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Wing Commander: Darkest Dawn — Fan-Made Goodness Reborn
MojoKid writes "Last week marked the launch of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn, a fan-built companion to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that's been in the making for the past ten years. It's a real labor of love. Now that the game is available, the question is, how good is it? "The game dropped on Thursday, I started playing Friday, and as of this writing (Sunday afternoon), my weekend chore list is gathering dust on the fridge. I've been too busy cursing my decision to chuck my Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 to notice. 'If I'd kept it just one more year I wouldn't have this problem,' I mutter, fingers splayed over the keyboard in a vain attempt to convince my Hellcat to bank like something other than a Centaurian Mud Pig. Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made game that's good enough to be worth paying for. Not only is it better than a lot of schlock companies expect you to pay for, it pays homage to its source material while improving on Wing Commander's classic gameplay and graphics."
Wow, I think that's a bigger accomplishment than the game itself.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'll have to try this out, but I sure loved the old Wing Commander games. I haven't replayed them to see how they hold up, but they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
It's been a long time since I've played a flight/space combat game that hooked me enough to play more than a couple missions. I hope this game finds some success.
I'm amazed at how the space combat genre seems to have died a bit of a death in recent years (yeah, I know about the X universe, etc). Surely it's about time someone either rebooted Wing Commander or Tie Fighter, or else made a new game in a similar mould? With modern technology, it could be awesome.
Which doesn't mean good in this case, it means self reenforcing. It is a case of the few ones that do come out suck badly, so nobody buys them, so publishers don't think there's any money in them, so nobody good can get funding, so only crap games can come out.
It's a vicious cycle, and some kinds of games can get it to it.
from the FAQ
prescient captcha: godsend
Now I really do have to sort Linux drivers for my pre-USB HOTAS.
Wing Commander: Standoff has been available for some time now, and it's pretty great - unlike Saga, it uses WC: Prophecy's engine (and consequently needs Prophecy: Secret Ops to run - just need to download that too). Check it out - http://standoff.solsector.net/
for the thing, then the developers could afford their own server and wouldn't have to put it on bizarre file websites.
I'd say this is pretty core Slashdot material.
Fan created game that's a sequel to a series of games missed by many Slashdotters, built on an open-source engine, released for free?
Hardly advertising.
Yes, about an hour ago. Tribes: Ascend doens't have mouse smoothing.
BF3 also didn't have it.
Neither did TF2.
Actually, what games on PC had forced mouse smoothing lately? Some random terrible console port that tries to put PC users into same multiplayer as console players and not have PC newbs mass slaighter the best of console players?
Flight/space sims take skill. Most MMOs (and their offline breatheren) are like FarmVille with a good story.
I love Diablo, but after one or two play throughs it's as boring as farming.