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« Last post by Borgkube on May 10, 2024, 08:43:08 am »
Original Descent Freespace: The Great War! My favorite all-time space sim. The Freespace series has the best HUD created even up to the current day, and you can customize it. This was not common back in the day. I like the command shortcut setup and you can change them. I have used Saitek, now Logitech, sticks for years and I program my stick for Freespace and the leftover non-critical commands are easily reached. The story is well done. Of course it is the usual save your side from the nasty attacking aliens but, it is well done. Descent voice-overs and good cutscenes. The opening video gives you the necessary feeling of urgency and panic of the sole survivor pilot. The DLC and Freespace 2 is more of the same which is just what you want. The quality of both original Freespace games is maintained. I highly commend Volition for putting the sourcecode for Freespace into the public domain when the company folded. Not something you see very often. Especially in today's world. Wherever the Volition team ended up I hope they are doing well. All of that leads up to today. The fact that this game is still being actinely modded today, 30 years later, tells how good the original games were, and how much the game is loved. Of course there are cons. The game was created in the days before the xbox/PS controllers were around. It was not created for today's screen resolutions. Of course the age of the game means that any halfway descent modern computer can run the game with the graphics on full. Most if not all of the cons have been dealt with by modders and the molded game runs very well on today's systems. All-in-all there way more pluses than minuses, and most problems can be corrected easily. You can't beat the price. I picked up both games for $7.99 om GOG. I actually have the original games, purchased at the time, with the original floppies and color manuals. I bought them to avoid the grunt work of installing the game and modding it up to run on today's systems. There was a time when I was happy to do all that work, and I still can, but I would rather use that time playing. Besides, $8 is way cheaper than the original games, and you can't complain about the 30 years of replayability that you have access to. It is also impressive of the quality of the work the molders have done over the years. Did I mention F.R.E.D. ? Freespace was one of the first games to include an editor so that you could easily create your own scenarios and share them with others. Look where That has led too today, both for Freespace and all the other games out there today. Oh well, enough talk, I could be playing the game instead of typing all this.
Cheers everyone!