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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

There is a certain subset of star systems that I will always associate with and have a fondness for because of Freespace 2. And the phrase “Capella jump node”.

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Dive! Dive! Dive! Hit your burners, pilot!

FreeSpace 2 will forever have a special place in my heart. The best space fighter sim experience there ever was.

I hear that perhaps Elite: Dangerous is comparable, but from the videos of it I've seen, it doesn't have that military sci-fi feel to it. I miss the FreeSpace ambience, where you'd fly around in your fighter listening to the chatter between capital ships as they duke it out. I'm sad there was never a third part of the series; the storyline with the Shivans was excellent.

Bought it in discount recently, and it has a good/great ambience, just not amazing . Obviously a lot of detail work has gone into it, and the cockpit is pretty convincing. It misses that “this is an alive universe” touch. The scale of it is pretty good, you do get the feeling of these huge distances you traverse.

It's not set in space, but as a fellow Freespace 2 fan... the Ace Combat series nails everything else that made Freespace 2 fun.

The AC series uses licensed real-world fighter jets but is set in a "near future" Earth-like setting. So there are sci-fi elements like giant flying aircraft carriers and enormous doomsday weapons such as giant railguns. The plots are enjoyably goofy, full of drama and plot twists. Lots of radio banter.

The overall "realism vs. fun" balance very closely approximates the good old spaceflight sims of yore like Freespace 2 and Tie Fighter.

AC7 is available on Windows as well as console, a first for the series. I put about 100 hours into it, and needless to say I really loved it. AC6 (Xbox 360) was great fun too; it may run on XBox One as well.

All AC games are all set in a shared fictional world ("Strangereal") but each game is a story about a different war and has a unique set of characters. So no worries about jumping into the series at some arbitrary random point; you're not going to be missing out on any context.

Thanks! I'm going to dust off my old joystick and try it out!

How do you get the license for real world jets?

It looks like Namco obtained licenses directly from the manufacturers. The title screen has a big, dense list of licensing information regarding the planes from Dassault, Boeing, and seemingly a million other manufacturers.

I'm not sure exactly what parts of the planes require licensing. Do you need to pay to use their names? Their likenesses? Both? Neither? Maybe it's just a courtesy? It's a good question. I'd love to know more myself.

BTW, when I say "goofy"... the AC games themselves never break character. They always maintain a serious air. Think "Metal Gear Solid meets Top Gun." Gritty military stuff combined with kind of an anime-style "save the world" or "save the country" plot. The end result winds up being sort of absurd, but ultimately I think it's a really fun blend of gritty faux-realism and absurdity.

A totally serious, military-accurate mood wouldn't quite work IMHO. Because then you bump up against realities like the fact that your jets are equipped with an absurd amount of missiles, and you will end each mission having shot down dozens of enemies, literally an order of magnitude more than any living pilot has shot down in an entire career.

So, I think the AC games walk the realism/absurdity line in just the right way.

Freespace 2 regularly goes on sale on Good old Games, and has an open source launcher/mod installer (called knossos[0]) that includes a super easy way to install tons of free community developed mod content, including re-implementations of Wing Commander 3 and a community developed Wing Commander universe based campaign. It's wonderful fun.

I also highly recommend Wing Commander Prophecy Gold [1]

[0]:https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=94068.0 [1]:https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_5_prophecy

Part of what made Freespace 2 so immersive was its usage of actual stars as the locations for jump nodes - as a kid, being able to actually point to Gamma Draconis in the night sky as the setting of a game I just played added a whole new dimension to it.

For me it's the same, except for I-War (marketed as Independence War in the US). And the phrase in my case is "Toliman jump point"[1] =)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_B

Man the graphics of I-war was really something else. Our 75MHz pentium with S3 graphics could make it look nice. Always wondered how they did that.

seems interesting, hadn't heard of I-War before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-War_%281997_video_game%29

The game was extremely well received critically, but sadly less successful commercially. It's one of the very few space combat sims with a fully Newtonian six-degrees-of-freedom flight model. It's still extremely playable due to a togglable "fly-by-wire" system where the computer attempts to make thruster burns to keep the ship's velocity vector as close to where its bow is pointing at as possible, but a totally free flight mode is just a key press away at any time.

Another of the game's distinctive features is that instead of piloting a nimble but vulnerable space fighter, the player assumes the responsibilities of the bridge crew of a 160-meter corvette with a dry mass of almost 20 thousand tons! Even though for playability's sake the ship is capable of several-gee accelerations, there's definitely a tangible feel of inertia in how it responds to the helm controls.

The 16-minute, full-CGI intro video is probably one of the best introductions to any game ever, and definitely worth watching even as a standalone work of fiction: https://youtu.be/ECfKL4oS-6w

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