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                               		 Games That WIll Change Gaming
 

Now That's Fancy

Freelancer's sense of grandeur is reinforced the moment you fly through the massive metallic accelerator that boosts you out of planetary space into an outer space so colorful and dramatic, it looks like it was photographed by the Hubble telescope.

Digital Anvil's version of space incorporates a sense of scale and attention to detail that will most likely set a new standard for virtual worlds. At one point, we flew around and through an enormous research station that seemed about 100 times the size of our ship. We also flew through a gorgeous, purplish-gassy, lightening-strewn nebula that created a particularly eerie effect. And in a scene that illustrated the amount of detail being put into the game, we flew past a fully operational ore-mining unit. As we flew up close, we could see the ship doing its ore-crunching - the large pincer hands breaking off chunks of ore, which were then sucked into the craw of the ship.

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Eventually your lovely little sight-seeing excursion is going to get interrupted by space pirates or a rival house. Then you'll see another part of Freelancer, one that takes a sharp turn from normal space combat. Roberts and company are throwing out the joystick as a controller and focusing on making the game playable with a unique mouse-and-keyboard interface. This fits in squarely with the Freelancer design team's mission of focusing on the purely fun parts of space combat, which means avoiding the constant 180-degree turning battles so common in space sims, where you line up a bogey, pass it after narrowly avoiding a head-on collision, and repeat.

Freelancer completely avoids this by placing the fundamental ship maneuvering and navigation under the control of your Neuronet. You move your mouse around to target and fire on enemy ships, select your weapons, and fine-tune your position and velocity. Holding down the Shift key allows you to freelook with your mouse and fire on anything you see. Holding down the Control key allows you to take over the controls and maneuver your ship in any direction.

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The wildcard in all this is the Neuronet - part interface manager, part onboard computer, and part pilot. It serves as your navigational aid, letting you plot coordinates for travel and check on your cargo. More crucially, it performs critical maneuvers during combat and can be upgraded with a variety of increasingly effective tactics to make it more combat-ready.

Space fights consist of you blasting away with your mouse and ordering your ship into various maneuvers via the Neuronet. Want to get on a bogey's tail and blast him into dust? Select the Trail command, which will order your ship to attempt to get on the bogey's six. Getting pounded? Order your ship to Evade, and, depending on the quality of your Neuronet, you will alleviate the pain.

Most interesting about this new take on ship-to-ship combat is the almost Diablo-style element of play Freelancer sets up. As you gain more money, prestige, and power, you'll be able to power up your Neuronet with new or upgraded maneuvers or buy entirely new Neuronets that are more advanced. Maybe you'll even discover amazingly sophisticated upgrades left behind by the ancient space-faring race who inhabited the area before you. You'll also be able to trade these maneuvers with your friends in the multiplayer game.

Multiplay