Imaginary games that you plan on getting (in your mind) this year

[A Black Falcon]

You're missing my point, as usual. Am I going to have to go on for another ten pages before you begin to understand what I'm saying (like with the text-based game debate)???

The dogfighting in the X-Wing series is very dull. It's slow, boring, and the enemy AI is crap. The only thing making it interesting is the power managment. X-Wing is most definitely not the dogfighter's game.

I'm not missing your point, its just totally wrong. X-Wing dogfighting isn't dull! Not even close! Freelancer's dogfighting bored me, so did Wing Commander and Starlancer... but X-Wing? Absolutely not. I love it... 'dull' it most certainly isn't. Its not that slow -- I'd say the pace is just right. Boring? Not for me, that's for sure... and the enemy AI isn't the best, but its good enough... they dogfight pretty well, I'd say. I certainly have always had a lot of fun dogfighting in those games.

Great rebuttal!

So remind me again, how many open-ended space sims have you played for more than a few minutes??

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Minuites? I played Freelancer for a couple of hours... enough to see what the combat was like, certainly.

You're absolutely insane. The combat in Wing Commander is just the combat of X-Wing but without the power management. The combat in Freelancer is like no other space/flight combat game ever made.

Uhh... different from other space combat games? Maybe... but its not TOTALLY new. As I said, I'd say that its got a combat that takes Wing Commander, adds some Descent, and changes it a bit... I know you think it is nothing like Descent, but the connection seems pretty clear to me...

Oh, and Wing Commander isn't X-Wing without power management. The ships contol quite differently in Wing Commander! And the whole style of the missions is so different... the ships aren't just X-Wings with no power management. And the missions... well their whole style is very different from the X-Wing mission style. (ie the way they are laid out, how often and where you fight, etc...) I don't see how you can just simplify the differences between those series to one thing... it makes no sense!

Oh, and as it went on the Wing Commander controls got somewhat more complex, but the missions stay simple in comparison to X-Wing, I'd say.