Reader Reviews

Star Review: Elite (multiple formats)

by Lutz

This is where it all started. At least in my eyes. Whilst I never played it when it was first out (I was only a nipper) it was the game that opened my eyes to the great sea of the stars. The game was simply astounding. So astounding in fact that most of you won't need to read this review, because you already know it. You've already breathed, lived, eaten, drunk and slept it. But for the uneducated out there, here it is.

Elite was made way back in 1984 by David Braben and Ian Bell. They wrote it for the old BBC Micro originally, but it later appeared on many other formats. Sadly a massive argument erupted between the pair, which ended up in court. Had the two stayed together, who knows what may have been achieved... but back to the task at hand.

Elite is a space trading game. The space trading game. The one that started all your Freelancers & Privateers etc and gave birth to the space-trading genre and heavily influenced others. To put it short, it's the Granddaddy. Taking the helm of your Cobra MKIII ship you head out from the planet Lave into the great unknown with only a basic laser, a couple of missiles and 100 credits to live on. You had only basic controls, pitch, yaw, speed and fire, for the ship. No targeting or any of that. None of the massive keyboard layouts that are often involved in games of this magnitude, layouts that are now inherent in such a game. You flew; you fired. Simple.

One of the goals was to get enough money together to upgrade your ship. New cargo bay, ECM system, more lasers, improved lasers etc. However even with the extended cargo bay you had limited space to store cargo, so it wasn't at all easy to make even a few thousand. Hell, reaching the first thousand was a great achievement. All the while you're travelling between systems you've got pirates too. And these are the "Shoot first, then reload, then nick the cargo and then ask questions" sort. Each ship had it's own attack pattern and getting attacked by groups was not uncommon. I remember dying a thousand deaths to the Cobra that would fire a missile at point blank range. The annoying thing was is that it wouldn't fire at you before hand, so you didn't even know it was coming or if you did it certainly didn't look hostile. Other tricks included major weaving and waving, which the smallest pirate ship used to do. Major to the point where you'd be hammering the keys until your fingers hurt.

Looting the destroyed ships was fun too; you never knew what you'd get after beating off an attack. Or maybe you want to do some hunting yourself? Go shoot down a couple of Anacondas, see what goodies lie inside. Asteroids causing problems? Take them out, get some small bounty for clearing up the galaxy. But watch out for the Kraits that would take off from their bases on the asteroids and attack you. Watch your ranking go up too as you take out ships. One of the main goals of the game was to become "Elite", a rank so high that not many achieved it.

The game was so well made it's unbelievable. There are eight galaxies to fly through, each one boasting systems that were different from the last, and if you ever managed to visit every system... Well, you're a better gamer than I. The game was a remarkably simple affair, aside from the docking for the novices, and despite being so simple the universe seemed so full of life. And you were never happier to see that life if you were ever misfortunate enough to make a mis-jump and end up in witch space with the Thargoids. Unless your ship was top notch you'd get torn apart very quickly.