Has anyone else played Escape Velocity or one of it's antecedents?

I found out about it by accident. I bought a used mac laptop on ebay for $100, and it was already installed on the hard drive. It's from Ambrosia Software, a company that used to be the big name in Apple shareware, but they do stuff for the PC too now.

I still have Escape Velocity: Nova, which is the latest version of the game, on my laptop.

It's basically a trading game. You're plopped down in a galaxy with a crummy little ship with a few tons of cargo capacity, and you're tasked with completing missions and trading goods until you get so big you don't need to do it anymore. Along the way, you have to deal with the law, pirates, and rebels.

The game takes place in two dimensions, so navigation and combat aren't overly complicated. You have a primary weapon that fires in front of you and a secondary weapon that may or may not track whomever you've targeted. If you just disable a ship, you can attempt to plunder or capture it (capturing a cool ship is a neat way to upgrade to something hard to find, expensive, or illegal for civilians to own)

Nova introduced some new elements, such as story arcs that you have the option of completing. You can only complete one arc per character, so choose who you work for wisely. (My first arc involved a race of people with telekinetic powers who could create ships purely out of psychic energy. Once I finished, my ship was so powerful that the combat wasn't even all that fun anymore. Plus, with the psychic ship, I couldn't buy upgrades without buying an inferior ship)

Also in Nova is the necessity to purchase licenses for certain weapons or defense technologies. In previous games, you just flew out to Bob's Upgrade emporium (branches on most major worlds, but selection varies!) and bought what you could afford. In Nova, you either need to buy a license for certain technologies, or you need to find one on the black market. If you do the latter, you risk getting attacked in solar systems patrolled by certain governments who scan your ship when you enter the gravity well of the planets in them. It sounds annoying, but it adds some depth to the game, wherein the last games you could buy black-market weapons but they weren't all that different from regular ones.

Communication is about as important as combat, though. Some planets won't let you land unless you bribe air traffic control, and some planets will dispatch fighters if they really don't like you. If you're feeling lucky, you can demand tribute from the planets, and you'll face a fleet of enemies. If you beat the fleet, the planet has to pay you protection money. if you lose, or duck out of the system, you lose the right to do business on that planet. I don't think bribing them works if you've tried to threaten them.

Communicating with other ships is important too. If you run out of gas, you have to signal for help and hope nobody takes advantage of your position. You can also render help to ships in need.

If trading isn't your bag, you can always try piracy, or you can hunt pirates. I've done the latter. After completing a complicated mission for some pirates, they stiffed me on the bill. After that, I upgraded my ship to a warship, and went on the hunt. I capture several pirate ships and made them my escorts. Had quite a fleet going before the computer died and I lost all my data.

It's a low resource game. The graphics won't blow anyone away, and there's no audio speech. Still, it's a fun diversion for noodling with if you don't have time for a big game, and plotting out routes for non-story missions is oddly addictive (to me anyway).

Anyone else tried it, and therefore not need the detailed description I've just typed?