Part 1: Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War (henceforth referred to as D:FS-TGW Freespace) was the first game developed by Volition Inc. (Red Faction, Saints Row), in 1998. Volition was one of two offshoots of Parallax Software, who made Descent 1 and 2 (the other being Outrage Entertainment, who made Descent 3).

Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War (henceforth referred to as D:FS-TGW Freespace) was the first game developed by Volition Inc. (Red Faction, Saints Row), in 1998. Volition was one of two offshoots of Parallax Software, who made Descent 1 and 2 (the other being Outrage Entertainment, who made Descent 3).
Despite its label as part of the Descent series, it bears little resemblance to the previous games. Its gameplay is that of a space sim, rather than a FPS, and there is no real story connection.

Each update will be brought to you in a two-course meal. First up will be a VLP of the briefing and level. This will use subtitled commentary, and not a lot of it. The game starts off slow, but the story really carries the game without my help once it gets going. So I won't be going for a lot of humor there, mostly just explaining things.
If you don't want to wait for the voiceover to read you the whole briefing, go ahead and skip ahead a bit after reading each screen. I think the mood is still better set that way than doing them in screenshots.

For the second course, there will be a screenshot section, in which I will introduce some aspect of the game. There is a ton of supplementary data in the game's tech database about every ship, every weapon, and so on. In this section, I'll share some of those, and discuss them.

With all that out of the way, let me just say bluntly that I could not more highly recommend the Freespace games, and I'm not just saying that because I'm doing the LPing. They are masterfully put together, from the music and voice acting to the story and gameplay. The game does start out at a snail's pace, but I promise it gets a lot more interesting if you stick with it.
If you want to play along, GOG.com's got it for $6. It even comes with the expansion that I've never tried.

Lastly, a note for those of you wondering about FSO, the open-source revamp of Freespace 2. It is a pretty amazing improvement to the game, and there is a port of the FS1 campaign using it. However, for this LP, I am sticking to the classic version of the game. While FSO looks better, it also looks and plays like FS2. I'd rather stick to the original experience for this game, and save FSO for the LP of the sequel.

Viddler links are inside pictures, and go to Polsy's player page. It's a lot gentler on the CPU than Viddler's official player, so give it a try even if you normally avoid Viddler. Of course, downloading the original file is still the best quality. Backups provided on Dailymotion.