[Thaeris]

Yes, I know that. One of the reasons why I'm not jumping on that however is that last time I tried to do that, a transaction with my bank and GOG would not go through. I believe it had something to do with that company being based in Cyprus. That may not be the case now, but my funds are very tight.

[Angelus]

Freelancer isn't that bad, i played the campaign and for a short time the BSG multiplayer.
The story is average ( and gets recycled in X3 ), and it plays like an RPG with fps shooter elements.
What i absolutely didn't like ( and that's why i bash this game with pleasure   ) is the fact that they didn't bother to implement joystick support. Flying with a mouse wasn't hard, it was too easy and it's just not as immersive as with a joystick.
A flightsim/ space combat game without joystick?  

[Sarafan]

The first I-War was a great, great game and it has one of the best intro I've seen, the story of the first is pretty good (does anyone know there is more than one ending?), it was a hard game but I dont consider that to be a bad thing, if it had a quick save option it would have been great  because of the already mentioned long travel time.

The sequel was a huge letdown, the plot was nowhere near as good as the first, it didnt had anything good for you to do between missions and I dont get what people say about the 2nd being hard, the moment you get a patcom the game becomes easy. I was always disappointed at how fast and easy you could take out capital ships in the 2nd, mount a mining laser or two and they're dead before you know it.

Freelancer was passable, the problem with it is that like I-War 2 you had nothing to do between missions (yeah, you had those "sidequests" but those were silly) and then nothing to do after you finish the main plot and the other problem is that the modding comunity is like the modding comunity of HW2, "Hey, let's add more ships/systems/guns and nothing else!!!". Starlancer, otoh, was just as good as the first Freespace, a great plot, nice ships, etc, you name it but it suffered from that lousy friendly AI and bugs.

[karajorma]

I didn't find I-War II that hard. I got pretty far. What I found was that it was so annoying when you died that I didn't want to play it any more.

[CP5670]

IW2's missions varied a lot in difficulty. Some were quite easy (but if you did die with a random Marauder attack or something, your last 20 minutes got wasted) while others were extremely hard. There was an especially brutal one where you had to dock with a bunch of gun platforms. I stopped playing at the point when you first leave the system (about a third of the way through) and still only had the tug available then.

Frankly, I always found Discovery to be boring, the only way to get anything that isn't a vanilla fighter is to trade between systems and it is boring, not to mention some of the rules for the Discovery server that most people play are are in, a lot of cases, asinine, as is the 'plot'. Discovery always felt the same as vanilla, just with a few more ships to fly.

I played this with my brother a few years ago on that RP server. We actually got a ton of money by just begging to random people and making up various stories. Once we got good ships though, there was little more left to do. We tried to become pirates but the fights often turned into endless stalemates, with someone eventually just getting bored and running away.

[Unknown Target]

IW2's missions varied a lot in difficulty. Some were quite easy (but if you did die with a random Marauder attack or something, your last 20 minutes got wasted) while others were extremely hard. There was an especially brutal one where you had to dock with a bunch of gun platforms. I stopped playing at the point when you first leave the system (about a third of the way through) and still only had the tug available then.

Frankly, I always found Discovery to be boring, the only way to get anything that isn't a vanilla fighter is to trade between systems and it is boring, not to mention some of the rules for the Discovery server that most people play are are in, a lot of cases, asinine, as is the 'plot'. Discovery always felt the same as vanilla, just with a few more ships to fly.

I played this with my brother a few years ago on that RP server. We actually got a ton of money by just begging to random people and making up various stories. Once we got good ships though, there was little more left to do. We tried to become pirates but the fights often turned into endless stalemates, with someone eventually just getting bored and running away.

The gun platform one was BRUTAL. I BARELY made it through that one, I was so pissed at that game I put it down for a week or two I think.

By the way, both Iwars are available on GoG.com for cheap, if no one's mentioned it yet.

EDIT: Damnit Flaser beat me to it.

EDIT2: Man that intro is AWESOME.

[Kszyhu]

Gunstar mission was really easy if you know what to do. I'm on my third playthrough, and I can't beat an escort mission late in the game, which involves defending disabled freighter against waves of Marauder vessels. Apart from this, only problem I can think of is the autopilot, taking constant detours through crowded L-points.

[Mars]

I could not learn to like these games. It's  30+ minutes of flying to get to the first enemy, who promptly blows you to hell.

[Ace]

Flying through jump nodes on manual also helped, as did playing dirty (as you should), and shooting up the escort of freighters from behind when they jump out of a node. I only used the autopilot for travel between jump points/stations.

Yeah, fights could be nasty but you had LDS drive which means: *wham* 0.9c of speed between you and them.

[Kszyhu]

Yeah, fights could be nasty but you had LDS drive which means: *wham* 0.9c of speed between you and them.

Followed by a LDSi missile.

[Mikes]

Tribute to I-War 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-7uEF-gDY8

:snip: does anyone know there is more than one ending? :snip:

I-War 1 not only had multiple endings.... it had a fully branching campaign with radically different mission arcs leading up to the endings.

Major Spoiler:

Spoiler:

for example... remember the Mission where the peace conference between President loyalists and Independents got sabotaged and turned into an instant fleet battle with everyone shooting and shouting at everybody? It was totally up to you which side you joined in that mission

As far as I-War goes in general.... i still consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time. That game was actually a spaceship simulator without compromise. Newtonian physics is often quoted, but that was really just one part of it. They put an incredible amount of effort into every single system on your ship. From LDS drives to the way you had to work with your Deflectors to actually block incoming attacks to the huge combined arms fleet battles it felt more *real* than any other space game i played. The campaign was outright incredible as far as story and mission design goes.

I-Wars 2 strenght was the sandbox/trading part... the mission/campaig design was still outstanding, but not as superb as I-War1 and while I-Wars 2 combat mechanics were still much more complex than the huge majority of other spacesims.... they were a lot less complex than I-War 1s, which was a bit of a disappointment for me. (Especially deflector handling.... that was an art in I-War 1, not so much in I-War 2).

Still.... both games are pretty much the non plus ultra as far as actual space-sims go that are also incredibly good games .

(There is - to my knowledge - only one other game out there that wants to be an actual complex "starship simulator", but it really, really, really does not deserve to be named in the same thread as great like I-War LOL )


Top 3 memorable I-War 1 moments:

Spoiler:

... "landing" your heavily damaged (jumpdrive offline) 200m Corvette on a Carrier made for 20m fightercraft in order to escape a devious trap that routed your fleet.... 
(See 6:51 in this video for a snip of the missionending cutscene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kohENjJK7kY&feature=related )

... having your (disabled) Corvette boarded by Pirates who commence to throw your crew out of the airlock one by one until you open the hatch to the command deck... and seeing actual corpses float by in front your window while one of your bridge crew members exclaims in horror that he knows that guy...

... facing off 1v1 in the final mission vs. a heavy cruiser in your badly damaged corvette...  an outright impossible fight in this game...  and taking it out by going full burn and ramming your ship into it while escaping with the command shuttle at the last second...

ah i could go on... as far as "unique memmorable moments" go I-War 1 is hard to beat.

[Colonol Dekker]

Tribute to I-War 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-7uEF-gDY8

:snip: does anyone know there is more than one ending? :snip:

I-War 1 not only had multiple endings.... it had a fully branching campaign with radically different mission arcs leading up to the endings.

Major Spoiler:

Spoiler:

for example... remember the Mission where the peace conference between President loyalists and Independents got sabotaged and turned into an instant fleet battle with everyone shooting and shouting at everybody? It was totally up to you which side you joined in that mission

As far as I-War goes in general.... i still consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time. That game was actually a spaceship simulator without compromise. Newtonian physics is often quoted, but that was really just one part of it. They put an incredible amount of effort into every single system on your ship. From LDS drives to the way you had to work with your Deflectors to actually block incoming attacks to the huge combined arms fleet battles it felt more *real* than any other space game i played. The campaign was outright incredible as far as story and mission design goes.

I-Wars 2 strenght was the sandbox/trading part... the mission/campaig design was still outstanding, but not as superb as I-War1 and while I-Wars 2 combat mechanics were still much more complex than the huge majority of other spacesims.... they were a lot less complex than I-War 1s, which was a bit of a disappointment for me. (Especially deflector handling.... that was an art in I-War 1, not so much in I-War 2).

Still.... both games are pretty much the non plus ultra as far as actual space-sims go that are also incredibly good games .

(There is - to my knowledge - only one other game out there that wants to be an actual complex "starship simulator", but it really, really, really does not deserve to be named in the same thread as great like I-War LOL )


Top 3 memorable I-War 1 moments:

Spoiler:

... "landing" your heavily damaged (jumpdrive offline) 200m Corvette on a Carrier made for 20m fightercraft in order to escape a devious trap that routed your fleet.... 
(See 6:51 in this video for a snip of the missionending cutscene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kohENjJK7kY&feature=related )

... having your (disabled) Corvette boarded by Pirates who commence to throw your crew out of the airlock one by one until you open the hatch to the command deck... and seeing actual corpses float by in front your window while one of your bridge crew members exclaims in horror that he knows that guy...

... facing off 1v1 in the final mission vs. a heavy cruiser in your badly damaged corvette...  an outright impossible fight in this game...  and taking it out by going full burn and ramming your ship into it while escaping with the command shuttle at the last second...

ah i could go on... as far as "unique memmorable moments" go I-War 1 is hard to beat.

I lived for I-War and Defiance. Commonwealth all the way baby!

[Sarafan]

Top 3 memorable I-War 1 moments:

Spoiler:

... "landing" your heavily damaged (jumpdrive offline) 200m Corvette on a Carrier made for 20m fightercraft in order to escape a devious trap that routed your fleet.... 
(See 6:51 in this video for a snip of the missionending cutscene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kohENjJK7kY&feature=related )
... facing off 1v1 in the final mission vs. a heavy cruiser in your badly damaged corvette...  an outright impossible fight in this game...  and taking it out by going full burn and ramming your ship into it while escaping with the command shuttle at the last second...

ah i could go on... as far as "unique memmorable moments" go I-War 1 is hard to beat.

I've just finished the main and Defiance's campaign again, man, this game is one of the best. Landing on the carrier was one of most insane parts I've ever seen, I was completely surprised at what you had to do the first time I played and it still am. The last mission you know what to do if you've seen the intro and Clay and your character downright say it but the carrier part was just crazy.

What had always impressed me is how complete the game is, nearly every mission you have different ways to accomplish things or different options that lead to different outcomes that are all well thought out, this is really letting the player decide how to handle things and letting you have a real impact in the story unlike the halfassed things we have today.

Now to replay I-War 2 again. I have to wonder, how possible would it be to make a total conversion of I-War to FS2? There already is realistic physics in the Babylon Project, I think the only real problem would be the amount of system to system jumping you have in I-War and how to handle the LDS.