#starlancer

the games themselves are fine they're very good space shooters and Freelancer is an excellent space trucker simulator (yes that's its own genre) with very good combat exploration and a living universe...

the "funny" thing about them is the geopolitical setup, in Starlancer you fight all across the solar system in a war for the Alliance which is made of the USA, the EU, Japan and Latin America it's unclear (more on that later)... So basically Space NATO against the Coalition that is made of China, Russia, and the "Tigris Confederation" or the "Saracens" it's so hkdjfjkssdjsdhj it's U-S-A AND ITS LITTLE BUDDIES AGAINST THE AXIS OF EVIL COMMIE-MUSLISMS (the game was released in 2000 btw), your friendly squad is mostly composed of Usamericans, British, Japanese and a few Latinos (again, it's unclear) and all the enemies have stupid accents and moustache twirling monologues it's so racist it comes all the way down to funny because how balant it is seriously even my cousin at 12 or 13 noticed... like you remember that Top Gun parody Hot Shots where all the Arab pilots have names like Falafel? It's exactly like that but taken seriously

NOW the sequel Freelancer is an amazing game where you can explore star systems and stuff, the story is good there's a lot of worldbuilding, but the backstory is as follows: some Aliens destroyed the Solar System (I acutally believe it was retconned from the Coalition destroying the Solar System because that would be too racist even for them), and the Alliance sent colony ships to escape (the rest of the world gets fucked I guess) which made new nations across the stars but they're basically the same nations of the Alliance now even more stereotyped, so you start in Space USA with planets such as New Manhattan, New Alaska, etc. and there's also Space England with a Space London which is rainy, Space Japan, Space Germany which has lots of space factory planets and starts wars at random, you get the idea

but the fifth lost colony ship, which was called the Hispania (AJHGHJSDGJHDFS MUERE DE CRINGE ODIO ODIO ODIO) apparently was supposed to represent both Spain and Latin America (because Hispanics I guess) apparently was destroyed or sabotaged because the captain was bad or something.

And what happened to the survivors of the Latin American themed ship?

they became drug dealers and bandits.

(you can't interact with them in game btw)

yeah.

On the back of our Freelancer coverage here are a few pictures from the 2000 Sega Dreamcast release of Digital Anvil’s prequel game:

Starlancer

One of the few Dreamcast titles to support widescreen and the Dreamcast port was by Warthog Games..

‘StarLancer’

[DC] [USA] [MAGAZINE, SPREAD] [2000]

Official Dreamcast Magazine (US), September-October 2000 (#7)