anybody know of any good space sims?

[night]

i'm looking for a space simulator that has a first person shooter element too, only thing that comes within two million miles is Universal Combat, but their interface sucks and the whole game is buggy like no other

[DanTheManPR]

Space sim like flying around in a space ship? In that case, I would recommend Freespace 2.

[night]

i played the demo for freespace 2 and loved it but do they let you fly capital ships? i mean like cruisers and carriers and the like.
where can you buy feespace2?

[Rafal Dudek]

you could try x2: The Threat

[Nova]

Here are the only ones I can think of right now.

Freespace 2

I don't think you'll find this one anywhere other than on Ebay, Amazon or something like that since it's actually quite old, but it's still one of (if not) the best of the genre and still looks good enough today. You play as a pilot of the GTVA through about 30 missions, so there's no trading open-ended element to it. Those missions are very, very good though, and there's a small or gigantic twist to almost every of them. It's got a great plot, great ship design, great cutscenes and voice acting. Basically everything about it is awesome. If you haven't played it already and manage to find it, don't hesitate. You can't fly capital ships in it though.

Freelancer

I guess this one is more like Diablo in space, but I really liked it. You can only play it using a mouse, but it's actually pretty well implemented. The game is part open-ended (mining, random missions, exploring etc.) and part linear storyline, and the latter isn't bad but doesn't compare with Freespace 2's. I think the best aspect of the game is as the title implies, freelancing. All of the systems are quite big and have their own layout of stations, lanes and hazards which include interesting space phenomena like asteroid fields, nebula clouds, radioactivity, neutron stars and others. The game also looks pretty good and runs well on new and older PC's alike. Give the demo a try, it's a decent enough representation of the whole game.

X2: The Threat

X2 probably has the steepest learning curve I've ever seen in any game. The beginning will most likely piss you off. The ship you start off with couldn't take down a sand castle and has crap cargo space (although it's pretty fast, at least). The game as 130+ systems to explore and there's tons of stuff to do, provided you have the in-game money to do so. You can buy and set up your own business with all kinds of factories and mines, do some mobile mining (which is pretty lucrative) do some bounty hunting and some more stuff I don't feel like typing. One of the cool things about the game is that you can purchase your own fleet (wich requires a bazillion cash and many game hours) and fly your own turret-covered destroyer. The game is a system hog and you'll need a fairly good rig to run it well. It also has a demo though I never tried it.

[night]

thanks a lot, downloading...