This is the game that I remember playing hours and hours and hours. It used FMV cutscenes to tell the story (I was really sad when they started using the in game engine to do cutscenes back in the day cuz they sucked - there was all this talk about immersion and crap, but I would wade and grind through a terrible game if I knew it had good cutscenes - the reason I'm playing grey goo now?) It had an awesome community around it and I can't think of a game I had more fun playing MP ever. If you are interested in some of the community created stuff check out massassi.net. There is a wealth of add-on content there for both MP and SP. Some of the SP crafted campaigns were pretty amazing considering the time period - fully voiced etc. There are three games that I remember playing in my whole life and being like "wow this is really awesome". This game, KOTOR, and the first Halo. Stop reading this and go play it - convince everyone else to play it to and go get some maps from massassi!
This was a fun game in its time - I'm not sure how well it has aged and if you didn't play it originally I don't think you would find much in it since there are a lot of games of this type. Many of those games do the core mechanics and gameplay better from the same time period so it was earth-shattering when it came out. Just be prepared to lose yourself in a mass of windows. You will have so many open to try and accomplish what you are doing and management of them isn't the best especially late game. There is nothing else like it in the Star Wars universe so for that it is fun and if you want to play a 4X game with a Star Wars theme it is great for that. Some of the graphics were a little silly especially the space combat. I know what you are all thinking "I don't buy these games because of graphics" but when the graphics were lacking in its original release I think it is fair to bring them up.
