It’s that time again; time to sound the space flight game horn on Blistered Thumbs. Instead of posting news about the latest 4X release (Nexus: The Jupiter Incident just released on GOG.com! Eeeeeeee!), or discussion about how excited I am for the release of X Rebirth, I’m instead tapping into my collection of old stuff here for what I’ve decided is a good reason, and what I decide is law.

When I’m waving the space flight flag I encounter a couple of common complaints/problems that people have with my unwavering love for the genre. The first is that many of the best of them tend to be complicated if you ever want to get good at them (if you don’t believe me, look at the control options for Freespace 2. That’s a lot of key binds), and the second is that many of them require a joystick, again, if you want to get good at them. Some of them require a joystick and go so far to insult your intelligence if you even so much as try to boot the game up without one, like X-Wing Alliance. When I was a strapping young lad I cut my teeth on early entries in the genre by use of the keyboard, but it’s not something I’d recommend. Sure, you can play Wing Commander that way, but you’ll tire of it quickly. I’m sure I would have too if I had any other games; allowances and slim release schedules had a way of doing that to me. So it is that people sometimes ask me if there’s a good space shooter that doesn’t require an expensive joystick that’s pretty intuitive to play. I wouldn’t be writing this article if there weren’t.

Don't believe me? Would a guy wearing FUTURE PANTS OF THE FUTURE lie to you?

“Based on an idea by” is a scary prelude to a credit. It conjures up the image of someone who has no idea what they’re talking about having had one too many glasses of stout telling his friend in game development, “You know, I’ve always wanted to make a game, but I never knew how!” That poor trusting friend might agree because he likes the idea, he’s easily influenced, or perhaps he’s had too many gin fizzes himself, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that all they would have a few months into development is anything less than a disaster. I go through all these emotions before the name even slips up from below the screen cutoff and reveals itself, mercifully calming me down by displaying “Chris Roberts.”

Freelancer was Chris Roberts’ last video game. He’d forever cemented himself in the history of gaming by being responsible for concrete proof that live action full motion video in CD ROM games need not be total crap (see: Wing Commander 3 & 4). The Wing Commander games themselves were pretty solid too, offering depth of plot and characters to a genre that managed to avoid them almost entirely. While not the greatest space flight games around, they distinguished themselves because of this, and became an important staple of the Origin Systems catalog of games alongside the likes of Ultima, or System Shock.

There's going to be a big fight when FTL travel happens and everybody wants to name it according to their favorite Sci-Fi series.

Freelancer itself came out of Digital Anvil studios, Roberts’ own studio he created after leaving Origin/Electronic Arts in the mid 90s. It’s safe to say that his concepts of the game followed much of the ideas he had developed in the Wing Commander offshoot: Privateer. Economies, job boards, organizations, faction ratings, and all of it to take place in a dynamic universe inhabited by thousands of players. It’s not a tremendous leap to say that Freelancer is indeed a spiritual successor to Privateer (arguably even more so than Privateer’s own sequel, The Darkening ), but certainly not quite as much game as Roberts had initially hoped.

In the end, after an acquisition of Digital Anvil by Microsoft Game Studios, Freelancer‘s final product came out a degree simpler. The dynamic galaxy, economy, and the thousands of proposed online players were cut from the game due to budget and time constraints, but the truth is that despite its over-hype-under-delivery arrival, what finally landed was actually a pretty solid game.