"Space Trucker #1," Bob Plays Privateer Gemini Gold
5Once upon a time in that magical year of 1993 when computer games were new, a game came out: Wing Commander: Privateer. It was part of the Wing Commander series of games and unlike those and most games, it gave you complete freedom to play however you want. You could be a merchant, a mercenary, a pirate, or a little of each. You could go where you wanted and do what you wanted. There were plot missions, but you could ignore them, rather in the fashion of the Elder Scrolls single-player games. I loved the Wing Commander series as a whole, but I especially loved Privateer.
There were two open-source remakes of Privateer based on the Vega Strike engine: Privateer and Privateer Gemini Gold. The latter was truer to the original Privateer but with some shortcomings. One shortcoming is that there is only one difficulty level: normal, and normal is almost impossible. You start out with an unupgraded version of the worst ship in the game (the Tarsus) and no money and things will almost certainly go downhill from there.
To give myself a boost, I edited a save file and gave myself enough money to fully upgrade the Tarsus. I am going to trade commodities until I earn back the money I gave myself, and then go for a Galaxy merchant ship or maybe a Centurion heavy fighter.