Amid this tense background, the Shivans reemerge from the void of space, forcing the alliance to fight a war on two fronts. The memorable final battle took place inside hyperspace, as you commanded a squadron of bombers tasked with taking out the massive Lucifer warship while it traveled toward Earth.įreespace 2 continues with the storyline 32 years later, as a rebel group of humans, the Neo-Terran Front, fights a civil war against the Terran/Vasudan alliance, who are accusing the human leadership of selling their race out to the Vasudans. They were ultimately successful in repelling the invaders, although at the cost of permanently cutting Earth off from interstellar travel. Faced with mutual extermination, the Vasudans and humans quickly ended their hostilities and formed a pact to fight against the Shivans. All attempts to communicate, let alone negotiate, were met with silence. The galactic balance of power was soon shifted, however, with the appearance of the Shivans, a third race with highly advanced technology that quickly started cutting a swath through the opposing forces. The first game in the series, the awkwardly titled Descent: Freespace - The Great War, an offshoot of the popular Descent series of free-flight 3D corridor crawlers, told the story of the eponymous Great War between Terrans (humans) and an aggressive race of aliens called the Vasudans. Hunting down enemy ships in the middle of a nebula was one of the most unique aspects of Freespace 2. Although there are still blips on the proverbial radar, such as X2: The Threat and Freelancer, it seems that the sun has set on one of the premier gaming genres of the 1990s, a decade that brought us a number of fantastic entries into the Wing Commander and X-wing series, and which was capped off by one of the finest PC games ever (of any genre), Freespace 2. Sci-fi flight sim games are deader than a doornail, at least on the PC. Luckily, even though it's six years old, Freespace 2 still looks and plays as well as it ever did-if you can find a copy, that is. With the general distaste for niche products and games that require peripherals to run (I'd wager that the percentage of PC gamers that also own joysticks is as low as it has ever been), it seems unlikely that we'll ever see a space sim of the scope and quality of Freespace 2 ever again. (It's worth noting, however, that there is a Babylon 5 total modification for the Freespace 2 engine that updates the graphics and includes a lengthy single-player campaign.) The project never did see the light of day, despite the usual round of online petitions and uproar from the Internet Babylon 5 community. The developers continued to work on it for a year, hoping to buy the license from Sierra, but to no avail. Despite the fact that the company had spent a ton of money on the game in the two years of development, and that it was only months away from release, the Sierra bigwigs decided that they weren't going to recoup their investment in the game and decided to cancel the project. The nail in the coffin of the big-budget space sim was probably Sierra's cancellation of its high-profile Babylon 5 game late in 1999. It doesn't look like the space sim genre is going to come back in any big way in the future, though. Thanks to mods, Freespace 2 and Babylon 5 live on well past their commercial extinction. While the controls actually worked out well, nothing can really compare with the feel of a good force feedback joystick kicking in your hands while you gun down enemy ships. Freelancer has a rather large asterisk by its name, anyway, due to the fact that it was based around a mouse-and-keyboard interface and didn't even include support for joysticks. Space sims, however, have almost disappeared completely, with the titles that are being released, such as X2: The Threat and Freelancer, doing rather poorly at retail. The general- audience flight sim genre as a whole has become a relatively niche category that most major publishers avoid, save for Microsoft and its Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator series. It's rather unfortunate that sci-fi flight sims have become so rare over the past half decade.
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