"and simply taping the fire button down until the capital ship explodes"

December 1, 2024 3:59 PM

A retrospective (YT, 10 minutes) by Brian McIntosh on Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War (WP), plus an extended ode (YT, 1 hour) to FreeSpace 2 (WP) by Llaren Sagan.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice (9 comments total)

(If like me you remember reading a lot of very exciting half-column game reviews and seeing a lot of very large and expensive boxes in the local game shop and buying almost none of them, videos like these answering the question "what was even the deal with that game?" with actual game footage may be something you find engaging)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:06 PM on December 1, 2024

what's a good "modern" space combat game? i haven't played one of these in 30+ years
posted by glonous keming at 4:36 PM on December 1, 2024 [1 favorite]

Well Tie-Fighter has 320x200 256 colors graphics...
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 5:08 PM on December 1, 2024 [1 favorite]

Everspace 2! First one's pretty rad too. Chorus was also quite good.
posted by Alex404 at 6:03 PM on December 1, 2024 [1 favorite]

Elite Dangerous is in a good state these days.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:34 PM on December 1, 2024

Star Wars Squadrons was excellent, as well.
posted by aurynn at 9:37 PM on December 1, 2024

Thanks for this. I was all about epic space combat games in my teens. FS2 was a particular highlight ("how can you even have graphics this good or spaceships this big") but I never got a chance to revisit it properly. Watch Later'd!
posted by jklaiho at 12:19 AM on December 2, 2024 [1 favorite]

Oh my lord. I played the shit out of Freespace when I was in grad school and have never found a flight sim that I loved as much. I was blown away by the ability to customize ships and the storyline. Thank you for bringing this back to my attention and I'm gonna wallow in nostalgia for a bit this afternoon.
posted by teleri025 at 11:40 AM on December 2, 2024 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Hey, thanks for making this post part of this month's Bingo game!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 2:13 PM on December 14, 2024