Project Starfighter

Project: Starfighter is a libre software Shoot'Em Up game. It follows a young pilot named Chris Bainfield and his friend Sid Wilson in their efforts to free the galaxy from enslavement by a weapons corporation called WEAPCO.

The last version of the game released by the original developer was version 1.1, but since then, further development of the game has been undertaken by various other people, first here and then here.^[1] These further developments replace the original graphics, sounds, and music used, since the originals are not legally distributable. As of 2019, the latest such version of Project: Starfighter is 2.0.

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Tropes used in Project Starfighter include:

• AI Roulette: All AI ships work this way. Some comments in the source code even lampshaded this in the past.
• Evil, Inc.: The intergalactic weapons corporation, WEAPCO.
• Fission Mailed: One mission is ostensibly to capture a WEAPCO transport. There's no way to capture it. Sid Wilson shoots ion beams at it uselessly throughout the mission, and you win the mission when the transport escapes; "PRIMARY OBJECTIVE FAILED" is displayed, and in the next mission you chase after and destroy it.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: The Laser weapon the Firefly is able to equip moves at the same speed as plasma bullets and comes out in short segments. In practice it's more or less like a rapid-fire plasma gun.
• Hyperspeed Escape: Used by several enemies and some friendly ships. The player can do this as well, but only once all primary objectives are completed, and at the cost of forfeiting the shield bonus.
• Infinity+1 Sword: The Supercharge is a rare powerup that gives you a 5-way spread, powerful, rapid-fire main weapon that can take out most enemies with ease. In Classic and Easy difficulties this is equivalent to a fully-upgraded and fully powered up plasma gun, but in harder difficulties this is the only way to make your main weapon this powerful and it goes away after the mission is over.
• Ironic Echo: When Chris catches up to a fleeing Kline at the end of the game, he repeats Kline's words from their first encounter.
• Lost Forever: The regular missile weapon was this prior to version 1.3 as well as in Classic difficulty; it isn't available at the shop, and you didn't get it back when you sold your secondary weapon. Fairly minor, since the micro missiles are basically better in every way, but it's somewhat useful in the cargo collection mission and the cargo ship capture mission where you need to be careful not to destroy the wrong things.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of the missions is to help some local rebels blow up a WEAPCO ore mining craft. Later on, it turns out that this caused an ore shortage, and you have to make up for this by mining some ore yourself.
• Nonstandard Game Over: Happens any time you fail to complete a primary objective (with one exception). Usually accompanied by a What the Hell, Hero? moment.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In the second system, you encounter slave ships. One of the objectives in the final mission of this system is to save all slaves in the area, but it is not required; you can allow the slave ships to escape, or you can leave them to die when their escape pods are jettisoned.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Sid does this in all of the missions where you're supposed to protect something, and it gets destroyed. Phoebe and Ursula also sometimes do this if you attack them.

1. ↑ The second one was originally at http://starfighter.nongnu.org, but has since then moved.