I didn't bother to read the entire thread since my last post, but I see there's now a list in the OP. A list which is missing
Total Distortion. A game I never actually played apart from the demo because I could never find it. That situation has not changed. It's an adventure game where you actually get to make music videos. Which was pretty awesome for the time.
And one of my favourites, mentioned in other threads but apparently not here:
Hardwar, released in 1998.
Probably the first good trading/piracy/bounty hunter sim since the Elite days, and the only one that wasn't complete shit until X:BTF came along. Very hard to find anything online about it, strangely even YouToob doesn't have the intro which I clearly remember, A bruised hand flicking a lighter on, cigarette being lit, then the guy starts speaking: I had a girl once. She's gone now. I had a dog too. He bit me one time. (flashbacks). Then he talks about losing everything you've ever known or something, hard to remember. And Google and Youtoob turn up absolutely nothing about the intro, that's how obscure it seems to be now.
You piloted a "moth", a figher/cargo ship and do missions, trade or shoot stuff to make money. If you have a cargo drone (and you're quick enough) you can shoot down other moths and loot their cargo from the surface for big $$$. But other than all other games of the genre, this doesn't take place in open space but on the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn in the not too distant future. One awesome thing is that this game was speculating on some things that turned out to be true. The game contains lakes, rivers and weather effects which at the time were just speculation but were confirmed later by space probes to actually exist on Titan. The game is set in the city of Misplaced Optimism (used to just be Optimism), which is spread over several huge craters linked by tunnels. It takes quite a while to fly from one crater to another, and each one specialised in certain things so big profits could be made by trading goods between craters but there was also big risks of getting attacked by pirates in the tunnels where you don't have room to escape. For example Reservoir is where most food and water came from, and consists of several biodomes spread out over a huge lake. Alpha was factories. Mines was made up of, you guessed it, mines. Downtown had most commercial businesses, moth shops and police HQ and so on.
The story goes something like, Titan was a very profitable mining operation, with megacorps and the usual bullshit. Then when most ore ran out/union difficulties/whatever, the megacorps left, destroying the only means of reaching orbit, the mass drivers used to launch the ore into orbit. So there's this kind of post-apocalyptic feel to it as well. Graphics were good for the time and actually ran very smoothly without a 3D card. Everything was extremely pink though:
Something I thought was pretty innovative, and not seen again until X:BTF, even Microsoft's shitty attempt Freelancer didn't have this, was the ability to buy property. There were several buildings for sale which you could use just as a garage for all your moths, or open to the public where you could charge NPC's or other players (That's right bitches, this game had LAN and Internet multiplayer and it was awesome) for repairs, or use it as a trading post. And, hangars had uber defense guns behind the outer airlock. If you lured/forced an enemy into range of those, they'd get blasted and hilarity ensued.
at the joystick.
