So I know I'm 'a little late to the party' (as the phrase goes) but playing through Freespace 2 and it is absolutely amazing. It's easily given me many more hours of fun than most of the more recent games I own. Overall it's just an extremely well made game. So I thought I'd get a 'Freespace Appreciation thread' going! Definitely on my favourite 5 games list!

Yeah, I agree. I played through Freespace 1 first and liked it a lot, so I expected 2 to be good as well. But those epic battles with ginormous capital ships and freaking awesome ship-to-ship beam weapons made this game really spectacular. I played it right after I watched the Babylon 5 series, and those beams reminded me of those in B5. You can tell I liked the beams can't you? BEAMS!

Hey, if you like freespace and like babylon 5 then you will LOVE this:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=56246.0
hip63

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try.
I played "Babylon 5: I've Found Her", a community created game, back when it was new (2004 or '05 I think). It was pretty cool, but it was crazy difficult to get used to how the ships behaved. The game is built on a new game engine and has realistic "newtonian" physics, something I had never tried before. From what I've gathered, a few other such games exist, but they are pretty rare. (In most space shooters the ships behave like airplanes, which is of course completely wrong but much easier to learn)
Back then the game was too short to give me a chance to learn it properly, but it has been updated since. Maybe I should give it a new look some day.