Psi 5 Trading Company

This is the classic PSI-5 Trading Company game from the 1980s! It's Dos-Box, but it works just fine on my Windows 10 machine in 2023. I played hundreds of hours of this on the Commodore back in the 1980s-90s. This version has everything that the original did regarding gameplay. This appears to be the IBM-PC version though, so the sounds are simpler than the Commodore 64 version, also it looks like the number of colors are greatly reduced. The music is not nearly as good as the Commodore version, but it's the same songs so if you played the original a lot your mind will fill in the sounds that the IBM sound chips couldn't do. In this game you pick your crew, each has advantages & disadvantages, pick a cargo/destination, then try to get there on time and fight off space pirates as you go. Manage your ship's power, route, repair priorities, etc. all through a menu system. I definitely recommend for fans of the original game and for those that like retro games.

I gave a "thumbs-Up" because I like the idea or premise of this game and because it was an old favorite when I was a kid. I liked the idea of a game that relied on delegating tasks to in-game characters, rather than being like all of the other sci-fi trading games where the player did the flying, shooting, navigating and all else. It is a bit unfortunate that the version made available here is limited to one of the least appealing color pallets. I was more accustomed to the richer colors that we had on the Commodore C-64 version. This version also seems to only have a single mission and no way to exit the game short of clicking on the "X" on the windows boarder after that mission is successfully completed. I really thought that the game went a bit further with more missions, but I may just be misremembering it.

This is from the 1980s but I like the concept: being a commander in a spaceship, giving orders to crew members which have cute characters in many cases. Even though the word "trading" appears in the name, this is not a trading game in the sense of buying and selling; it is about passing successfully through a trade route, shooting pirate ships and making the best use of your ship's resources. For example, when a reactor is damaged and energy supply is low, you can choose which subsystems to keep going and which ones to shut down. I used to to play the Commodore 64 version of this game a lot back in the day. This one in Steam is the PC version, however. The musics are not as good as on C64. The graphics quality is CGA but on the positive side, events are less fixed than in the C64 version: Attack waves of enemies do not always happen the same way, and the recommendations about which weapon to use against a specific enemy are not fixed for each enemy type. The worst bug I've discovered so far is in repair functionality: Assigning more than 1 robodroid to a task doesn't make it any faster.

Text-based Space Crew: Legendary Edition predecessor.

a quirky little game with lot of intensity once you`re on mission. Just remember to prioritize power, repair and scan options and try to not let your crew die. This game is very retro and the graphics reflect that (I used to play this on a commodore 64). However this game is easy to get into.