Wing Commander ®: Privateer ™

Still amazing fun to play today. It is a bit iffy the first hour getting used to the old "2d but still 3d spatial dogfighting" of old, but once your brain activates your imagination to comprehend what's going on, something we've not needed in many decades of gaming, things become beautiful. I must be crazy, but I actually think that the graphics are quite remarkable for that day and age. It's a very very strange graphics style that feels like it could be scaled up indefinetly (Privateer HD, please?). The ships, stations and planets are only limited by the resolution of the game, while a more recent 3d game like Privateer 2 in my opinion actually looks more basic than this does. There's an elegant sophistication in the aesthetics in this game where each and every single pixel fulfills a purpose. I'd take this over the early 3d for 3d's sake games anyday. Almost makes me wonder what kind of graphics (with no slowdowns at all due to high numbers on screen) we could have today if someone was to make a 2d space sim.

I remember spending almost an hour limping back to a base since afterburners didnt work and almost no armor left. We first installed on my 386 that litterally had 2-4 frames a second. It was unbearable until we tried a friend's 486, ran smooth and still remember hundreds of hours of gameplay way into the early morning!

too young to have played elite (i'm 30), privateer was my first space sim. On 6 floppy disks on my Packard Bell 120Mhz with 4mb of ram and 950mb of HD ... Good old days. A fantastic game, selling slaves, doing missions, with a piece of jump for a starship :) Love this game, will buy it righ now

Of all of the wing commander games this was one of my top favorites. i STILL have a fully working CD of this game with the Voice and RF expansion. For you rookies out there, i recommend as soon as u can get a second missile launcher attached to you Tarsus, if u fly with a joystick the way to fire a missile is the thumb button then trigger with a second missile launcher u can fire 2 at once. with most of the craft being Talon fighters, get both missiles to hit one location and the ship is blown instantly. javelins to FoF missiles dont matter. but no matter what u fly i HIGHLY recommend getting the ECM3 installed in ur ship ASAP. most of the incoming missiles will get jammed

This game hooked me the first time I bought it, and I couldn't wait for the expansions. I clocked about 450 hrs total in this game, just grinding away to get the best guns, armor, tech and upgrade there was in this game. This game was the game that made me hooked on space sims.