Trading always takes precedence from the outset, even for the toppest-gun, because until you've scraped together enough cash to buy a time compression system, your ship moves at a mind-numbing crawl. Even with a SETA time compressor on board, your ship's still sluggish until you drop in at pirate station for a tune up. And in such a vast game galaxy, tediously slow travel rapidly becomes a massive problem.

The fact that X is visually impressive eases the pain for the first few hours. For a while it's fun enough just marvelling at the massive space factories, ringed planets rotating slowly against beautiful nebula backdrops and the massive trading stations spinning just the way they should. Yet all the nice paintwork in the universe can't hide the fact that X's suffers from a fundamental lack of focus. The 'go where you like when you like' structure provides no safety net for beginners and ensures the lost stay lost. The first trail you're sent to follow, "Go west through Ceo's Buckzoid, young man," rapidly goes cold and leaves you randomly prodding everything in sight, hoping that eventually the plot will bite back. Sifting through the necessarily bland information offered by other pilots quickly becomes so mechanical that it's easy to miss the few new clues.

With insufficient direction from the game, trading soon supplants the plot and you find yourself obsessed with stockpiling cash for the next upgrade, rather than hunting for hints on how to get home. Certain sad anoraks (like a certain reviewer) may choose to suffer its foibles for nostalgia value and because we want it to work, but real people (with lives and everything!) will find the slow travel, loose focus and vague plot of X intolerable.