My choices are all major releases that any fan of the genre will recognize, but they’re all also mainstream choices.
It all culminated in 1999’s Freespace 2-which was and remains the indisputable pinnacle of the genre, even today (and I’ll fight you out behind the cafeteria after class if you say otherwise).Īs with any limited list of games, a lot will be left out. While this exercise will first take us to the 1980s, it’s the 1990s where this gaming genre had its greatest hits. The first couple served to set up what was possible, and the rest each did something incredible with their implementation and storytelling. To help further contextualize Elite, we’re going to crank up the Nostalgia Machine and walk through five "tentpole" space combat games. Advertisementįurther Reading Review: Elite: Dangerous is the best damn spaceship game I’ve ever played I remember entire summers spent with LucasArts games, one year defeating the Empire in the cockpit of an X-Wing, and then a summer or two later switching sides and wiping out the Rebellion from the seat of a screaming TIE Defender prototype. As a space-obsessed kid growing up, I can demarcate my youth by Roberts’ game releases, which doubled as semi-annual reminders to upgrade your whole computer. But the stick-n-throttle stickler has been effectively forgotten for fifteen years, bereft of AAA titles (no, the X series doesn’t count) until Elite: Dangerous was released last December. Genre legend Chris Roberts-who’s currently hard at work on the massive sprawling thing that is Star Citizen-even gave us Freelancer in 2003. EVE Online is one of the biggest, but EVE Online isn’t a cockpit-centric game that you need a joystick to play right. Sure, there’ve been space games in the 2000s.
In my eyes, there hadn’t been a really good, hard-core, stick-n-throttle space sim to hit the market since 1999. But the other reason? This game was like giving water to a dying man in the desert. As such, I had such high praise for Elite: Dangerous for two primary reasons: first, it’s a great game that puts you in the cockpit like few others have managed. But that’s about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get-I’ve put in stick time with just about every major "you are flying a spaceship" game that’s come out in the past 30 years. When reviewing Elite: Dangerous, I went with the headline " the best damn spaceship game I’ve ever played." Naturally, a snarky commenter or two suggested that I obviously hadn’t played very many spaceship games.
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