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Unofficial Babylon 5 Freeware Space Sim Released
Pluvius writes "The Prequel Campaign to the unofficial freeware Babylon 5 space sim I've Found Her has been released. According to the development team behind the game: 'We've been trying to finish this piece of art for the last 2 years... it's time to play and find out if it was worth the waiting.' You can find a download link (220MB) and an overview FAQ on its site as well, as well as a screenshot or two." This is an interesting unofficial development, following an ill-fated official project along the same lines.
The fact that this B5 game is unofficial is pretty important, considering the number of fans of the show here...
Rob (/. does have a lot of B5 fans, doesn't it?)
Downloaded and ran this game... very impressive! Gameplay, graphics presentation and sound work are all proffesional quality and better than many of the computer games i've played lately. Also runs beautifully at 1024 on my geforce 2MX.. i bet that it would look like the show on something more modern. I am still working on the training mission, but if the campaign is long enough, i'd say this is a game i would have been more than willing to pay for! too bad it's too late for them to get the license now. but it is a good thing that JMS is aware of this project (according to the faq) and isn't foxing it. Makes me remember how much I liked B5 back when it was on TNT every day and spent a good summer or two watching the entire thing. Maybe I should go rent some of the DVDs?
Now if someone would do something like this for DS9 to make up for that awful Dominion Wars game, I'd be in geek heaven!
Not necessarily the best engine, as Freespace uses a flight simulator model, and Babylon is one of the few sci-fi series that even attempts to use real physics. So I'd think that that a Babylon sim would be better of based on Independece War 2:Egde of Chaos. It's just another spaceshooter, but with real physics this time.
Which begs the question: why do the big publishers always screw up?
It doesn't actually "beg the question," but I know what you are trying to say.
Sierra does not seem to be a company that's interested in taking risks:
- A friend of mine was working on a modern update of a classic Sierra game (I can't say which one), that got cancelled because Sierra got cold feet.
- Homeworld2's first incarnation (about 2 years in development) was completely scrapped after the developer ran into some technical issues and Sierra decided to play it safe and had them make a new game that was much more like the original than the one they'd been working on.
Into the Fire (the Babylon Five game) would have been completed after the original series finished airing. B5 was excellent, but it was never a huge commercial success. I imagine that Sierra was concerned that the percentage of PC gamers (already a small fraction of the market compared to console games, for example) who also liked a non-mainstream sci-fi series was too small to justify spending any more money.
They could very well have been wrong. Maybe ItF would have sold millions of copies. I doubt it, though - the PC market is not as kind to unusual games as the console market is.
Most people never saw Crimson Skies on the PC, but when a CS game was made for the Xbox, it sold like hotcakes. Maybe Sierra should have hung onto ItF for a year or two and released it for the Xbox instead.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman