implied a freedom of choice on how to play the game, buried somewhere in the blurb. It's still elite / oolite / freebooter/ whatever, with the added annoyance of RTS'ing if you actually want to 'win'.
The whole space genre IS annoying, being not far removed from very early games. I truly recommend Celestia, an open source/free starmap - look at that, it's free:
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/A game developer would not even have to give a 'real' universe with all 120k mapped stars, fly around in that and wonder why it is not at least a nav computer for some game.
Instead, the space sim formula seems to be a series of boxes you arrive at through jump gates/ wormholes etc.
Speaking of other dissapointing space games, how bout Spore?
The creators in game are fun, and initally travelling in space is interesting. Sadly, however, each and every race will act as one of 6 or so archetypes. It is not that I didn't enjoy tooling around in my own designed spacecraft, but it wears thin. The 'adventures' expansion is to be avoided, unless you are a masochist. And the latest, darkspore, looks like they've given up entirely the fun that could have been with that galaxy map. A worthy expansion would have been dozens of new archetypes, mission types and otherwise expanding the space phase of the game.
The space navigation system and resource gathering in Mass Effect 2 is a joke, a watered down, actually hosed down version of starflight/alphaflight or star control.
