Since then I've played so many, many games, but my heart has always beat loudest for the space sim. Wing Commander 2. All those mission packs. Privateer. Freespace. I-War. Privateer 2. Starlancer. Freelancer. X2. And even X3 until I realised it was, as I've said before, a spreadsheet with nebula effects.

There's just something about the the space sim that targets and tweaks some perfect gameplay sensor deep within my psyche. I love almost everything about them. The mission briefings, with the helpful graphics. The hokey acting. Occasionally, the FMV. The way you start with a crappy little dinky armed with pop guns and darts with foam bits over the pointy end, and you slowly progress through to the uber-fighter that can detonate entire suns.

I love the way the good space sims have characters, out there in space with you. Wing Commander did this so well, when Chris Roberts and his gang realised the graphics were never going to be that good, so they had to fill up the rest of the game with other cool stuff.

In this game, you had wingmen, each with a slightly different personality. Sure, their actual fighting styles were all identical, but back on board the Tiger's Claw you could swap "scuttlebutt" with them in the bar. Wing Commander taught me that word, you know.

Even more so than the wingmen, the enemy aces added incredible flavour to this 256-colour game. Every four or five missions you'd come up against an ace. He was little more than a monochrome image on an MFD and only subtly different from the generic enemy face, but hell, you were fighting an ace! And when you blasted him out of the galaxy, how awesome did you feel? I'll tell you - damn awesome.

Privateer 2 was another space sim that sticks in my mind. That was a game where the creative people really were given free reign. "The Tri-system culture is massively advanced, so why would all their space stations be simplistic metal platforms? Let's get crazy with the landing visuals here!" Of course, my PC wasn't quite powerful enough to play all those landing visuals until I upgraded the CD-ROM drive, but once I had the hardware sorted out, it was awesome.

That said, Privateer 2 was pretty much a rather nifty independent British SF film cut up into pieces and fed to those players who could be bothered completing the not-exactly-scintillating combat missions. It also proved that having sixteen indistinguishable flyable ships wasn't anywhere near as good as having four really awesome and characterful flyable ships.

For me, much of my early gaming experience was in pursuit of a virtual world that seemed complete and seamless. Graphics tech being what it was in those days, most games had very noticeable seams. Bits of scenery you couldn't interact with. Doors that were just painted on. The expression "a game on rails" was bandied about a lot, in the dim prehistory of our hobby.

But space sims seemed complete. You had a set of tools you could use to interact with the game world, and the world was so simple that there was very little danger of you accidentally seeing "behind the dropcloth", as it were.

Today, the space sim is a rare breed. There's Eve Online, of course, but my understanding is that's mainly a forum for new players to sit around imagining how great it would have been to have started playing the game two years ago so they could be part of the "in" crowd that controls all the good tech and resources.

Or you could get into X3: Reunion, if you're really really hardcore and have a spare PC so you can leave it running. Now, I am into games, but any game that says in the fan-generated "super basic getting started just scratch the surface FAQ" something along the lines of "you might not want to buy too many of commodity X until the universe has been running for a few hours and the economy has had time to settle down" is indeed too much game for me.

But the dumb, fun space sims have gone the way of the adventure game - there are few and far between. Darkstar One? GameRankings average of 72%. Where's I-War 3? Damn the first two games were awesome - the first truly serious space sims I ever played, where the word "sim" was almost justifiable.

Why this sudden drought? Well, my theory is that games today have to impress you, graphically. And when your engines can render entire countries, a la Oblivion, why would you waste time programming something that is basically an empty black sphere filled with a few complex polygons? Sure, you can paint the inside of the sphere with nebula effects or plonk in a planet or two, but even the best-looking space sim (probably X3) is primitive stuff compared to a high-end RPG.

I'm still waiting for the ultimate space game though, one that allows you to fight it out in the upper atmosphere, then dip down for a landing and take it to the bad guys on foot. You want epic invasion sequences, that's the genre for it right there. The Precursors looks very, very promising but then I played Boiling Point...

Oh for a new game to take the place of Wing Commander and Privateer. A proper Elite-em-up, on a human scale. Not a faceless German Excel document with giant, unvisitable planets where you're expected to draft a fiscal policy for your massive trade network.

Wait, a Battlestar Galactica total conversion for the Freespace 2 engine? And it's stand alone? Thanks PCPP forums!

PS: Stay tuned for a future blog entry on the Star Wars space sims. Best Star Wars games ever, and possibly the best space sims too.