In my early years, I played the epic game Elite on my PC. I spent many months trading and fighting in space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on. The original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC edition I played had a 64 KB executable. I am still impressed today that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so small.
I have known about the free software game Oolite inspired by Elite for a while, but did not really have time to test it properly until a few days ago. It was great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were still valid. But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had to retrain to be able to dock on a space station. And I am still not able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)
When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different planets to be able to decide where to trade what. This time I had the advantages of the Elite wiki, where information about each planet is easily available with common price ranges and suggested trading routes. This improved my ability to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of useful equipent in a few days. I believe I originally played for months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it after less then a week.
If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in space, you should try out Oolite. It is available for Linux, MacOSX and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.
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