Washing-Up Software Projects
(Frontier/Gametek 1993. DOS)
Nine years passed between the release of the original Elite and that of its sequel, but we only had two years to wait for the next entry in the series. I had caned Frontier: Elite II on the Amiga, but now I was at college studying Software Engineering and had reluctantly acquired a PC, ostensibly to do coursework, but of course I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to explore the world of DOS gaming. My 486 SX 25, with its 4 meg of RAM and 120mb hard drive was hardly a powerhouse even by the standards of the day, but above running Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic for college it could do a respectable job with stuff like Wolfenstein 3D, and could just about cope with Doom, albeit with some slowdown and hard-drive thrashing.
When it was announced that the third game in the series, Frontier: First Encounters, would feature full texture-mapping of its 3d models, as well as planets with actual terrain instead of the smooth pool-balls of its predecessor, of course I was excited. That it would be a PC-only release was sad but not unexpected, these being the final days of the venerable Amiga. The requirement for a math-coprocessor was a bummer, though, as that was something the "SX" flavors of the 486 processor lacked. Still, I was living at home rent-free, so I set about raiding piggy banks for unspent birthday money and checking down the back of the sofa. (I was one of the last generations to receive a government grant to pursue higher-education in the UK, and while it was fairly paltry I can't honestly claim that none of it went towards this most noble of causes as well. But it was a long time ago and my memory is hazy.)
PC duly upgraded - fortunately it was a drop-in replacement for the CPU that was already there and didn't require a new motherboard - release day came and I breathlessly installed and launched Elite 3.
It was technically impressive all right. True enough, all the spaceships and stations now had textures applied to them, giving the impression of more detail, and the planets now featured mountains, coastlines, and valleys that you could pilot your ship down. That was cool. And it was more Elite! Sure, space was still that obnoxious shade of blue, but there were more mission types, more spaceships to pilot, and the return of the alien Thargoids, nominal antagonists of the first game that had been suspiciously absent, bar one well-hidden easter egg, in Elite II.
I dove in, and while I did play it for many hours, something niggled at me. Several somethings actually. Those texture maps and fractal landscapes I was so jazzed about? They might not have been possible on my Amiga, but man, were they ugly! Those nice clean polygons ruined by a smudgy low-resolution mess, like they had been badly vandalized, graffitied by a teenager with a spray can. I realized then that the previous game had a minimalist beauty that was perhaps less realistic but somehow felt more real.
On top of which, First Encounters was buggy. Crashes were all too common, of both your real-world computer and your in-game ship when entrusted to an autopilot that liked to slam it into the sides of space-stations. This being some years before digital distribution became commonplace, providing patches for the game post-release was a matter of offering them on floppy disks to affected customers, and I dimly remember my copy having one such disk in the box already. It would later transpire that publisher GameTek was on the verge of bankruptcy and forced Frontier to release the game in an unfinished state in a desperate attempt to bring in some revenue, much to the chagrin of David Braben and his team.
None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy my time with First Encounters. I did, but I was left wondering what could have been, with just a little more polish and some different creative direction. Still, it was a much beloved series of games, so surely Elite IV would be along soon, right?
#gamesilove #gamesidontlove #elite #frontier #frontierfirstencounters #msdos
(Gametek/Konami 1993. Played on Amiga.)
Ignoring rereleases such as Nintendo's continual repackaging of Super Mario Bros et al, few games saw as many official ports over such a long period as the original Elite. Released in 1984 on the BBC Micro, it lived well into the 16-bit era, with versions for the Acorn Archimedes, PC and NES all coming out in 1991. More powerful computers meant better framerates, solid 3D graphics and more custom missions, but the core of the game remained essentially unchanged. It wasn't until 1993 that a true sequel arrived in the form of Frontier.
By then I was rocking a newly acquired Amiga 1200, and Frontier was just the killer app to justify my defection from the Atari ST (which did get a port, but it ran slooooowly). As soon as the intro cinematic started, all rendered in-engine and including nothing that you couldn't actually do yourself in the course of the game, I knew I was in for a treat. Check it out:
I still think it looks cool today and really sets the scene for the kind of deep-space adventures that await you. (Though I don't know why the ships bob up-and-down like rowboats on the ocean.)
Although keeping the same basic gameplay loop of flying around, trading between planets, fighting pirates and upgrading your spaceship, Elite II brought an unprecedented level of realism. Solar systems no longer consisted of a single star, planet and space-station, waiting patiently in space for you to visit. Now there were binary star systems, gas giants, icy moons and a variety of different orbital outposts, all of which moved through space according to some convincing orbital mechanics. Planets could be flown over and landed upon, whether or not they were populated with starports and cities. (That these were rendered as a handful of grey cubes didn't matter one jot.) One of the starting positions found you parked on the moon of a gas giant, and it was a joy to simply sit and watch it rise over the horizon while the wind howled around my cockpit.
Where once you were confined to a stock Cobra Mk. III, now with enough capital you could purchase a range of ships from tiny little shuttles without even room for a hyperdrive to enormous, lumbering space-freighters. As well as the trading, piracy, bounty-hunting and asteroid-mining of the original, a variety of mission types, from simple deliveries to risky assassinations, provided ample opportunities for a young commander to earn that cash.
It wasn't simply the planets that moved realistically. Your ship was now subject to proper Newtonian physics, whereby pointing in a direction and firing your engines would send you off in that direction until you applied the opposite force. No longer could you turn on a dime in pursuit of an enemy, and the joystick-focused control of the original game was out in favor of a mouse-and-keyboard approach to orienting your ship. This insistence on realism, while admirable, unfortunately turned dogfighting from a fun Star Wars-like affair, to a dull jousting match where you and your opponent lined up with each other, firing lasers and accelerating before flashing past one another in the blink of an eye, flipping over, thrusting, and repeating the process until one of you died. Later in the game, when you acquired larger, less agile ships with gun turrets that could be manned by AI crew members, combat became a matter of sussing out your opponent and deciding whether to flee, or wait for them to be automatically turned to space-dust by your defenses while you sat back and watched.
FTL travel was limited to flipping between star-systems. Travel across those systems to get to your destination occurred at realistic sunlight speeds, which in practice meant setting your autopilot and hitting the "fast-forward" button to accelerate time until you got there, sometimes passing in-game days or weeks in the blink of an eye.
To this day, then, it baffles me that a game which prides itself on its scientifically accurate portrayal of interplanetary travel would choose to render the omnipresent background of space as blue instead of black. Was the intention to suggest nebulae and the like that the platform didn't have the power to render in detail? Whatever the reasoning, it was a partly immersion-breaking choice for me, that bugs me to this day. In fact, I used to play it with the brightness on my Commodore monitor turned right down in order to get space as close to black as possible while still being playable.
I may not have put as many hours into Elite II as I did the various incarnations of its predecessor, and I can't honestly tell you if I made it to Elite combateer status, though I know I did own the largest ship in the game and was making bank hauling vast quantities of expensive cargo between star systens. For all its faults, though, it's still a formative, fondly remembered game that presented an immersive vision of space-exploration that to this day has rarely been beaten.
(Acornsoft / Firebird 1984. Played on ZX Spectrum and Atari ST)
Christmas 1985, I'm about to turn ten years old, and Father Christmas has left a 48k ZX Spectrum for me under the tree. I was delighted but a little surprised, as it wasn't something that I had asked for. Clearly it was a gift for my dad as much as me. He had bought a Spectrum over a year prior, but by getting me my own he would finally be able to use the thing without having to pry me off of it with a crowbar.
Alongside the Speccy was a large, black box with a bright yellow crest on the front and the word "Elite". This was a wonderfully tactile box of delights, containing the game on cassette, a thick manual, a novella that fleshed out the game's universe, a poster displaying all the different spaceships one might encounter, and a curious lump of plastic called a Lenslok.
Lenslok was a copy protection mechanism. When the game was loaded it would display a garbled mess of blocks and wait for an input. You would take the Lenslok and put it up to the screen. Looking through it would "unscramble" the image and allow you to read a code that, when entered, would start the actual game.
It was certainly ingenious, though its flaws were obvious. Should you lose or break it, your game would be unplayable forever unless you could somehow source a replacement. Plus, although there was an option to adjust the size of the image to better align with the plastic lens, some sizes of screen were simply incompatible with it. It was only ever used for a handful of titles and many of those scrapped it in later re-releases.
When I finally loaded up Elite and got past the copy protection... Well, I hated it. I had no idea what to do. Up until now, games had presented fairly obvious and intuitive goals. Shoot all the aliens. Collect all the keys. Here I was presented with an impenetrable maze of menus and keyboard commands. I could launch my spaceship all right, turn around, crash into the space station, but the rest seemed beyond my grasp. I fiddled with it for ten minutes that first day before putting it down and playing something more accessible. We already had a load of (mostly pirated) games. My dad didn't care for them (except for Heathrow Air Traffic Control, which seemed interminably dull to me), so they all went in my room. I do remember loading Elite up again at least once just to play the "use the Lenslok to unscramble the code" game, then turning it off again straight away.
I don't know how long it was - weeks or months - before I decided to knuckle down, read the manual, and try to figure this game out. It wasn't long before the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what a wonder Elite was. Here was a game that dropped you into a spaceship with just a single laser and 100 measly credits to your name, gave you a pat on the back, and sent you out to make your fortune and reputation as an Elite space combateer by whatever means you chose. You were free to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt and pirate. The spaceships, planets and stations were simple wireframes that moved at a single-digit framerate, but that was irrelevant. No game had ever felt so real. I wasn't controlling Miner Willy or Monty Mole. I was me. A much cooler, futuristic space-adventurer version of me.
As I played I began to get good at it. I was figuring out the best items to trade between neighboring planets of different economic types, using the profits to upgrade my ship with deadlier weapons and defensive capabilities, and honing my dogfighting skills against pirates and deadly alien Thargoids. And when I was having a shit time at school, I could run home and immerse myself in a world where I was competent, powerful, and (I imagined) respected. Even when I wasn't playing it, I would fantasize about waking up one morning to find a fueled-up Cobra Mk III conveniently parked in my back garden, waiting to take me to a new life among the stars.
I did, eventually, achieve Elite status, a feat requiring the player to defeat some 6400(!) enemies in combat. Then a few years later I upgraded to an Atari ST, and was excited to start the journey over again on my futuristic new 16-bit computer. The ST release of Elite featured solid 3D graphics and a framerate that was silky smooth compared to any of the 8-bit versions. I enjoyed the new docking and launch sequences that gave you a glimpse of a hanger inside the space station containing other parked ships, and the way the docking computer would actually fly your ship (accompanied by a chiptune rendition of Strauss The Blue Danube, a-la 2001: A Space Odyssey) rather than just teleporting you to your destination like the Speccy version. Some of the colour choices seemed a bit garish though, and I was disappointed that exploding ships seemed to just disintegrate into pieces. The Spectrum version used the simple but effective technique of drawing a solid red circle for a frame or two to simulate the flash of an explosion, which was far more satisfying. But these minor quibbles didn't stop the ST version from consuming many more hours of my teenage life, though not quite as many as the Spectrum one, and I'm not sure I ever made it to Elite.
Elite originated on the BBC Micro, but I didn't know anyone who had one of those at home. They were expensive, and seemed mainly fit for boring educational purposes, lining the walls of our high school computer lab. It received a ton of ports through the 80s and 90s though, including a surprisingly capable version for the NES. And there are the sequels, of course, but I'll come back to those. They add much but aren't as accessible as the original. If you want to try it today you can fire up an emulator for your 8- or 16-bit computer of choice and almost certainly find a port for it. (The Acorn Archimedes version is particularly well thought-of.) Or, if you prefer something with more modern graphics but the same classic gameplay, Oolite might be just the ticket. But the monochromatic slideshow of the Speccy version will always have a special place in my heart. A special place only accessible via application of an awkward, easily broken plastic lens.
