[caine440]

Finished  Sol: A history and Gehenna's Gate, part of the Series Resurrecta .
Just started The Spirit of Ptah.

All these campaigns have been great fun.

[Colonol Dekker]

Gate slipped sunder my radar when it released.   I plan on rectifying that mistake.

[Blue Lion]

I have a horrible confession to make. I not only have not played FS2 in well over a decade. I have never played a player made campaign or mod outside the one I worked on myself.

[Colonol Dekker]

Play derelict..... Play it now.   That needs to be everybody's first non retail campaign.

[Mobius]

I have a horrible confession to make. I not only have not played FS2 in well over a decade. I have never played a player made campaign or mod outside the one I worked on myself.

You should definitely make up for it. There are soooo many campaigns around there that deserved to be played... and re-played. 

[Colonol Dekker]

Windmills is nice and short but...... Wow.  What a ride.

[caine440]

Just finished the Unification war.
 I learned that with out the tech (targeting and such) I am a crappy pilot.  It was entertaining and challenging campaign.
 I have just started Frontlines.

[caine440]

I have been playing Into the depths of Hell.
It has been great, a long campaign with lots of twists and turns.
A few glitches here and there but nothing to take away from the fun.

[Iain Baker]

BP AoA, the rest of BP inc the new Neptune mission next.

If you want a challenge I highly recommend  Bem Cavalgar. I feel every one should try it at least once. The behaviour of the Shivans has been tweaked so they all circle strafe, fly sideways, backwards etc. which makes the game a hell of a lot harder. Seriously, BC on medium is on par with most campaigns on very hard. Even Fury AI campaigns seem tame in comparison. Just surviving is a challenge.

Thankfully you don't fail a mission if you jump out early, it just makes you feel bad by telling you how many people died because of it, and you will have less resources for your next mission. Plus you can choose which missions to take part in - but you can only do half of them per play-through since you can't be in two places at once. Do you save civvies, or military targets, since you can't save both.

Its the only time I have played FS in a LONG time where I truly felt like a victim, and not "I AM ALPHA ONE, HEAR ME ROAR!!!". Instead, I ended up feeling like the universe's ***** and wanting to cry out for mummy to take me home.    It actually made me feel just how desperate the fight against the Shivans in Vasuda would have felt if I were a Vasudan and it was real.


A few hints to help you survive more than about sixty seconds 

1: When chasing and shooting a fighter after you land a few shots it will pivot on its axis 180 degrees so its facing you and will start shooting back. Considering that both the  Shivan's shields and weapons* are MUCH stronger in this campaign you can't play chicken with them and expect to win. Hit and run tactics are your best bet.  Wear down its shields a bit then break off. Then re-engage and wear them down a bit more and break off again, rinse and repeat until its dead.

*Think what being on the receiving end of TEV Balors in BP is like. Now imagine every Shivan fighter and bomber having these.

NB - Basilisks now have shields stronger than a vanilla Seraphim. Scorpions and ****ans have shields about as strong as a vanilla Nephilim, and a Nephilim (when you include its shields) takes almost as many hits to kill as a vanilla Fenris. Remember that first mission in retail FS1 when you engage the Scorpion and ****ans with your utterly ineffective guns? Its almost like that - EVERY. SINGLE. MISSION. At least your sensors work...

2) ...unless they get knocked out that is, which is quite likely if you get hit by a missile. Missiles hurt A LOT in BC and will likely wreck multiple subsystems if you get hit by one.

3) If a fighter gets on your a$$ target it then spam the 'attack my target' command to all your wingmen, this should save you.  Also, stick close to your wingmen and keep them alive, as you will NOT survive on your own. Let them go ahead of you then shoot at the Shivans shooting at them - this is probably the best way how to prioritise targets.
 
4) When the Shivans send in reinforcements of hunter-killer teams - usually consisting of Dragons (which have shields at least as strong as a vanilla Basilisk) - its time to drop everything and jump out. Order your wingmen to do likewise otherwise they will get schwacked and will not be available in the next mission. Any mission objectives not completed by this point will just have to stay uncompleted, because even mere survival is unlikely if you hang around.

So, good luck with that    I may even replay it on Hard and Insane just to see how quickly it hands me my a$$ 

[Glowhyena]

Last week, I started playing Descent: FreeSpace under FSO. So, today, finished the first game on a medium difficulty level, then started with the expansion Silent Threat on the same difficulty level.

I don't know if this topic is too old to post a message. If so, I'm sorry!

[jr2]

Battleships Forever (yes it works on Windows 10).

[Borgkube]

Fs1 campaign then FS2 campaign, all over again. Freespace Descent The Great War was always my all-time favorite space sim. It is still the best executed HUD in space Sims. The Shivans are a great Foe. One of my favorite of all my PC games. I was glad that Volition made the source available when they shut down. The fact that it is still being molded 30 years later speaks to the quality of the original product!

[ShivanSlayer]

I just beat Shrouding the Light and crushed the HOL for good.  Next I will battle the NTF in Pandora's Box

[Colonol Dekker]

I keep going back to Between the ashes, but I can't seem to extract rhe vasudan agent.  He always dies 🤣

[Borgkube]

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!

[Iain Baker]

FSPort: ReCharged, since I’m playing it as I make it 😜

[FrizzySpizzXTREEM]

Got myself a fancy new VKB HOTAS setup and decided to dive back into FreeSpace, starting fresh with the retail FS1 and 2 campaigns. My setup now is totally overkill for FreeSpace - I literally have more buttons than I know what to do with, which is the opposite problem with my old X52. I can even have an entire hat dedicated to subsystem and turret targeting! Anyways, as I replay these campaigns, I'm struck by how a lot of the the infamously hard missions I dreaded playing were actually fairly easy and maybe even fun(???) this time around.

Specifically, I found Playing Judas was a lot easier than I remember. It might have something to do with the plethora of buttons I now have on my VKB sticks, but I also like to think that for anyone who's played FreeSpace for this long, managing stuff like targeting becomes second nature. Playing Judas really highlights for me one of the things that has long set FS apart from other space combat games - it's the emphasis on tactics and managing avionics. Deciding in the moment which objectives and threats to prioritize, targeting the right thing at the right time - stuff like that elevates the gameplay beyond just the dogfights. In a mission where there's practically no dogfighting, those mechanics really get their time to shine. I'm saying that Playing Judas is good, actually. Fight me 

Bearbaiting in FS2 was another mission I had always really dreaded. On replaying it, I won't say that mechanically it's all that fun; however the the sense of terror and desperation still holds up. The mission is really just a case of knowing the right way to take out the Sath's beams (dual fire Helios at close range while slamming afterburners), but once I got it down it became pretty easy. There was great satisfaction in taking out all the beams (previously I'd probably only managed to destroy 2) and then going into High Noon and watching the Colossus just go to town on a helpless Sathanas. Of course, I also fired a few Helios at it myself in order to get the Sath onto my kill list.

Anyways, I'm onto replaying Silent Threat: Reborn and I'm almost near the end. There's really nothing I could say in praise of it that hasn't already been said. It's simply an incredible showcase of how this community can create a work that can so closely match (and even exceed) 's craft in both style and polish. There's certainly more polish in ST:R than in retail FS2, now that I think about it.

Not sure what's next after I've finished what I consider the "base" campaigns (ST:R is definitely included in that definition). After playing all these OG staples, Solaris looks very shiny and appealing to me. Whenever I revisit this game and community, I'm always floored by what has been accomplished in my absence. However, I've also never touched any of the campaigns by the legendary Ransom Arceihn, so Sync and Transcend are definitely on my to-do list. All that being said, my propensity for being obsessed with obscure old stuff might lead me to Operation Templar or something like Alliance Fights Back.

Slightly off topic, but since I'm deep in thought about old stuff: Still sad that that  got killed for good. They've left behind an inimitable legacy of classics across so many different genres. At the very least, I'm thankful that FreeSpace can outlive its original creators and still be going strong after all these years.

[+ Rennie Ash +]

Most recently I played through FreeSpace (2) Blue, then Blue Planet (All).

I loved spamming Piranha missiles - they never used to be this good right?

Using Stiletto and EMP Adv. to kill Tiamat. You won't get away this time!

Disabling fighters in High Noon and launching Helios at them. (Put away any wingmen that have damaging weapons)

Warping out just as Bastion explodes from purposely failing mission and my ship missing the warp effect due to the shockwave ;p