full sound, and my usb gamepad worked as well. I assume a flightstick will as well.
will try interceptor later and let you know…though I am unsure what will happen with tie fighter (it’s the collector’s cd version, btw)
Lute- if you don’t mind, I’ll shoot you an e-mail. thanks.
astro- no idea why no good space sims for xp. seems like there was a ‘golden age’ for them, and no one bothered to update them for xp. I figure it’s because of the way the games manipulated your gaming hardware, and xp has built-in protection against that as a security measure.
Well, one of the games mentioned above, Freelancer, just came out last year. But overall, you’re right.
I don’t know why. The death of Origin certainly didn’t help. LucasArts seems to be leading towards more arcade-y flight sims, judging from Secret Weapons Over Normandy. I guess a good question to ask is how the market for flight sims is doing in general. Are a lot of flight sims currently hitting the shelves? I know of Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator 3 and the excellent IL-2, but those are the only two that come to mind.
If you’re interested in a MMORPG set in space, there’s Vendetta Online: http://www.vendetta-online.com/
I’ve played it during the beta phase a while back, but it just came out as a full commercial product recently.
Freespace 2 remains one of my favorite games ever. You might be able to find it in the budget games rack - I’ve seen it at Fry’s at some point in the past in CD-jewel case only type packaging. Also, a while back they released the source code to the game, and there were several interesting projects using that, but I haven’t kept up on the status of any of them. There are a lot of cool mods for the game out there, too.
So, for full disclosure, the developers are friends of friends, though I’ve never had any real direct contact with them.
I enjoyed playing it, it was a lot of fun and the space sim aspect was very well done.
The netcode was good, you could have pretty effective space battles with people all over the place, and things usually went pretty smoothly. At the point where I was playing, people were discovering things in the game that weren’t really bugs as much as gameplay balance issues, leading to the higher powered, or at least in-the-know players being able to lay the smackdown on just about anyone else.
The biggest issue I had was that I’m not that hardcore and spending a week away meant that everything was different when I’d come back and I’d basically have to re-learn the game. I stopped playing when someone figured out how to mine space stations and suddenly there were mines everywhere.
I know that since then they put a lot of work into gameplay balance, so that it’s not in the best interest in the uber-players to go smash up on the newbies. Also, since it’s not in beta anymore, I doubt they’ll make the kinds of sweeping changes from version to version that they were doing when I was playing.