Freelancer vs. the rest...

Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:41 am by Travelller

This thread got me really going that I temporarily put Freelancer aside and re-installed X-Wing Alliance, X-BTF as well as Wing Commander. I even went as far as to download the Frontier: Elite II

Just to get re-aquainted with WCP & XWA, I played them an hour each. WCP started off on the wrong foot, speeding through the FMVs* however, the gameplay itself was as I remembered it & I enjoyed it, despite the outdated graphics & rather crappy sound quality. It would be a great shame to play through the game again without the FMVs though....
*Yeah, I tried the no HW-accel. sound setting, but it didn't make a difference.

XWA gave me no problems whatsoever, and I ran through the test missions. The fact that there are about 125 different possible commands however made me a little wary... :p Target preset keys...?!? Oh, boy. That, and the fact that the graphics are outdated - I know, I know, forget the eye candy, enjoy the gameplay

Then I started up X-BTF which I bought a while back but never got around to playing. I enjoyed the "training" phase, the storyline & even the first alien encounter with the Taladians (I think). But after three hours, all I had was about 450 credits & a bunch of flowers, shuttling back & forth, forth & back at a snail's pace between trading posts. A little difficult to handle after a game of UT2003, I'm afraid

What I found most admirable was the ease of the controls - you can toss the handbook after running through the training session!!!

I'm certain X-BTF will only get more interesting when you've earned enough & actually can afford more than a 1MW shield and maybe even a laser, but geez, it will take 6hrs just to get to that point. I'm not at all surprised that someone above quoted three months to play the game...! Still... I downloaded the X2 DivX movie & must say I will have to play it - looks incredible! I'm going to assume that Egosoft has made some strides between X-BTF, XT & X2.....

Last but not least, I tried to run Frontier Elite II on both my W98 & XP rigs, but up 'till now, I've had no success

I will have to scrounge up some conventional memory , maybe even have to hardcode the Interrupt handler for my soundcard... #5, like Doom...?

Maybe Elite 4 will be the ticket! Any info on that one...?

I will keep hacking @ them all, but for now, I'm off to play Freespace

Traveller - Geneve * Melbourne * Miami * Wien

XBOX: P4 [email protected]/ P4PE/ 512MB Samsung DDR426/ MSI G4Ti4200@305 64M@615/ SBLive!/ WD WDC800JB/ Pioneer DVD-A05S/ Intellimouse Ex. 3.0/ W98SE/ DX9/ nVidia 41.09

GBA: P3 866@1040/ GW FOP-32I/ CUSL-2C/ 512MB Kingmax PC150/ Elsa 721(G3Ti200@220 64M@496)/ Fortissimo YMF744B/ Quantum 313600/ ASUS CDS-500/ iFeel std/ WinXP/ DX9/ nVidia 41.09

Sat Mar 15, 2003 3:45 am by Voyager

out of 4 pages. I get two mentions of Elite.

Elite was the original space trading/combat game. There was no game before it. It was an original title and in my teens I played it for hrs on my commodore 64. Absolutly Brilliant.

Now I have some questions you may be able to answer.

If I was to get an existing (if I can find one) "X" game, what would it be. Is there a package with all of them on it. Which is the one to get.

Also, I havnt played privateer. Cause I my XP pooness which doesnt run pure DOS. Anyone figured a way around this. Should I partition my hardrive and install WIN98? Has that got pure dos?

If you want to play Elite II:Fronteir, grab yourself and Amiga emulator/copy of the game and play using that. The Amiga version was far superior to the PC version anyhow (in the time that it came out)

- We who are truly brave, will never live in fear -

Sat Mar 15, 2003 4:32 am by SumerNivek

Traveller,

Same here! I loaded up the Kilrathi Saga on XP today and played through the first two missions of Wing Commander. Those are the Enyo missions, if you remember. Now I've been transferred over to the squadron that uses the Scimatars...or as Iceman calls them, Centaurian Mud Pigs! Ahh, the memories...

SumerNivek
Killer of Khaja the Fang
Privateer Extrodanaire

Sat Mar 15, 2003 4:55 am by Lemlestarn

Regarding Frontier (since Travelller mentioned having trouble with it), It's shareware now and it works on my computer running windows xp.

The shareware version can be downloaded here:
http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/

Support on how to get it running can be found here:
http://www.frontier.co.uk/games/frontier/support.html

To get some sound working, look into VDMSound (www.google.com).

Granted, the graphics aren't exactly jaw-dropping, but considering it's a game that turns 10 years old this fall, it's pretty amazing what Braben & Co accomplished. Seamless take-off and landings on planet surfaces (real size planets), colossal universe (100 billion planets/stars) generated from a formula (same every time). The Sol system is realistically simulated with planet orbits, rotations, planets/stars have gravitation making sling shots possible, etc. Imagine if the game play of space games had evolved at the same rate the graphics has these past 10 years.

Sat Mar 15, 2003 5:16 am by DataDroid

If you found XWA's graphics a bit dated, head to www.xwaupgrade.com, home of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade project. I post there from time to time (same name) and was even involved in modding for a while.

What they've done is redone many of the original models with much higher polygon counts and higher-res textures for a vast graphical improvement, really amazing.

Sat Mar 15, 2003 7:44 am by Bananko

Not that it's really a space sim as the other games described here, but have any of you played Earth & Beyond?

If so, what do you think of it?

Sat Mar 15, 2003 10:40 am by RangerKarl

Well, I played, in order of chronology:

Wing Commander Armada
(gap of about 4 years here)
Freespace
Freespace 2
Starlancer
Wing Commander 4
WC Prophecy
WC Secret Ops
I-War 2

My favorite so far is still Freespace 2. The mod community is huge, the missions frenetic, and the fights awesome.

Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:19 pm by Travelller

Voyager: If you want to play Elite II:Fronteir, grab yourself and Amiga emulator/copy of the game and play using that. The Amiga version was far superior to the PC version anyhow (in the time that it came out)

Thx, Voyager, I'll try that instead!

Lemlestarn: and it works on my computer running windows xp.

I tried to get XP to run it Lemlestarn, but even with the EMM = RAM entry, I still didn't get it to run (not enough conventional memory*)...

*P.S. - just performed MEM & it tells me that I have:
655360 avail. to MS DOS
627808 largest exec. pgm size
1048576 bytes tot contig. ext mem
0 bytes avail contig. ext mem (<-- this the problem?)
941056 avail. XMS
MS DOS resident in himem
btw, autoexec.nt looking good as well, everything's prefixed with LH!

Edited by - Travelller on 15-03-2003 13:52:19

Sat Mar 15, 2003 2:16 pm by Lemlestarn

@Travelller

I can only get it to run if I start it with the short-cut ("Frontier" instead of "Frontier.bat"

that was included in the shareware version. Otherwise I get a memory error aswell. If you've already tried that, then I don't know.

Sat Mar 15, 2003 5:53 pm by eclex

Yes Aetherus, I remember Starflight as well. Spent many hours with it. Think I had an Atari version..

Sat Mar 15, 2003 7:41 pm by Travelller

Ok... I guess this thread's mentioned almost every space sim / space combat game past, present & future - except for Homeplanet....

Anyone following this one? Anyone try out their demo? Anyone here fluent in Russian...

Sat Mar 15, 2003 11:07 pm by Bananko

Earth & Beyond

Sun Mar 16, 2003 8:06 am by SEADREGS

Space Rouge, Commadore 64
StarFlight, C-64
Frontier Elite
X-Wing
Wing Commander 1
WC 2
X-Wing 2
Privater
WC 3
Privateer 2
FreeSpace
Tachyon the Fringe
X beyond the Frontier
HardWar
X-Tension

and now Freelancer.

Freelancer has great graphics and the game engine works fine. The game wasn't tweaked correctly. The SP should have been able to explore the entire universe gotten the ablity to buy any ship before taking on the missions.

Although this is the closest to Privater. I actually had more fun with Privater. I would even play it again if I could get it to work with a modern sound card.

Sun Mar 16, 2003 10:23 am by cleopete

Independance War 2 eats Freelancer's lunch as far as I'm concerned. It was far superior in everyway, except multiplayer, since apparently no one else bought it. The universe was bigger and absolutely no one cared if I was new around here.

I like Freelancer, but it's geared towards people who can't fly spaceships.

Sun Mar 16, 2003 10:57 am by krayzkrok

This thread brings a tear to my eye - all those classic space sim games throughout my history of computer gaming. But I remember earlier games that I played:

Starstrike (ZX Spectrum) - basically the "Star Wars" coin-op
Starstrike 2 (ZX Spectrum) - solid 3d objects! Vaguely inspired by no.1
Dark Star (ZX Spectrum) - another Star Wars variant but brilliantly programmed
Forbidden Planet (ZX Spectrum) - the sequel to Dark Star. Insanely difficult.
Code Name Matt (ZX Spectrum) - non-linear flight around the solar system
Time Gate 4D (Zx Spectrum) - the oldest of the bunch, a cross between Atari's "Space Raiders" and that venerably old "Star Trek" mainframe game

What I can't remember is whether Code Name Matt predated "Elite" or not, because it was similar in concept in terms of freely flying between different planets, but without any trade, and restricted to the solar system. My all time favourite game for a while, it was.

And then there were:

Starglider (Atari ST)
Starglider 2 (Commodore Amiga)

Both created by Jez San (Argonaut). He's still going, but lost his knack for decent space sims by the looks of things. The latter featured a fully integrated solar system with planets and even tunnels through the planets. The graphics engine handled it all seamlessly. I'm sure there were several more but my memory fails me.

And then the PC era began for me.

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