Space-sims

[bus]

I've played X2 and it was OK, the fact that you could build your own factories and hire trade ships + figters was cool, but it is really a very short game in the sense that once you earn a decent amount of money you don't have anything to do.

Battlecruiser + Universal Combat - I haven't actually played those two (installed Battlecruiser 3K a long time ago but couldn't figure how to play the damn game) but I heard a lot of bad stuff about them, especially that they are hard to get hang of and also very buggy.

Freespace 2 is probably the best fighter space sim I've ever seen. You don't have the trading part in the game but the fighting part rocks! The new community-improved open source version has some pretty cool graphics (my computer is some 3-4 years old so it won't handle most of the eye-candy but the bits I saw were pretty damn cool). It seems to be reasonably realistic, the cap ships are huge (not like in Freelancer) and if you get hit by one of the cap ship beams, you are dead meat. You can damage ship subsystems so you could for example take out your enemy's engines and he won't be able to move anymore, or you can destroy individual turrets on battleships, and so on. Oh, and the singleplayer campaign is very nice.

(Yeah, I really like that game.:))

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LPI-John.Baxter (EP-ID-004)