If you give Freespace 2 a shot, it might may be worth installing all the upgrades that have come up since the source code was released: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Makes things look and feel more modern than otherwise. There is an installer thing for it all, but it has been some time since I upgraded my install so I can’t say how easy it is to do these days.
FreeSpace2 isn’t good, it is the best there is. Get it, then go to HardLight and get FSOpen.
Freelancer, the Microsoft game with mouse control thing, isn’t bad either. The interface - especially if you intend to play with a mouse - is fantastic, the star systems still look great, the presentation/atmosphere is lovely, and if you’re into tightly knit persistent MP gaming with 50-200 people server caps, then Freelancer is pure crack. But pretty much everything else about the game is mediocre.
Plus, Femshep is in Freelancer as well.
Freespace 2 is the best game in the genre, the pinnacle, the game no one has sadly yet toppled. It’s combination of amazing story, breathtaking graphics (especially when you add Freespace Open from Hard Light, which is pretty easy thanks to these instructions) and fantastic combat make it the best in the business 12 years after its release. You CAN play it with a mouse, but a joystick is highly recommended.
Ah yes, Freelancer, an exceptional game to be honest, but much different than Freespace. While Freelancer is a fairly open space combat game, it’s more of an RPG set in space (wherein your ship is your avatar) with the chance to explore the universe thanks to its open nature, rather than a more traditional linear mission-based space combat sim such as Freespace 2. Both are awesome games though.
Chuck
4467
Freelancer was cool; I loved the atmosphere and all the background chatter, but the design decision to make the controls mouse-only left me and my flight stick scratching our heads. (or should I say hats)
I was skeptical about it at first as well, but I found that I loved it once I accepted that it actually wasn’t a space flight sim in any stretch of the imagination. ;)
Marcin
4469
<3 Juni. I only found out she was Femshep much, much later when looking up her resume on IMDB. Which in turn explained why Femshep is the only Shep.
Although really, all the voice acting in the game was fantastic, from the cutscenes to the generated traffic chatter. It might be the best noisy - but informative and accurate, since it actually reflected the AI routes and cargo! - space game chatter ever, actually.
True, it had fantastic voice acting through and through. So did Freespace 2, really. ;)
I just finished Freespace 2. It was absolutely fantastic. I plan on playing it through again starting this weekend and I never do that. I can’t say enough good stuff about it.
Edit: I have independence war 2 on deck as well. Can’t wait!
One thing that Mr. Rubin always fails to pass on in his breathless recommendations of the FreeSpace games:
They are hard. They come from that pre-millienial era of games that had not quite yet been consolified to pander to mouth-breathing couch dwellers and aren’t there to provide you a gentle gaming experience. To play FS, you need a joystick and you will need to get good at using it. To play it well, you will need to obtain the muscle memory of targetting keys and systems shifts and weapons systems and stuff that very few gamers have any more.
So FreeSpace: awesome sauce, but not really for everyone who wasn’t raised on joystick games.
Yeah, I play through FS2 at least once a year. I-War 2 is an ENTIRELY different animal though, since it uses realistic physics, so be careful.
You know what sucks? That you HAVE to mention that in the first place, no matter how right you may be. Sigh.
Kalle
4474
Back in '99-'00 (has it really been that long?) when I first played FS2 my joystick was broken. I played through the entire game with mouse and keyboard. It can be done. It’s not the best solution, I remember trying to shoot down a Dragon that kept out-turning me and having to lift my mouse off the mousepad and reset over and over, but I still loved the game.
The realistic style physics is what drew me to the game actually. I played the first 30 minutes or so when I bought my stick and really enjoyed it.
It’s funny, I would have bet fat monies that FS2 had Newtonian physics too. Recently I made the mistake of checking out I-War 2 before revisiting FS2 and was disappointed by FS2 at first. It had been almost 10 years since I played it and that was with a controller, not a flightstick. After the first couple minutes though I realized the devs had struck a beautiful balance between realistic and arcadey.
I would have never played I-War2 and would never have replayed FS2 had it not been for GoG.
Completely off topic but dammit I love my new stick. Between FS2, I-War2, X3, and Il-2 '46 I am in gaming heaven. I get home from work and have a hard time deciding what awesome freaking game I’m going to play before falling asleep at my computer. Seriously, for $30 you can’t go wrong with a Logitech 3d Pro.
I beat FS2 with a mouse and keyboard back in the day… But my mousing wrist/elbow would explode if I tried again today.
Re: On Freespace 2 difficulty.
Back when Freespace 2 was going to come out, Volition posted their developer notes leading up to the release. And I remember one of them had Mike Kulas (the president of the company) saying that he was having hard time with the game on the default medium difficulty, and he proposed changing the default difficulty of the game down to Easy. And that was approved. So the game came out with the default difficulty of Easy. (Not Very Easy, which is also another setting btw, IIRC the game has 5 difficult settings).
And when I first started Freespace 2 upon release day, I changed the difficulty to medium, since I was a veteran of the first game and was really good at it. But I soon had to agree with Mike Kulas and changed it back to Easy. Easy is the right difficulty to play the game, even for space sim fans, I think.
Re: On Independence War’s realistic physics.
Man, I loved Independence War so much. As much as I love arcade-space sims with their unrealistic physics model, there’s something about playing with actual Newtonian physics that’s just sooooo satisfying that I have a hard time deciding what is the best space sim of all time for me: Freespace 2 or Independence War.
I haven’t played Independence War 2 yet. I bought it on launch day to support Particle Systems, even though I was super busy in those days and didn’t have time to play any games. And now it’s the one space sim from that era that I still haven’t played. I keep meaning to go back to it, but I’m once again in a phase of my life when I have no time for games, so we’ll see. Hopefully one day I can get my Sidwinder Precision Pro hooked up again and enjoy I-war 2.
IWar 2 is one of the big games of the genre, together with Tie Fighter and Freespace 2. Play it!
Freelancer is the only one of those games I’ve played, because it’s the only one of them designed to be played with the mouse and keyboard I already have. I’ve just never been interested in buying a peripheral I’m only going to use with a handful of games at the very most, and since flight sims don’t interest me at all, that chops off about half of the potential uses right there.
One issue that I have with Independence War 2 is a big one.
You see, in the first Independence War, one of the options in the menu let you change the joystick hat so that it would control the lateral thrusters. I rely very heavily on being able to control the lateral thrusters with the joystick hat. Without that control, I don’t feel as much in complete control of the ship.
In Independence War 2, one of the big interface changes they made is that they made the joystick hat your main way of interacting with the ship’s interface. And you couldn’t change the controls in the game itself. You had to change the controls using a text file outside the game. Back when the game came out, I made some time and changed all the controls to my liking, but it took a bit of time and effort. I got through the the prologue in the game, where you play as a young man, through to the very beginning of adulthood. I was really looking forward to playing it through again one day when I get time.
But that whole interface thing is a huge mental barrier, and has been for years. I know that in order to play the game, not only will I have to rearrange my desk to make room for a joystick, but I’ll also have to mess around with a text file and change controls by starting the game, messing with controls, then quitting and changing the text file some more. It’s a pain in the ass, and I really wish they’d allowed a lateral thruster control option from within the game like the first I-war did.
My big issue with I-War 2 is that it’s such a big puzzle game.
