The space fighter genre seems to be lost. I did some research a few years ago trying to understand what happened. Not enough market demand was the answer. The same goes for Mech games and flight sims. We live in a cold world some days :(
I had the Jedi Starfighter game for the original xbox. It was fun, but completely lacked the enjoyment I got from X-Wing. It could just be nostalgia, but I still get the same enjoyment from firing up X-Wing in DOSBox.
The Rogue Squadron games achieved high popularity, but they felt more like spiritual successors to the Rebel Assault games, rather than X-Wing.
I want my sprawling space battles with Correllian Corvettes and Frigates and all the different TIE variations, Y-Wings, B-Wings, A-Wings.
Aw man, I'm going to reinstall X-Wing when I get home. Just need to find a cheap joystick that works with DOSBox now.
Try TIE Fighter as well, if you can: the game engine is better, and the storyline is excellent. Thanks for the tip about DOSBox. I'd pay money to get that game in a modern package that would run on my system. (Same goes for SFC3 and NFS: High Stakes, mind you - both old games that I can't even get to run properly. Perhaps DOSBox is the answer?)
It's a little hard to get running sometimes, but there are plenty of guides online. On an older PC I was able to successfully get peripherals working.
Right now I think DOSBox is the best way to play the older games. I would fork over a good amount of money for an easy to use platform for playing older PC games and a marketplace that sold them.
Good Old Games www.gog.com has a nice selection, but it doesn't completely scratch the itch.
I'm still wishing I could find a helicopter simulator to equal Janes AH-64 Longbow. A friend and I spend many, many hours after work playing that game.
"Sorry, sweetie, I have to work late again..."
I still have controllers in my basement, just hoping to get pulled out.
Technically, they already have, since the Freespace 2 code was open-sourced.[1] And there have been multiple space-flight Kickstarter projects, such as Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, and Limit Theory.
The distinction, before about 1998 or so, was pretty much immaterial: Totally Games was "independent" but was composed of ex-Lucasfilm Games people and only published through LucasArts. I cannot say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lucasfilm (then LucasArts) had an ownership stake in it at one point, as Nintendo did with Rare during the mid-90's.
Contrast this to, say, Raven Software doing Jedi Knight 2 and Elite Force right on the heels of one another. (Of course, Totally Games did do Star Trek: Bridge Commander, but that was seven years after they split from Lucasfilm Games.)
I miss them too. I make up for it playing the X series[1] and Freespace mods[2]. X series is more like a single player Eve (also has lots of mods like Freespace), while Freespace is more like X-Wing/Tie Fighter. There's even a Star Wars mod for Freespace (might be one for X, but have not checked).
