One of my GOAT moments as a videogaming youngster is the final mission of Psygnosis cyberpunk flight sim G-Police. (It came out in 1997, and as such, I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has passed, but if you still intend to play, stop reading now.) The mission completes the long arc of foreshadowing begun by the intro’s mention that capital-class spacecraft have been outlawed, following a ruinous war. It turns out that one particular evil corpo has been sneakily building one of these megaships – not only that, but you get to fly inside it, cannons ablazing. It was while doing so that teenage me realised the true exceptionality of the Video Game Artform. You can’t fly inside capital ships in, like, symbolist poems or baroque symphonies, can you? You can’t fly in poems or symphonies at all, unless you do so metaphorically – “metaphor” being a kind of poor man’s graphics card.
The technology of flight simming has advanced mightily since G-Police’s day. For instance: in Everspace 2‘s just-announced Titans DLC, you get to fly inside not just regular old spaceships, but massive space kaiju with procedurally generated digestive systems. Here’s the trailer.
