A Space Fighter Versus the World

[Yellowbeard]

Four words: Freespace-2 Open Source Project

I finally tried this the other day after not having played the game for years, in spite of having it somewhere around #3 in my all-time favourites.

Bloody awesome, and FS2 was a damn good-looking game in the first place.

I'm actually stoked, because I found a Saitek Aviator in the local thrift store for $6, and I'm busy setting up the profile software to bind all 50 or so necessary controls to the 12 buttons & hat switch.

Never buying another Logitech joystick, that's for sure.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

Any love for Miner Wars 2081 [http://www.minerwars.com/] around here? Minecraft meets Descent basically. Just putting it out there.

I guess when FPS was getting popular there wasn't an easy way to impliment the control scheme on very different controllers being the PS1 and N64. Now the rapidlly adopted dual stick standard allows someone to preform 6 actions at once with one thumb on the left stick/d-pad and the other on the right stick/action buttons. I think it shouldn't be too hard to adapt.

 

[Awexsome]

I am personally holding out major hope that this is the next thing Bungie does. The space section of the Long Night of Solace mission in Reach was the greatest part of the game and was only a 10-20 minute section... testing the waters perhaps?

Bungie's been great at leading the way before and I could see them spearhead the new genre.

I would be disappointed with another FPS by them as they've proven they can tackle other genres brilliantly before. With Bungie making a game 100% behind that space combat aspect... I feel they could start a gaming revolution as big as they did with Halo in the first place if they craft it as masterfully as their last blockbuster series.

 

[JamesCoote]

Why not sell the joystick with the box, and pick up the loss with microtransactions?

 

[Raso719]

IDK from my experience most really hardcore FPS gamers never really fit the bill of "poeple who enjoy anything other than FPSs" ie they probably think that space fighters, star ships and even space are lame and features befitting a game that is some how inherently flawed because of a lack of SOPMOD or Black Hawk helicopters.

Now that's not to say that there wasn't a period of ship jumping back at the end of what I consider the golden age of gaming but I don't think that people were leaving the space sim genre in droves for their Quakes and their Call of Dutys but rather I think that those people were becoming the dominant force in the market and everyone else was being given the shaft. I mean look at the sales numbers of any game in it's first year or two up until the early 00s and you'll notice that very few games pushed nearly as many copies as many of today block buster, once-a-year-ever-year gravy train titles. It's not that these genres were failing as much as they were never able to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator to the same extent as safer, more accessible titles.

Basically the flaw of the Space Sim was that it actually had a target demographic smaller than "the human race" while more vague and generic titles like Mass Effect, Call of Duty and so on aim to sell a copy of their game (and all their DLC)to every living person on Earth. The gamers haven't failed the genre as much as the industry has all but abandoned anything other than uber-expensive once-a-year-every-year block busters aimed at any person, age 1-110, who breaths and has hands opposed to actually targeting specific interest groups and cultivating their fan base.