Intro post - 1st Feature: Freelancer

Hi, I'm Moth and this is actually my first blog. I'm still learning the ropes so I hope you, dear reader, will bear with me through my learning process. :)
The purpose of this blog is, as the title says, to present a gamer's take on the various (mostly PC) games we play. Hopefully people reading these posts will gain some info on the game they are interested in procuring and gamers who own featured games will leave their valuable insight and share their experience.

As a start 1st featured game will be one of best space combat sims, at least imho, out there - Freelancer.

While it's not the revolutionary title it initially promised to be, Freelancer delivers the exact combination of addictive and accessible gameplay that the genre has needed for a long time. - Gamespot

As the writer on Gamespot said it's not a particularly revolutionary game but still it had a certain "something" special that had me coming back.

Continue past the cut to find out more.

 Ah, good old Freelancer... I actually wasn't looking for it when I first got it. Was in some obscure game shop which had some cheap games to offer and they weren't that good. After rummaging through the offered games I came across some game that had space combat, cool ships and a big game space. In absence of anything else I was interested in I got it.

 Thinking about it now Freelancer did not have particularly epic graphic or something, but after all my PC wasn't anything special and it still looked great and ran smoothly, unlike most other games of the time on the same settings and on my PC. The ships had nice textures and not too complex models and lighting effects were ok, considering the simplicity of the design it looked great. Of course not everything was great and some thing may have been done differently but consider that Freelancer came on 1 CD and that it was 8 years ago, a lot in computer game time. :)
 The thing that made it great was the possibilities of modding the game, you could have made entire solar systems, new factions, bases and even import new ship models and design new weapons by relatively simple text editing of .ini files. Of course some of the modding required outside programs, like 3DS Max for modelling the ships and such but overall it wasn't too complex.

Ship Firing Weapons

 Story wasn't anything special, your typical Save the Galaxy From Bad Aliens type of story with a couple of twists, but it was enough to suck you in cause, although it was not extraordinary, it wasn't bad. Stopping right there, maybe someone didn't play it. Unfortunately I always felt it was too short and that was one of the reasons I always expected a sequel to come out.
 The gameplay was simply addictive, rpg elements of upgrading the weapons, making money and buying better ships were simple enough not to loose focus from the main story and yet good enough to make you feel a sense of accomplishment when u got that bigger gun. Ship was very responsive to mouse control and had a great 3rd person view (which I prefer) along with a 1st person view one unlike some other games that simply ignore 3rd person perspective, also you would "feel" it in the controls when you replaced a small and agile craft with a bigger and heavier one.

Trade Lane Travel

 Just to make a short mention of the 3 types of moving your ship through a solar system aside from the jump gates between them; 1st - regular flight coupled with afterburners, 2nd - cruise engines that generally made you go 600% (or was it 400%) of normal flight speed and 3rd trade lane rings that made you go around 1500% of regular flight speed. These types of movement really made you feel the vastness of space without making you fly 10 minutes to get from A to B. The fun thing about Trade Lanes was that their functionality could be interrupted by NPC pirates (or other players in MP) by simply shooting at one of the rings which made you drop out early and be attacked.
 The background scenery was beautiful and sometimes even breathtaking, the space is not just endless blackness with a couple of sparkling white stars and Freelancer designers were well aware of this. No point in typing, a picture says it all.

Colorful Space

 The game also had capital ships and although the players were unable to fly them in an original release you could always load a mod that enabled you to do just that. Unfortunately most of the capital ships were generally blocky and unimpressive, however the thing that bugged me the most was the fact that they were relatively small, not at all "capital". Were the ships bigger, as they should have been, it would make some of the story moments more enjoyable and memorable.

An example of a Capital Ship

Anyway I could really go on and on about Freelancer and there is a lot of details that made this game one of the best in it's genre: damaged ships would loose it's wing along with a gun that was mounted on it, radiation damage too close to the sun, disintegration and explosions of destroyed opposing ships, cool asteroid fields and bouncing asteroids off your shields and so on; but it's time to wrap it up.
 Overall Freelancer was a great game from a great genre that unfortunately does not have enough quality representatives and it will always have a special place on my hard drive. :)

 That's it for my 1st Feature, hope it was ok and that, at least, made you remember that old great game and the fun you had playing it! So feel free to post any info or insight you might have. Also I hear there are rumors of a sequel in production, finally, but I fear they are only rumors. :/