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Aside from the hyperspace level, I thought IFH was pretty awesome, but then I never had much trouble flying, must be the only kind of gameplay I'm actually good at. Mostly you just had to remember that if you were jousting you needed to quit over-accelerating and get yourself into a turning fight, because the AI's aim isn't all that great.

If you're looking for good graphics, more than ten kills per hour, or single-player story missions, then Allegiance won't be your cup of tea, but I find its version of newtonian-plus-drag to be a reasonable middle ground between IFH's unlimited top speeds and Freespace/X-Wing's inability to fly backwards. The implementation could be better - you'll generally have a lower top speed for flying backwards. On the other hand, it's the only game I've played where hitting things with missiles actually feels like a challenge.

Stark wrote:No, joust combat sucks shit and is boring as fuck and any game relying on it is shit. If the game uses decent controls and design it isn't necessary (like I-War or even Starshatter). This isn't Space War anymore.

You're right, of course, that newtonian games need to be far more about actually putting yourself in the right place with the right vector and doign the right thing than ZOOM PEW PEW PEW NEEEEEEROING PEW PEW like a 'space flight simulator'. That's why they're not as popular.

Perhaps you have a more strict definition of joust combat. What I mean by it is that your distance and relative speed to the target is varying a lot more than in a classic X-Wing style gameplay, which is basically a bastardized version of WW1 dogfights without gravity. I find that quite boring, since it provides very little tactical options. The only true challenge of X-Wing/Tie Fighter and Wing Commander games was to do things in the right order and fast enough; the actual dogfights with enemy starfighters were boring and repetitive. The Freespace games were somewhat better with more possible variations in approach and tactics.

Oh. I mean the sort of thing you get in IWar when you turn the governors off or in Elite; two guys at ludicrous speed zoom past each other trying to hit at huge crossing speeds, and then spend 15m to turn around and do the same thing again. Ugh.