bingle

I have no idea how popular this game was, but it was one of my favorites when I was just getting into PC gaming, and it still shapes my opinion of games.

It was a graphical space adventure game, that I used to play in DOS on a 286. You were a generic human spaceman, and you started on a space station with a sort of Y-Wing looking spaceship. You could pick a crew from a bunch of different races, including robots and insect guys. Your mission started out just being about getting money for ship upgrades; you'd travel out to other planets in the system and mine them for minerals which you'd sell. Once you upgraded a bit, you could start to go out into the wider universe, and you'd discover a bunch of other races to trade with and fight. You'd also eventually realize that the whole universe was going super-nova, one system at a time, and that you had to find some ancient artifacts to stop that happening.

It was a really deep game for its time, it had a lot of gameplay, diplomatic and combat encounters, and a little buggy thing for exploring planets and finding artifacts and mining. It was also unique in that you had to sort of discover your ultimate purpose over time, through finding clues left by ancient civilizations as you plundered their ruins. It was really a fantastic game (at least in my memory) and I'd very much like to see if I can find a copy somewhere to try and play again.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Bingle