Star lancer?

Maj.Striker said:
Agree with you completely on the ship progression there. British and American should have been annihilated by the Germans in a few days. Not sure what brilliant fella thought that scheme up. Other than that...fantastic game.

It's a very common idea among action/adventure/rpg games where your character grows in strength throughout the game. I think someone took the "Diablo in space" concept and inappropriately applied that design here. It sort of makes sense in the context of some of those games (hell demons are tougher than underground skeletons), but it's sort of a cheap cop-out in a game like Freelancer. It should be particularly more well thought out in a nonlinear game. You only have to look as far as Privateer to see a decent way to do it.
 
Hello,

Starlancer:
Negative:
It is f....g racists game. The bad, bad Russians & the good good Americans. I can't tell you how I hate this kind of plot. I also can't see any more of this 'All American Heros'. I'm really sick of them. And, like @gevatter Lars, mentioned: The dialekt the people use. Puuuhhh.... you probably can't imagine how bad this sounds in our German ears.
Always the same missions. Nobody else is shooting down anything, its all up to you. The enemy is too often flying in front of you crying: 'Shoot me down' ! This is btw. typical for Chris & Erin Roberts Games.

Positive:
Despite the Missions are all the same - its Fun! Especially in Multiplayer CoOp!! Which I like very much. It expands Gameplay. We played it up to 4 guys. It's perfect with 2 guys.
Nice Graphics. The shipdesign is cool.
Pretty stable.
And.... I wanted to get thru the Game as good as possible! Getting all the medals and finishing any goal.
 
While I agree that the story has extremely bad clichés you should be fair: It's not the "good, good Americans" versus the "bad, bad Russians" it's more like "the good Western civilization" versus the "Evil Eastern countries".
I mean, Klaus Steiner after all is a hero, if not the hero and the Captain of the ANS Reliant (forgot his name) is British and your second flagship is Japanese. So I wouldn't call this game American-centered at all.

Regarding your complaint about you being sick of "All American heroes" - nobody forces you to endure them if you dont' want to. I certainly feel as you sometimes, especially when historic events are twisted but: you can't really blame (US)American producers or game developers (etc) of making Americans their heroes - who else should they choose? Why should they make movies/games in which someone else is the main good character?
French movies have French heroes, German movies have German...main characters (they're seldom heroes), I guess it's totally normal.

P.S.: Stuttgart - I was born there. Nice city. :)
 
Quake 4 was fun

I'm always confused by the lackluster reviews Quake 4 got. The graphics looked fantastic, and it was just about the first linear FPS game ever to actually have a compelling progression. Normally I hate linear games, but in Q4 you're fighting along side competant AI, which was thrilling to finally have, in contrast to Starlancer.

Starlancer was really fun to play. It was kind of BS how none of the AI in that game seemed to have even passed flight school, but I think as long as we're having fun pretending we have a spaceship, we might as well have fun pretending we have superhuman skills.

Like Mekt-Hakkikt said, there really wasn't much of an American focus. I don't think they ever even identified your character's nationality. The game was in English just because it was made by English speaking people for an English speaking audience. I'm not sure how racist it was either. I think we could chalk the cruel executions up to a military structure ruled by a few homocidal future leaders. Maybe they're indicating that in the future people are raised with nationalistic furvor. I don't think we have any proof that the Alliance wasn't murdering just as hard as the Coalition. Something had to piss them off, right?
 
yea, imo, the negative side to doom3 was that it wasn't really scary, except for a few short episodes(beginning of delta labs, for example) avp, both of them, playing humans, was scary as hell.
fear...the end is VERY scary, if you haven't played that far, i won't spoil it. apart from the end, it's challeging and somewhat unsettling but not all too scary(unless you want to say the ai is scary)

i did like starlancer for being old school. no business simulation with a bit of space flight, like X, but just like wing commander and freespace used to be. "here's your plane, you guns and your missiles. now go and get them!" it focused on the fighting, and not the grabbing enough money to eventually be able to fight. the evil space soviets were certainly not the best possible secanrio, i admit.

one thing i disliked about freelancer, at the end of the intro it said"we have grown, we have prospered, but we will never forget..." i always took this as a hint that there would be some kind of contact with the coalition, but nothing ever came of it

Q4- well the story was kind of low flowing, not much tension building there. the only notable exception, a great and surprising climax, was the assimilation. but the marketing dept made the grave mistake of giving that one away long before the game came out, making the rest of the story look even more dull. also, we had the "torp chasing mission" debate further up. what about the "door opening mission"?
 
Mekt-Hakkikt said:
While I agree that the story has extremely bad clichés you should be fair: It's not the "good, good Americans" versus the "bad, bad Russians" it's more like "the good Western civilization" versus the "Evil Eastern countries".
Wow, so Japan is a part of the Western civilisation now? :p

BarFly said:
It is f....g racists game. The bad, bad Russians & the good good Americans.
I personally find it offensive when people who have never even been on the other side of the Iron Curtain whine about how racist it is to do a game with Russians as the bad guys. It would be racist to show them as anything but bad guys.
 
BarFly said:
It is f....g racists game. The bad, bad Russians & the good good Americans. I can't tell you how I hate this kind of plot. I also can't see any more of this 'All American Heros'.

I don't see how that constitutes racism at all. Political slander, perhaps - maybe even some badly plotted "chest beating" but this has been going on since the beginning of the Cold War, before either of us were born, I'm assuming.

Get use to it.
 
Mekt-Hakkikt said:
Regarding your complaint about you being sick of "All American heroes" - nobody forces you to endure them if you dont' want to. I certainly feel as you sometimes, especially when historic events are twisted but: you can't really blame (US)American producers or game developers (etc) of making Americans their heroes - who else should they choose? Why should they make movies/games in which someone else is the main good character?

Erin Roberts is British
 
The plot is not racist. It's a freaking war. Russians are fighting for Russia, how is that any kind of surprise?
 
Quarto said:
Wow, so Japan is a part of the Western civilisation now? :p

Nitpicker! :) (Though I guess some Japanese wouldn't consider it nitpicking...)


TopGun said:
Erin Roberts is British

Regardless of whether he's now actually American or British, what was your point?

I guess you somehow misunderstood that my second paragraph was generally spoken and not "Of course Starlancer has All-American-Heroes because it was made by an American" which would also contradict my first paragraph where I stated that Starlancer is not about All-American-Heroes.
 
Quarto said:
I personally find it offensive when people who have never even been on the other side of the Iron Curtain whine about how racist it is to do a game with Russians as the bad guys. It would be racist to show them as anything but bad guys.

Dude, what the hell? You're saying if someone is born in Russia they are bad? That's pretty messed up.
 
Bearcat said:
Dude, what the hell? You're saying if someone is born in Russia they are bad? That's pretty messed up.

....and not an ubelievable stretch, either. Giant evil russian empire? No way anyone would ever buy that.

Ever.
 
Bearcat said:
Dude, what the hell? You're saying if someone is born in Russia they are bad? That's pretty messed up.
I'm not saying that, in the same way that anybody complaining about the evil North Korean regime isn't saying North Koreans are all evil. It's just a way of phrasing things in such discussions - it's pretty much standard procedure to replace the words "Russian government" with the more generic "Russians". The same thing applies to the Americans, British, and the rest of the world.

...In any case, my point is that people these days complain about how racist (...or whatever) it is to portray the Russians as evil, but they themselves seem oblivious to how racist it would be to portray the Russians as good guys. They killed 100+ million people... if you suggest they're good guys, you're also suggesting all their victims *deserved* to die.

Note that this doesn't necessarily apply to present-day Russia (though one certainly could argue that it should, given how little Russia has actually changed) but rather to Soviet Russia, which of course is what you were supposed to be fighting in StarLancer, even if it wasn't called that.
 
Hello,

Quarto said:
Wow, so Japan is a part of the Western civilisation now? :p


I personally find it offensive when people who have never even been on the other side of the Iron Curtain whine about how racist it is to do a game with Russians as the bad guys. It would be racist to show them as anything but bad guys.

I do have Hungarian Roots and about 20 Cousins (My Grandparents, 2 Uncles and 2 Aunts were also living there) are still living there. And the first time I was in Hungary, was 1963! The last time was last August for a wedding of my Cousins son. I still have and had all the years good connections to them with lots of talking about the living here and there. When I was a Teen I went to Hungary, because this was the place you met them all: Polish, Czech, and very important the people of the former DDR (GDR). For americans, that Germany was there's :)
So don't tell me that I don't know what was going on over there. I got a pretty clean look behind the curtain.
And NO! Russians are not the Bad ones. Hey what do you think when people in Germany or France say about the Polish: " They are all, but honest"
This is stupid, we all know!

@Mekt-Hakkikt
okay lets say - the poltical correctness is missing. And besides, the Cold War is over for quite a while.
For lots of Europeans it is always astonishing how the Americans (Correct: US- Citizens) are thinking they would lead us also in Future :).
But this would turn out into a political discussion, we do NOT do here.
I just wrote what I didn't like at this game.
And believe me, also German Game Magazines did not like this plot.
OT:
When have you been at Stuttgart the last time?
 
BarFly said:
Hello,


And NO! Russians are not the Bad ones. Hey what do you think when people in Germany or France say about the Polish: " They are all, but honest"
This is stupid, we all know!

Make the argument for Russia as the good guy in the last hundred years, I fucking dare you.

@Mekt-Hakkikt
okay lets say - the poltical correctness is missing. And besides, the Cold War is over for quite a while.
For lots of Europeans it is always astonishing how the Americans (Correct: US- Citizens) are thinking they would lead us also in Future :).
But this would turn out into a political discussion, we do NOT do here.

Sure we do, we do political discussion all the time.
It's always astonishing to americans how europeans think that it's weird for the last super power to assume we're in charge. :)

In all seriousness though, the cold war being over doesn't mean that the things the soviets did are magically OK. Thats like saying that because we beat the germans, we can't be upset with what the nazis did.
 
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