidewinder ForceFeedback Pro. Which is a shame since this game had the best ForceFeedback ever done for a space sim IMHO. Oh well. I don’t need FF.
It’s a shame that someone at Particle Systems didn’t keep around the original video cutscenes around, ones without all the compression artifacts. I realize why they compressed the video so much originally. I mean, the game was already on 3 CDs when it was released. They had to compress the video as much as possible without it looking completely horrible. But space is not a problem now. It’s too bad Particle Systems isn’t around anymore, otherwise I bet they could have done it nowadays.
Argh, the legendary Sidewinder Pro comes back to taunt my lack of buying it… yet again.
Is it because you’re in Australia?
I just checked Amazon. That’s the joystick I have. Right now there’s 4 or 5 used ones being sold for around $50 or so including shipping. But I’m guessing that’s shipping to the U.S.
Well there’s no Amazon here, and the US sales don’t ship here. However, you reminded me to check eBay again and sure enough there are several for sale there that ship to Australia. So, the Force Feedback 2 is the bee’s knees, eh? If I’m going to get one, I may as well go for broke.
That’s a good game, but old, not so much.
Well, if they are going to skip their “good old games” shtick, i prefer it with “good but not old games” than “old but not good games”. :)
Yeh, we’re stretching the limits of what’s “old” with this one… but eh, it’s $9.99 and it’s awesome. :)
2 years old is old enough in my book.
Hell, 1 year old is old enough, if the game is good :P
Too bad I already have KB retail.
That’s my theory, too. At least in North America, it’s impossible to get anything more than a few months old at retail (at least reliably). Sure, it’s available elsewhere digitally, but I think we still offer enough added value to make it worth a purchase…
