This is a hands-on review of what I expect I'd be calling, easily, the best game I'd ever played, if only I'd kept my hand in. For I played the original
Elite, the really original one, as first appeared on the BBC Micro in 1984. It was a marvel that stretched that 8-bit technology to its core -- yet as good as I got at it, I wasn't bitten by the gaming bug. I can't claim I've never played anything since -- I lost some decades of my life to
Lemmings -- but
Elite: Dangerous is my first exposure to modern games. It's my first introduction to Steam.
Elite back after 30 years, and Steam in all its 2015 power: I'm really reviewing the game alongside this entire environment, and also exorcising some of my childhood.
I'm going to try keeping my childhood to myself -- I was there, I saw me do it, and you had a childhood of your own -- but do remember that I'm looking at
Elite from a time far away. I would no more have been able to program
Elite then than I could now, but at least back in the 1980s I could understand and appreciate the cleverness of its design, as well as enjoy the game. Plus, there is barely a moment in the new game that doesn't see me sitting here, flying a 2015 ship using a joystick on my Mac, with my teenage self sitting next to me flying a BBC Micro by the keyboard. Here's what I see when I half-close my eyes in front of the game:
This image is by
Paul Downey, and
Trevor Johnson's work was also used in compiling the
MacNN main feature image. Looking at that, you're you're wondering whether that's a ship on the screen. It is: the ships in the original
Elite were all wireframe ones. What I'm looking at is the keyboard on that BBC Micro: here in the UK, you tended to like this machine or the Sinclair Spectrum. Each had their advantages, but I was already a writer enjoying that gorgeous full-size, full-travel keyboard -- with the occasional marathon
Elite session.
For comparison, this is what the current
Elite: Dangerous for OS X looks like today. Look carefully: the differences are subtle.
It's not a fair comparison, because the simple Load New Commander Y/N start to the game has become a multi-step login process with profiles, and then this. There's an image of your first
Elite: Dangerous ship on the navigation controls, and to me that looks vastly better, far more rendered, yet still somehow the same ship. There's no reason why the new game should slavishly follow the original but honestly, seeing that -- and especially seeing the central navigation map -- felt like coming home.
Although if it's home, it's a home that has been surrounded by a freeway interchange, a new city, and an awful lot of paperwork. I don't remember how long it used to take
Elite to start up, but it wasn't fast -- and you know that my 2012 iMac must work at lightspeed compared to my 1984 BBC Micro. The only thing is that the BBC Micro didn't have to put up with Steam.
Steam rises
From out here in the non-gaming world, Steam is big enough that I'm aware of it, and I get that it's a platform. One platform that runs across Windows, Macs and whatever else so that -- as I understand it -- one game can easily run on all the different operating systems around today. Saying that reminds me that we do live in simpler times: today you've got OS X, Windows, Linux and that's about it. In 1984, we had Acorn's BBC Computer OS, Commodore's PET and Amiga and 64, Sinclair's Spectrum system and its QL. Plus Apple II and Mac System 1, and DOS on PCs, and doubtlessly others that I've forgotten (editor's note: TRS-80 Color Computer 4EVER).
Even with today's so few operating systems, it's a enough of an issue that Steam is a clear advantage. Only, again from out here in the non-gaming world, the way that Steam works across platforms feels to me like a limitation. It's an abstraction layer. You gain cross-platform benefits, but you give up something. You give up something that makes the Mac the Mac and presumably on PCs you give up whatever it is that makes a PC a PC.
Now that I've used it in order to play
Elite: Dangerous, I don't think I'm right. I don't think that PC owners have given up anything, and I do think that Mac users are for some insane reason accepting what looks to me to be barely working. So much of Steam reminds me of Windows: it wants you to know and appreciate all the work it's doing for you. Consequently you can't just click Play to play a game, you have to click one play button to get an activation key, and then a second to actually play it.
Except what you get after that second play button is a dialog saying Steam is preparing to load the game -- and there is a tick box to say that you want the game to launch as soon as it's ready. What in the world else could you want at this time? You've launched Steam, you've pressed Play twice, it's a fair bet that you want to, you guessed it,
launch the game.
Just to be sure, though, it also ignores when you've ticked that box, and instead waits there with a third Play button. Okay. You also have the option to view some updates about something. Uh-huh. If you skip that, you get to a login screen which tells you about updates and various other exciting
Elite: Dangerous news items -- and requires you to log in. You've launched the game, press play now three times, but now you have to login. It's not unreasonable that
Elite needs you to login so that it can keep track of your various levels and whatever, but after all this we're a pixel away from needing a retina scan and a note from our mom before it will actually play.
Don't bother getting out your login details, though, because once you click on the button it shows you the login screen with all the details you filled out last time already in place, and ready for you to press a second login button. So you've launched the game, pressed Play three times, and now pressed Login twice. Fortunately, that's it, you're in now -- you just have to press Play again.
Steam is just tiresome. If you go to the support page, there's a search box with a typical "Search Steam Support" line already written in there. You know what happens next: you click in that box, and that helpful text instantly goes away to let you type what you want. Not in Steam. Here, you have to delete back to the start or Command-A to select this, and then delete. You'd wonder if anyone had ever used this, or any other support service except if you go into another search field on the same page -- there are two support search boxes on the page, because of course there would be -- that one works correctly.
The act of launching
Elite: Dangerous is like playing a tedious game by itself, and if you have any problems, it feels as if the available support is only for people who already know the answer they're looking for. I had a lot of connection issues that I knew were down to my Internet, but I followed Steam's instructions on checking support for "connection time outs" -- and there isn't any. Click on Steam's button that says it will give you advice on connection time outs, and it doesn't. Nothing there.
You can hear how narked this got me, and I'm not proud of that, but this isn't even the game yet. Compare this to the Load New Commander Y/N of the original
Elite. Schlepping through this modern version every time means you're not going to dip into
Elite: Dangerous for five minutes during a coffee break, and it was enough of a chore that I went from thrilled to have
Elite: back to putting off playing it.
Then, even when I wasn't trying to play anything, Steam was annoying me with updates and prompts for something or other that I got on any restart and ignored every time. Steam is a little slice of Windows running on your Mac, and I had thought the name was to do with steampunk, but I see now that it is also something that rises from certain things on the street.
Are we nearly there yet?
Elite: Dangerous running on Steam is definitely great running on bad. There weren't actually any rude words up to this point, but now I'm not even thinking rude words from here to the end. The sole disappointment I had with actually playing
Elite: Dangerous is that I couldn't just use a keyboard. There are enough options to power a dozen keyboards, but
Elite: Dangerous needs a joystick, and I bought my very first one solely to play it. I like it, it reminds me of when I once had some lessons flying helicopters.
Elite is reminding me of my childhood, this joystick is reminding me of my youth in the air, I'm starting to feel ancient. I'm starting to feel like the kind of person who says "back in the day" a lot.
Back in the day, though, I only ever played
Elite with a keyboard, and I got so good at it. Right now my fingers go to the right keys to control pitch and yaw, to fire, to dock my ship. Considering that the game was rather simpler then, and considering that you can never check I'm telling you the truth, I'm going to say I was great at this game.
One example: there was then, as there is now, a permanent on-screen display showing the positions of enemy ships, like radar or the DRADIS from
Battlestar Galactica. Dots appear on that display long before you can see them out of the ship's windows, yet I was able to spin around, get a line on them, and blast 'em out of space before the BBC Micro had even drawn them.
Reportedly, you can use a keyboard on the new
Elite: Dangerous, but I was never able to get the ship out of its landing bay until I bought that joystick. I feel handicapped by using that joystick, yet I have to say that there is one area where it was better to use a stick.
Vertigo
Elite: Dangerous needs you to work through rather a lot of training exercises, before you're let loose on the game as I remember it starts properly. Those exercises are clever: they're mostly enjoyable, and they do teach you how to do many specific things. They also trick you into becoming used to flying this ship, even to becoming quite nimble at it.
That's where the joystick sings. The moment the very first training mission began, I was right back in the past. Not to 1984 and the keyboard of a BBC Micro, but to the cyclic of a Robinson R22 helicopter. Every move you make affects every other control, and your sense of up and down, left and right takes a battering as every move also changes your orientation. Seeing that starfield rolling up was exactly as stomach-punching as seeing the ground and the horizon lurch is in a helicopter for the first time.
I got a bit bored shooting at various enemy vessels. I'm not some gaming pacifist: I had quite a good time trying to blast all hell out of Trevithick Dock for no reason. Shooting successfully takes a lot more precision than I remember, but the lesson you learn on these missions is how to recognize when you've got a positive lock on an enemy. I still don't entirely follow what each targeting dot means, but I can unthinkingly recognize when they mean I should shoot now.
Shoot now
Another different and modern aspect to the game is that you are no longer playing by yourself. Once you get through the training and can step out on your own, you can choose fly your ship across a rather crowded galaxy.
Elite: Dangerous is a space game, with plenty of shoot-em-ups, but it's also a trading one. You start off as a very new pilot in a very cheap starship, and work your way up through ratings rather than layers. You can now even join factions where groups of you presumably pick on other factions. Reportedly, you can be warlike or you can peaceably trade away, though I'm not clear what happens when your peace-loving faction meets combat.
The reason I don't know is partly that I'm still reliving the 1980s, and striking out across the galaxy by myself, looking for opportunities, possibly recreating my famous battles of the past. I've yet to join a faction, that actually feels like far too much hard work.
Elite: Dangerous today is a universe with no ending, and I can now lose a lot of time relishing it. What possibly tells me that I'm still not a gamer is that it hasn't drawn me in to joining other people, or agreeing times to play together. These are fantastic features that were unimaginable in 1984, and are perhaps more familiar today. They're familiar enough that I've heard of multi-user games even from out here, and they're familiar enough that I can appreciate how well
Elite: Dangerous does it.
My sole regret with this dip into my own past, and peek into an immeasurably richer
Elite, is that it does come with Steam. I'm told that if you have very many games, then all this makes sense, and that by having exactly and only one, I am having to work through more layers than would be necessary. Sure. Four clicks on four different buttons that are all called Play, two Logins, one copying the activation key and I don't think ever having to paste it anywhere, it's Steam that has held me back from playing
Elite: Dangerous.
Elite: Dangerous requires OS X 10.10.3 or later, 4GB RAM (8GB recommended), plus a 2.3Ghz quad-core Intel Core i5 CPU or better. We're already bored with specifications, but that's how things roll with games and Steam.
Chess never needed an quad anything.
Elite: Dangerous officially costs $60, but in the gaming world the price is seemingly less important than the quads. At time of writing, there is a brief sale on the game, giving you 40 percent off, but there is also the promise of further games in a series. Open your wallet, or your purse, and hang on as you head to the
store on the official Elite: Dangerous site.
Who is Elite: Dangerous for:
You need plenty of time and some patience to get through Steam. Otherwise, it's a game that rather adapts to you: go exploring, go trading, go join a faction and take on the universe.
Who is Elite: Dangerous not for:
If you don't have a joystick, and a spare decade or two, this isn't for you.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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