Hello everyone,
I have managed to pull myself out of Mars Horizon (It really is silly addictive) to drop Day 6’s post … What’s behind the door ?
Some kind of triangle starfighter … another variation of TIE brought in for the Rise of Skywalker movie. A curious design … the triangles allow for more visibility up and down to the sides at the cost of a bit of blanking at the level position.
Probably good for combat, not so much for docking up at the end of the mission.
Today’s game is Elite … but I think I’ll be diverting off to other things as well. The original Elite dates back all the way to 1984, for the BBC B Micro. It was a marvel of programming, managing to fit an incredible amount into the limited amount of memory available in that computer while still delivering quite a decent little game.
The graphics were the limit of what could be done at the time, so a bit of imagination was needed to fill the gaps. No worries there. They started you off in a pretty basic Cobra Mk3 and the aim was to trade up to build a ship capable of bounty hunting and then grind up the combat ranks towards Elite.
There’s a bit more about the game here (including pictures that I’m not going to steal). Linky !
Ahh there we go. You’d get a “RIGHT ON COMMANDER!” on screen every time you got 256 kills. You needed 512 kills to get Dangerous ranking. I managed to stay in to get Deadly a couple of times (2560) but always resetted before going on to Elite.
I still like the early game in games like this, even in the new Elite. I’ve been having those temptations to reset the character again and build up from scratch.
Elite’s come a long way since those humble beginnings 36 years ago. I played on the Atari ST as well, which was a nice upgrade to the original with better graphics and some subtle adjustments to the combat model.
I’ve been meaning to do some more flying in Elite Dangerous too, although that’s kinda holding due to an addiction to Mars Horizons. Let’s see what I posted before …
The sparks and vortices around the side of that rocket were not concerning at all.
That was the first shuttle. Oh well.
Must watch Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets again some day. That was a very silly movie but I enjoyed it.
Oh ! There’s my dinner bell going off.
Stay safe, be well.