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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.
#Great space simulator games upgrade#
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.