Oolite

Like Elite, Oolite is a first-person, open-ended, single-player space trading and combat simulator. The player is the pilot of a spacecraft, capable of interstellar travel to other nearby planetary systems using wormholes generated by the ship's engines. Each system contains only one inhabited planet, with an orbiting space station; players choose the destination system by the name of its planet. Although players can create outgoing wormholes almost anywhere within a system, assuming their engines have sufficient fuel to do so, ships always enter a new system at a considerable distance from the target planet.

The player must then pilot their ship from the entry point, through "normal" space, to the station. During this stage of the journey the player can encounter other ships, and combat can occur. Oolite spaceships' principal armaments are lasers and missiles. Most combats are dogfights and the ships exhibit non-Newtonian flight characteristics, being immune from the effects of inertia and gravity.

Giles Williams began work on Oolite for Mac OS X in 2003. In July 2004, Oolite v1.0 was released but remained in active development for a long time afterwards.

By September 2005, Mac Oolite had reached v1.52, and a Linux port was released, closely following the Mac OS X developments since.

Oolite was given four stars and the Macworld Editors' Choice Award in 2007: "Oolite (Object Oriented Elite) is as addictive and compelling today as Elite was in 1984 ... The core program is fully extensible with new ships, missions and planets – and the universe you explore in Oolite is completely open ended. This game’s a blast from the past that’s been rebuilt to last. Grab it now."

On July 24, 2009, TechRadar.com listed Oolite as one of the 10 best free PC games you should play today: "Oolite takes the exact same, brilliantly compulsive gameplay [as Elite] and makes it slicker, faster and better looking – for free. If the core package isn't thrilling enough, there are expansion packs available, too."