I meant to edit my post to say that I meant that that was irrelevant. The legal distinguishment between piracy and theft is relatively unimportant to what we were discussing. The only difference would be the consequences, not the legality of it.
Reminds me of that old kid's movie...what was it? Where the lady says, "I hate it when you call them stinkers..." It was one of those seemingly-overabundant seal movies...
Wow, it went from online sci-fi games to movies about seals.
Guys, start another topic about piracy. It's more fun for others to join in that way
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Well in response to the initial question, what about Mass Effect? I don't know how much galaxy exploring is involved but it looked like it had aliens. . .
You ARE talking about Starflight, the one that started it all.
OLD EGA game. There's a more graphical version for Sega Genesis, if you can *get* it *somehow*.
This genre is usually called Space Adventure. You can consider Mass Effect as a light space adventure/action/rpg, for example.
But I like this type of game, so I already made some research. There's others, some of them with demos, just Google those names and you find it:
Escape Velocity Nova
Freelancer
Independence War II - Edge of Chaos
The Battlecruiser/Universal Combat Series (really hard to learn and a bit buggy, but some of them are free)
Flatspace I & II
EpochStar
There's some older ones, if you know how to use DosBox:
Elite II & III
Protostar
Nomad
Sad they don't make this kind of game anymore. I guess the hole "gather a crew and equip a ship to explore the unknown galaxy" think is too hardcore for today's standards...