An Estival ST Festival: Elite

Elite

Elite is, along with Star Raiders, one of the earliest examples of what we now consider to be "space trader" games. Those that, instead of forcing the player to perform a linear series of escort missions like almost every other space sim at the time, allowed them near-unlimited access to a near-unlimited universe and a handful of suggestions they were free to pursue to acquire fame and fortune. The more famous you got, the stronger your opposition became. But, of course, with all that accompanying wealth you'd be well-equipped in expensive ship upgrades to deal with any danger that might arise.

Elite was originally released in 1984 for the BBC Micro (and its little brother, the Acorn Electron), but it's the 1988 Atari ST port we'll be playing here. They filled in all the vector ships of the original; that's how classy this version is. (Elite, famously, only contains one piece of music: a MIDI version of Strauss' The Blue Danube Waltz, a cute homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're into MIDI classical music, by all means have at it.)

Welcome to Elite! Is that planet bleeding? Is it Ego, the Living Planet?! The cosmos holds many mysteries, my friends.This sexy door wedge right here, the Cobra MkIII, is our state-of-the-art cruiser. It has a very limited initial loadout, but is built for customization.Jameson is the default commander name, and I didn't feel compelled to change it. It feels... right. As you can see, we have a single pulse laser and a trio of missiles. We're essentially only one step ahead of a depowered Samus Aran.Lave is the default origin point of any new game of Elite, but the rest of the galaxy is procedurally generated from scratch. Vast amounts of systems and planets, generated on the fly by an algorithm. It was the only way to create a game this immense on a single floppy.The nearby planet of Orerve seems friendly enough, being as it is "reasonably" famous for its hospitality. You especially want to pay attention to a few elements: the Economy and the Tech Level. I'm not sure if the type of government actually matters, though I'm sure the medieval society down there would probably disagree.Looking at this one, we can see that the economy is poor and agricultural. You generally want to head to poor planets to buy goods, and wealthy planets to sell them. For an agricultural planet, you'll be able to buy things like food and textiles on the cheap, and then sell them on industrial planets for profits. It's all about figuring out what people want. (If I had to hazard a guess what that thing on the left wants, it's probably your children's souls.)And there's a lot of transportable good to choose from. I was never entirely up on which resource is the best for trading at any given time (I usually went for the alloys, in the middle), but you're always spoiled for choice. The numbers indicate the value of them on this particular planet, while the bars indicate their available quantity. (I think. It's been a while.) (Also, maybe don't trade slaves?)What's nuts is that this is only one galaxy of several. You'd be hard-pressed to visit every planet in this game, as there's tens of thousands. It's a bit like trying to go everywhere in Daggerfall, except you don't clip through the world quite as often.Here's where any prospective space trader's eyes start to light up. Depending on the Tech Level of the planet (which is why I said it was the other important consideration), you can purchase all sorts of upgrades to your ship, if you have the cash. Spending all your cash on one upgrade is inadvisable, as you need some amount to fill your cargo bay for the trading journey ahead. Fortunately, getting a larger cargo hold is just one of many upgrades here.Because I'm a busy guy and have no scruples that I am aware of, I've activated the game's cheat mode. Well, it's actually the in-game Hex editor. You can break the game in several interesting ways from here, but for now I'm just going to spawn some valuable cargo real quick.That's more like it. I can grab myself a few early upgrades here, but the one I really want isn't available. I'll have to head to a more technologically advanced planet to purchase it.When purchasing a new weapon, you have the option of placing it at any cardinal direction: front, rear, left and right. I've equipped both the front and back of my craft; the latter comes in useful if you want to keep your distance from a target while firing on them. You know, like a coward. Like what I am.Now that's a beefy tech level. I'm sure I'll be able to get everything I need there with my misbegotten funds. Better look out for those tree grubs, though.I'm automatically deposited outside of the space station (thanks automated launch sequence!)And I set my hyperspace for launch. It'd take hundreds of years to get there otherwise, which is a big incentive to make sure you don't run out of fuel.Who doesn't love an elaborate hyperspace sequence? All it needs now is Tails and Sonic running down this thing.And we're here! Well, kinda. The hyperspace drops you off a few hundred thousand miles from the destination, so you have to fly the rest of the way.It'll take about ten minutes, but fortunately we'll have a bunch of space pirate encounters to keep us busy.Now that I have a rear laser, I can keep an eye on incoming enemies without interrupting my sprint to the planet. You could shoot at the system's star if you wanted to, but it'll come alive and eat you if you do. (No it won't.) (That's Super Mario Bros. 3 I'm thinking of.)The planet, by the by, is what this big green thing is, if you were wondering. There's a little compass directly above and to the right of the radar below. By centering the orange dot, you ensure that you're heading towards the main objective.The radar displays various points of interest in the vicinity; pale blue, like our Adder friend here, is a hostile vessel. Yellow are friendly/peaceful vessels and purple is anything inert floating in space, such as asteroids, cargo containers and space stations.Destroying a pirate gives you a bounty reward based on its difficulty, but it also boosts your reputation a little. As you blow up more pirates, you become more renowned, and you'll attract stronger pirates who will attack you in groups. Ah, the travails of being popular.I feel like I should separate each of these with elaborate "FIVE MINUTES LATER" narration boxes. It takes a while. More time to be reflective of the great and terrible endless space in every direction. Space is creepy as hell.So... seen any good space movies, recently? Read any good space books?Ah, here we go. The big S on the radar down there indicates that we're now in range of the local space station. We can't land on the planet directly, because of those annoying issues with burning up in the atmosphere and then requiring an enormous amount of thrust to leave it again if we didn't burn up, so instead we do all our trading at the orbiting space station. (In the sequel, Frontier, you can totally land on planets and it's rad.)You might've noticed that the compass was a little off in that last screen. That's because the main objective marker is now pointing at the space station instead of the planet. Come closer you big green son of a dodecahedron. Alas, if I had a docking computer, I'd be able to dock automatically. As it is though......we have to fly this baby in ourselves. All it takes is a little patience and the right angle and-Um. Let's call a mulligan on that one.Excellent! I successfully docked inside the station. Eventually.First things first: buy a goddamned docking computer. You're meant to play this game for several hours before you can afford one of these, but that manual docking is just way too harrowing. There's more fun stuff here: escape pods (which don't come as standard, unfortunately), stronger military-grade lasers and - if we get bored of this galaxy - an intergalactic hyperdrive system.We also see a different array of cargo to buy/sell here. Sometimes it's too difficult to predict the prices, so you might find yourself noting down high-value items and simply going back and forth for a while between two known quantities. It's especially useful in the early game. Once you have your space legs, that's the point where you start flying off into the unknown.

For now, though, we'll leave Commander Jameson and his ludicrous fortune alone. He probably has enough to buy his own tropical planet and retire, but ideally it would take many hours to reach this point with innumerable obstacles along the way. For instance: Thargoids, the imperial insectoid alien race that will overpower practically any human vessel you can throw at it. Those giant pink octagon battleships of theirs still give me the willies, but not as much as getting trapped in witchspace - an endless void absent of stars that sits in the subspace between hyperdrive jumps. There's nothing there besides other vessels that have also had their hyperdrive crap out on them, and the Thargoids are the only other ones besides yourself and high-level pirates with that tech. It's like getting stuck in an elevator with your worst enemy.