Ahhh, the "Great Graph Paper Shortage of 1988." The hours I would spend playing this game and trying to decipher the clues to the mystery while fighting off pirate craft at the same time... never mind drawing as faithful a map as I could manager. Echelon was a pretty strange beast in those days: a cross-genre game decades before crossing genres became a thing. In this case, it was a puzzle game and a combat flight simulator. While fighting pirate craft was a regular occurence, the largest part of my time was drawing maps on graph paper and looking for artifact clues that eventually led to the coordinates of the pirates' base. Now, this is nothing close to the complexity and spectacle of today's games, but if you are from a similar generation as myself, and remember this game, it's well worth the (very modest) expense to have a little nostalgia in your life.
