[shasarak]

Ah, I remember Elite. I had the original BBC Model B version on floppy disc, complete with no less than two missions. Hunting down the stolen Constrictor was a blast. ("Son of a bitch ship shot me up at Ausar. My lasers didn't even scratch the whoreson beetle headflap-ear'd knave.")

Did anyone else abuse the "bitstick toggle" to get the ship down to zero forward velocity, then hang outside a space station shooting vipers for about half an hour?

I also played the Acorn Archimedes version of the game, which I suspect was a little less popular, owing to the comparative scarcity of Archimedes hardware. It was (I think) the first version of Elite to use solidly-coloured polygons rather than just lines (although even the BBC version had hidden line removal, which was pretty cool in those days). The Arch version actually had rock hermits in it (although not dredgers or generation ships, as I recall), and asteroid mining that worked, plus quite a number of interesting missions. It was also sophisticated enough to support other ships shooting at each other rather than only at you; you could follow a squadron of vipers flying in formation and after a while they would detect a pirate and then all peel off to engage or destroy it. Sometimes they would even come and rescue you from pirate attack.

I don't know what happened to the whole space trading genre. The last decent space trader that I can recall was Privateer 2: The Darkening (with high budget interactive movie sequences featuring quite well known actors - Clive Owen, Christopher Walken, David Warner, and many others). X: Beyond The Frontier I never got into, and Freelancer was curiously dissapointing too, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. Are there any good examples I've missed?