| | | ArcElite, aka "Elite: The New Kind," is a re-creation by Christian Pinder of the original BBC Micro version of Ian Bell and David Braben's seminal space-trading game Elite, written to run on modern Windows PCs. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.new-kind.com/arcelite/ (note that that is a more recent version than the one on the site's "Download" page; not sure why Download still has an older version).
Ian Bell, who released many versions of Elite for free, endorses E:TNK on his site http://www.elitehomepage.org/pc/index.htm --although he links to an out-of-date URL for it.
It's hard. On my first try, I bought some cargo, not knowing what was a good price, locked my navigation on the nearest star system, launched, drifted for a while while I looked at the controls--and then just exploded. Maybe another ship launched behind me and collided with me?
On my second try, I again bought cargo blind, launched, moved aside in a hurry, hyperspaced to the nearest system, jumped, flew (this part was a bit slow) to the station, lined up to dock manually (I think you had to do this at first on the C64 version with which I was vaguely familiar), then accidentally hit C, activating the docking computer, which docked me safely. Whew! I sold my cargo and realized I had just sold it for a big loss, and that I should actually write down the trade prices on each planet I visited. ... I don't really want to do that. But obviously the Food and Textiles I had sold at this second system were cheaper here than on the first planet--so I bought them back, set my navicomp for the first planet, and jumped.
Flying to the first planet's station, a pack of ships came along. Actually, flying to the second planet, I'd encountered some ships, and some of them shot at me--but then some also started...blowing up? I think they were fighting, I dunno; they went away, fortunately. This time, though, they were all after me, and did not go away. I started trying to zero one one to lock a missile, but was really bad at using the roll and pitch keys to line one up--if I try this again I'll have to map the buttons to my arcade stick. They shot me a lot and I blew up.
It runs smooth and looks decent in colorful solid polygons. |
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| | | OH. I was confused: Christian Pinder made TWO re-creations of Elite: one of the original BBC Micro version--that's his "Elite: The New Kind," and one of the Acorn Archimedes version--that's "ArcElite."
Wikipedia describes the Archimedes version of Elite thusly:
"The Acorn Archimedes version, ArcElite (1991), written by Warren Burch & Clive Gringras and regarded by Stuff magazine as the best conversion of the original game,[54] added intelligent opponents who engage in their own private battles and police who take an active interest in protecting the law. As well as such gameplay enhancements, the version also exploited the more modern hardware by using polygon mesh graphics in place of the wire-frames. The game world no longer seems to be centred around the player; freighter fleets with escorts go about their own business, pirate formations patrol lawless systems looking for cargo to loot and mining ships can often be found breaking up asteroids for their mineral content. Unlike the mythical Generation Ships of the original, rare occurrences of other non-pirate entities mentioned in the manual really can be found in the Archimedes version: geometric formations of space beacons; hermits living among the asteroids; abandoned ships towed by police (although Dredgers and Generation Ships are confirmed not to exist in Archimedes Elite).[55] The Archimedes version of Elite was originally written to be a space trading game called Trojan - however the obvious similarities eventually meant that to avoid a potential lawsuit Trojan had to become an official Elite conversion.[56] ArcElite was one of a number of games released for free by The Icon Bar website in 2006.
So that first group of apparently battling ships I encountered probably WERE battling each other! |
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| | | | Just realized Crazy Taxi (see entry 1455) is Elite only with The Offspring instead of Strauss. |
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