Be Excellent To Each Other

Beeb owners would have probably played it on the keyboard. It might have supported a analogue stick. The Beeb had no digital joystick port which is a pain.

I found a boxed analogue BBC joystick recently and (a) its crap and (b) not many games support it.

You can manage your account to 20 up until midnight uk time

Malc

Meh, 500 credits extra.

Future echoes, man.

I used keys on my BBC for ages then tried a Quickshot joystick. It was a fucking abomination - the keys were miles easier to use.

I always preferred keyboard control for Elite.

I wouldn't have even considered playing it on a joystick. Mind you, I played everything on keyboards till consoles and the Amiga came along.

Not bad!

Malc

Same here.

Braben & Bell managed to get Elite on to the NES (and it's a terrific port BTW), but even then the controls are a bit of a fudge considering you're limited to a NES pad.

Elite and it's 2 sequels always had relatively complex controls, just the experience as a whole was always something fairly simple to get to grips with, unlike the likes of the X games.

I'm absolutely certain I had a digital joystick for my BBC B. in fact, I used 2 joysticks for Elite - a digital one for combat and general navigation, then I'd unplug it and plug an analogue one in for docking.

I definitely used a digital joystick to play it. White with red buttons. Think they were rare though.

Until you compare it to Star Citizen. That's a surprise to me, because I thought everyone loved Elite. Did it exist in the US?

I'm pretty sure the majority of the pledges for this Kickstarter were from the UK. There's a big following for Elite in Eastern Europe, too, and I know the Aussies know the game, so I'd assume there's a fair few pledges from those types too.

It did come out on the US as far as I'm aware (The NES version for sure, and I would assume the C64) but you know 'Merkins... They wouldn't know a good game if it shat in their face. It probably didn't help that there was that whole videogame crash over there. That didn't really happen in the UK. By the time the 2600 was failing, we were all starting to buy C64s and Speccys.

Original versions of Elite should be played on keys, definitely. I reckon it was okay playing on a control pad because that's not all that different from keyboard, in a way. Or at least not a shit as a Cheetah, or something. The menu strip interface on the NES was fine, I thought. The big problem I found with the othewise sublime Archimedes version was the fact that you has to play on mouse or stupid proprietry joystick.

Apparently you can run it on the Raspberry Pi with the Pi RISCOS and an Archie emulator. As a welcome back thing for students I'm teaching on Monday I'm going to let them have a go on it. Will they be interested, or will they just say 'it's just blocks' in the same way idiots said Elite was 'all lines' back in the day? Alternatively, they might just humour the nutcase computer guy do his thing whilst waiting for the programming lesson.

Also, that video posted by Dimrill was actually quite emotional. Anacondas! Attacked by Cobra Mk IIIs! This is so great. Odd that they didn't manage to get me that excited before the kickstarter finished.

*bites*

I had a friend who, along with his dad and brother, were constantly on BBSes throughout the late 80s and 90s. My parents also had friends with two sons. They all yarred mercilessly and through them I think there were very few DOS games that I didn't play or watch them play at some point or other. However, I never heard about Elite until I saw Frontier in the second issue of PC Gamer circa 1993, and I didn't actually play it until 1998.

The Wing Commander series was far bigger and so most people over there knew and loved Privateer as their space trading game. They're interesting in comparison: Frontier has the huge universe with full control of your ship and lots of customization while Privateer has far nicer presentation and story and arguably better combat.

The video game crash would not be much of if any influence as it didn't affect home computers - in fact, they benefited from it. The C64 was beloved over there (whereas the Spectrum was practically unknown and was not a success, likewise the Amiga) and computer gaming development carried on just fine while all the video game makers shriveled up.

Would have been. The Beeb uses a PC analogue style connector and just like the early days of PC gaming, analogue sticks ruled the roost. Have never tried an actual PC stick on my Master for fear it might explode.

It'll be all the places the big 3 UK 8 bits were big. Forget the Beeb, it sold a third of what the CPC did and didn't export well. It'll be where people played it on Speccys, C64 or CPC's. And of course later the Amiga and ST (which again sold into the same markets).

So it will be Europe, Scandinavia, Australia/NZ, and lots of ex-comminist countries thanks to the proliferation of Spectrum clones and pirated games. Basically the places you'd expect.

Presumably it's lack of success in the US would be why all the console ports (except the NES) version got canned. I'm positive I read about a SNES version in production in the early 90's and Ian Bell's website has test versions of the Megadrive/Genesis and Gameboy versions.

Backers should've received a link to the website in order to reserve your Commander name. Just sayin.

Cheers, Dimrill. I saw the email, but was in no rush to do anything with it. 'Devilman' goes quite quickly on some sites, so at least I have it reserved now

As I understand the page, you are submitting a name now, but they will be processed in the order of pledging.

I was in pretty early, so hopefully Commander Zoidberg will be mine.

I reserved all your names.

Some groin trembling stuff in the latest newsletter.

Cities!
http://s1305.beta.photobucket.com/user/ ... f.jpg.html

Sidewinder!
http://s1305.beta.photobucket.com/user/ ... 7.png.html

HNNGH!

Yeah, pretty awesome stuff. Can't wait to see some proper renders of what the universe is going to look like, but that's probably still far off.

Has anyone received the latest newsletter yet? Some of the ideas they're touting for this game are incredible, enough so that I'm worried about the possible Molyneux-effect, but Braben's generally delivered the goods in the past.

Highlights for me include visible wear and tear to player ships, so the longer you hold on to a ship and the more scrapes you get into, the more dings and dents and scratches in the paintwork your ship picks up, letting other players see just how tough a life you've put your ship through. There's also talk about the emergency personal life support systems they're planning on implementing and some stuff about Hyperspace is meant to work in this game. There's talk of how mis-jumps can take you to previously hidden places and systems and so on. You can also piggy-back through someone else's hyperspace jump, allowing groups of players to travel together, but I suppose also allowing for rescues. Who doesn't remember fruitlessly sending out distress calls in Frontier for help that will never come? With this game, other players potentially could come to your rescue.

All in all, it sounds fucking amazing.

Every newsletter makes me more and more excited. Trying not to froth. So hard right now.

x eleventy-billion.

I'm sure there'll be a certain level of Molyneux to it all, but I'm sure they could do quite a lot with 1.5million!

Hnnnnnghh.

I just want to start playing. I don't even care anymore if its bork

Bork

I'm so excited about this game I'm in serious danger of becoming incontinent.

I try to be creative.. some times it works others not so.

Bork and Bindy o/

The Bollywood version.

Oh yeah! Bring it to masses. Now just need a Bollywood version of Alf and I'm golden.... BALF?

A disco Bollywood version of 70's Buck Rogers would also be ace. Think about it.

I've decided I'm more excited about Star Citizen.

HHNHNNNNGH! Gods' cocks...

I hope it's everything Space Rangers 2 was, and more!

Space Rangers 2 was the best.

Dimrill - I wasn't able to translate your comment. Did you think it good or bad?

I think 'HHNHNNNNGH!' is his arousal sound.

yes

The big question is - how many game-breaking bugs will it be released with?

Wasn't First Encounters bugs meant to be largely the fault of Gametek, the publisher? My understanding of it was that the company were going bust, so decided to hastily chuck out the very latest version of the game Frontier had sent them as a retail product, despite the game still being in the fairly early beta stages. Braben took the company to court over it. I certainly remember being surprised when I saw it on store shelves for sale as I'd been looking forward to the game being released but wasn't expecting it to come out anything like as early as it did.

The initial release barely worked at all and had to be very quickly patched just to get it to load on many PCs. There are 3rd party versions of the game now (I used to play one called JFFE), which have fixed a great number of other bugs with the game - it's possible to get the Thargoid ship now for instance. There's little point in it, since it's so massively overpowered that nothing else in the game will so much as scratch it's paintwork, but you can get it now.

It demanded impossible amounts of base memory to get it working and even that was without sound. The patch fixed that but it was still one of the tightest games I had.

What a pain in the backside base memory and boot floppies were. It's a marvel anyone wanted to play games on PC's at all!

The latest newsletter about the procedurally generated space stations was great. Trying to keep on top of my excitement for this game.

Tasty new video rendered using the game engine!

And suddenly I'm very interested in Elite.

I wonder how that would look in actual gameplay, though (probably a lot like a "Game Over" screen for me).

Apparently that is actual gameplay.

Hnnngh.