Thread by @gravislizard

In re my tweets a while back about the X-Wing series: not only were all star wars flight combat sims made by one company in the space of a few years, space combat sims in general were never a popular game genre at all, even beyond Star Wars

i think about this sort of thing a lot. there's genres like the first person shooter or 2d platformer where if I asked you to start listing games, even as a fairly casual player you'd probably keep going until I asked you to stop - you'd even have to summarize franchises

But then there's a couple where you'd *think* there were a lot of entries (or, at least, a lot in a particular period) but if you try to name them you come up with four or five, tops, and research doesn't really expose much more.

Particularly as regards the IBM PC - how many platform games, for instance, came out for the PC? They were virtually impossible to make prior to 1990, and in my perspective there's maybe... a dozen decent ones, and then shovelware, basement shareware projects and amiga ports.

"decent" is bearing a lot of weight here - I remember Jazz Jackrabbit with intense fondness but it was not a very good platform game if you ask me. Super Mario Bros. is a comparative masterpiece in terms of level design and gameplay physics.

Footnote/tangent: Most platform games for the PC were nauseatingly nonlinear, to the extent that every time I played Commander Keen I found it very unsatisfying because most levels could be skipped in almost their entirety, and the game didn't explain why.

In Commander Keen 4, the first couple levels can be literally jumped over. You just begin pogoing and move forward, and if you take none of the proffered paths downward, you reach the exit in less than fifteen seconds with no enemy encounters.

Duke Nukem, Secret Agent Man, Hocus Pocus - all of these games required you to spend eons and eons wandering back and forth in a maze trying to figure out what was expected of you.

Exits are strewn throughout levels - sometimes in the middle, sometimes on the left or right. Keen 4 even has some right to left levels. They just blatantly reject any option for making your goals clear.

Super Mario Bros. 3 opened up the levels for vertical movement as well as backtracking, but at most times the path forward was still clear. I, personally, just found it easier to remember where I'd been and not been.

I'd have to do some side by side comparisons (i've been kind of meaning to do this for eons) but I believe that PC platformers typically have a much smaller FOV, so you can't really see as much level context.

A way I've always described it, although this isn't quite fair, is that the level design in the average NES game has a certain feeling of purpose and humanity to it that PC platformers rarely achieved.

I don't know why this is, I can't quantify it. I have no strong affinity to the NES - I played more PC games than Nintendo growing up, even within the platform genre, and I actually didn't really like the Mario games as a kid. The PC games just felt empty and inhuman.

Returning to my original topic - my thesis is that the space combat sim is a recurrent flash in the pan. Every 8-10 years there's a significant title or two, but by and large it's not a major genre. Franchises Georg threw things off with a couple series that released yearly.

X-Wing had five or six titles, Wing Commander had five or six, but if you look at the number of unique franchises it's pitiful compared to virtually anything else.

And what's interesting about this to me is that if you'd asked me - or if I'd asked a lot of you - how often games came out in this genre, before I put this much thought into it, I would have said at least every couple years.

I still can't get over how bad the *flight sim* genre is as far as this goes. Unless I'm missing something, the last serious flight sim that was released was Flight Simulator X in 2006.

X-Plane doesn't really count, I think, since there's virtually no difference between, like, the 2002 version and the 2020 version.

Lockheed Martin Prepar3d is just a modified FSX. FS2020 was basically the first significant step forward in flight sims in 14 years, as far as I can tell. There's just been... nothing.