As promised the first mission in Elite popped up after I amassed 256 kills. I got a “Right On Commander” message flashing up straight after the kill and the moment I land I receive the following message:-

What follows is a wild goose chase throughout two galaxies as I attempt to locate this missing ship. The way this is handled is a little quirky as I get messages through text at the bottom of the planetary information screens after landing on each space station. These take the place of the usual planetary descriptions. Once I figure out where to look for these messages it’s a case of following the trail first to Reesdice, then Arexe and on into a new galaxy.

After stumping up the 5000 credits for a galactic hyperdrive, the trail goes cold as the ship is nowhere to be seen. I fly to all the planets within jumping range of the entry point one by one landing at each station and eventually get another clue:-

The trail takes me all over the galaxy after this until I finally get told the present location and can attempt a showdown:-

The battle when it comes is certainly longer than most but no more difficult. The only time enemy ships get a lot of hits in is when they are on their first approach. After than it’s just a case of tailing them as close as possible and that’s exactly what happens here. This particular ship does require a considerable amount of hits to destroy and had at least 4 missiles to fire at me while I was chipping away at it. The ECM deals with those missiles and it’s soon destroyed on the first attempt. I get this message on landing:-

It’s not stated but my reward appears to be some kills since my rating went up in addition to a few thousand credits. Not a huge amount after all that effort but enough to set me up for exploring this galaxy. There is another mission at 500 (in hexadecimal) kills apparently which I would guess is about double what I’m on now. This first mission doesn’t look like much when described here but took many hours to play through with all the travelling around. I wasn’t expecting anything this epic actually and it was a great addition to the game which I’m sure I missed when playing Elite Plus first time around. It didn’t change the basic gameplay all that much but it gives the short term goals to be working toward that I was badly missing prior to this.

As for a final verdict, it’s easy to see why this game is so loved but to an extent I think you had be there at the time to really appreciate it. The speed of gameplay is sluggish not so much in the framerate as the amount of time it takes to dock at every station and travel around. I’d frequently wander off an do something else while waiting for the autopilot to land the ship only to come back and it still wasn’t docked. Elite also suffers from lack of variety and with no real goals a lot of time except grinding kills.

Despite all that there is something undeniably addictive and it is still fun if you can cope with the slow pace. It’s worth a look to see one of the origins of the space sim genre and in terms of gameplay elements there is precious little in Privateer that hadn’t already been done here. Unless you have a serious attachment to the BBC version, one of the remakes such as Elite Plus or Oolite have to be the way to go though as it would benefit greatly from some modernisation.

There may be a part 5 if I ever get the required kills for mission 2 but not for some months as I’ve had my fill of Elite for now and can’t face grinding out another 600-700 kills. I’ll probably fire it up for the occasional go when I’m in the mood and maybe make it there one day. I am still in the mood for space sims and it’s been ages since I blasted through WC4 so I’m going to be trying out the Playstation port of that next.

At the end of part 2, I was trading my way up to a military laser. After much toing and froing between planets I got the needed cash and also the money for an ECM, an extremely useful gadget which blows up any missiles in the vicinity for a small energy cost. At this point I finally felt able to try some ship combat.

My ships systems are similar to Wing Commander in some ways. I have a rear and forward shield which slowly recharges if depleted. There is no armour and subsequent hits drain energy instead. Once all this energy has gone it’s game over. This energy also recharges over time although more slowly if charging the shields. This means in effect that I don’t take any permanent damage although unless in the vicinity of the planet I never get enough time to fully recharge if badly damaged.

I have views from both sides and rear of the ship available and can mount one of any weapon I can afford to each but there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of use in the side views for this. Fighting with the rear turret is a realistic option and does give the front shield a chance to charge up again. The military laser I saved up for is extremely effective and will take down any ship in seconds provided I’m aiming well. It does have the downside of overheating fairly quickly in another game mechanic that made it into Wing Commander. The lasers here in Elite have something of a mind of their own and move around to a degree within the crosshairs so it’s not possible to be precise at distance.

There are some other weapons available with a one-use energy bomb which destroys anything in the area but they cost a fortune. There are also missiles which need to first be locked on simply by getting any target in the crosshair momentarily. I can’t say I’ve found these to be of any real use as if I have a target in my crosshair it’s far quicker to use the lasers. Combat is extremely brief and in truth quite basic. With the limited manoeuvrability and overpowered lasers it’s just a case of getting a ship in the crosshairs with no need to aim ahead or attempt to tail them. The enemies come in packs of up to 4 and the initial approach to a pack of this size is by far the most dangerous part with only a limited amount I can do to protect myself. Offence is the only defence and it is entirely possible to take down a full pack in the first pass with the main difficulty being the lack of visibility among the explosions and the slowdown. The combat model is crying out for the afterburners used in Wing Commander which added some spice to the mix.

There is no target locking or any particular way to identify the good and bad guys other than their behaviour. Some ships are only ever manned by hostile forces such as the Thargoid flying saucers but others can be used by different classes. In the end I’ve given up trying and am taking a shoot it if it moves approach hence I’ve usually got a fugitive rating but it does help to rack up the kills when everyone is hostile.

The radar at the bottom middle of the screen takes a little getting used to. I think I originally played Elite Plus after Wing Commander all those years back and remember having real difficulty with it then. It essentially shows a flat plane of space with lines coming from it to the targets to represent how far above or below that plane they are. There is some colour coding for classes of ship but again this doesn’t identify friend or foe expect in the case of Thargoids.

I did try flying out to a sun to grab some fuel and it does indeed work at the risk of overheating my ship and blowing up. Given the relatively cheap price of fuel and the number of enemies lurking around these further reaches it’s never going to be worth getting fuel this way just for financial reasons. In fact it’s hardly worth travelling between systems once the military laser has been bought. Money stops being the issue and it’s just about racking up kills and increasing my ranking. I’ve been achieving this by randomly jumping around the system which generates almost constant battles. There is quite the variety of ships to come up against but little noticeable difference in all honesty when fighting them. Some are more likely to launch missiles and the Thargoids are particularly laser happy but all are much the same and I tend to do my best not to let them get close enough to be identifiable.

Graphically the game doesn’t exactly look amazing these days but it’s nice enough for 1984 and the graphics do the job. It would be quite easy to get swept into the universe of Elite back then given how few 3D games were available. The stars are always visible through the ships which is a minus in the realism department but at least the lines on the ship models are obscured appropriately. The Master version I’m playing has some added colour over the original also which brightens things up. The hardware does show it’s limitations in some serious slowdown especially when near a planet. I’ve taken to looking out the side view when approaching a space station to dock in order to get there more quickly.

Some of the cheats the game engine uses have also become apparent by this point. For instance it’s possible to do short jumps around the system when asteroids or cargo is floating around. However this cargo then maintains it’s position relative to me after the jump. When I’ve been hopping around racking up kills I’ve tended not to bother picking up cargo as I don’t need the money meaning I end up with debris orbiting me in ever increasing quantity and slowing the game down. Something else I’ve noticed is that the space station appears to be randomly generated when near enough the planet but it has a tendency to un-generate and then appear somewhere else often several times.

I was expecting Elite to open out to me once I had my ship better equipped but it seems to me that after this point there is very little left to achieve. All the basic elements that went into Privateer are there but Elite is in dire need of a campaign to play through. This was a limitation of the hardware at the time of course especially with this game being designed to load onto a 32K machine via cassette. Even within the limitations some better and ludicrously expensive equipment to be aiming for wouldn’t have hurt. The combat in the game doesn’t offer enough financial reward for it to be a viable means of affording anything expensive and that’s only once you don’t really need the money which is another flaw in the design in my opinion. Shooting for nothing but a one word ranking doesn’t seem like enough of a goal nearly 30 years later when that Elite status is thousands of kills away. I know from experience that nothing happens when you get there from Elite Plus years back. I really can’t complain about the amount of gameplay I’ve already had from of a game of this size but it is showing it’s age.

Right now I’ve just reached competent status. Allegedly I need to double my number of kills from here to get to the first of two secret missions that were put in the game to maintain interest for the player that thought they had seen and done everything. I’ve already reached that point if I’m honest but I’ll stick with it long enough to see that first mission if possible.

I’ve had my first couple of sessions on Elite and I have to say that in this day and age it hasn’t been the most accessible of games to get into. I had about 45 minutes to give it a shot on Monday night so I thought I’d have a quick fly around to find my feet then start in earnest on Tuesday. The first hurdle is that I don’t have the manual. I do have Elite Plus but there are enough differences to the controls that this wasn’t always entirely helpful so rather than doing the sensible thing and looking for the right manual online I decided to use trial and error.

Something I’m rediscovering is that the controls on BBC games appear to be almost random with no common scheme adopted in these early days of computing. It’s a slightly similar experience to no one being able to make up their mind which joystick port to use on the C64 but at least the controller was standard once you got over the first hurdle. Here the keys could be worse for steering with s and x for up down, < and > for left and right but it then starts to get strange with space to speed up, / to slow down and a to fire with that last one being the cause of many space stations taking offense as I accidentally shoot them while trying to dock.

Talking about docking, it’s not easy. Elite does have save games but only on space stations most of which have to be docked with manually at the start of the game. All progress is lost if you mess it up and to start out with I couldn’t manage to dock successfully to save my life. The space stations all rotate around an axis and in order to dock you have to be able to line up perfectly with the docking bay, matching rotation speed by carefully timed presses of the keys in order to fly perfectly through the slot and land. I was constantly finding that I wasn’t quite lined up right and when I closed in the door would get gradually off center resulting in a splash dive into the station.

Making this trickier is the control scheme itself. I can rotate left and right and pitch up and down but cannot turn left and right. I.e. To turn left I have to rotate 90 degrees first and then pull up or down. It’s not at all intuitive for anyone raised on X-Wing and Wing Commander.

All in all I wasn’t sure that playing this was such a good idea after my first attempt. I’d not managed to get anywhere and had more or less decided to give it another quick go and then swap to Elite Plus instead but on the Tuesday something clicked and I suddenly started to get the hang of it. I found myself able to dock every time, building up a little money in the process and Elite had me hooked. That isn’t to say that life became easy but I was moving forward. I said at the end of the last post that I wasn’t going to play another RPG next but starting out in Elite is very much the experience of a starting character in an RPG with everything in the world being against you and having to take baby steps before you can really go and explore.

To get into the game mechanics at long last, Elite is a space combat/trading game with a monumentally large procedurally generated universe with 8 galaxies each with 256 systems to explore. Each system has a sun and a single planet with a space station orbiting that planet. All the trading, ship upgrades and the like are done in these space stations. There isn’t a goal to the game as such although I do understand there are 2 or 3 missions which can be found along the way. I intend to play long enough to see at least one of these – I think the last would require me to be Elite status (9800+ kills) which may be a step too far.

All the planets have different technical levels which affect commodity prices and the equipment available for my ship. I’m stuck with the same Cobra Mark III ship for the duration of the game but there is a good selection of weapons available with various lasers, missiles, extra cargo capacity and most usefully of all an automatic docking computer which saves a whole lot of time even when you do know how to dock.

It’s possible to bring up a description of each planet at any time which offers some clues as to what prices are likely to be when you get there. I can’t pull up a full price list until in system but it is possible to do this while in flight so I can pop into a system, decide I don’t like the profit margin and head on to green pastures provided I have enough fuel. My ship is limited to start with to just 20 tonnes of cargo. There are some high value commodities such as gold and gems which don’t appear to take any room up since they come in smaller units.

Speaking of fuel it doesn’t come for free in this game. It’s only used for hyperspacing between systems and doesn’t drain in normal flight but it’s important to fill up every time you stop. Later in the game I understand I can buy fuel scoops and fly out to the sun to refuel for free. This is a great little detail in a game of this age but it may be a while before I’m equipped to try it.

Gameplay so far has basically consisted of filling my hold as much as possible, hyperspacing between two systems, docking, selling everything and then repeating. I’m following some advice and travelling between low and high tech worlds taking computers one way and booze the other which is raking in the credits now I can afford to fill up every time. 100 credits at the start really is absolutely nothing and it’s hard to make a decent profit when you can hardly afford any cargo to trade in the first place – you need money to make money in Elite. I’ve got myself up to 3000 credits now even after buying a docking computer and a cargo bay expansion.

When hyperspacing into a system I’m always miles away from the planet and have a long approach which is where most of my time has gone so far. There is a jump button to skip ahead if there are no ships around but it’s still quite a slow process. It has been helped by the automatic docking computer once I could afford it. I’ve not got into a whole lot of combat so far and I think I’ll save that and the flight systems for part 3. I can cope with a ship at a time but when I have been set upon by a band of pirates I’ve not been equipped to deal with it and have really been relying on luck and reloading.

After initially putting me off, I think the difficulty is part of what has drawn me in ultimately. It provides the drive to build up my ship so that I can travel more freely, start to take on the pirates, maybe do a little bounty hunting and most importantly get rid of that “Harmless” rating on my pilot screen. I’ve got my eyes on a military level laser next but I’ve a lot more trading to do first.