And as Elite has finally appeared in an actual screenshot in the thread (shame that the news of its founding has been kind of swamped by ... other things 
), I get to talk about it.
Game: Elite
Released: 1984
Played: 1986?
Personal rating: Best. Game. Ever.
Elite is an open-ended, spaced-based simulation of trading and combat. You start as a fresh pilot, rated "Harmless", with your Cobra Mk III armed trader carrying a single pulse laser and three of your four missile tubes full. You can't afford a fourth missile, because you need all your handful of credits to buy cargo. If you choose wisely, you can jump to another system, sell the cargo for enough to cover your fuel costs, buy a better cargo, and maybe, maybe, start saving for that fourth missile. And a real gun. And better shields. And ECM to protect you from other ships' missiles. And an escape pod for when your reflexes, shields, ECM and guns aren't enough to save you...
Oh, and a docking computer. Because your real enemies in the early game are the space stations that you need to dock with in order to sell your cargo and buy all this lovely stuff. They have a narrow docking bay that spins temptingly slowly but not quite slowly enough. You can survive warp and pirate attacks to die very easily through bad parking
.
But then, when you have a real gun and enough cash, you can do what you damn well like. Hang around in spacelanes looking for fat, slow Anaconda freighters to blow apart and pick through rather than buying your own cargo; just look out for the escorts, and the police. Visit the local Anarchy worlds, looking for - and finding - trouble
. Bounties can pay well, and it's much faster to rack up the kills that way if you're good enough. Or just keep shuttling computers and furs between safe Rich Industrial and Poor Agricultural worlds to be able to afford an even better gun and even better shields, so you can one day rack up enough kills to reach the final ranking - "Elite".
I never actually managed to get to Elite myself (Deadly with a few "Right on Commander" progress messages is as far as I got), but started this game over and over and over. Even although I had to load it from tape, and then load my profile, again from tape, and save my progress back to - you guessed it - tape. Between that and the real-time musical docking computer sequence having no shortcut on the C64 version, I got through a lot of paperback sci-fi novels while "playing" this game. Probably good for my eyes and back.
Alternatively, I could spend the time just settling back and flipping through the manual, or the accompanying novella "The Dark Wheel". The manual is a part of the Elite world, full of descriptions of how the police work, the history of ship designs and little stories about the strange things that you might just come across in odd corners of the eight galaxies if you live long enough. None of this actually helps with the game (or is even actually in the game in some cases), but it all works to build the world in the players head. The novella, by the usually rather serious novelist Robert Holdstock, is a well-written story that gives an even firmer platform from which the imagination can jump off. Meld that with the open world gameplay and the wide-open star maps and you somehow had something more than just a computer game.
Some of this is nostalgia, some of this is the awe I feel now when I realise how much effort and genius went into packing so much into an 8-bit game that had to fit into less than 64k of RAM. The graphics are lined based, but you can tell what is going on. The sounds are simple but well chosen - the horrible screech as lasers stop bouncing off your shields and start eating into your hull, telling you that had only seconds to do something special to keep living, is particularly effective. The UI is a masterpiece of design, presenting all the key information clearly without clutter. It even manages to provide an effective 3D view of the locations of other ships on the sensor screen. The designers of the Civ VI UI should probably be made to play this game for a while...
The game also makes the smart decision to tell realism to go take a running jump where gameplay or immersion would otherwise suffer. No spaceship will ever fly like this one, with the banking turns, acceleration and deceleration, but it's intuitive and fun. The sequels and later clones lost some of simplicity, to no great effect. I remember playing a derivative on the Archimedes that actually modeled relativistic time dilation as you flew. I like Special Relativity, and consider it a thing of almost unparalled beauty. I don't want to have to consider it when I'm playing a game.
Yes, there are flaws and peculiarities. Once you get up to having bought all the good kit, it's a repetitive grind to keep getting the kills. In the original, you get to buy weapons and shields that are much better than anything you'll see on other ships in normal flight, making everything but the most badly outnumbered fights easy. While there are missions, they're few and far between, easy to miss and don't actually seem to mean much in terms of reward. The procedurally generated planets add a lot of flavour, but the individual elements start to repeat quite quickly ("goat soup") and even a ten-year old realises soon that they don't actually matter in the game.
But none of this is important. As I've said, I am a sucker for story, and particularly for games that let me feel I am writing the story. Elite does that very well indeed. The basic gameplay remains fun - I've spent quite a while playing the free, open source remake "Oolite". Yes, they've updated the graphics (line mode is available as an option). Yes, they've tweaked the AI behaviour (for the better, actually). Yes, the community has made a plethora of "add-ons" that include new ships, new missions, new equipment (and a bunch of stuff that was mentioned in the manual but didn't exist). But the core of it is still there, unchanged.
Except for the fact that they seem to have allowed other spaceships to equip the best guns and shields as a matter of course. So I still haven't made it to Elite
. Had loads of fun though!
), I get to talk about it.Game: Elite
Released: 1984
Played: 1986?
Personal rating: Best. Game. Ever.
Elite is an open-ended, spaced-based simulation of trading and combat. You start as a fresh pilot, rated "Harmless", with your Cobra Mk III armed trader carrying a single pulse laser and three of your four missile tubes full. You can't afford a fourth missile, because you need all your handful of credits to buy cargo. If you choose wisely, you can jump to another system, sell the cargo for enough to cover your fuel costs, buy a better cargo, and maybe, maybe, start saving for that fourth missile. And a real gun. And better shields. And ECM to protect you from other ships' missiles. And an escape pod for when your reflexes, shields, ECM and guns aren't enough to save you...
Oh, and a docking computer. Because your real enemies in the early game are the space stations that you need to dock with in order to sell your cargo and buy all this lovely stuff. They have a narrow docking bay that spins temptingly slowly but not quite slowly enough. You can survive warp and pirate attacks to die very easily through bad parking
. But then, when you have a real gun and enough cash, you can do what you damn well like. Hang around in spacelanes looking for fat, slow Anaconda freighters to blow apart and pick through rather than buying your own cargo; just look out for the escorts, and the police. Visit the local Anarchy worlds, looking for - and finding - trouble
. Bounties can pay well, and it's much faster to rack up the kills that way if you're good enough. Or just keep shuttling computers and furs between safe Rich Industrial and Poor Agricultural worlds to be able to afford an even better gun and even better shields, so you can one day rack up enough kills to reach the final ranking - "Elite".I never actually managed to get to Elite myself (Deadly with a few "Right on Commander" progress messages is as far as I got), but started this game over and over and over. Even although I had to load it from tape, and then load my profile, again from tape, and save my progress back to - you guessed it - tape. Between that and the real-time musical docking computer sequence having no shortcut on the C64 version, I got through a lot of paperback sci-fi novels while "playing" this game. Probably good for my eyes and back.
Alternatively, I could spend the time just settling back and flipping through the manual, or the accompanying novella "The Dark Wheel". The manual is a part of the Elite world, full of descriptions of how the police work, the history of ship designs and little stories about the strange things that you might just come across in odd corners of the eight galaxies if you live long enough. None of this actually helps with the game (or is even actually in the game in some cases), but it all works to build the world in the players head. The novella, by the usually rather serious novelist Robert Holdstock, is a well-written story that gives an even firmer platform from which the imagination can jump off. Meld that with the open world gameplay and the wide-open star maps and you somehow had something more than just a computer game.
Some of this is nostalgia, some of this is the awe I feel now when I realise how much effort and genius went into packing so much into an 8-bit game that had to fit into less than 64k of RAM. The graphics are lined based, but you can tell what is going on. The sounds are simple but well chosen - the horrible screech as lasers stop bouncing off your shields and start eating into your hull, telling you that had only seconds to do something special to keep living, is particularly effective. The UI is a masterpiece of design, presenting all the key information clearly without clutter. It even manages to provide an effective 3D view of the locations of other ships on the sensor screen. The designers of the Civ VI UI should probably be made to play this game for a while...
The game also makes the smart decision to tell realism to go take a running jump where gameplay or immersion would otherwise suffer. No spaceship will ever fly like this one, with the banking turns, acceleration and deceleration, but it's intuitive and fun. The sequels and later clones lost some of simplicity, to no great effect. I remember playing a derivative on the Archimedes that actually modeled relativistic time dilation as you flew. I like Special Relativity, and consider it a thing of almost unparalled beauty. I don't want to have to consider it when I'm playing a game.
Yes, there are flaws and peculiarities. Once you get up to having bought all the good kit, it's a repetitive grind to keep getting the kills. In the original, you get to buy weapons and shields that are much better than anything you'll see on other ships in normal flight, making everything but the most badly outnumbered fights easy. While there are missions, they're few and far between, easy to miss and don't actually seem to mean much in terms of reward. The procedurally generated planets add a lot of flavour, but the individual elements start to repeat quite quickly ("goat soup") and even a ten-year old realises soon that they don't actually matter in the game.
But none of this is important. As I've said, I am a sucker for story, and particularly for games that let me feel I am writing the story. Elite does that very well indeed. The basic gameplay remains fun - I've spent quite a while playing the free, open source remake "Oolite". Yes, they've updated the graphics (line mode is available as an option). Yes, they've tweaked the AI behaviour (for the better, actually). Yes, the community has made a plethora of "add-ons" that include new ships, new missions, new equipment (and a bunch of stuff that was mentioned in the manual but didn't exist). But the core of it is still there, unchanged.
Except for the fact that they seem to have allowed other spaceships to equip the best guns and shields as a matter of course. So I still haven't made it to Elite
. Had loads of fun though!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore