Elite - 25yrs old...

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 08:53

teulk said:
I had a BBC B and i remeber Elite well, many a day of my childhood lost playing that game.........."witch space and thargoids ( i think) - what a blast man.I couldnt quite get into Frontier i have to say. Docking computers were a god send although manual docking was fun during a battle.

Frontier was utterlyAMAZING for its day). The fact all planets/stars/day-night cycles were accurately positioned/timed etc etc.

It's just a shame the gameplay was just dull dull dull. If they'd just made it 'arcade flight' instead of realistic Newtonian, it would have been brilliant.

I still think if they did Elite 4 - A solid modern day Elite type game where you could upgrade ships and do missions all in a uber rendered universe - it would sell like hot cakes!

Jono · 22 Sep 2009 at 09:41

Trading slaves eh? You'd never get away with that these days.

misterPK · 22 Sep 2009 at 10:07

Jono said:
Trading slaves eh? You'd never get away with that these days.

Is that better or worse than blasting apart escape pods?

PK!

J1nxy · 22 Sep 2009 at 10:31

misterPK said:
Is that better or worse than blasting apart escape pods?

PK!

Scope them up and sell them...remember spending many many many hours on BBC B with initially the tape and then the disk version of Elite. Thargoids and Tharglets also made a lot of money

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 10:41

Did anyone else play Frontier?

Apart from the combat being as dull as hell, I also recall a lot of bugs. Far too often you'd go to place X, to kill person Y at time Z, and nothing would happen...

J1nxy · 22 Sep 2009 at 10:43

NeilFawcett said:
Did anyone else play Frontier?

Apart from the combat being as dull as hell, I also recall a lot of bugs. Far too often you'd go to place X, to kill person Y at time Z, and nothing would happen...

I had the PC version which I played to death along with First Encounters, they were buggey as hell. I remember getting disks from the developer with patches for the game. This was before the internet had taken off.

The combat depended on what your approach was. I remember having the biggest ship in the game and sticking the the biggest gun in 1 turret and the second biggest in the other, they tended to be one shot 1 kill against a lot of the other ships.

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 11:17

J1nxy said:
I had the PC version which I played to death along with First Encounters, they were buggey as hell. I remember getting disks from the developer with patches for the game. This was before the internet had taken off.

The combat depended on what your approach was. I remember having the biggest ship in the game and sticking the the biggest gun in 1 turret and the second biggest in the other, they tended to be one shot 1 kill against a lot of the other ships.

The graphics and simulation was stunning for it's day... If ONLY it had been 'arcade flight'! (As even implied in its own intro!!)

Skii · 22 Sep 2009 at 11:41

Azagoth said:
You ever considered scratch building a Cobra Mk.III?

Nice idea

ScarySquirrel · 22 Sep 2009 at 11:44

It's older than me. Never played it.

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 11:48

ScarySquirrel said:
It's older than me. Never played it.

Oh, I suspect you'd find it laughable now.

But in its day, the first time you saw it, it was stunning. Before then games had been things like pacman and platformers. But all of a sudden out of 16k of memory was coming 3D graphics of space ships and planets. Thousands of stars and planets all with economic models etc etc... 16K!!!!!!

It was to gaming what Star Wars was like to the cinema I guess!

Devlish · 22 Sep 2009 at 12:17

Nobody who wasnt there can understand the environment that Elite exploded into or its impact on future games. The computer,especially the BBC, wasnt even considered a gaming machine until Elite. I remember reading somewhere that they sold more copies of Elite for the BBCB than they did BBCBs.

It literally was the difference between playing text MUDs to suddenly exploring the depths of space in a 3D environment. I remember the first time I saw a station, awesome in its wireframed hugeness! All the gaps were filled in by imagination, unlike today where we seem to have lost anything not realistically rendered. Ah well.

PS anyone who didnt dock manually was a p***y!

britboy4321 · 22 Sep 2009 at 12:42

On the BBC news story they said that he is working on 'Elite 2'.

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 13:25

britboy4321 said:
On the BBC news story they said that he is working on 'Elite 2'.

A good imaginative (single player) modern Elite game would sell like hot cakes!!!

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 13:54

Maybe this is what we should be looking at?

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php

Dark_Angel · 22 Sep 2009 at 14:00

I always wanted to play this... but never did. I can't believe how old some of these games are now though, it is kind of. :eek:

Toekiller · 22 Sep 2009 at 14:52

I never did find that blasted secret ship with the uber shields. What a game.

SteveOBHave · 22 Sep 2009 at 15:14

NeilFawcett said:
The graphics and simulation was stunning for it's day... If ONLY it had been 'arcade flight'! (As even implied in its own intro!!)

I entirely dissagree - the Newtonian physics are one of the elements that make the Frontier series as good as they are. I would be bitterly dissappointed if that were to be lost. Frontier was never supposed to be an arcade shooter and to make it so would be dumbing it down and that is unforgivable.

Briton · 22 Sep 2009 at 15:15

NeilFawcett said:
Maybe this is what we should be looking at?

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php

Infinity looks great, although I wish it was a single player game being developed.

Be interesting to see how the procedural generation works out...If it ever gets released that is.

NeilF · 22 Sep 2009 at 15:25

SteveOBHave said:
I entirely dissagree - the Newtonian physics are one of the elements that make the Frontier series as good as they are. I would be bitterly dissappointed if that were to be lost. Frontier was never supposed to be an arcade shooter and to make it so would be dumbing it down and that is unforgivable.

But combat was a core element of the game, and it ended up being a skilless joust in space. It was akin to bungy boxing on ice...

SteveOBHave · 22 Sep 2009 at 15:29

NeilFawcett said:
But combat was a core element of the game, and it ended up being a skilless joust in space. It was akin to bungy boxing on ice...

Again I dissagree - there was skill involved, it was by no means a 'skilless joust' altho I see the comparison, there was plenty of scope to get good at it. It's a space sim not an arcade shooter...