ELITE FRONTIER

It all started for me with an Acorn Electron (remember them!).  I had it for a few years before I found Elite.   On my first flight I was killed by half a dozen police ships out of  Lave.   Well, how was I supposed to know that you weren't to shoot at the space station.   My second flight, I crashed into the planet Diso. I was trying to land on it!

It wasn't long before I achieved ELITE status.  It was quite fun to trying to get the RIGHT ON COMMANDER! message at each session.

I eventually got a BBC model B to play the special missions.  I never seemed to find that bloody ship, where did it go?

Hey it was in COLOUR.  I tried to play this on my first PC, which was a 486sx-25, and it seem to be very fast. Too fast that it was unplayable.   I had to use a program to slow the machine down to play it.

It wasn't as good as the BBC version.

What a game to come on a single 3.5" floppy disk.  The galaxy was massive.  How many planets are there???

With this version you got a map of the galaxy, which I put up on my wall.   The galaxy had the Sol system with Earth, the Moon and all the other planets.   It still had the trusty old Lave system.

The auto-pilot was a let down.  It believed that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line even if it is through a planet or a star.  You had to manually fly around a planet if you wanted to land on the other side.

Some of the missions on the bulletin boards seemed to have impossible completion dates, especially if you had a larger ship that took a lot longer to travel to the planets within a system.  People complained about the flight controls being to complicated during battles.   It didn't take me a long to adjust to the realistic flight controls, once I knew what was going on.

When I want to play Elite, this is the version I play!  I even have it running a window running under Windows98.

What did they do to this?  The graphics were supposed to be better, flight controls improved and there was to be Thargoid missions.

First the few good bits.  The planets and ships where more detailed and some ships had moving parts.  The newspapers that you subscribed to were an interesting read at first.

Various patch disks were issued to fix a lot of bugs.  I didn't seem to be affected by these, but I put them on any way.  The only problem I had was with the Thargoid missions.  The game would lock up when you left the Thargoid station.  This was the first bug that I really needed a patch disk for.

More bugs, more patches, more bugs, more patches.  I wrote this version off and went back to FRONTIER.
 

ELITE IV - ???

The rumours of a new version 4 that was to be released sometime have faded.  You can find interviews with David Braden on many web sites.  Apparently, the flight controls and graphics were are to be similar to Wing Commander Series.

What I would like to see in the new version?

Ships:  More, more and even more ships.  Technology should improve during the game and be available to the player. 

Missions:  Mission update disks to add to the current missions in the bulletin board system and special operations.

Battles: There should be fleets of ships, military patrols, pirate ambushes and trade ships with fighter escorts.

I would like the game redesigned to be completely "modular" and take full advantage of the computers we use today. To allow new components to be introduced later, could enhance the game or even take it to another concept.  It could be more than just a space trading game, but a fully customizable platform that could allow Commander Jamison to venture a military career, manage a space station, Terriform a planet and manage resources or even build a galactic empire and conquer the galaxy. 

If there is going to be a ELITE IV, please make it GREAT! - P L E A S E !