Відео

Mine too!

Still annoyed what became of Volition unfortunately. Though Shapechanger lives on.

Excellent video God the memories ❤

I'm only 3 minuets in and you have the most preposterously, impeccably good sense of taste I've ever seen

Aww yes! 100% on everything. It is literally the only single player game I will replay every few years. Such a special piece of art!

I'd love you to cover Babylon 5! Be seeing you! ;)

I was a huge fan of the x wing and tie fighter games when they came out. Then I bought Freespace 2 thinking it was the same but better, but I couldnt get into it. I dont know why. Maybe It was more complex and not as clear design as Lucasarts games. Maybe it just lacked the Star Wars magic.

Interesting comparison to B5 and FS2---I gotta say it looks like Those all powerful chaos aliens, "The Shadows" did a lot to inspire the image of the Shivans, though I'm wondering if the Wing Commander Prophecy game's new antagonists, the Nephilim came first or if FS1 "simply did it better"

How am I only now discovering your channel? This video is phenomenal, thank-you for making it.

You mention what the “it” factor is that makes FS2 great and I think it’s the mysterious motivations of the antagonist and the disembodiment of the player. At both the end of FS1 and FS2 were are left with haunting questions on the motivations of the alien attackers, never to be answered. Only speculation. FS2 is also unique in that you are just a nameless pilot. You have no identity or presence in the story. This huge story is happening around you and you are just being blown around it like a grain of sand. Much like its setting in the vastness of space, you feel mostly inconsequential and unable to answer questions.

I am upset that I am 2 years late in watching this, I shall do my best to inform the peak department of this piece of art.

You did a great job presenting FS2. I don't agree on everything, I think FS1 is better told than FS2. For example I loved that FS1 narrative was better driven and clearer, while FS2 was a bit all over the place. Also the feeling of utter helplessness against the shivans is better in FS1. You never feel you have anything going against them. Every victory you achieved was smallered by the overall going of the war and you faced real annihilation. Where in FS2 it felt like you tapped into shivan space and they kicked you out slamming the door behind your back. That's why I wasn't as compelled. Sure it had the better game features! No argument, but it was also way easier, making the threat not feeling as threaty. ^^ Also I love that you mentioned Mass Effect. Mass Effect 1 and Free Space 1 have almost the same overall narrative. Ancient incomprehendable alien race appears to "destroy" every space traveling races, not knowing why except when those races started using the Mass Effect Gates or like in Freespace, the Freespace nodes. Both the Souvereign and the Lucifer could only get destroyed after finding records of a predecessor race that found out how to, but to late and got extinct. I played ME when it came out and was like, "THATS FREESPACE 1 STORY!" ... well from another angle like. But then ME2 and 3 changed the whole narrative.

me too

They don’t make them like this anymore. I played this so much in high school. Last time I played was about 12 years ago with SCP mods on my MacBook Pro back then. I still have the original discs.

I feel the same. This game has been unsurpassed ever since. Thanks for bringing it back to me in detail, when I remembered it and rummaged youtube for nostalgia once more. 🤗

49:42 The Clone option on the profile select screen preserves keybinds. Also, you can adjust them in-mission: just press F2. Also, as a content creator, I love Freespace's narrow focus. If you can write and wrap your head around the event editor, you can make a campaign. All the assets you need are right there, either from the base game or the community.

Post-Mission Briefs, After-Action Reviews, and Debriefing are all VERY much a real thing in real militaries. This was amissed opportunity for a cutscene of "You acomplished the mission, but your whole squadron got wiped out, you OK?" or "it is with great sadness that we mourn those who went down with the GTVA Collosus, their sacrifice will live on in our memories as we endeavor to fight in their memory..." etc. The post-mission briefs were I think a bit under-developed.

I love the FS1 campaign. The early game plot twist of Shivans showing up is great, and the sense of dread is palpable the longer you play. Killing off you home ship was a surprise and really increased the sense of vulnerability. The Pyrrhic victory at the end was another surprise. I think the only reason FS1&2 are not more accessible is because of the lack of characterization. The feelings mostly all happen in you head, as the player, as you watch grand events unfold around you as a "fly-on-the-wall". However, you never get to savour those emotions through in-game characters except through voice only briefings; or through cuscenes wherein the characters are unrelated to the player. FS2 I think does a bit more characterization, but is still pretty spartan.

funky thing its still the best space sim to this day especialy for mause controling

Unlike your choice of dress, your choice of best game is spot on. You should do a full cover on the source code project. Which mods you like best and which graphical settings. As beam shine and the backgrounds. Textures. Shadows. Etc... Which catered experience did you make? Also you failed to touch on the musical scores. Which are some of the best in gaming and did well to give acrossed the tension and conditions of the battle as well as evoke the levels of stress relative to the situation.

Great video. You covered what makes FS2 so special very well. My interpretation of the ending of FS2 is that the shivans are so advanced, that they can recreate jump nodes by collapsing a star into a supernova, and it's implicit that they have already re-visited earth and destroyed it. Therefore the events of FS2 were in fact the final stand of humanity against a cosmic force that is unknowable and unstoppable (the efforts of Aken Bosch notwithstanding). I think it's the best example of "The Dark Forrest' theory in fiction. Mind blowing and underappreciated gem.

Still trying to get my friend to play Freespace. He was not one of the enlightened ones like in back in the day.

I dream that one day there will be a freespace RTS game like Homeworld with a story. what if Earth sent a fleet to regain contact with its lost colonies. What if there is another perhaps larger fish swimming in the tank? the open ending of freespace 2 is just as good as the open ending of The thing by John Carpenter.

Hey there, great video. Do you happen to know the song playing at the end of Part 8 in the video? I've listened to the freespace 1 & 2 soundtrack for years but don't recognize this song (which sounds great!)

Watching the Galatea go down is still etched into my memory...

lmao

It's definitely in my top 5, next to a few others like Unreal Tournament and Half Life 1 and 2. Even though the overarching story was standard Sci-fi fare, I think it really captured a sense of being a single pilot taking part in a gigantic war, instead of so many other games which pit you as the hero who's personal journey shapes the war. Even though you do participate in key moments of the war. Especially awesome were the giant capital ships with their crazy huge lasers that were the true movers and shakers on the battlefield. I gotta do a revisit.

There is absolutely no other game that really hits that itch. So many different games i have tried and all of them just don't hit that exact need that Freespace gives. Either the controls, The story or even just the general vibe. And i have played Elite. I find myself aimless in ED.. Freespace just is so satisfying to me.

There were only a few videob games I greatly enjoyed and the entire Descent and Freespace series were most of them - the rest were R.O.T.T., Serious Sam First and Second Encounters, and Portal. I remember following their dev blog "bug if the week" when developing FS2. I think my favorite was a bug that was in code reused from Descent: Freespace but none of the bombs were big enough to trigger it - double firing the larger bombs in FS2 would have both miss their target due to an issue with the collision avoidance code. I think my favorite "yep, that's wingman AI for you" was in the Grall mission. I assigned some of my wingmen to protect the disabled ship and the transport that jumps in. Everything's fine until the transport begins docking at which point my wingmen decide the other ship is attacking the one they're protecting.

Oh the memores. I worked on the German translation of FreeSpace 2 back in the day and did beta testing for both FS1 + 2. I remember first seeing and playinng the (beta) campaign for FS2, back then they had the same voices as FS1 (which were the employes of Volition), which I actually always liked more than the professional external they hired for FS2 final. Even in beta it felt so much better in its variety and the story built-up. The FS2 campaign really was so much more advanced with the possibility to branch into the secret operations, and the "DIVE DIVE DIVE HIT YOUR BURNERS PILOT" is soooo effective and is by far the best moment in all of FreeSpace campaigns bar none. And I always loved the nebula and what cool new missions it made possible. BTW, there was a second character that was a bit explored and that was the undercover agent, that you worked directly with. Not deep character exploration, but much more than with any other in all of the FS campaigns. Great to see that the FS2 source went so big and created something so great nowadays - I remember packing up the FS2 source for Volition, testing and releasing it to the public back then. Even though I saw what people did with Descent 2 back then (which also had the source released), FS2 seems to got so much further by hobbyists. Great. Seems like even some tools like VPView I programmed back in the day still are being used in updated form :)... Great video, btw I would have also had the FS1 intro built in, which I always liked better than the FS2, it flows so good and the music was so great. Anyways, thanks for the trip back to old times :)...

Have you played Battlezone 98? I love it as much as I love freespace 2, for vastly different reasons.

I still remember that early mission where you're exploring a nebula and the game just has you drift and sit with the tension of the malfunctioning radar giving you false positives until that tension breaks when the enemy does eventually show up and you're almost relieved there's something tangible in there with you even if it wants to murder you

Definitely the greatest space sim. Possibly the best mod community ever too. There's so much that can be said about some of the more out there mods like Transcend and Sync, the ones which turn the game into something of a space survival-horror feeling, something which really hasn't been done elsewhere. would definitely recommend if you haven't done those. 'Windmills' too, by the same author.

after 23 years and more attempts than I would like to admit, I finally beat this game a few days ago. Its so good. Absolutely one of if not my favourite game of all time.

Psssst, you can copy your pilot profiles. Which will carry over your bindings. This video puts down alot of the things I've not been able to put to words about the franchise. Wounderful work. An also a constant reminder that Freespace has some incredibly high-quality background music.

I love this game

Freespace 2 was a masterpiece in its day and also had exeptional multiplayer. Its the Benchmark i hold all space games up against. On a side note, the wing commander saga is a standalone game made in FS open, its well worth downloading. An Excelent synopsis, couldnt have put it better myself. Sub earned. EDIT:- On checking up, seems this creator just dissapeared from all platforms a year ago. Hope theyre ok.

I wonder can any species survive the Shivans?

This game is the classic master peace

I know it's been over a year since you posted this video, but you might want to know that there is a Babylon 5 mod for freespace 2. And Fans who made it put a lot of stuff into it.

The Shivans are how the Borg should have stayed. It's so unsettling to think of a race that can't be reasoned with. Closer to being a force of nature. I'm glad Volition went and stuck with that tone. I'm curious what they had planned for the future.

wait. you can do key bindings during missions. you can access the options menu through one of the F# keys. besides that i very agree to your broad points. amazing retrospective. :)

That description of the final 5 missions got me coming back to this video. Phenomenal!

Thanks to Volition for releasing the source code when they knew the studio would fold, and thanks to the community for picking it up and carrying it so far. Thanks to all of them Freespace looks even better and plays just as it did 25 years ago.

I bought a Gateway Computer back in the day with all of the money I had made working at my job during high school for a summer. Bundled with it was Descent: Freespace and it blew me away. I was already a fan of Tie Fighter back then and had put hundreds of hours into that game and its fan-made content/community (shoutout to any Emperor's Hammer flyers still out there) but Freespace seemed to take everything I loved about that game and ratchet it up a notch. Then, one day two years later I was in Electronics Boutique and saw, sitting on a shelf neglected with a small amount of dust on it, one copy of Freespace 2, and my jaw hit the floor. I will never understand the decision to not give that game a marketing budget worth its value and as a result, despite being a budding gamer, I had no idea it had been made. I will never forget the words I read on the box, "The Shivans have returned, and they want to know what happened to their scouting party." Chills dude, absolute chills. On the way to the register to purchase it, I tried in vain to tell my friends what that meant, friends who still remember the event and tell me I turned into a crazy person saying things like, "Bastion... wormhole...LUCIFER" in an unintelligible babble. I still have the box.

Freespace 2 is amazing. There are frustrating points, but this is being emotionally involved in the story not a glitch.

I miss the space shooters from The 90s! Loved freespace 2, darllight conflict, the descent series, wing commander and privateer!

Great vid! I loved this series so much as a teen and have gone back to it for the first time in about 20 years or so thanks to GOG. Having a blast, and I still remember how I felt playing this game for the first time back in the early 00s. Still remember how I was like 'Whoa...' when that first cinematic played in Freespace 1 (I'd never seen anything quite that dramatic or well done in a game before--I was probably fresh off the N64)...the sense of wonder you get when you first encounter the Shivans...the absolute 'holy shit!' sensation I got the first time you get eyes on the Lucifer, or the giddiness I felt at the prospect of the GTA and Vasudan's putting the war behind them and finally teaming up. The fact that numerous missions had optional or hidden objectives that'd award you prestigious commendations (displayed in a medal case no less!)...the interactive 'you're on a ship' menu system. It was the perfect game to play as a 13-year-old with a very active imagination. And the best part is it still holds up! Just finished FS1's campaign tonight and am about to dive into FS2 and having the absolute time of my life.

The opening montages at the beginning of Ronald Moore's BSG are an homage to the opening montages of Space: 1999.

Another time another place is the episode that could explain season 2... Which there was a season 3 and more, if they ever do a reboot, I hope they see your review!