(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