It’s nothing to do with Origin but I was asked for some scans of Descent Freespace reviews last week and was curious enough to oblige. It’s one of those series that I own but never got around to playing for some reason. I have seen Freespace 2 accused of killing off the space sim genre not because it was a bad game but due to the lack of sales for such a well reviewed title. Freespace 1 was clearly just as well received with every review I’ve found scoring it around the 90% mark.
This first comes from the September 1998 PC Guide:-
Number 2 from the September 1998 PC Home:-
Number 3 is from the August 1998 PC Format:-
And another from the August 1998 PC Zone:-
And finally this is from the September 1998 PC Gamer:-
Love your site, man. You’re a bad influence for me. I’m a junkie for old gold and already spend way too much time & effort keeping my old P3 PC alive and games backed up. Your feeding my unproductive nostalgia with all these wonderful memories. Thanks 🙂
Freespace is something you’ve just gotta try. They had just done everything right and you didn’t even need to read the manual. The options screens & training missions were so well designed & the controls are so intuitive that you have no trouble remembering every single key (best played with keyboard). FS1 had better quality in everything from cutscenes & tech room animations to briefing animations. FS2 was sorely lacking in this, but it had more levels & tweaked gameplay & new weapons & stuff (just like Bg1 & Bg2).
Luckily this runs fine on modern computers. You should run FS1 via the latest nGlide (v1.00+) and it proprely emulates the graphics. On other glide wrappers or D3d mode, there is no lighting on any ships. There’s also a “Freespace Port” using enhanced graphics from modded FS2-engine, but I found it’s not 100% faithful to the original looks & feel.
You’re welcome. I’m having much the same experience with consoles having been influenced into buying several retro machines recently. A few years ago I was fine with emulators but I’ve just spent several hours modding a SNES…
I’m definitely going to bump Freespace up the list. I guess it should run well enough on my PII so I’ll try it there first.