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Wing commander privateer bar game11/12/2022 ![]() Finding himself with neither ship nor cash, he signs on as a hired gun with a shapely, young, vaguely Asian woman named Juni. You play the role of Trent (indicating the target audience of the game, I suppose – there’s no option to play a woman or minority here), a freelance cargo hauler who is caught up in the midst of a mysterious terrorist attack. #Wing commander privateer bar game series#On first pass, the storyline greatly resembles that of Privateer, the 1994 game in the Wing Commander series that was a delight to play even with its 486-era graphics. Like so many games released in the Age of Pentium, Freelancer’s designers sadly succumbed to the intoxicating charm of the high-octane graphics and wrote the backstory almost as an afterthought. Flying your fighter and blasting bad guys is the highlight of the game, which is a good thing, because the rest of the game has some adequacy issues. The heads-up display in the combat sequences works like a charm, including a very simple (yet not simplistic) method for tracking the location of enemies and friends and reducing the amount of extraneous sensory input that has occasionally made other spaceflight games overwhelming. Anyone who suffered under the two hundred thousand or so hotkey combinations common to the Mechwarrior line of games will appreciate the streamlined simplicity of the Freelancer interface, and you can make it as simple or complex as you like by adding options to your ship. Using the PC's two-button mouse as a centerpiece, the designers came up with a system that lets you fly, shoot, and control damage-repair options using just the mouse, saving only a few things for the keyboard hot buttons. Since it seems that joystick games are becoming fewer and farther between, Digital Anvil skipped the usual translation of joystick-to-mouse control that has been problematic for some games in the past instead, Freelancer has been designed to fly-by-mouse right from the ground up. The best feature of the game is the mouse-control flight system. The space flight engine is very good as well, although its actually modeled on a two-dimensional scheme this becomes apparent when your ship occasionally rights itself back to its starting point back on the good ol' X-Y axis, leaving the Z axis to take care of itself. One tip: play this game on a big monitor, as you'll want to fully appreciate the beauty of the graphics. "Phenomenal" is one word that comes to mind cruising between the planets, one encounters asteroid fields, ion storms, nebulae, and all sorts of stellar phenomena sure to tickle your rods and cones. The underlying storyline is flat, however, but I'll get to that in a second.įirst, let's talk graphics. The backstory is adequate, although not revolutionary, and the occasional cutscenes add some amount of interest in between interplanetary voyages and starfighter combat. Sadly, it also has a completely banal storyline and a pathetic script.įor background, Freelancer provides the standard fluff intro that you've come to expect from many CRPG's. Its graphics put most other games in the genre to shame, and the game interface itself is extremely well thought out and designed. Freelancer, released in March of 2003 by Microsoft and Digital Anvil, is one of the most beautiful space-fighter-jockey games to come along. ![]()
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