GameSpot's ongoing "Greatest Games of All Time" feature has finally visited the space sim genre. They mention Freespace 2, Freelancer, X2, X-Wing and Wing Commander as highlights of the decade when space sims ruled supreme. Some of our readers might wonder about GameSpot's emphasis on Freespace in this article, and there's already been some backlash by Wing Commander fans at other message boards where this has been posted.
Sci-fi flight sim games are deader than a doornail, at least on the PC. Although there are still blips on the proverbial radar, such as X2: The Threat and Freelancer, it seems that the sun has set on one of the premier gaming genres of the 1990s, a decade that brought us a number of fantastic entries into the Wing Commander and X-wing series...
It's rather unfortunate that sci-fi flight sims have become so rare over the past half decade. The general- audience flight sim genre as a whole has become a relatively niche category that most major publishers avoid, save for Microsoft and its Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator series. Space sims, however, have almost disappeared completely, with the titles that are being released, such as X2: The Threat and Freelancer, doing rather poorly at retail. Freelancer has a rather large asterisk by its name, anyway, due to the fact that it was based around a mouse-and-keyboard interface and didn't even include support for joysticks. While the controls actually worked out well, nothing can really compare with the feel of a good force feedback joystick kicking in your hands while you gun down enemy ships.
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