Twelve years ago I picked this game off a shelf in Office Depot because, hey, it looked kinda cool and a bunch of us at college had been having a blast with running Descent LAN parties. Twelve years. Wow. In game years that's more like two hundred, and I've gone through hundreds of games since then - picked them up, played them for awhile and either lost interest or beat them and forgot them. Freespace, though, is different. I keep coming back to it, time after time, year after year; I've long since forgotten how many times I've won the game, but I still keep a copy because I keep coming back. Good games come and go, great games stick around for awhile, but it takes a masterpiece to survive more than a decade and still be just as fun as it ever was. There are a lot of reasons for that. The gameplay is balanced, intuitive, and polished, easily configurable for keyboard, keyboard & mouse, or joystick (and you can use a utility like Xpadder to extend it even more to use an XBOX360 controller). It ramps the difficulty up almost without you realizing it, offering more ships and more weapons the deeper into the story you get. The graphics hold their own even in the original unmodded game, but if you want to make it really pretty (and I mean, REALLY pretty) then get the Freespace SCP installed (http://scp.indiegames.us/). But graphics and gameplay are only a part of it - great graphics are the norm today, and plenty of games have decent gameplay - it doesn't mean they'll still be around after a decade plus change. What pulls it together and makes a great game into a masterpiece is the story of FS2, and how perfectly the game allows you to experience that story through great graphics and killer gameplay. It engages you, pulls you in and takes you along for the ride. Every mission drives the story, every dogfight feels like it's important. It lets you start to feel like you're the big man on deck, and then delivers a punch that makes you sit back in awe as huge ships, hundreds of times your size, suddenly appear and remind you how big this war really is. The next minute you're put in a situation that shows how one soldier, one pilot, can turn the tide. Get this game. GOG has it for less than lunch at McDonalds, and the Freespace SCP is completely free. Then compare it to one of the recent games that ran you 49.99, and you'll see why this still sets the standard after all these years.
