Hey hey, FreeSpace fans. Happy spring! (or fall for the South Hemisphereians) At least I hope there is some semblance of spring (or fall) where you are! So March has come and gone with some campaign releases and re-releases. And a very important birthday! Yes, FreeSpace 1 was released March 19th, 1998! Fifteen years old, why next year it will be able to drive.
So what went on in this community that's primarily dedicated to this teenager of a game?
So last month I said it was a quiet month for campaigns, well this month had a bit of an update on that.
Shadow Genesis, a 40+ mission campaign has released! Looks like the GTVA is having trouble with renegade groups and Shivans. (Boy, that seems to happen a lot!) So hop in your fighter and defend the GTVA from certain dooooom...!
And a large group of campaigns were re-released in March as well.
BTA re-released Dusk Wars with a re-written story and a slightly re-made warp effect, requiring everyone to re-finish it. Re-bravo!
Andrew of Doom released a new version of Dimensional Eclipse. Featuring fixed missions, difficulty changes and some new and redesigned ships. Maybe I will get around to playing this one day!
And
fightermedic throws 6 remastered campaigns at us, Lightning Marshalls 1-4, The Regulus Campaign and Operation: Savior. Aside from the usual things like new backgrounds and nameplates, fightermedic threw in some things seen in Diaspora like cockpits!
To be all meta-like, I'll report on the
Fate of the Galaxy newsgrid giving a report on whats going on in a project far, far away. It's got some nice screenshots and even some words!
February 28, 2013, 08:55:40 pm CST, Axem posts March Newsletter. March 01, 2013, 12:46:31 pm CST, SCP releases FreeSpace Open 3.6.18. Really guys? REALLY? So because of that damage scaling bug from 3.6.16, they pushed out a quick official version that fixes it. Now the SCP team is quickly integrating the new pilot code to allow people playing to just use a single pilot all the time. After that, who knows? Maybe... g-e-o---- I'll stop there.
This space reserved for 3.6.20 release news:
I'M WAITINGMeanwhile, in the scripting forum:
Scooby Doo has a fairly comprehensive rotating animation script in an alpha release. If you're feeling brave, check it out. It does stuff like lowering landing gear and... raising landing gear. Well, that is still pretty neat.
BlasterNT posted some ideas about neat scripts he would like to see, and then actually delivers! This is such an unheard thing! He's got a hit indicator so you know when you actually hit stuff, and a reload gauge so you know exactly when you can shoot stuff.
PoDo shows off some neat scripting that lets you display cockpit information on another computer. This is great for people building immersive cockpits. Definitely cool.
No real releases this month, but progress is there!
Okay, well there's this release of the
soundtrack to Syrk by ShadowsofLight. Perfect for anyone looking for some new music for their mods. Personally I will not be using it, as there is no disco. It's just a personal thing, I hope you all understand.
When we last left ShadowWolf making the Pharoah, it was untextured and just a single color. But he's taken
secret texturing lessons from mjn.mixael and thrown a great coat of paint on his ship. Hope to see is released soon!
BlasterNT shows that, not only can he write lua scripts,
but he can do some cool modelling stuff. This stealth bomber has more moving parts than my toaster. But I think it would still burn my precious raison bread. I hope flying that thing will make bombing missions so much easier.
Oddgrim has obviously been sacrificing items to the right god, because oh my FRED, he just keeps turning out amazing things.
The Isis? The Bast? The now-finished Orisis? I'm dying of dehydration from all this drool being lost.
Oh and speaking of sexy Vasudan Craft, The_Dagger gives us the
GVB Hathor, based off of some of the concept art of FreeSpace 2. I'm starting to think there's more good Vasudan fighters than Terran now!
ScoobyDoo continues being a starship factory with some
new fighters and a capital ship! Seriously, what are you guys sacrificing to the god of ship-making?
Secret intelligence division doing secret things for the GTVA... secretly. It's the
Titan Rebellion and what I'm about to tell you... is not secret.
Let me just start off this review with saying, the campaign and ensuing things that happen to the player is bananas. I really mean no offense to anyone who enjoyed it or who made it. The story is straight up bananas. But that's okay. The debriefing recommendations on the successful debriefs sort of show a certain self-awareness that's telling the player, "Look, I know this is bananas. You know this is bananas. Let's just have some fun with this bananas story." And I'm okay with this, so just turn off your logic center from your Blue Planet playthrough and enjoy the pleasant variety of missions and 50+ ship killing sprees.
Like the Aeos Affair, this is a campaign from an older era (though there is an updated version by the FSCRP with newer assets and stuff). The tricks we take for granted are not really here, but we still come out with some not-bad-at-all missions. So just to bring you up to speed, you're part of a super secret organization called NeoIntel, that reports only to the GTVA Security Council and no one else knows about you. Not the GTVA, no the SOC and not the GTVI. Well, except for one GTVI admiral aaaand... SPOILERS, he's the main bad guy. So the missions are sort of what you would expect from spec-ops missions. Capture this, stealth recon that, attack this under a false flag. There's a few missions that are kind of stale, just ones that are "defend this motionless object for 5 minutes", but I'll forgive that... for now. Oh and Alpha 1 syndrome is alive and well in this campaign, not that I can blame NeoIntel... I wouldn't trust my wingmen with anything that decides the fate of the GTVA either!
Seriously guys, learn from a masterSo there's two missions I'd like to shine a spotlight on. From a consequence in the first mission, your operation has caused a fued between two Vasudan clans to re-erupt (I would hope that the Vasudans were past that stuff by now but hey), so you're sort of flying a GTVA flag to get everyone to just calm down. You do this by disarming everybody and shooting down hostile fighters (acceptable losses!), and even when you've saved the underdog they repay you with "I never needed your help, now I'll finish them off". Geez! Then there's a twist at the end. Anyway, looking at the mission just on a pure gameplay level, its just disable and dogfighting. Hardly unique! But in the way its presented that gives it a special shine to it. People sometimes get stuck in a "I have to make this mission totally unique" mindset, when sometimes the solution is just to present your escort or attack mission a little differently.
The other mission is kind of funny (atleast to me). Excuse me while I drop a campaign I made in but... I thought I was being SO ORIGINAL and CLEVER when I came up with the idea of a massive beam-tag system to kill capital ships. And then I played Titan Rebellion and seen that I was beaten to the punch years before. Bravo. Bravo. So there's definitely a good mix of original ideas that keep you going from a few staler escort missions.
I'm now afraid of being sued for blatantly stealing massive beam-tag systems!Now I know I said the story is pretty bananas, but I'll give credit for nicely introducing various elements that pay off in later missions. "Oh, this Ganymede is setup like a giant railgun, that'd be cool to see" *Several missions later* "Neat!" "Oh, this renegade Orion isn't using its beams. The debrief says its weird too, something about reworking beams?" *Several missions later* "Aaaah the beams!" So nothing is really unexplained and what does come out of left field is something that gets uncovered later. I can't say if you'll accept those explanations anyway; because if you can't get your head around a secret society of 20,000+ people breaking any law to protect the GTVA from foreign and domestic threats in their eyes, this campaign may not be for you...
A campaign should be judged on what it tries to be versus what it is. With a wild attitude and a weird sense of logic, the Titan Rebellion shows its just here to have some fun missions with some fun ships. It doesn't ask to be taken seriously or demand you think about a gripping story, it just asks you to have some plain old fun.
So I'd recommend its a play if you can just roll with some asburdities.
Plus you get shiny medals. Wait...hold on here! I didn't anything! I take back everything I said, this campaign is AWFUL!Next month we're going to- er- we're going to- Um, I'm sorry. I'm not feeling great, I guess I'm just a little...
HOMESICK.Yes, Homesick! It was highly acclaimed back in the day, but that was back in the day. It broke barriers and introduced this whole "lets talk for minutes about THINGS instead of shootings". Now it might be a little tricky to get working, there's always tales of red-alert problems and whatnot, but we're going to give it our best. Worse comes to worse, ctrl+shift+s all the way!
Last's month theme was vasudans! And apparently no one likes them! Poor guys. First they get their homeworld glassed over, then they're almost ignored in a screencap contest. Luckily there were still some very nice pics.
FreeSpaceFreak gives us the winning pic for the month, with a gorgeous shot of a Hatshepsut. The station in the background kind of makes the destroyer look like its got some extra appendanges, but the lighting on that shot is just great.
Screencap Scoreboard:
ssmit132 - 1
X3N0-Life-Form - 1
FreeSpaceFreak - 1
For next month, our theme will be: Outnumbered. Give me a sense of dread, show me a lost cause that will still go down in history!
What is WITH all these rebellions and renegade groups in campaigns? FreeSpace 1 had the Hammer of Light, Silent Threat had the GTI, FreeSpace 2 had the Neo-Terran Front, it seems like its super easy to get thousands of people on your side at a moments notice. That's it, I can't take it anymore. I'm splitting off into the People's Front of Neo-Terra! Who's with me?!
