General FreeSpace > FreeSpace Discussion

How did you find FS2?

<< < (2/4) > >>

herkie423:
As for me, in 1997, I was playing Colony Wars 1, 2, and 3, Darklight Conflict, Xenocracy, all PS one. I am really a fan of space games. Then I stopped because of a low-point period in life. Then in 2010, I bought a PC, I started downloading space simulation games, "Independence Wars" "Freelancer" and the Colony Wars series Playstation bin files using an emulator to play them. I realized there's not much space simulation games out there. Then I found HLP and got my Freespace 2, FSO 3.6.12, MediaAVP 3612, and the first version of Blue Planet (thru the FSO installer at that time). I still have them now. And I thought Blue Planet was an actual retail game. Found out later that it was fan-made mod. Wow. And thus gave the inspiration to make the original "The Aftermath" then years later its Reboot and "The Blue Guardian." HLP rocks!

PS: I never use a joystick. I prefer the full freedom of a mouse and keyboard.

Kie99:
FreeSpace 1 came free with my first PC.  I was about 8 so I had no idea what I was doing, couldn't understand the training so I skipped it.  I was just randomly pushing buttons until something happened after that.  When I pressed "del" I had no idea that this was the ship that I was supposed to be flying, but I did notice that pressing spacebar fired these red rockets.

I think I completed my first playthrough of FS1 without ever using the thrusters, only the afterburners, and without ever knowing the difference between fighters and bombers.  Clash of the Titans took me what felt like a year to complete, not least because I'd usually order everyone to attack the Tantalus because it seemed like the biggest threat, but I eventually completed it.

Found FS2 in Electronics Boutique, a now defunct UK electronics chain, shortly after, and worked out what I was actually doing in that, thanks in no small part to that training mission with the Deimos in FS2.

Discovered mods about 2003ish, I knew about FRED and I loved that there were so many alternate stories.  Derelict and Homesick were among the first I played and I was blown away, but at this point I had absolutely no idea that you could add entirely new ships to the game.  I played Warzone which had some kind of explorer ship called the GTE Vidal or something like that.  I was convinced it was something I'd missed in the game files, I FREDed a mission just so I could look at it.

You can imagine how stoked I was for Inferno.

FekLeyrTarg:
About 15 years ago, members of the Star Wars gaming club Emperor's Hammer developed a freeware game called "Imperial Alliance".
It was based on the FreeSpace Open engine and that's how I became aware of FS2 and the many mods and standalone games based on it.

"Imperial Alliance" had a multiplayer-only demo which has become lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C91d2WakzxI

Rhys:

--- Quote from: herkie423 on January 08, 2022, 10:22:00 am ---
PS: I never use a joystick. I prefer the full freedom of a mouse and keyboard.

--- End quote ---

Same. I think when the joystick broke shortly after I got the game I switched to M+K and found it a lot easier to play. It's funny because in all other space/flight sims I only use a HOTAS or controller. It just seems to work really well in FS, or that could just be the fact that I have played it that way for nearly two decades lol.

perihelion:
Back in the mid-nineties, my and a group of other like-minded nerds basically took over the highschool science office, and its attendant 486 PC.  For the 2nd half of our lunch period, we'd hang out in there and try out whatever cool game one of us had come across.  There was an awful lot of "Scorched Earth" played (https://www.dosgames.com/game/scorched-earth), and Wolfenstein, bit of Doom and Heretic thrown in for good measure.  Then one of us happens across Descent.  All of us are instantly hooked.  This Parallax Software company was hitting absolutely all of the right buttons with us.  It was set in space.  You got to blow up robots.  Zero G and complete 3-degrees of freedom.  Lava, cloaking devices, sick weapons.

I was already hopelessly hooked on videogames in general, but that was the first time the PC-gaming bug really bit me, hard.  I had to have my own PC.  It took until my last year of highschool before I was finally able to talk my parents into it, but once I got Descent there was no going back.  I followed everything that came out of Parallax from then on.  When the company split into Outrage and Volition after Descent 2, I was crestfallen.  I took note of Decent: Freespace several years later from Volition (by then I was an undergrad) but what I really wanted was Decent 3 (which, when it finally came out, was somehow a bit disappointing even though it looked much better than its predecessors).  I just wasn't that interested at the time.

Eventually, somewhere in the early-to-mid 2000's, I had my degrees and got married and had a job, and I found myself with some free time again, had re-played all the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games past the point of fun, but I was still craving something along those lines, and remembered Freespace had come out of one of the companies that came out of Parallax.  Dug around a bit on the internet and lo, I found HLP!  At that point, I finally realized that not only had FS1 and FS2 been good, they had a cult following!  Not only that, but there were no new copies of either game to be found ANYWHERE!  I created my eBay account strictly for the purpose of getting copies of FS1 and FS2, at a significantly higher price original retail price.

Easily the best purchase I ever made.  Bar none. 

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page