Freespace 2: Still good 20 years later

[Rogue 9]

I saw gameplay video of the upcoming Star Wars: Squadrons game yesterday, and found out that it looks an awful lot like an X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter clone, control-wise, which put the starfighter sim bug in me, so I decided to fire up Freespace 2 in the interim.

Long story short, I encountered a bug in my decade-old installation, so decided to upgrade to the current FSOpen iteration and graphics assets. And holy shit, explosions have gotten real pretty over the last ten years.



On top of that, the team behind Blue Planet has remade the original campaign with tweaked missions and rebalanced weapons. That was a pipe dream in 2010 when I was active in the testing community, but apparently the crazy bastards have gone and done it. Hard Light Productions has implemented a new installer/launcher that runs without a hitch. If you like the genre, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

[Rogue 9]

I could start a new thread, but this one's still on the first page. Now that my X-Wing playthrough is wrapping up, I'm doing the Freespace games on YouTube. The opening cutscene of Freespace 1 went up today.



The missions will go live in this playlist every Monday and Friday, two missions a day at 9:00am and 5:00pm Eastern time.

[Rogue 9]

First mission up this morning, second mission goes live in about an hour and a half from this post.

[Rogue 9]

This cutscene still gives me chills.

[montypython]

Freespace 2 is that rare combination of excellent gameplay matched with great cinematics in a space sim game, which in itself is already not that common to begin with.

[Rogue 9]

This won't be my gameplay, but a new Freespace campaign I voice acted for has its public release in about eleven hours, and Ill Fated Gaming has been kind enough to agree to stream it on release day. Nearly a year of highly skilled work and polish has gone into this and the writing is excellent; it'll be well worth the watch.

[Rogue 9]

Okay, so he banged his head on the second part and just failed to get how to do it for like an hour, but we got there. Meanwhile, I wrapped up The Great War campaign today; Silent Threat and Silent Threat: Reborn (I'm running them side by side since they fill the same story space) start tomorrow.

[Rogue 9]

This mission from Silent Threat: Reborn exemplifies the cosmic horror aspect of Freespace so well.