[Anaz]

FS1 demo on PCGamer. Must've played it at least 20 times. "This is the GTC Orff, now on station."

My friend bought me a copy of FS1. I just realized that i've never actually finished FS1. Got stuck on playing judas, and gave up (many years back...). Joined the vbb looking for some FRED help. Downloaded the FS2 demo after that. Was utterly blown away. (this was after FS2 was a year or so old). Saved up my allowance, and then bought FS2. Found HLP because 5th sun looked really cool.

[Knight Templar]

Hehe, I found HLP Through MT.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, my story is rather lackluster, I suppose...

When I was a younger, I used to have a VERY active imagination. I'd combine ideas from Star Wars with Star Trek with Megaman and make up my own ship designs (This was way back at the age when I thought designing a ship slightly larger than the Millenium Falcon with 144 turbolasers was really cool. )

Anyway, sometime after that I spotted Freespace...and it struck me as being the *perfect* space simulator when I read the cover on the box in a local software store. So, at once, I...put it back on the shelf and decided to get the money to buy it.

Time passed.

Then, one day, at the same computer store, I spotted FS2 in the "New releases" section. Crap, I thought, there's already a second one and I haven't even bought the first. So I eventually bought Freespace and played it through, up 'til the mission where you had to defend the comm station. (The Hope, I think, jumps in and you have to defend it - then you can depart, or try and save the Faustus serving as a Comm center. I didn't realize you could depart until I talked with a friend who also played Freespace.)
I'd enjoyed FS1, so a while later I bought Freespace 2, beat it, got onto the VBB, and (after awhile again ) finally beat FS1.

[Tieowbeijas]

I first got to play FS1 when it came on a PC Gamer disc, kinda liked it but didn't buy it. A bit later dad had bought a new computer and with it came a FS1 OEM on a DVD and I played through it a few times. First contact with FS2 was like FS1, on a PCG disc and I got the full game as a christmas gift a while later.

[TrashMan]

I saw FS1 fisrst in a game magazine, but at that time I was full of prejudice and tought it will prolyl be a peace of crap, so alltough I had the demo, I didn't played it...untill one night, after an attack of acute boredom I finally decided to give it a try.

The next day I had FS1 installed on my PC. After Fs2 came out and I finished it, I browsed around and acicdently stumbled upon HLP and well...now I'm rooted here.

*booming narrator voice*
"Bound in this place untill the end of time and the Final Battle...erm..ups..wrong story"
but I don't mind

[varus]

I don't remember the initial details, but somehow or another I found out about Home of the Underdogs about 2 years ago.  (Ahhh, the wonders of being a bored college student not wanting to do homework, and having a relatively highspeed internet connection).

Anyway, after about a month or so of browsing HotU, I decided to try to look for a space combat/sim game.  (Still remember the good old days of Rebel Assault.  That was a fun game.)  HotU came up with 'Wing Commander This' and 'Wing Commander that' and 'Yet another Wing Commander'.  Unfortunatly, or fortunatly as the case may be, those wing commanders either did not have downloads, or did not work on my computer.  (P2-330, 128 MB ram, old graphics card...Wait!  That sounds like what FS2 was designed for)

Then I happened across Freespace 2.  219 MB download?  I don't care.  Its 8 AM on a Saturday!  I have the College's whole internet pipe at my disposal, because everyone else is asleep!  Download took about an hour and a half.  I uncompressed it, loaded it up, and it worked.  So I started playing, and had my breath taken away on the second training mission, with a seemingly MASSIVE Arcadia-class installation hovering in the background, and that about 10 KM away.  (I still like flying around that thing just for fun.)  Needless to say, I did not accomplish much homework that weekend.  

Finals week rolled around a couple of months later, and I regretfully needed to delete FS2, so I could actually get some studying done.  Summer comes and goes, and in the middle of the fall semester, I decided to get FS2 again.  But the download was gone!  Something about Interplay releasing a 20th anniversary edition in the spring.  

Over the summer of 2004, I decided to see if I could find FS2 anywhere else.  Did some googling, and ended up at karajorma's Freespace Oracle website.  That said HotU had a download.  Skeptically I checked, but suspected that karajorma was an incompetant website maintainer who had not bothered to update his page in half a year or more.  (If you read this, karajorma, I now know that you are not).  But I follow the link, and the HotU download is back!  "I don't care that this will take the whole day to download, but I'm getting it anyway, before the link goes away again!"  And, going back to karajorma's site, which was now a lot nicer in my opinion, I see the link to the FTP site thread.  Needless to say, I did a lot of downloading six months ago.  But FS2 is not leaving my hard drive now, so long as the hard drive is functional.  And it, along with all of the VP files, are now backed up on my Ipod.  Its not getting lost again.

[Jaeger]

PC Gamer had reviewed a game called "Descent: Freespace - The Great War". I looked at it in passing, never gave it much thought.

Two weeks later, I see the box on a shelf, open it up, and I see the size comparison between a Herc iirc, and a Typhon.

Immediate response: "I gotta get this game".

Fast-forward a bit to FS2. My dad picked it up off one of his friends from work. I have no money, so I watch him complete the Myrmidon training. Silent Threat is quickly snatched up from a Target shelf, and it's the only game I play for the next month and a half. I finally get FS2, spending the first four hours in the techroom

Surrender, Belisarius! remains one of the most memorable missions I have played in any game. Period. When I watched the Psamtik light up the Deimos I was floored.

[FireCrack]

Well, introduction eh?

I was a long time descent fan, the name "Descent : freespace" mislead me and i looked at it a bit but frogot about it when i discovered it was not descent


around 4 or 5 years later (in grade 7) a friend starts raving about this game called freespace, i had frogotten about the first encounter by that time but for my birthday he baught me freespace.

Wow, awesome was i amazed. My first pilot name was

Jasonathonachrismustdiecat  (the longest freespace allowed)

[wojta]

I played demo of CFS (FS1) in 1998. It was from a local game magazine. I enyoed it much and played such two missons again and again.
I found  FS2 in a local cheap bookstore (and CD shop) four years later. It was miracle because the game has never been officialy sold in the Czech Republic. I've paid only 99 CZK (~ $4 ).

[RangerKarl]

There was a review in the paper, showing the Hornet missiles in action. I think I was attracted due to the Robotech/Macross similarity, and so I asked my big sis to get a copy. Or at least I tried to, because I was too shy. In the end my sis got me the game, with me tagging behind. Lost that copy though

[karajorma]

Originally posted by varus
Skeptically I checked, but suspected that karajorma was an incompetant website maintainer who had not bothered to update his page in half a year or more.  (If you read this, karajorma, I now know that you are not).

Actually I'd say that was kind of accurate actually

[Woolie Wool]

Two weeks later, I see the box on a shelf, open it up, and I see the size comparison between a Herc iirc, and a Typhon.

It was a Medusa, IIRC. Even with -fov 0.35, fighters and cruisers look too large compared to caps. An Orion is 8 times as long as a Fenris and probably 40 times as large, but the Fenris looks around a third the length of an Orion unless they're practically touching each other. FS2 seems to render distances improperly.

[nyg]

I bought a Logitech force feedback joystick in October 2004, with the intent of using it with my MS flightsimulator, but the FS2-Colossus DEMO came with it, so after finishing that I was compelled to buy the FS/FS2 package.  Just completed FS2 today...

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool


It was a Medusa, IIRC. Even with -fov 0.35, fighters and cruisers look too large compared to caps. An Orion is 8 times as long as a Fenris and probably 40 times as large, but the Fenris looks around a third the length of an Orion unless they're practically touching each other. FS2 seems to render distances improperly.

AT it looks like that is one thing tat not even SCP can (strangely) fix...

[StratComm]

It's called perspective.  A cruiser does look tiny if you're viewing it from really far away, but thanks to the wide FOV that we're accustomed to, both ships are too small to really see by that point.  But as far as the math is concerned, the line from the viewpoint to any point on a ship don't change at all regardless of FOV.  A cruiser will obscure just as much of a capship with a 2 degree FOV as with a 180 degree one if viewed from the same location.  This has been argued a thousand times, but you're misunderstanding the cause of the problem if you think it's somehow the fault of the game that things look that way.  If the problem can be traced, it's probably that combat ranges are much smaller in FS than you'd see in any realistic scenario (it's actually one of the things that makes FS a fun game) and so you spend a lot of time up close to large ships where the wide-angle view takes its toll on perspective as you're used to it.

[FireCrack]

And also the lack of stero vision makes us underestimate the distanes to, and thus the size of caps.

Has anyone played freespace wiht one of those stero vision thingamabobers?