I’m sure it makes me a goddamn dirty blasphemer in the eyes of most Qt3ers, but my favorite game is Prophecy, which is probably the closest thing to playable in this day and age. Plus hey, Transition-Era Mark Hamill with beard but without old!
Plus it’s often like $2 on GOG
sharaleo
5032
And even that is wishful thinking. There are game mechanics they want to leverage for SQ42 that have not even seen the light of day yet. Heck I don’t think the flight model is finalised yet and that will have a core impact on mission tuning and perhaps even design.
Oh wait I forgot the best part - I own all the WC games on GOG - and I’ve never played them! AND I NEVER WILL.*
*I mean, maybe someday. Who knows?
rhamorim
5034
That was such an evil remark.
I approve.
One of the consequences of my having grown up spoiled by '80s sci-fi like Aliens, Robocop, and Blade Runner, is that if somebody casts Matthew fucking Lillard in their space epic, they’ve lost me forever. Unless, maybe, if they also cast Robert Preston, but I’m pretty sure he was dead by then.
Prophecy was a pretty darn good space-sim. I loved playing as Dana Carey, too.
Gameplay wise the game was good. The alien AI was dumb as rocks but they sent a lot more of them at you than the old games. Probably was a hack and not intentional but it didn’t really matter.
Story and writing wise though… wow was it awful. To be fair, EA slashed the game’s budget while it was in production but I doubt more money was going to magically make those scenes work.
Brooski
5038
Thanks, that helps. So it seems that at $3.5 million they added boarding operations, which seems like the gateway to this FPS nonsense? That’s a pretty low funding level to add a whole new game.
But dude was born to play Shaggy, I think you must admit. And the guy has done some pretty good acting in recent years, like on the U.S. remake of The Bridge.
Yeah, he’s actually a decent actor, and he was indeed as fit to play Shaggy as Shelly Duvall was to play Olive Oyl.
milo
5041
OK, I haven’t played any of the Wing Commander games since… um… the nineties? (Yikes!) But as I recall them, they weren’t actually 3D space sims, were they? Yes, the ships were 3D models rendered with polygons, but did any of the games have a 3D flight model? It always felt like I would arrive at a waypoint and see a bunch of dots on the scanner. Then pull the joystick (no, the other one) towards the little white chevron until an enemy ship appeared in front of me. And at that point it appeared to become a rail shooter with the alien ship twitching randomly across the screen until I got in a lucky shot. Lather, rinse, repeat. It never seemed possible to develop a sense for where all the ships were situated in space around me.
Am I misremembering?
I’m only bringing it up because I can’t see how a modern version of those games would even work as a single-player experience, let alone PvP multiplayer.
I agree. They had a flight model, but it was pretty terrible.
Freespace 2 set the gold standard until Elite:Dangerous arrived, and Freespace 2 rocks in so many other ways in terms of its combat.
Hah!
Come on; Elite has a fantastic flight model.
I guess it’s hard to quantify. I’ve been very satisfied puttering around in Elite (which is pretty much the full extent of its gameplay). It’s more drifty than the tight FS2 engine, but I like that aspect. It reminds me of a slightly easier Babylon project mod for FS2.
WHAT ABOUT IT SIR?
They really are apples and oranges, but I actually prefer the aforementioned I-War as well as Evochron over Elite. If we’re talking Newtonian models, that is.
WWII in space? Freespace 2 and TIE Fighter are still tops.
KevinC
5049
Yeah, Evochron jousting I can do without. Booooring.
Please, try to engage in combat in Elite II, then talk to me about fucking jousting.
