Created to avoid usurping the
loadouts thread with chat about how wonderful/terrible Egosoft is.
So, X.
Pretty much my go-to replacement for elite since the early 00's.
I first picked up a copy of
Beyond the Frontier in the winter of '99 after being hooked by it's demo on a cover disc. And I subsequently lost months of my life to this thing just running around building stuff as that was a pretty novel and new feature for this kind of game, and one that I really happened to like.
Sadly, BtF has not aged well. It still looks mostly okay if a little plain, but it is let down by the less than stellar AI that really liked ramming, and the means of controlling your factories being awkward as hell. (And one factory not being able to hire transporters so you had to stock it yourself or it would never work.)
Then less than a year later came X-Tension, a sort of add-on-come-sequel to BtF using the same engine (with a few tweaks) and adding what would become a staple of the X games in the future: A whole mess of ships you can 'acquire' and fly yourself, AND the ability to remotely monitor/control distant things.
I never owned XT due to it being absurdly rare, but I did know someone who did...
At the end of 2004 I got
X2: The Threat, and even though my PC at the time could barely run it and being a Win98a that machine couldn't support the DirectX version needed to display most of the textures, I still loved it and played it to death.
X
2 introduced scripting which gave modders what amounted to an enormous toolbox, albeit with no real supporting documentation. (That came later.)
Also: Player capital ships were now a thing.
The weird thing with X
2 is that even though it will run flawlessly on modern systems, it's installer will not. So you have to manually install it by copying the contents of the discs to a location yourself.
And modern keyboards make fighting a bit more difficult as they have introduced two extra keys between <right-ctrl> and <alt-gr> meaning the strafe drive is a bit more awkward to use.
So yeah, X
2 is a game I really like and have spent a ton of time on. And if anyone wants to
argue debate about what is the best ship and why it is the Split Iguana, have at it.
If anyone wants to add some stuff about X
3 and beyond that would be cool. I never got any of those, not even the ones that don't exist....
