Privateer: ASCII Sector is a cool space exploration game with roguelike elements, it features a pretty fun trading and mission based schema with space combat and ship upgrade elements. The game is still being development but it is fun to play already; it is full of small details such as federation ships inspecting you for contraband and space travel via warp zones.
Your starting ship is pretty weak and slow, so you will have to take a lot of care if engaged in combat, with time and some missions acomplished you will be able to buy faster, bigger ships. Space combat is simple yet you have a lot of options like handling your shield levels and selecting from your different weapons.
Exploring the space may get a bit tiring, although there exists an autopilot feature, but most of times you will be wandering around empty star clusters. Autopilot stops too far from navpoints so you still have to travel a bit of empty space.
The game doesn’t feature music or sound effects, which would add a lot to the space exploration phase. I end up playing some techno tracks in the background while playing this.
The game is real-time, and doesn’t feature dungeon crawling nor random space generation, which would have been great. It keeps its roguelike tag for being ascii and spatially consistent.
Browse the official website, including screenshots and a forum. The game already sports a nice degree of complexity, and I am sure the author would appreciate your comments!
Temple of The Roguelike 
I have been playing this and quite enjoying it. I have played a few space /combat/trading/exploration games before and although this has nothing new it is still quite good for a new game. This is lots of improvements scheduled but the current game is quite playable, however spending too much time flying through empty space before the auto pilot takes over is quite annoying. Maybe I just need a faster ship.
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Real time? Humm… I think I’ll pass.
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The process of landing not being described at all in the manual, as well as there not being at least an easily accessible *facsimile* of if not an easily accessible manual in-game pissed me off a bit, and eventually the way you can get terribly beaten in the beginning if more than two ships decide to try toasting you (friendly fire in the process of trying to help shoot a retro, anyone?) made me give up. It’ll probably get better, but I’m going to give this time to get a bit more love than 0.2 before I really get invested.
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Also, *since* it’s not in the manual at all; before you can land, first you have to press ‘c’ for Chat, and select the planet. Then, you select “Requesting automatic landing.” Only *after* you do this will the money you need to pay to land be deducted, and then you can land on the planet with the grantedly intuitive but equally documented ‘l’. If anyone else thought that landing was going to be truly automatic when the game said you were going over an automatic landing zone, I feel your pain.
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you dont need to press ‘l’ to land. actually pressing ‘l’ does nothing. when the planet has said that they have deducted the landing pay you will land automatically after a few seconds.
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Cool site. Check out this freebie from the past I ran across. Netrek, can’t believe it is still around and maintained.
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