Elite: "The game that couldn't be written" [video]

For enough kills you needed to upgrade your ship, which cost money.

I seem to recall (maybe Elite Plus?) that you couldn't progress if you weren't in the first galaxy, ie. if you had used the galactic hyperspace upgrade. In any case I got stuck on Dangerous and that's what I blame.

This is how I play through the Ultima series with my eight-year-old. She doesn’t have a device of her own to look up spoilers, she takes notes and draws maps on paper, and looks through them when I’m not available to play with her.

It was a little like this with tape loading games - you had 10 to 15 minutes (an eternity when you were young) to do something, and that's if you were lucky with tape head azimuth and you didn't knock the joystick controller - if there was a manual you read that every time, I even remember reading the copy protection sheets over and over again.

I think the docking scene in Elite is borrowed in turn from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Yes, because I figured out how to reliably force a Thargoid incursion every time I did a hyperspace jump. From memory (BBC micro model B disc version):

- Pause the game and press the ‘x’ key. You’ll hear a beep. I don’t know what this does.

- Engage hyperspace. As soon as you see the concentric hexagon animation, press and hold the ‘Ctrl’ key. You should see the animation a second time as you drop out of hyperspace surrounded by Thargoid ships.

Now this is a true hacker move!

Perhaps the Space Traders Flight Training Manual was to blame for the difficulty.

http://www.elitehomepage.org/manual.htm#A13

The manual was bundled with the cassette or disc, and it states in the 'Docking Procedure' section:

Approach the final moments of docking at DEAD SLOW SPEED

However this is dead wrong! If you put some speed on before entering the 'letterbox' you're actually far less likely to crash, unrealistic though this may be. It's perfectly possible to dock successfully at full speed. Try it out here:

https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=366

Oddly enough, the docking computers are also capable of crashing your ship.

The trick was to get perfectly perpendicular to the face of the spacestation that had the docking slot. But that was very hard to do visually. You had to fly directly away, turn around and watch the space station very carefully as it rotated to see if the rotation was symettrical from your point of view. Then approach slowly, match spin, but dont go too slow that actually made it harder. But even then would be game over one time in 20 or so.

I just remember that weekend very well - "the weekend I got Elite but couldn't play it for 3 days so spent ages reading the manual"

Memory is a strange beast.. although I had, but never played Elite, I was playing Saboteur 2.

I remember on Saboteur 2 the room where your character could 'duck'and would get god-mode/full energy. And I hadn't played the game since... I'll say 1985?

I had a nostalgia phase a couple of summers ago, found it in one of the abandonwares and with DOSBOX I played it again. Yes I could remember the room!

Yeah some of it wasn't in the game:

in dealing with any alien life form, for the purposes of trade, there are three cardinal rules:

- Learn the body language of the alien race

- Cover up your body scent

- Beware of Carapace concealed weapons

But there were some hints about obscure functionality - It is rumoured that the Galactic Navy are designing their own remote-controlled fighter, and will pay well for Thargoid ones to study - this could be done in the game. Also there were some hints about the possibility of capturing enemy escape capsules and then selling them as slaves.

Maybe some of it was only in the disk version?

I played the Electron version, which was even more limited, as the Electron's video chip couldn't do all the tricks the BBC Micro's could. (I think you even got some of the game memory looking like random garbage on screen. But that could have been a different game.)

I don’t think the generation ships (mentioned in the manual) were in any of the original BBC micro versions, but I think they were added to a 16-bit computer version later.

There was a much easier bug on the ZX Spectrum.

You would set where to hyperspace to, then trigger a hyperspace jump as you are docking. You would then land in the space station of the other system.

I'm guessing you don't do a lot of gaming on macOS. That prompt shows up with lots of games.

>Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast.

It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc.

Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board.

Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them.

Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player.

a few edits:

I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress.

Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser.

The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped.

FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.

It's impressively immersive, but at least when I tried it, not something I would categorize as an absolute blast. The PvP aspect seemed to take a back seat to creating a beautiful and expansive spaceflight simulator. (Which it is!) Mining resources and transporting goods just seem like excuses to fly around and can become tedious. Exploration felt repetitive, too, though I can hardly imagine the excitement of the first player to have an alien encounter.

Eh, if you want to play a game that FEELS like it was balanced with a "pay real money to buy in game credits" feature but doesn't actually have that feature, then yes it's great.

One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog.

I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.

Seems like a nice way to justify piracy.