Wing Commander ®: Privateer ™

Played this one back in the 90s so I was familiar with the game, but back then I was never good enough to play it fair and square. The game haunted me for almost 3 decades for not finishing it and when I found out about it being on GoG I had to buy it. First I played through the previous WC1 and WC2 games to get the 'feel' for the combat and then blasted through Privateer and it's sequel in about 23 hours of gameplay. The game itself is somewhat grindy in the beginning and you kind of have to get tens of thousands of credits doing the same old scouting missions or hauling cargo from A to B. When you get the Orion-ship the game becomes much easier and you can rack up credits way faster. After that I focused on getting the Centurion and the weapons for it. So after grinding that you are set to go with the plot missions. And you have to save the game before you attempt the missions as you can fail them without even realizing it - if you land somewhere else than instructed, you will fail the mission and you do not have a way to fix it without reloading etc. Regarding the difficulty when you get to a decked out Centurion with two missile launchers and four Tachyon cannons you should be good against all the opponents if you just aim well. And if you remember to use your afterburner when you do not have to fight the enemies it is even easier to skip the fights. If you are having trouble with the asteroid fields remember to pitch your ship up and down to manipulate the asteroid spawns so that you won't hit any of the pesky rocks. The expansion pack ups the difficulty of the fights in the final battle, but it is doable. And you get some new things for your ship to make your travels more enjoyable. The version on GoG is really well done and the only option I would like to have is to adjust the volume level.

This is one of those games where, over the years, I kept an old computer around with the original specs just to play the game right. That computer may as well have been fired into the sun, because happiness is now only a download away. Privateer stole hours away from me in my youth, wandering the universe, building up credits for that next big ship upgrade. It always gave me a feeling of a single-player TradeWars 2002. Really looking forward to hitting it up again.

I remember playing this in the good old days of DOS. This was ground breaking gaming. Great sound and Speech to boot! This game has it all. You can be a good guy and take out pirates and retros or run cargo and blow up the militia. I just love this game. Hours of fun blowing up bad guys and dodging asteroids. Well worth having and playing again.

I never actually finished this game - I played it with my dad when I was a kid, and all we did was buy stuff in one system and sell it in the next, day in and day out. This thing alone kept us playing this game for weeks on end, so it's gotta count for something. :D

I spent many late nights playing this on a 486 DX4 100Mhz with a tiny 14" VGA monitor back in the mid 1990s. I would have rated it one of my all time favorites then, and haven't changed my mind now. If you have an old CRT that still works, use it while playing this game. It looks far better. Side note: Oh, and it's clunky at first, but once you get the hang of it, a JOYSTICK really makes this very fun.