All right, you all know the drill by now.

Up for grabs in this third edition of a giveaway trilogy are two GoG copies of X3: Terran War Pack (containing X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude).

Why have a third edition, you ask? Why because third time's a charm, of course! And because Egosoft is soon to release a new patch for both X3:TC and X3:AP (now in beta), which comes to show both are still very much alive and still considered two of the best incarnations of the X series.

I'll repost the rules (same old, same old with minor adjustments) for everyone's convenience:

Rules:
1. Post here to say you're in for the giveaway (can't win if you're not in).
2. Sign up because you want to play the games, not because you want to collect and shelf the games.
3. The winners will be chosen randomly in two weeks from today (on a Saturday).
4. You must swear a sacred oath to uphold your end of the bargain, as described below under "Responsibilities".
5. The winner can give the game to someone else (or you can participate for someone else and then pass along the codes), as long as that certain someone agrees to uphold point 4.

Responsibilities (aka "the winner has to"):

1. Play at least one of the games in sandbox or campaign mode.
2. Record and post an X3 diary in the X Series thread for the first 7 days of game-play (actual in-game time). In total there have to be at least seven posts, each taken at a 1 day interval (1st post after 1 day spent in the game, not an actual day spent playing the game IRL, and so on). The diary entries should contain at least one screenshot and a short summary of what the player has been doing in the game so far (it can be captain's log style, or you can turn it into a space-adventure novel if you wish).

The Priest Duke's compliments!

As one of the winners of the previous iteration, nearly having reached the 7th day of my commitment (and fully intending to keep publishing diary entries after that), I can strongly encourage everyone to enter this giveaway. The commitment might seem heavy, but I'm surprised by how easy it ended up being.

If you're not familiar with the X games: X3 is a flawed game, which gives rise to a lot of frustrating experiences. You'll lose hours of gameplay due to a stupid mistake, the game will absolutely baffle you early on, and many of its features will continue to baffle you even after many days of gameplay.

But underneath all that, X3 is a game which has kept me playing it virtually non-stop since October, which is pretty much unheard of in my personal gaming experience. X3 is a game with a scope and reach to rival anything I know. The sights of the universe are wondrous to behold, and every time I glide into the spacedock of one of those truly massive space stations, accompanied by its own distinctive soundtrack, I feel like I'm effectively captaining the Enterprise. Yet I also get to dogfight as if I was flying an X-wing!

The mission chains are endless, not quite well-developed enough, and built up of tasks which you've done dozens of times already. I mostly found myself ignoring them in favour of building up my business empire. Yet when I completed two of them, and then discovered there's a third one which continues the story and brings the universe further alive... I found myself really looking forward to finding out how it all will work out. And really, there's few gameplay accomplishments I take as much pride in as I do in my well-tuned construction and trading empire in this game.

Massive thanks and +1 to WinterSnowfall for running this giveaway again. And I'll be greatly looking forward to reading the diaries of the winners! :)

Not in as i don't think i can uphold the responsibilities in a timely fashion, but thank you very much for doing this! +1

The responsibilities I outlined really seem to push people off, but they're hardly draconian. You might want to reconsider and you have two weeks to do so :).

Just for reference, it took me about a year of on and off play to get to my 7th in-game day and I'm perfectly fine if it takes you even longer than that.

I'm in

Sure sure, force me to play games, you heartless monster!

Seriously though, thanks for running the giveaway. I like the format.

I don't think they're draconian at all; on the contrary, i think it's a great way to make sure that the winner will actually play the game instead of dumping it in their backlog. And since you seem to really enjoy this game, i guess it's a joy to read others' stories from it's universe.

It's just that i'm about to get into flight simulators after a long hiatus; more specifically into Falcon 4.0 BMS (to log in a few hundred hours in the F16 and maybe get into multiplayer sometime next year) plus some others like IL-2 Sturmovik (but only casually, just to get my WWII fix). So, i guess there won't be enough free time for another time consuming game and if i'll be in and luckily win, that will put me in uneeded stress. So, i guess some other time, thanks again! ;)

+

In space you said? Well, if you happen to cross a planet called Kerbin with your shiny spaceship, just stop for a coffee--Jebediah Kerman's the name. :P

This seems like such an awesome format for a giveaway.

I've been aware of the x3 games for years, but never tried any of them. I was told by a friend that they were awesome, but severely flawed. Upon seeing this giveaway I checked some YouTube vids of it, and I'm not really convinced I could get fully invested in it, so I think I'll skip on entering for now. At least until I've checked out some more gameplay to be fully convinced I'd want to actually play the game for a longer period. I'll make a new post if that's the case.

I wish we had more giveaways of this style. It "forces" people to commit and get invested, which I think is super cool.

I wouldn't call them severely flawed any more, though that was the case up to the first couple of major patches. Most, if not all, of the major bugs have been ironed out by now, but of course there still are a few unsolved issues that annoy you every now and then... to be honest, because the game is so grand in scope, you learn to live with them.

This is all abstract talk, so let me give you an example:

In about roughly 1 out of 20 cases when I send a smaller ship to dock with a carrier class ship in the same sector where my (the player's) ship is in, the smaller ship will close up on the carrier and then just sit there doing nothing, like it was Buridan's donkey, presented with a dilemma it can't quite get over.

The dilemma is in fact a bug in the docking logic, that can be quickly fixed with some minor background muttering about lazy developers not writing a damn fix for it in the first place: you issue a move order to the carrier ship in any direction for just a couple of meters, which forces the docking logic to re-evaluate. Then your smaller ship docks as it's supposed to have done in the first place.

For me it's no longer a bug, it's routine :).

The downside is that it also scares off a lot of people :).

Let me know if you reconsider - it's an awesome game once you get the hang of it... getting the hang of it, of course, does take time (steep learning curve warning), so may lead to frustration, especially if you die and have to reload because of a bug, but once you master it, there's nothing else you'd rather play, believe you me, especially if you're into space empire-building flight sims.

Not in because I have the games af least twice and given them away myself a couple of times. However thanks for doing this and I'm also sending out an encouragement, those who are afraid to enter, the games are highly addictive.
Also Albion Prelude is probably the most polished of them all, so if you want to play vanilla it's your best bet. On the other hand if you like modding, you can mod it to have all X3: TC missions. And imho the station builder mod is a must if you plan on building Gigacomplexes, because hauling silicon/ore mines gets tedious after a while, and although AP has hephaistos corp to build stations for you, it doesn't links mines into complexes.

When people think space sim, they think pew pew in space but it is possible not to fire a single shot yourself, if you are so inclined.

If all you want to do is pew pew, that is also possible and plays like a different game compared to the above.

If you are one of the above extreme examples, you will have problems with some of the plots but they are NOT compulsory. No idea what to do in this sandbox simulation if skipping the plots? Experienced players can suggest goals for you, like this: Some Paranid captain has burnt out the eyes of a beloved one during a robbery at your place while you were away. You want to gouge out said captain's three eyes personally in revenge. Problem is, he is the captain of an Odysseus destroyer (M2 class) and you need to board it in order to get to him. Getting there will take you maybe 10-25 in-game days.

Bump, because space feels too empty without enough entrants!

Oh yes, I'm in! I played Reunion to death when that was the latest X. I completely understand why some people find it slow and tedious, but it's so satisfying to start small and build an empire with self-contained production facilities and have an armada of warships escort you into battle with the Xenon! I'm particularly interested to see just how polished Albion Prelude has become, although I assume I'll be over to the Egosoft forums again to pick up a few 'quality of life mods'. Thanks for the chance, WinterSnowfall :)