.. way way back many years ago (somewhere between 1994 and 2000... but the game may well be older than that) I played a game. And I want to relive the experience and be bitterly disappointed.

Its a turn based empire building game set in space.

Its not Spaceward Ho nor Master of Orion, but its similar. I believe it had a single word name...

Anyone got any ideas?

DukeNukem1
Orion
DukeNukem2

Any of those?

All seriousness aside, I can't think of an old space sim other than those you mentioned off the top of my head. Will think harder though.

Is it Homeworld 1 or 2?

Speaking of old PC games, anyone got 'Dark Reign'?

Stars? Ascendancy?

BTW, Master of Orion 2 > all other space TBS games.

PLEASE anyone play a game with a professor that threw spanners, and could upgrade guns to wter pistol and shit, and there was a bit where u needed a preasure suit and a plant world and the last one was a question mark level.

i really need it
i have been searching for years.

Oob... u never fail to impress me.

Ascendency :)

Is MOO2 similar?

Duke Nukem 3d?

I only played Ascendancy briefly, but I hear it has a crappy AI.

MOO2 is quite similar, give it a try, it kicks ass. Plus it has the following cool features:

* Setting a ship to self destruct to damage the ships around it
* Biological weapons (although this pisses of the other races)
* Using spies for espionage or sabotage, and sometimes you can frame other races (fucking Darloks always frame me :( )
* Retreating from battle at high warp, which allows my favourite strategy: launch a whole lot of missiles and retreat before the enemy can retaliate. Unfortunately the enemy may eventually get the warp dissipater technology which stops you from retreating until you blow up the vessel(s) carrying it
* Blowing up planets (in the very late game)
* Ethnic cleansing
* Mind control
* Terraforming
* Boarding ships, which you can either use for yourself or scrap in order to get money and some of the technology on the ship (if it has stuff you don't have).
* Space monsters. In particular, if a giant space amoeba attacks one of your planets (extremely rare) and wins, it makes your planet toxic, and even has a little video clip showing it doing so.

I could go on for a while...

Just found it on TradeMe... $2 :)

Then I realised I actually sold the game about a year ago and had never played it!

Try looking on abandonware sites first, particularly this site.

Ta... Ascendency is there... I'll get it tonight

Woohoo... got it... even patched it. Played it. Love it still.

Yey for me being old and easily amused

You may want to keep an eye on the Free Orion project... it's been going for a few years now, hopefully in another few years they'll have something worth playing.

Abandonware is wicked. Another pretty cool space game is the Ur-Quan masters, which is downloadable from somewhere, possibly the underdogs, google it.

I also reminisce fondly about Masters of Magic. It's a bit tricky to get it to work on XP though, i cant be bothered figuring out that DosBox shit.

There's a dosbox tutorial here. I found it pretty damn easy to use, but then I was using DOS for the better part of a decade, so I didn't have to learn any commands.

You should only need to do this though (here's an example of what I would do to run Zork, which is played by running the file zork.exe, which is in the folder e:\games\zork):

1) Install DOSbox
2) Run the program
3) Mount c e:\games\zork (or wherever you have your DOS games)
4) c:
5) zork

OK so I did win MOO2. Is MOO3 better/worse/any good at all?

MOO3 is a bad game just a hair short of being a brilliant game.

So MOO2 over MOO3 then?

Yeah I think so. MOO3 is better in some ways, but I'd say overall MOO2 is better. MOO3 is better for multiplayer though in my experience.

Thats OK. I dont have any friends.