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Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1979

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 :(

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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.

I pulled my old joystick out I'd kept for the last ten years, only to realise my PC doesn't have a serial port. Warning!

(I've no idea how long I haven't had a serial port. Which makes it worse.)

There is MechWarrior online in a freemium open beta and another mecha but more FPSy game in development I can't recall right now.

Hawken. It's fun. :) Low complexity, but seems to reward skill.

Low market genres like that could be addressed by open source, perhaps? Or a Kickstarter?

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.

[1] http://scp.indiegames.us/

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