Games I Love: Frontier: Elite II
(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.
