Elite 2
Elite 2 - 3/12/08 to 12/06/09
Frontier Elite 2 was a computer game which was too easy to play for months and months and months, just because of the open endedness of it all. It was a whole universe to do what you want with. The opportunities seemed endless - bounty hunt, mine asteroids by laser or planets by a mining machine, buy a hyperspace tracker and become an assassin, work your way up in the military in one of two warring factions, piracy on the frontier (yarrr), or be paid for taking radioactives off peoples hands and dumping them into the nearest star.
Me, I loved the good old fashioned nice and safe trading route between Sol and Barnard’s Star in the heart of Federation Space with few pirates to be seen and nice unfluctuating commodity prices and supply.
The ship you’re looking at is a nicely rendered Eagle Long Range Fighter Mk 1 passing by a gas giant. You wouldn’t really want to own one of them, they have naff all cargo space.
Combat in Elite 2 could be an absolute pain, the same sort of realism that allowed you to slingshot yourself round a large planet or star to save on fuel would get in the way of combat. Unlike arcade space battles that you sometimes see where ships can stop and turn round with no trouble at all, in Elite 2 ships carried momentum and so it was all too easy to go on an attack run and fly straight past the ship you’re fighting, or looping round the other ship about 20 km away and well out of laser range, for about an hour. Automated docking was a must have ship accessory for the same reason.
Long distances in Elite 2 were travelled by hyperspace and you could see jump gates forming at the arrival point of ships still in hyperspace which made setting a trap for the poor vessel easy. A bug in the game (and it had many) also allowed you to travel *some* really long distances and explore proper frontier worlds, mainly for mining, and I think this is where I first got the name Prospecting Distant Systems. It always seemed like a waste you couldn’t colonise planets though. Hadar had 3 earth like planets just ready for someone to stroll in and start their own empire commune.
Finally, one of the great things about Elite 2 was it was chiefly written by one person, David Braben. The days when one person wrote a best selling computer game are sadly long gone.
If you know the game then you may like to reminisce in the intro below (if you haven’t then - warning, includes midi soundtrack).
There’s talk that Elite 4 is being worked on. If this is true and when it comes out, I think you can safely assume no changes to this site for months and months and months.