In my cleaning frenzy the other week looking for an important but rarely used tool, I found a stack of CD’s including all the Star Wars flight sims. This week I tracked down a joystick and loaded up X-wing Alliance. I was under the false impression the game would come back to me naturally. Well, I found I’ve lost any talent I had for such things. My fingers never found their homes on the keyboard and I had no idea what all the commands were. I put it aside in frustration. I might go back to it. In the brief period I found the graphics where far less impressive then I remembered.
Overall I think I’d like to get back into a flight sims, I’d gotten out of them because nothing came out for years. I don’t really understand why that genre of games died off. I think the most recent one I own is Wing Commander Prophecy and that’s like 15 years old now. While I can probably entertain myself with what I got learning new fancier and flasher would be preferred over relearning the ancient and lackluster.
Are there newer flight sims worth looking at? Anything scheduled to come out?
Couple of free ones: Oolite (open source fan-made remake of Elite, with lots of mods available) and Vega Strike (sort of a single-player version of Eve Online). I’d provide links but my browser isn’t cooperating at the moment.
While there haven’t been that many space sims in the last 15 years, there are definitely a few you’ve missed out on. Freespace 2 is a classic. I’m quite fond of the Independence War series, where you were “flying” a small warship with realistic (and unforgiving) physics.
There’s also the X series, which are as much trading and empire building simulators as combat simulators. For the ones I’ve played, you can run through the plot simply as a fighter jock, but the real meat of the game is working your way up from hired gun to running a vast trading and manufacturing empire. Of course, if that’s not your cup of tea, you might think that the series is really Excel with pretty graphics and a cockpit. I found them enjoyable, though I haven’t played all of them so I can’t say which is best.
In the near future, there’s another game in the X series, and SOL: Exodus is an indie title that’s been drumming up a bit of publicity recently.
Now you have me combing through the wiki List Of Space Sims and getting all nostalgic…
Starlancer is another classic example of the Last Great Space Sims. Very much in the same vein as Freespace 2 or X-wing.
There’s also Freelancer, but it’s really a bastardized sort of space sim. You can’t use a joystick(?!), and everything is in a single plane(!). Very arcad-ey, but despite that I found it rather fun. Just think of it as an older-style first person shooter where all of the walls have suddenly gone missing…
But yeah, looking back there really haven’t been many. Most of the games I’ve mentioned are contemporaries of the games you’ve mentioned. The X series is pretty much the only decent attempt in the last ten years…
So if you’re interested in a gorgeous space sim that happens to be bolted to the side of a trading and economy simulator, I’d suggest X3: Reunion followed by its sequel, X3: Terran Conflict. (You can buy them both on Steam as X3: Gold).
Otherwise, just find copies of the classics I mentioned and re-live the glory days of the space sim. Independence War and Freespace (and their respective sequels) are both available at GOG.com.
Sad huh, you’d think the joystick manufacturers alone would do more to revive these games just to increase sales if nothing else. I’d prefer to skip the economy or building side of things. More just looking to mindlessly blow stuff up.
I think I actually own both Independence War and Freespace though I never played them. I might do some more digging.
Yeah, well, the game studios found they could make more money selling Halo clones to frat boys. The hardware makers all just went to the flight sim market, where there are lots of people with disposable income. Those guys don’t quite have enough money to afford to actually fly, so they instead blow lots of money on these sorts of toys.
And is there really no one else around here with space-sim nostolgia? The genre really is dead…
My attempts at reliving the Star Wars games have come to a halt. Apparently my graphics card doesn’t like them, it’s a known issue. Something about the 32 bit refusing to play nice with that collection of 16 bit games.
I managed to find only disk two of Freespace.
A few more months and I’ll just move into the Star Wars MMO, maybe they will add a space expansion.
Who knew finding computer games to kill my time would be so discouraging.
Tachyon:The Fringe came out more or less at the same time, and shares much with it - the freelancer/trader aspects, the exploration, the economy (“do I need to fire a missile at this guy ? These things cost money !”) etc…, but is a real flight sim, with a couple of interesting space gimmicks, notably the ability to go one way, cut propulsion and orient your ship another way without losing momentum. Eat physics, bitches ! Also lasers.
The graphics weren’t exactly superb (about on par with X-Wing Alliance, I’d say), but I remember it being a lot of fun.
Welcome to the fantastic world of incorporated game development, where you’ll be fronted tons of money to develop any game you could dream of, as long as you dream of cover shooters and Madden sequels.
I got a fair bit of play out of X3: Terran Conflict, and it was pretty cheap (five bucks on sale over Steam, and their Christmas sale isn’t too far off). It’s rather slow-paced, though.
I’ve read that there will be space combat, and that each PC will have their own ship (at least eventually).
It’s an on-rails arcade shooter, like Afterburner 3D or the shooting stage in the first Shadow Hearts. That’s what I recalled from their previews, anyway.
I’m so into the space-sim nostalgia, (to the point where I’m downloading Oolite as I type to relive some Elite goodness). Onthat note what are the good mods for Oolite, and more importantly is there a good Homeworld-type free game?
I cringe at calling them “space sims”. There’s nothing simulatory about any of them, as they all have viscous space, magical sensors, human-aimed weaponry with an effective range of across the room, and so on.
For me, the genre died when it all tried to go open-world. The great flaw is that all the fighter combat just devolved into ‘crank stick hard and hold’. The highlights of the genre were the games that focused more on goals and coordination: TIE Fighter was my personal favorite and almost every mission in it was focused on attacking a large enemy target with a lot of friendlies, or protecting something slow-moving, and frequently there was interesting story flavor going on. It spent relatively little time on the fighter-on-fighter drudgery. When everything went open-world a la Tachyon/etc you lost the heavy scripting that enabled scenarios like that.
When the Freespace 2 mods were mentioned, I remembered that there’s a fairly short but very tough **Battlestar Galactica **mod floating around out there as well.
And then I remembered BGO, which I really must get around to trying.
Here’s a list of what’s available. I haven’t tried them yet but Sunskimmers and Total Patrol sound good; the former makes it so you’re not the only one refueling from the local sun and the latter sends the local police out there as well.
Fair enough. Part of my love for Independence War is that it mixes a lot of hard sci-fi “truthiness” into the genre. The developers assumed relatively few sci-fi conceits (fusion power, jump gates, space-warping fields) and used a newtonian physics engine. That was extrapolated to a near-future setting where warships are spartan things with a few weapons wrapped around a bigass fusion engine and particle accelerator ring. So instead of flying a P-51 masquarading as a spaceship, you were in command of a small warship. The developers turned that into very interesting tactical gameplay, IMO, though the physics made for a fairly steep learning curve.
That’s a valid point. The core gameplay mechanics are pretty simple – dogfight and attack big things while dodging other things. So, in 1999, what is there left for developers to make? Another X-wing clone with different ship models and better graphics?
The open world concept was one way that the X series developed pretty well – their later games are both richer and more expansive than Tachyon, while still retaining some pretty good story elements and big scripted set-piece battles. Enough people are buying those to keep X’s developers going, but that’s the current extent of the genre. (Of course, the X definition of a “rich” setting includes a pretty intimidatingly complex economy simulator)
Well, yeah, why not? A lot of people have been successful making “Another Call of Duty/Madden/Street Fighter clone with different models and better graphics”. Iteration on popular themes is the bread and butter of gaming. IMO the reason the space shooters died out is because the genre lost sight of what made it fun. They either started spending more effort on cutscenes than the actual game or they went open-world and tried to shoehorn Trade Wars 2002 into there at the neglect of the actual shooter entertainment. The last games with the original genre flavor were Freespace 1 & 2, and those did fairly well, despite coming from a mostly unknown fragment developer and despite being an X-Wing clone with better graphics
It’s a pretty damning indictment of the genre when an arcadey action game like Sinistar Unleashed winds up having more involved gameplay than any of the supposedly serious games.
Joystick market penetration isn’t the problem, considering the proliferation of console controllers these days. Everybody on the console has analog controls and quite a few on the PC do as well. I think it’s more that we’re in a chicken and egg situation now. Nobody’s done a major space shooter for ages, and thus nobody wants to take the risk to make one, and the Trade Wars style games are never going to break out of their niche (not to mention that they’re kind of doomed with EVE trumping them so hard)
Heh, that’s what they advertised on the box, but all that meant was that they included the then-newish ‘coast’ button. It followed the standard formula to the letter, right down to the viscous-space-imposed top speeds. I will give I-War credit for focusing on the core gameplay, it was a pretty engaging shooter…one of the notable X-Wing clones with better graphics
Any time I build a new game system, Freespace 2 is the first game I install. Sort of a personal tradition at this point. After losing track of the CDs one too many times I spent all of 6 dollars buying it again it on gog.com.
I’ve been playing a game on my iPad called “Galaxy on Fire 2”. It’s available for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. It’s very simplified, even by space sim standards, but I’ve been having fun. It’s kind of X3-esque with commodities you can trade and asteroids you can mine in addition to dogfighting space pirates and the like.
I played Battlestar Galactica Online for about a week, but it was rather annoying because I couldn’t compete with kids abusing their parent’s credit cards. You really can’t advance out of the basic fighter without spending a lot of cash, and the systems were full of people in huge, virtually invincible cruisers. Basically all you could hope to do is putter about in the safe systems and shoot up NPCs.
