![]() Several hundred years have passed since then and the many peoples of Sirius have thrived unmolested, establishing a political and economic map across several star systems that reflects their ethno/national origins. ![]() The nations of the Middle East along with Russia succeed in driving America, Britain, Japan, and Germany into retreat beyond our solar system where they set up series of colonies near Sirius, one of our neighboring stars. It begins with a recap of Starlancer's plot, detailing the final stages of a desperate war between East and West fought exclusively in outer space. ![]() Although traditionally these types of games aren't generally known for their compelling stories, Freelancer, being of the Wing Commander legacy, manages to start off with an unusually compelling premise. Like all space-flight sims, Freelancer is a game where the player controls a space craft as if they were piloting an airplane, much akin to the fight sim genre of which it is obviously derivative. Now, no less than six years after Starlancer's release, Freelancer has finally arrived to valiantly uphold the legacy and give the genre the adrenaline boost it's needed for a long, long time. Unfortunately, after Starlancer was released to little critical acclaim and lukewarm sales Freelancer seemed to extend on and on into obscurity until Roberts himself finally left the project as well as his newly founded company, Digital Anvil. The so-called "Lancer Saga" was billed as the next evolution in the genre brought to you by the masters themselves. It was originally envisioned as a sequel to Starlancer by Chris Roberts, pioneer of space-flight sims whose seminal Wing Commander series redefined the genre in the early 90's. This was to be expected considering its legacy. Being the most recent entry in the waning (some would say 'dead') space-flight simulation genre, it is one of the few games I've played in the past few years that let me experience a compelling virtual recreation of outer space. It made me think about it in ways that few things have. It's very seldom that we are reminded that it would take tens of thousands of human lifetimes traveling at the speed of light to even reach beyond the limits of our own galaxy, that the sheer size of all that is, all that exists, is so beyond our limited perception that it can only be "known" via abstract mathematical approximation, diagrams, and enigmatic photographs of phenomena that we could never in our wildest imaginations directly experience.įreelancer made me think about this. We're used to seeing outer space in science fiction as an arbitrary void where people conveniently zip around in futuristic machines that utterly evade any tangible sense of the true vastness of space. It's a sobering thought to remember that our planet is such a small piece of a much larger universe.
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