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I am desperately seeking a space shooter game that I played when I was young (between 1990 and 2000). The game takes place in space. You have some kind of fighter that you control with the mouse. You navigate in space, fight some enemies or asteroids, retrieve weapons (dual red laser/quadruple green laser, etc.), and change levels by entering some kind of "stargate" by entering the vortex.

Can someone help me retrieve this game?

galacticninja
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Omega
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    There's not much to go on here. Is there anything more you can think of? Anything about the graphics: the shape of the ship, the colour scheme, the style of graphics? Was there any music or sound effects? What system were you playing it on - Amiga, MS-DOS, Apple Mac, ...? Did the levels scroll past left to right, or bottom to top, or just navigate around a single screen? – IMSoP Jul 23 '23 at 10:35
  • Just navigate around a single screen, and I think I was playing it on a windows 2000 or xp, but to me looks like an old game because I had it on cardboard cd packaging as if it were an old game repackaged and resold. on the jacket they were a yellow fighter firing laser i guess – Omega Jul 23 '23 at 13:58
  • If you have a screen shot, you could try to ask on retrocomputing.SE – shoover Jul 23 '23 at 15:51
  • Im gonna search in my garage if i can find back the game, but i dont have much hope to find it – Omega Jul 23 '23 at 20:33
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    Was it 3d or 2d? Something like this old one Xenon 2 ? – Yaroslav Kornachevskyi Jul 24 '23 at 14:42
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    The dual/quad laser mention makes me think of Descent. – Dosco Jones Jul 24 '23 at 16:41
  • Some games you might want to check out, Wing Commander series, Fury3 1995 and Hellbender 1996, Forsaken 1998. – DafyddNZ Jul 25 '23 at 03:59
  • I was going to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaga, since that was back in the Ms. Pacman era and would be an older game people would play on Windows. However, I'm not sure if you went through a portal at any level. Looking on Youtube, you just start the next level, but I can't be sure. – HyperNym Jul 25 '23 at 18:42
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  • The Arqade SE forbids video game identification with no media because it is just a complete crapshoot. – Nelson Aug 23 '23 at 02:03

5 Answers5

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This sounds like Freelancer. You control a space ship with primarily mouse controls, which I recall being novel at the time. The game came out in 2003, and you can fight enemies and collect things dropped by the enemies. There are also jump gates that resemble stargates:

Jump Gate https://freelancer.fandom.com/wiki/Jump_Gate

Here's a playthrough: Playthrough

Jontia
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EmpytButtons
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    Mouse control being novel in 2003? Hell, I was playing spacecraft video games using mousing as the primary control a decade before that with Frontier Elite 2…. And I fondly remember Descent and lots of other space based games using the same controls. – Moo Aug 24 '23 at 04:29
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    I should have been more clear, I meant that being primarily designed to use mouse controls was novel. I believe all those other games were designed with a joystick in mind, and the mouse controls were just emulating a joystick. Here's someone trying to recreate the controls in unity where they discuss the differences a bit: https://github.com/brihernandez/FreelancerFlightExample – EmpytButtons Aug 25 '23 at 00:00
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Reminded me of Descent.

You control a space ship through an asteroid, and when you enter a new level, there is some kind of Vortex that disappears, see second 6 - 7 from the video.

Dosco Jones
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Shade
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6

It's possible that the game is Descent 2. The dual/quad laser mention still applies, but in this sequel to Descent the ship is given a prototype jump drive. The jump effect may be the referenced "stargate".

Video clip here.

Dosco Jones
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3

One possible match is Tachyon: The Fringe. I lack the wherewithal to provide screenshots at this time, but I will explain the rationale:

  • "between 1990 and 2000" -- Released in early 2000, right at the edge of your time frame.

  • "The game takes place in space." -- Yes. This is a space combat game, with light inventory management and story bits interspersed between combat missions. The player spends the vast majority of their active game time flying around in space.

  • "You have some kind of fighter that you control with the mouse." -- Yes, definitely. The game supported various control types, including joystick and mouse/keyboard. The game features 8 controllable space fighters (essentially, one of each type: light, medium, heavy, bomber), split evenly between the game's two factions.

  • "You navigate in space" -- Check. There's a lot of flying between starbases, asteroids, waypoints, gates, etc.

  • "fight some enemies or asteroids" -- Check. The player fights plenty of enemies during any given mission. Asteroids can be destroyed for fun and/or resources/loot, depending on the mission. The multiplayer game features a "Base Wars" mode devoted entirely to harvesting resources from asteroids in order to climb the tech tree, with the ultimate goal of destroying the opponent's base. Many, many asteroids get destroyed in this mode.

  • "retrieve weapons (dual red laser/quadruple green laser, etc.)" -- This is not a perfect match, but is at least a partial match. The "red laser/green laser" mention in particular strongly reminded me of the game's two factions, who have (essentially) color-coded lasers. The GalSpan faction has primarily green(ish) lasers, and the Bora faction has primarily red(ish) lasers. The heavier ship types can equip greater numbers of weapons, and the most powerful ships were able to mount 4+ laser weapons. The player spends a lot of time in early ships with only 1-2 lasers available, and getting to the "quad laser" ship certainly felt like a massive, memorable upgrade!

  • "and change levels by entering some kind of "stargate" by entering the vortex." -- Big match. The plot of the game centers largely around control of the gates connecting various systems, as a means of controlling independence, commerce, resources, etc. Almost every single mission requires the player to enter gates -- which have a big swirling Stargate-like central vortex while active -- multiple times.

  • "I had it on cardboard cd packaging as if it were an old game repackaged and resold. on the jacket they were a yellow fighter firing laser i guess" -- I cannot speak to the packaging itself, but this is a reasonable description of the game's box art. A blue/white GalSpan fighter is being chased by a brown/yellow Bora fighter, which is firing green lasers at their target.

Other possible matches include Descent: Freespace, and partially the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series. I won't go bullet-by-bullet, except to say that essentially all these same boxes get ticked in essentially the same fashion: released prior to 2000, space combat games, mouse controls, stuff gets shot, red and green lasers, and so forth.

The weakest part of this being a Descent: Freespace match (or X-wing, or Tie Fighter) remains that weapons are not collected mid-mission. One stronger item is that Descent: Freespace was repackaged in jewel-case-only format at least once by around 2000, because I acquired it that way first before acquiring the full-box version. Likewise, both X-Wing and Tie Fighter appeared, to the best of my knowledge, in paper-sleeve versions various software compilation packs (in various shades of "full game" and "demo" versions).

However, while Descent: Freespace ends missions by warping the player's ship out via a stargate-wormhole-like effect, this does not strictly match X-Wing or Tie Fighter.

TheMaskedBowler
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2

This sounds like a partial memory of Homeworld, the original was released in 1999 with the sequel in 2003.

Overall this is not a fighter game, it is a Real-Time Strategy game, but you can zoom right in on a fighter and have it feel a little bit like a shooter which may fog the memory.

In Homeworld you collect resources from asteroids, build new fighters and larger ships and warp out at the end of every level.

Fighter

Jontia
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