PSA: if you came down here to ask about the "best" space sim, check the video right after this one! i also recommended checking out my other stuff. this is a variety channel! thanks for dropping by :p
Thing about this game, is that so many of us did the combat wrong back in the day. You were supposed to turn the engines off to get regular space combat. If you didn't turn them off, you were engaged in deadly high speed relativistic "jousts" with enemy ships, and once your ship was a certain size you'd always end up crashing into them on one pass or another. At some point, 20 or 30 years on, people found this out and the "oooooohhhhh, that's what I was doing wrong" is palpable every time. The "turn engines off" button should have been described in the manual as the equivalent of "dropping out of warp to engage sublight engines".
@@hatersgonnalovethis You know what, I decided to look it up in case I missed it. And no, it doesn’t seem to be in the manual. Nothing in the combat section, and it only briefly mentions engines off in navigation for complex manoeuvring, and casually notes “some experienced pilots use this in combat”. It’s very much not the standard recommended combat mode that it should be, the manual let the game down here.
Ah Elite 2! It took me 2 years to learn how to use the hyperspace drive (you had to go to the map, select your system within your drive's capabilities and then hit the F8 button to jump). But once I did boy oh boy did I spend my whole childhood/teenage years playing it.
@@Shroom-ToppGoing from the original elite to this was a painful experience. Deep space dogfighting with Newtonian physics was difficult. It put a lot of folks off!
Hyperspace Drive had bug/exploit, if you went far away it reset distance to zero, so fastest way to jump was go far away then jump back to area around you started.
i feel like having that dangerous feeling of space is really important now that you mention it, where the space itself can be a threat and not only hostile ships like the modern ones
@@viejitaloca Yeah things get Hotter a lot faster than Colder so Overheating is always a invisible threat And also Space is Flat so Warships have Infinite Range basically since there is no gravity to bring the shots down or curvature to limit How far You can see so You can have a Warship in the other side of the Milk Way Galaxy aim at You and shot and eventually it will hit You specially if You are traveling in a straight line towards Them or have Them aim up ahead so that by the time You arrive at ahead the shot would have already travel the full distance and hit You so long as there isn't any planets or asteroids blocking the view
@@alface935 That's the terrifying part about space warfare that stays on the back of my mind. The same could be said about shrapnel and debris, as well. If a spaceship/drone gets destroyed and their debris is scattered throughout space, it could travel at high speeds for centuries until it hits another unsuspecting ship full of people and completely destroy the thing, which might even perpetuate the cycle.
@@kirishima638which version did you play? When did hardware finally catch up to the point where you could enjoy? How does it stack against other real-time 3d rendered open space simulator games?
@@dfunited1 here is a video of this game gunning on an Amiga 500, a 1200, and with a modern accelerator (which was NOT a thing in the mid 90s). th-cam.com/video/CTcWH6WSh4Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=2Gq5RRBV9tmZXeja You can see the performance on the stock 500. The Atari ST was similar.
The first three Elite game's analogue of "loading screens" is that solar systems are completely walled-off from each other, and require hyperspace to travel between them. It's a trick - but by golly it's a neat one.
even with those loading screens, you still have tens of thousands of fully scaled solar systems to explore. key words: fully scaled. i'm sure the devs sacrificed their newborns or something because this game SOMEHOW fit on a floppy disk for under a megabyte.
@@viejitaloca_100 days to the next solar system_ That's an entirely different number to what I'm getting. _T = 4.3 x 31536000,_ light travel time from Sol to Alpha Centauri in seconds. _Tt = T x c. / 204000,_ top speed of ships (at least in FFE) is just over 2/3 c, so scale ship travel time. _Tr = Tt / 10000,_ maximum Stardreamer time compression of 10,000x. _Tr = 19879.32 seconds,_ about five-and-a-half hours real time.
Ah, Elite II: Frontier! I spent a lot of time playing this flawed masterpiece on my (accelerated) Amiga A1200, and while being riddled with bugs was a game of breathtaking scope hardly ever seen, before or since. Running peaceful cargo routes in colossal freighters, pirate and bounty hunting, piracy, assassinations and making nuclear missile attack runs on secret moon bases, this game had it all. Thanks for the video and reminding me of some great gaming memories :)
I could be wrong, but I don't think many people below the age of 30 will appreciate just how mindblowing this game was at the time. I'd certainly never seen anything like it before and spent every spare hour for months glued to my screen. Thanks for sharing this and bringing back some happy memories.
You should probably tweak that number. I was born in 97 and played enough games from the time period to know that simulating and rendering large scale stuff like that wasn’t simple in the 90’s
You can even go back further to the initial release of Elite on BBC or C64. It wasn't newtonian physics and you even couldn't land on planets. But for that time the technical aspect of the game was quite astonishing. They managed to get realtime hidden line wireframe 3D. On a C64 in 1984.
Im 18 and always loved retro gaming, some times i enjoy old games more than new ones (AAA industry is very questionable nowadays). I wish there were more of us, Elite 2 and TES Daggerfall are two of my favourite games of all time because of their scale and complex systems that are hard to find in modern gaming.
MegaAlter: had Elite on the Speccy 48k...have a vague memory of the mining laser being one of the best weapons in the game...and the docking computer was almost essential... 😎
I guess part of it is that you can get away with a big empty planet with some simple spaceports scattered across them when your entire screen has like 5 polygons on it, but it looks a lot weirder with 2014 graphics. Still a huge bummer, but I kinda get it.
Cutting edge. Something about games like this just makes me so proud. I'll definitely be showing this to the younger people in my family. Thanks for sharing!
oh yeah, it's huge. from earth to saturn takes a few days in-game, moving at thousands of km/s. neptune and uranus are twice as far away as the gas giants, and pluto is twice as far as they are. massive.
this is one of the good things from the internet, the essence of social networks, showcasing something you find interesting in a proper way without filling it woth bullshit, just raw good content i'm about to watch the latest video!
Noctis IV will always be the best space sim I have ever played. No Mans Sky pretty much took everything from it. Being able to control a ship in first person, to chart a trip to any planet in the galaxy, then, you can land anywhere on the planet. The game was made for dos and it's I think less than a megabyte in size. It blows my mind people don't talk about it more.
Frontier Elite 2, my beloved. Made it to the Panther Clipper with 100MW turret lasers by finding an exploit: In Cegreth it was illegal to have precious metals, so you got money at black markets to take them. Sold them in Cemis for a profit. Do the trip 12 times and you are millionaire.
Even better, on the amiga i lost my ship and had 100 mining drones on it...when i respawned in my Eagle mk2 i sstill had 100 mining drones. It gave me an Eagle with about 250 tonnes internal space. I basically got an Eagle Tardis with an INSANE jump range after fitting all the oversized gear into it.
There are also a few safe routes which you can fly without any weapons at all. Coming across a pirate was very, very unlikely. I think it was Sol and Barnard's Star which I used. Buying robotics or computers and selling them for food, I think. Took a few hours (or days :D) but you'll get that Panther Clipper eventually!
I played this so much, I put the big poster you got in the box on my wall behind my amiga and i used to get my big ships sorted, load them with fuel (and a scoop) and go exploring, you could name planets and allsorts, things that weren't on the map, fighting with pirates, joining the empire just for the neat ships, this game was an absolute blast!
you gotta make sure you actually have an autopilot module installed in your ship. the only way you can spawn with one is by starting at Merlin. Mars and Lave have more difficult starting conditions. then you have to select an object either on the system map or just from your cockpit by clicking on it so it has that green square around it. press the engine button till autopilot activates, and you're off. be careful with planets, though, it has a tendency to spit you out on a direct collision course for them.
First Encounters was my jam for a good while some 20 years ago. It's a slightly improved sequel to this (textures, shading, actual story missions) but it released prematurely and in a buggy state so I used a reverse engineered port called JJFFE with bug fixes and modern system support. Other than that F:FE is practically identical to E2 (which I never knew existed until years later). Really liked the game and the intro music is fantastic. I still hum it every once in a while. Also remember completing story missions was a pain even with a detailed guide (no room for error) but the reward at the end was a Thargoid ship all to yourself! Most memorable moment is a achieving stable orbit 200km above our Moon. Not easy to pull off but somehow I got lucky by not even trying. And landing on a random "8" shaped asteroid I stumbled upon, where sunset happened every few minutes. Yeah very fond memories surfaced thanks to your vid, thanks for that :)
honestly, i prefer elite 2's more simple textureless graphics, they're more charming and timeless i really want to try f:fe, still, it looks awesome thanks for stopping by! :)
Thanks for reminding me that I never did get the hang of this game... still have it on my Amiga 2000 downstairs... on the MASSIVE 170mb (!) hard drive...
@@Rumms-Bumms69 TBH, I honestly don't remember. I actually have 3, but only 1 running solid. 68020 with a video card. I've also got 2 x 500s, one vanilla stock and one with a Viper530 card in it. My A4000 died long ago, but I still have the dead unit. You would think I'd get it running too... but alas, even the power supply on the 4000 case died this last year, when I was trying to build a PI build inside that case.
Oh, WOW! I don't know how many hours I've racked up in this game but "a lot" is a conservative estimate. We (me and siblings) figured a way to be able to take on military contracts for _both_ factions, which was useful. (Pay the fine if you're caught in the opposite system, immediately take on a military contract for the opposite side and, hey, you're accepted by both factions and you can do military missions for both.) We discovered the hyperjump roll-over bug ourselves, so a little triangulation we could jump to just about anywhere in 2 short hops. But the biggest exploit we discovered was that the autopilot would work in accelerated time, but it would ignore the need for decelleration. Jump to a destination system, give autopilot a target, disengage autopilot, ramp up the target speed to more than 200.000 km/s, hit max time acceleration, watch your speed climb, and climb, and climb, and seconds before arrival, while still in sped up time, re-engage autopilot. You could be doing half lightspeed, but the autopilot would snap dock you, or land you, regardless of your excessive speed. It could save you from in-game days of decellerating. No matter your contract, you'd be on time.
I still remember this coming out on 28/10/93. I played it on my A500 for about a month, then got an A1200 in November, and later a 68040 accelerator for it which made a big difference. I had the poster on my wall for years. I'd previously become Elite on the first game (also on the Amiga).
This is the game that had some planets you couldn’t get to in some ships because the ship wasn’t fast enough to catch up with it in orbit. You had to try and go in a reverse orbit in a Panther Clipper to get to them. In the end I found the Imperial Trader was good enough to get to most planets and had enough cargo space to make it worthwhile.
Not quite. The cause is that they orbit too close to a more massive parent body, so the sphere-of-influence code never switches your relative coordinate system from the parent body to the target body. Only the relative body exerts gravity onto your ship, so because it never switches to the target body, you can't approach them "normally". If you match the orbital velocity of the planet while orbiting the parent body, you can catch up to it, but you will go through it, because collisions also are only counted for the relative body. For some bodies it will switch the SOI extremely close and it's barely possible to land if you're very careful, but for several of these the SOI switch would happen inside the ground level and it would immediately destroy you if you manage to trigger it. Additionally, the autopilot "cheats" and it doesn't actually make proper approaches. It gets you close enough and then it warps you to a preset point near your target station or base, regardless of your relative velocity. This also relies on the SOI change and if the SOI change never happens, the autopilot never triggers the "final approach". The autopilot is incapable of doing a full approach in real time, if you use 3x time acceleration or less (which doesn't trigger the warp) it will basically always crash into the planet, because it fails to brake in time.
@@cshairydude Patched conics are used for trajectory planning (in KSP they are used to draw your future approximate trajectory through multiple SOIs; approximate because it's not exactly the same as what the numerical integration results in when you actually fly the path, but it's close). There is no trajectory planning in Frontier, your future trajectory is not drawn anywhere. Frontier has just on-rails planets and stations and the numeric integrator for your own position (and positions of any other ships).
I remember falling in love with this game. It was indeed truly mind blowing just as you say, the sense of scale both as it relates to the actual galaxy but also when it comes to how black hole dense the programming must have been to shoe horn an entire universe onto a 720kb floppy disc.
I bought Elite: Dangerous very early in my gaming life and I still go back to it from time to time. Even as these newer space sims come out, you can just tell how much more experience went into E:D. I hope Frontier comes out with a new title soon to properly compete, I don't mind the expansions as much as other people, but its age is starting to show regardless
E:D was fun back in the day, might even have been my favourite. nowadays it feels a bit directionless and stale, it would be SO cool if they announced a new elite game. thanks for dropping by commander! o7
Actually, Elite:Dangerous is in constant development, is in awesome state right now, and prospects for separate game are (fortunately) between zero and "non existent".
@@catladygames_ Agreed. I have over 5000 hours in Elite Dangerous, and have been playing since 2018. The game has never been better than it is right now. After six years, it's never lost its shine, and I'm always excited to get back into the game. Every time. Tomorrow we start the final assault on Titan Raijin!
I think someone launched his hyperdrive at Paris space port. You could go examine its cloud, to find out where he jumped to. Moving 50 km/s relative to Earth, that is... see that's the beauty of the game... it knows there are no absolute speeds except the speed of light. It already featured what i would then only see in Kerbal Space Program decades later (except for Elite III, that is, but that doesnt really count): Spheres of gravitational dominance against which your speed is defined. The scale of the game, though, is really in its galaxy map - it contains every star in the milky way (sort of - of course it's only an approximation - we dont know all the stars in the milky way) and it is entirely mind-boggling how this was done on a single disc (880 kb) for the Amiga computers. It's basically the same galaxy map as in modern Elite:Dangerous.
To anyone wishing for a modern version of this, the closest we have is Pioneer Space Sim. It's a big rough around the edges and development is glacial, but it's free and highly recommended if you like this particular style of game.
@@notstandingwithukraine9478 Elite Dangerous does not have realistic physics. Even with flight assist off, ships have "space friction" and speed limits, and there's no orbital mechanics or free atmosphere flight. To be completely fair, this is by design and has lore explanations. E:D is a _very good_ spaceship game don't get me wrong. It conveys the _idea_ of piloting a ship better than most. But it's based (more or less) on the original Elite. Pioneer is based on Frontier: Elite II, which is a fairly different experience mechanically.
Both Elite and Elite 2 used 'The Blue Danube' for the docking sequences (once you engaged the autopilot as I recall), although the quality of rendition was obviously hardware dependent. Both Amiga and Atari ST were pretty good in that regard, certainly compared with PCs which weren't yet being marketed as leisure/gaming platforms. Even the C64 version was bearable. I don't think it was on the original BBC Micro version.
Huge congrats on this going viral and thanks for bringing rightful recognition to this amazing game. Loved playing this on my first PC, a used 386DX with 4MB RAM.
thanks! :) it does have orbital mechanics (i'm not sure to what degree) it's actually closer to KSP due to the 3D graphics and closer to elite dangerous and star citizen in terms of gameplay, except actually fun lol the fact that this was released in the same year as the first Jurassic Park blows my mind
@@Shroom-Topp In Orbiter you also may imagine you transport cargo and supplies. You can travel and calculate your costs to deliver cargo and passengers. That is a nice intellectual exercise.
This game feels more realistic and immersive than any modern space game. Theres a magical feeling I get watching this and it’s not just nostalgia, but the memory of being a real space pilot
You went down the driveway to get the mail! One planet, in one star system, out of all the stars in the galaxy, in the 1990s. Man they were cooking with fire back then, but we've only just begun to fully represent the beauty that scale.
If FDev implement such a quality of the ELWs into ED, people will just whine even louder. ELWs in old Elites are just have a level of rocky bodies and nothing more. For proper ELW, FDev should spend a lot of time and money for people's work, there's no such resources. Look at Scam Citizen - 10 years of bugged techdemo with one system, no game, but hey, interiors and ELWs.
This is why i love DOS era games. They where trying achieve technological marvel with simulation and strategy games. Now it mostly about making a good graphics and not about breaking limitations of scale and what could be achived outside of boundaries.
@@dard2240 that's not entirely true though, there are contemporaries to Frontier that were significantly 'prettier' and smaller (eg Privateer) There's always been different developers doing their own takes on genres with their own priorities and preferences for what they want their interpretation to be. It's a good thing!
There was a bug where you could hyperspace in jumps of ~480YL (Been a long time since I have played the game). Got to see a lot of the galaxy. On the Amiga version.
I thought it was 65536 lightyears? Anyway, you could use that to get anywhere you wanted in two jumps that were counted as very short jumps. Perfect for hit jobs.
It was long ago, but as far i remember, i was scared by the magnitude of size differences in this game. The planets were huge and accidentally ramming into them with incredible speed was shocking, but also you could read the radiation warning sign next to the engines on the Cobra Mk III.
I have Thought about it and it would be good to make it, just hoping that someone posts more than this playthrough or posts the game files so i can make models, basic controls and the space factor. This game would be very much able to be brought into the 2020's or 2030's.
Because of that precise game, i've learned about how space is in constant movement and one little miscalculation and you'll be lost in space or you'll crash into a planet at LUDICROUS SPEED!
I made a fortune trading goods between industrial systems and agricultural systems with my Panther-Clipper. It was a great fun to explore different solar systems.
These games are so awesome! Elite: Dangerous is such a massive leap from its roots. Imagine a modern space sim using modern tools/software from Frontier that was created for the players instead of the investors!
I remember the days of playing this in DOS, where first I'd need to run Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker so that it would load a mouse driver that could then work in Elite 2
By whom is it actually underappreciated ? By the people too young to have known or played it back then ? It was mindblowing ! It fit on a single floppy for god sake !
a lot of people can't really fathom how crazy this game is. they see a ship flying and leaving Earth, and they think, "Oh, cool. flight sim" they see a planet looming in the sky, and they think, "Wow, cool skybox." the scale is hard to grasp even for people familiar with the universe, so unfortunately it goes over some people's heads.
I've never been any good at them, but I've always respected the hell out of the early Elite games. The sheer scope and ambition on display is astounding, especially considering the hardware and software limitations of the time.
I loved this game as a kid, a friend gave me a floppy disk of the game, but with no manual, I had no idea what I was doing and had to figure things out by trial and error, I remember taking passengers and putting them out of the airlock, also remember running from the Police a lot, which were both unrelated.
Yep one the best games imo of all time. Spent hours doing missions, exploring, trade, trying out the various ships and equipment. A game for me at the time was simply mind blowing.
The graphics engine for this is also amazing even by todays standards, those arent 10000 polygon parabola dishes, they are literally smooth curves in 3d space, as in each face of that thing is a third order function, this is something you never otherwise see in real time, and only really in serious business engineer CAD software
yeah, people roll their eyes at these graphics and call them "simple" and "primitive" not only are they absolutely stunning for 1993, but they're still pleasing to look at 30 years later. absolute marvel of programming and game design.
Yep, the game is not interpolated polygonal 3d, it has function defined vectors for edges. Its also fully texture mapped, and has that insane scale. This is technology that is impressive today, and it predates fucking wolf3d
@@Shroom-Topp the entire engine design is amazing, rendering is done with a VM, the models are programs, there are so many aspects of the engineering in this that just make me cry tears of... many feelings at once knowing this was not what became the trend in video game development
Very cool! I have only ever played the original Elite and the Elite Dangerous. This is just an amazing accomplishment for 1993. I do remember around that time spending many many hours "playing" Microsoft Space Sim, which was also an amazing piece of software. It contained so much of space on just 2 floppy discs. I'm going to have to fire up an emulator and give Elite II a play. Thanks for the video!
Context: This game released the same year as: - Street Fighter 2 - Street Fighter 2 Turbo - Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition - Mortal Kombat 1 - Mortal Kombat 2 - Star Fox 1 - Disney's Aladdin - Super Mario All-Stars - Super Bomberman - Streets Of Rage 2 - FIFA International Soccer - Jurassic Park (1993) - Super Mario Land 2 6 Golden Coins - The Legend Of Zelda Link's Awakening - Sonic CD - Sonic Spinball - Tecmo Super Bowl - Kirby's Adventure - Tetris 2 - Star War Rebel Assault - Samurai Shodown - Virtua Fighter 1 - Ridge Racer - NBA Jam - Star Wars X-Wing - Myst - Sam & Max Hit The Road - Doom 1 - Mega Man X - Phantasy Star 4 The End Of The Millennium - Virtua Racing - Secret Of Mana
I loved this game! But to be very honest, in the original version combat was pretty much unplayable because you didn't have control over the lateral thrusters. So your only chance was to have the bigger ship. That was fixed only much later with GLFrontier. With direct thruster control, you could make actual use of your spaceship.
I used to spend so much time on this game, it was so very engaging. Figuring out how to got to a planet faster than the autopilot could (without cratering onto it). Using the time accelerator to pick off groups of pirates/hostiles one by one (they fixed that in the next, super buggy iteration). And using my "reverse jousting" technique to destroy 'em all (I once destroyed an Imperial Courier in an Asp using pulse or mining laser). Good times !
I reached Elite status but I'm still a Lieutenant, Federation. I have 12 000 000 in the Bank but I don't like big ships, Constrictor forever! I use a real MT-32 on a 2004 eMac to play this masterpiece
I just remember that the first thing I did while playing this back in the day on PC was flying from earth and landing to the moon. Despite the level of graphics it was a magical video gaming moment for me and any modern game hasn't been able to replicate the feeling quite like Elite 2. I just wonder what kind of modern space sim we could get if we kept the graphic fidelity around the same but pushed everything else to the limits?
omg, yes. More brains should produce these kinds of thoughts! Carrier Command 2 was fascinating in that they kept the original polygonal look but applied modern terrain scale and lighting. I'm screaming inside to see more games mine this aesthetic.
@@granttlcuk I'm getting annoyed about these limitations that modern games prevent doing things because they cannot provide us what we want because it would be impossible to do with the level of graphics they target. Things have gotten very stale already (everything is ever increasingly more expensive and takes longer to produce) and my answer for that would be: just drop the fidelity already and get innovating in other areas instead!
I used to play a flash game as a kid that looked a lot like this but it was like a futuristic jet fighter game and I can't for the life of me remember the name of it
Wow! Thank you for making this video! I tried the early installments in the X series but have not tried the early versions of Elite! Even though I played Elite Dangerous far before I got into X4! Hah. I really aught to give these a try. That is very cool for a game. That must have been AMAZING back in 93. I wonder how it would have been to have been a video game enthusiast back then trying this out for the first time.
Back in high school, I heard network admins complain about the folder "FRONTIER" that was popping up constantly on lab computers. Of course, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. I was playing it from a 5 1/4" floppy disk I had in my backpack. 😼
Love it. I was a huge fan of Elite (I played the Plus version for DOS) and when I found a copy of this game at a big box electronics store back in the day, I immediately snatched it up. It was definitely a learning curve, though. The first time you accelerate to interplanetary speeds and realize that you have to turn your main engines around and slow down before you reach your destination is a little jarring. Because the alternative is you either overshoot by several thousand Km or you become a pancake. It was the first time I really appreciated the distance between objects in space.
![แฉกลโกงงานวัด 2024 [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.106 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/taC5dpP3HXA/mqdefault.jpg)
PSA:
if you came down here to ask about the "best" space sim, check the video right after this one!
i also recommended checking out my other stuff. this is a variety channel!
thanks for dropping by :p
No.
Will do! Frontier is amazing and soooo far ahead of its time. Newtonian physics adds so much.
Its outerwilds right? ¦P
The best space sim is Orbiter
It has to be Solar Jetman on the NES, I've had the game for over 30 years and am still stuck on level 2.
apparently this 157 year old song is copyrighted.
oh well!
edit: good news, everyone! the copyright has been dealt with!
How is this possible? It should be in the public domain.
you're right, it should be.
i'll see if i can dispute it, although i didn't get a strike or anything, so it should be fine.
@@Abstract_Code The song itself is not copyrighted, but this particular recording of it is.
well that's just unlucky lmao.
aparrently it has no effect on the video though, so it should be alright 👍
Heyo, I saw a second dot orbiting earth. Was it another space city?
"within seconds we have climbed higher than most commercial flights"
I wanna see the aerodynamic model on that sensor dish.
lmaooo
@@Shroom-Topp Shields can be aerodynamic.
there's an atmospheric shield you need to not blow up going fast in atmosphere
@@doltBmB A heat shield, similar to what they have on crew capsules and the space shuttle.
i imagine the shield forms a sort of 'bubble' around the ship that negates or significantly reduces drag and friction
That game was mindblowing in its own way. Knowing that the entire game fits on a single floppy is just... Wow...
Couldn't fit Italy and Florida though
What!? Damn, that's _crazy._
@@HallowedError It looks like the UK not Florida.
Extra amazing since Ultima V was on multiple floppies.
I'm quite sure my racing car flew higher in the old DOS game called 'Stunts' when it crashed at top speed
Thing about this game, is that so many of us did the combat wrong back in the day. You were supposed to turn the engines off to get regular space combat. If you didn't turn them off, you were engaged in deadly high speed relativistic "jousts" with enemy ships, and once your ship was a certain size you'd always end up crashing into them on one pass or another. At some point, 20 or 30 years on, people found this out and the "oooooohhhhh, that's what I was doing wrong" is palpable every time. The "turn engines off" button should have been described in the manual as the equivalent of "dropping out of warp to engage sublight engines".
@@TheHongKongHermit ah but it was always fun when a viper bounced off my Panther's shields :D
So Newtonian Physics were in the game? Wicked!
@@TheHongKongHermit well, it‘s all written in thar thic manual which came with the game, if you had the original copy ;)
@@hatersgonnalovethis You know what, I decided to look it up in case I missed it. And no, it doesn’t seem to be in the manual. Nothing in the combat section, and it only briefly mentions engines off in navigation for complex manoeuvring, and casually notes “some experienced pilots use this in combat”. It’s very much not the standard recommended combat mode that it should be, the manual let the game down here.
12 year old me thanks you for that.
Ah Elite 2! It took me 2 years to learn how to use the hyperspace drive (you had to go to the map, select your system within your drive's capabilities and then hit the F8 button to jump). But once I did boy oh boy did I spend my whole childhood/teenage years playing it.
yeah you almost need a degree in theoretical physics to understand this game lmao
so much fun though
@@Shroom-ToppNah bro, I'm sure any person with theoretical degree in physics could play it
@@cicak2404yeah you have to be fantastic to play it
@@Shroom-ToppGoing from the original elite to this was a painful experience. Deep space dogfighting with Newtonian physics was difficult. It put a lot of folks off!
Hyperspace Drive had bug/exploit, if you went far away it reset distance to zero, so fastest way to jump was go far away then jump back to area around you started.
it just needs to be playing at like 10 FPS and with the midi music to fully get the effect :D
True. I don't remember it running slow on a 1200, but that might be because in that era nothing comparable ran fast! I miss that Soundtracker stuff.
I wonder if Johann Strauss II ever considered that his composition would be synonymous with spaceflight when he was writing it.
All because of Stanley Kubrick
he certainly was high as a kite
He was probably primarily thinking about a river going from germany to the east of romania.
This sim scares me with the dangerousness of space, more than any of the newer sims with their fantasies of comfortable and safe ships.
i feel like having that dangerous feeling of space is really important now that you mention it, where the space itself can be a threat and not only hostile ships like the modern ones
@@viejitaloca Yeah things get Hotter a lot faster than Colder so Overheating is always a invisible threat
And also Space is Flat so Warships have Infinite Range basically since there is no gravity to bring the shots down or curvature to limit How far You can see so You can have a Warship in the other side of the Milk Way Galaxy aim at You and shot and eventually it will hit You specially if You are traveling in a straight line towards Them or have Them aim up ahead so that by the time You arrive at ahead the shot would have already travel the full distance and hit You so long as there isn't any planets or asteroids blocking the view
@@alface935 That's the terrifying part about space warfare that stays on the back of my mind. The same could be said about shrapnel and debris, as well. If a spaceship/drone gets destroyed and their debris is scattered throughout space, it could travel at high speeds for centuries until it hits another unsuspecting ship full of people and completely destroy the thing, which might even perpetuate the cycle.
@@avoughtf4u-4corsair19 It gets worst the more We think about it...
Yep, the modern space Sims REALLY need this aspect to be returned!
A planetary landing SHOULD be a difficult and dangerous operation!
That's very impressive 1993.
But misleading: it did not run anywhere near as well on the hardware of the time. It was a slideshow.
@@kirishima638People were more used to low FPS back then, too.
@@kirishima638which version did you play? When did hardware finally catch up to the point where you could enjoy?
How does it stack against other real-time 3d rendered open space simulator games?
@@dfunited1 here is a video of this game gunning on an Amiga 500, a 1200, and with a modern accelerator (which was NOT a thing in the mid 90s).
th-cam.com/video/CTcWH6WSh4Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=2Gq5RRBV9tmZXeja
You can see the performance on the stock 500. The Atari ST was similar.
@@kirishima638 that runs a lot better than I expected it would, especially for the Amiga version.
Todd Howard told me this is impossible. Todd Howard says load screens are the only way.
it just works.
The first three Elite game's analogue of "loading screens" is that solar systems are completely walled-off from each other, and require hyperspace to travel between them. It's a trick - but by golly it's a neat one.
even with those loading screens, you still have tens of thousands of fully scaled solar systems to explore.
key words: fully scaled.
i'm sure the devs sacrificed their newborns or something because this game SOMEHOW fit on a floppy disk for under a megabyte.
@@throwaway6478 which isnt really a problem, unless you were planning on traveling for 100 days to the next solar system
@@viejitaloca_100 days to the next solar system_
That's an entirely different number to what I'm getting.
_T = 4.3 x 31536000,_ light travel time from Sol to Alpha Centauri in seconds.
_Tt = T x c. / 204000,_ top speed of ships (at least in FFE) is just over 2/3 c, so scale ship travel time.
_Tr = Tt / 10000,_ maximum Stardreamer time compression of 10,000x.
_Tr = 19879.32 seconds,_ about five-and-a-half hours real time.
Ah, Elite II: Frontier! I spent a lot of time playing this flawed masterpiece on my (accelerated) Amiga A1200, and while being riddled with bugs was a game of breathtaking scope hardly ever seen, before or since. Running peaceful cargo routes in colossal freighters, pirate and bounty hunting, piracy, assassinations and making nuclear missile attack runs on secret moon bases, this game had it all.
Thanks for the video and reminding me of some great gaming memories :)
And trying to remember where you had dropped off any M4 Mining machines so you could return to them and collect the shit they dug up.
I could be wrong, but I don't think many people below the age of 30 will appreciate just how mindblowing this game was at the time. I'd certainly never seen anything like it before and spent every spare hour for months glued to my screen. Thanks for sharing this and bringing back some happy memories.
You should probably tweak that number. I was born in 97 and played enough games from the time period to know that simulating and rendering large scale stuff like that wasn’t simple in the 90’s
You can even go back further to the initial release of Elite on BBC or C64. It wasn't newtonian physics and you even couldn't land on planets. But for that time the technical aspect of the game was quite astonishing. They managed to get realtime hidden line wireframe 3D. On a C64 in 1984.
Im 18 and always loved retro gaming, some times i enjoy old games more than new ones (AAA industry is very questionable nowadays). I wish there were more of us, Elite 2 and TES Daggerfall are two of my favourite games of all time because of their scale and complex systems that are hard to find in modern gaming.
@MegaAlterSchwede not to mention eight galaxies of unique planets.
MegaAlter: had Elite on the Speccy 48k...have a vague memory of the mining laser being one of the best weapons in the game...and the docking computer was almost essential... 😎
Its the moment when it hit you that they did not put in a time acceleration of factor 10000 for fun...
The fact Elite had atmospheric flight and cities in 1993 but Dangerous is so basic in 2024 is rather depressing
indeed...
@@TurboLoveTrain elite dangerous is from 2014, DEI wasnt even a thought back then bro
@@viejitaloca honestly wild how brain poisoned people are these days. can’t imagine it myself
@@TurboLoveTrain Lol NPC detected
I guess part of it is that you can get away with a big empty planet with some simple spaceports scattered across them when your entire screen has like 5 polygons on it, but it looks a lot weirder with 2014 graphics.
Still a huge bummer, but I kinda get it.
Cutting edge.
Something about games like this just makes me so proud.
I'll definitely be showing this to the younger people in my family.
Thanks for sharing!
I like how Scotland doesn’t exist in the future.
lmaoo
it's probably due to rising sea levels, but i like to think the people of earth unanimously decided to remove it for aesthetic purposes
The map of Earth bugged me no end 30 years ago and still does.
Good incentive to get out there and do some dirty deeds in deep space.
Us Scots have been reduced to a mere spike at the top of England; so much for independence…
@@richardnicklin654 if you think its bad here try playing Frontier First Encounters (the sequel) .... Earth is a dust bowl with no water at all
Or maybe it’s ALL Scotland!
i have never seen this game before, and i am already in love with it because even some modern space sims aren't this big.
oh yeah, it's huge.
from earth to saturn takes a few days in-game, moving at thousands of km/s.
neptune and uranus are twice as far away as the gas giants, and pluto is twice as far as they are.
massive.
Are you kidding? There's the whole Milkyway galaxy in Elite Dangerous! And you can land on almost every planet!
@@notstandingwithukraine9478 same with this game! :p
this game has follow ups,. Elite Dangerous is the modern version, you explore the whole milkyway, its great
this is one of the good things from the internet, the essence of social networks, showcasing something you find interesting in a proper way without filling it woth bullshit, just raw good content
i'm about to watch the latest video!
thanks a lot!! :)
Noctis IV will always be the best space sim I have ever played. No Mans Sky pretty much took everything from it. Being able to control a ship in first person, to chart a trip to any planet in the galaxy, then, you can land anywhere on the planet. The game was made for dos and it's I think less than a megabyte in size. It blows my mind people don't talk about it more.
Starfield 30 years later:
*Loading Screen to enter space*
If this is the second best space sim, the best would be Kerbal Space program?
definitely a good contender, but the #1 spot belongs to another game!
@@Shroom-Topp tell mee which oooone pleasee
you'll have to wait for the next video to find out ;)
@@Shroom-ToppSFS 2?
noooope! 🙊
Frontier Elite 2, my beloved.
Made it to the Panther Clipper with 100MW turret lasers by finding an exploit:
In Cegreth it was illegal to have precious metals, so you got money at black markets to take them. Sold them in Cemis for a profit. Do the trip 12 times and you are millionaire.
Oh. And I found the Targoid ship in orbit around a small planetoid in Polaris 72,-1
man, that's so cool.
this game is freaking awesome!
i'll have to steal your money-making scheme, BTW 😈
Even better, on the amiga i lost my ship and had 100 mining drones on it...when i respawned in my Eagle mk2 i sstill had 100 mining drones. It gave me an Eagle with about 250 tonnes internal space. I basically got an Eagle Tardis with an INSANE jump range after fitting all the oversized gear into it.
@@niklasdahlgren7641 you can jump any distance anyways... you just have to know where to look for the integer overflow.
There are also a few safe routes which you can fly without any weapons at all. Coming across a pirate was very, very unlikely. I think it was Sol and Barnard's Star which I used. Buying robotics or computers and selling them for food, I think. Took a few hours (or days :D) but you'll get that Panther Clipper eventually!
I played this so much, I put the big poster you got in the box on my wall behind my amiga and i used to get my big ships sorted, load them with fuel (and a scoop) and go exploring, you could name planets and allsorts, things that weren't on the map, fighting with pirates, joining the empire just for the neat ships, this game was an absolute blast!
Imperial Courier, coolest thing around!
So far, I've been unsuccessful at getting autopilot working in this game.
But on the upshot, I have managed to crash into Saturn at Mach 37+.
you gotta make sure you actually have an autopilot module installed in your ship.
the only way you can spawn with one is by starting at Merlin. Mars and Lave have more difficult starting conditions.
then you have to select an object either on the system map or just from your cockpit by clicking on it so it has that green square around it.
press the engine button till autopilot activates, and you're off.
be careful with planets, though, it has a tendency to spit you out on a direct collision course for them.
Is that the Mars speed of sound or the earth speed of sound? I suppose results are the same either way at 37+
Too bad the fuel rats wouldn't be available for at least a few centuries... 😂
They helped me out one time! Great experience 👍🏻
First Encounters was my jam for a good while some 20 years ago. It's a slightly improved sequel to this (textures, shading, actual story missions) but it released prematurely and in a buggy state so I used a reverse engineered port called JJFFE with bug fixes and modern system support. Other than that F:FE is practically identical to E2 (which I never knew existed until years later).
Really liked the game and the intro music is fantastic. I still hum it every once in a while. Also remember completing story missions was a pain even with a detailed guide (no room for error) but the reward at the end was a Thargoid ship all to yourself! Most memorable moment is a achieving stable orbit 200km above our Moon. Not easy to pull off but somehow I got lucky by not even trying. And landing on a random "8" shaped asteroid I stumbled upon, where sunset happened every few minutes.
Yeah very fond memories surfaced thanks to your vid, thanks for that :)
honestly, i prefer elite 2's more simple textureless graphics, they're more charming and timeless
i really want to try f:fe, still, it looks awesome
thanks for stopping by! :)
@@Shroom-Topp Some of the new ships were fun, I especially liked the one you spawned in with the default start which looked like a fancy corkscrew
I played this game on AMIGA and I still have it on emulator. One of the best space videogames I've ever played. ❤
Friendly reminder that you cannot do this in Elite: Dangerous
Yeah, Earth is sadly off-limits.
One of my single biggest complaints about E:D. Seemed utterly ridiculous to me they didn't do atmospheric planets, especially Earth!🤷♂️
@@ConanTroutmannbut the dlc did apparantly
Though id love to drift a eagle or cobra or something through a city
@@alazygamer1032 DLC only did planets with thin atmospheres. Earth and other developed habitable worlds are still off limits.
@@alazygamer1032 Nope, no atmospheric planets are landable in E:D unfortunately
Thanks for reminding me that I never did get the hang of this game... still have it on my Amiga 2000 downstairs... on the MASSIVE 170mb (!) hard drive...
Which model? A, B or C?
@@Rumms-Bumms69 TBH, I honestly don't remember. I actually have 3, but only 1 running solid. 68020 with a video card. I've also got 2 x 500s, one vanilla stock and one with a Viper530 card in it. My A4000 died long ago, but I still have the dead unit. You would think I'd get it running too... but alas, even the power supply on the 4000 case died this last year, when I was trying to build a PI build inside that case.
Oh, WOW!
I don't know how many hours I've racked up in this game but "a lot" is a conservative estimate.
We (me and siblings) figured a way to be able to take on military contracts for _both_ factions, which was useful. (Pay the fine if you're caught in the opposite system, immediately take on a military contract for the opposite side and, hey, you're accepted by both factions and you can do military missions for both.) We discovered the hyperjump roll-over bug ourselves, so a little triangulation we could jump to just about anywhere in 2 short hops.
But the biggest exploit we discovered was that the autopilot would work in accelerated time, but it would ignore the need for decelleration. Jump to a destination system, give autopilot a target, disengage autopilot, ramp up the target speed to more than 200.000 km/s, hit max time acceleration, watch your speed climb, and climb, and climb, and seconds before arrival, while still in sped up time, re-engage autopilot. You could be doing half lightspeed, but the autopilot would snap dock you, or land you, regardless of your excessive speed. It could save you from in-game days of decellerating. No matter your contract, you'd be on time.
Show them the 3D Milky Way galaxy map with every f.king star and billions of planets. Tell them this is just one floppy drive 1.44mb game.
I still remember this coming out on 28/10/93. I played it on my A500 for about a month, then got an A1200 in November, and later a 68040 accelerator for it which made a big difference. I had the poster on my wall for years.
I'd previously become Elite on the first game (also on the Amiga).
This is the game that had some planets you couldn’t get to in some ships because the ship wasn’t fast enough to catch up with it in orbit. You had to try and go in a reverse orbit in a Panther Clipper to get to them. In the end I found the Imperial Trader was good enough to get to most planets and had enough cargo space to make it worthwhile.
Not quite. The cause is that they orbit too close to a more massive parent body, so the sphere-of-influence code never switches your relative coordinate system from the parent body to the target body. Only the relative body exerts gravity onto your ship, so because it never switches to the target body, you can't approach them "normally". If you match the orbital velocity of the planet while orbiting the parent body, you can catch up to it, but you will go through it, because collisions also are only counted for the relative body. For some bodies it will switch the SOI extremely close and it's barely possible to land if you're very careful, but for several of these the SOI switch would happen inside the ground level and it would immediately destroy you if you manage to trigger it.
Additionally, the autopilot "cheats" and it doesn't actually make proper approaches. It gets you close enough and then it warps you to a preset point near your target station or base, regardless of your relative velocity. This also relies on the SOI change and if the SOI change never happens, the autopilot never triggers the "final approach". The autopilot is incapable of doing a full approach in real time, if you use 3x time acceleration or less (which doesn't trigger the warp) it will basically always crash into the planet, because it fails to brake in time.
@tylisirn this is extremely interesting
@@tylisirnDoes it use patched conics like KSP, or something simpler?
@@cshairydude Patched conics are used for trajectory planning (in KSP they are used to draw your future approximate trajectory through multiple SOIs; approximate because it's not exactly the same as what the numerical integration results in when you actually fly the path, but it's close). There is no trajectory planning in Frontier, your future trajectory is not drawn anywhere. Frontier has just on-rails planets and stations and the numeric integrator for your own position (and positions of any other ships).
I remember falling in love with this game. It was indeed truly mind blowing just as you say, the sense of scale both as it relates to the actual galaxy but also when it comes to how black hole dense the programming must have been to shoe horn an entire universe onto a 720kb floppy disc.
1:25 lol the groups of grey buildings each take on the form of a swastika
I bought Elite: Dangerous very early in my gaming life and I still go back to it from time to time. Even as these newer space sims come out, you can just tell how much more experience went into E:D. I hope Frontier comes out with a new title soon to properly compete, I don't mind the expansions as much as other people, but its age is starting to show regardless
E:D was fun back in the day, might even have been my favourite.
nowadays it feels a bit directionless and stale, it would be SO cool if they announced a new elite game.
thanks for dropping by commander! o7
@@Shroom-ToppI made a couple video series (on here) in ED, where I did a lap around the galaxy.
man, that's a really big trip!
Actually, Elite:Dangerous is in constant development, is in awesome state right now, and prospects for separate game are (fortunately) between zero and "non existent".
@@catladygames_ Agreed. I have over 5000 hours in Elite Dangerous, and have been playing since 2018. The game has never been better than it is right now. After six years, it's never lost its shine, and I'm always excited to get back into the game. Every time.
Tomorrow we start the final assault on Titan Raijin!
I think someone launched his hyperdrive at Paris space port. You could go examine its cloud, to find out where he jumped to.
Moving 50 km/s relative to Earth, that is... see that's the beauty of the game... it knows there are no absolute speeds except the speed of light. It already featured what i would then only see in Kerbal Space Program decades later (except for Elite III, that is, but that doesnt really count): Spheres of gravitational dominance against which your speed is defined.
The scale of the game, though, is really in its galaxy map - it contains every star in the milky way (sort of - of course it's only an approximation - we dont know all the stars in the milky way) and it is entirely mind-boggling how this was done on a single disc (880 kb) for the Amiga computers. It's basically the same galaxy map as in modern Elite:Dangerous.
To anyone wishing for a modern version of this, the closest we have is Pioneer Space Sim. It's a big rough around the edges and development is glacial, but it's free and highly recommended if you like this particular style of game.
What? Elite Dangerous is by far the closest! Realistic physics, almost 1:1 Milkyway with billions of planets etc.
@@notstandingwithukraine9478 Elite Dangerous does not have realistic physics. Even with flight assist off, ships have "space friction" and speed limits, and there's no orbital mechanics or free atmosphere flight.
To be completely fair, this is by design and has lore explanations. E:D is a _very good_ spaceship game don't get me wrong. It conveys the _idea_ of piloting a ship better than most. But it's based (more or less) on the original Elite. Pioneer is based on Frontier: Elite II, which is a fairly different experience mechanically.
07:50 yooo I was vibing !
Nice use of music, same song as was used during the space station docking scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The whole game was just incredible classical music tracks from composers like Debussy and Holst.
There are direct references to 2001scenes during the opening sequence of Frontier 🫡
@@ConanTroutmann Nice!
@@krashd Cool
Both Elite and Elite 2 used 'The Blue Danube' for the docking sequences (once you engaged the autopilot as I recall), although the quality of rendition was obviously hardware dependent. Both Amiga and Atari ST were pretty good in that regard, certainly compared with PCs which weren't yet being marketed as leisure/gaming platforms. Even the C64 version was bearable. I don't think it was on the original BBC Micro version.
Huge congrats on this going viral and thanks for bringing rightful recognition to this amazing game. Loved playing this on my first PC, a used 386DX with 4MB RAM.
The police is completely ruthless in this game 😂 Loved it though!
god forbid you forget to ask for permission to launch.
then you realise the last time you saved was 3 hyperspace jumps ago...
the *pain...*
A whole space on one floppy.
Looks like an old Orbiter Space Flight Simulator.
Great video BTW.
thanks! :)
it does have orbital mechanics (i'm not sure to what degree)
it's actually closer to KSP due to the 3D graphics and closer to elite dangerous and star citizen in terms of gameplay, except actually fun lol
the fact that this was released in the same year as the first Jurassic Park blows my mind
@@Shroom-Topp In Orbiter you also may imagine you transport cargo and supplies. You can travel and calculate your costs to deliver cargo and passengers. That is a nice intellectual exercise.
This game feels more realistic and immersive than any modern space game. Theres a magical feeling I get watching this and it’s not just nostalgia, but the memory of being a real space pilot
Frontier is EPIC. Was looking for a download to play it for the first time, thanks!
You went down the driveway to get the mail! One planet, in one star system, out of all the stars in the galaxy, in the 1990s.
Man they were cooking with fire back then, but we've only just begun to fully represent the beauty that scale.
You could land on ELWs, back then? Can't do that in ED.
this game does a LOT of things better than ED lmao
What is ED?
@@dantecontreras887 Elite: Dangerous, the modern game made by David Braben, one of the original creators of Elite.
@@dantecontreras887 I should have said E:D, since ED is something that's usually treated with blue pills.
If FDev implement such a quality of the ELWs into ED, people will just whine even louder. ELWs in old Elites are just have a level of rocky bodies and nothing more. For proper ELW, FDev should spend a lot of time and money for people's work, there's no such resources. Look at Scam Citizen - 10 years of bugged techdemo with one system, no game, but hey, interiors and ELWs.
I remember this on my amiga. I loved it
This is why i love DOS era games. They where trying achieve technological marvel with simulation and strategy games. Now it mostly about making a good graphics and not about breaking limitations of scale and what could be achived outside of boundaries.
@@dard2240 that's not entirely true though, there are contemporaries to Frontier that were significantly 'prettier' and smaller (eg Privateer)
There's always been different developers doing their own takes on genres with their own priorities and preferences for what they want their interpretation to be. It's a good thing!
Came for the game, stayed for the music
wait i just noticed you have 28 (now 29) subs, honestly deserves way more attention for niche stuff like this
thank you!
more on the way soon! :p
so many great memories and moments from this and the following frontiers game! thank you for showing this 😁
Can't believe you've never heard of orbiter. You bring great dishonor!
an uncultured swine i am.
i've since done my research, and have found it to look extremely interesting!
That flimsy umbrella really seems to tolerate the acceleration and atmospheric resistance very well 🙌.
There was a bug where you could hyperspace in jumps of ~480YL (Been a long time since I have played the game). Got to see a lot of the galaxy. On the Amiga version.
integer overflow... :D
Worked on PC too.
@@HenningRogge IEEE 754-1993 Folding Points 😁
I thought it was 65536 lightyears?
Anyway, you could use that to get anywhere you wanted in two jumps that were counted as very short jumps. Perfect for hit jobs.
It was long ago, but as far i remember, i was scared by the magnitude of size differences in this game. The planets were huge and accidentally ramming into them with incredible speed was shocking, but also you could read the radiation warning sign next to the engines on the Cobra Mk III.
I played soooo much with this. How badly do I miss Mussorgskij's music in Elite Dangerous.
Mussorgski was added as well? Not only Johann Strauss?
@@notstandingwithukraine9478 In Frontier (Elite II), the game would play a synthesised version of certain pieces of Mussorgskij.
My favorite space sim was EV Nova. The game was fun. The ship customization was cool. The stories felt deep and branching and the world felt endless
Now i want to make a remaster of this...
Edit: if more of the game is posted or if you post frontier: Elite II on an emulator.
that would be awesome!
I have Thought about it and it would be good to make it, just hoping that someone posts more than this playthrough or posts the game files so i can make models, basic controls and the space factor. This game would be very much able to be brought into the 2020's or 2030's.
Because of that precise game, i've learned about how space is in constant movement and one little miscalculation and you'll be lost in space or you'll crash into a planet at LUDICROUS SPEED!
Man, these graphics are truly delightful. I would play the heck out of a brand new game made with them too.
ikr!!
they're so charming and have aged fantastically!
I made a fortune trading goods between industrial systems and agricultural systems with my Panther-Clipper. It was a great fun to explore different solar systems.
If you like elite 2, you might like pioneer space sim. It's an open source reimagination of it.
i've heard mentions of it on other videos about elite 2. i'll give it a look, thanks!
i just checked it out, it looks freaking incredible!!
CANNOT believe this is still going! :O I haven't even looked at this in over a decade. Might have to give it a download!
These games are so awesome! Elite: Dangerous is such a massive leap from its roots. Imagine a modern space sim using modern tools/software from Frontier that was created for the players instead of the investors!
Modern game Devs don't know how to make games it seems... The studious don't either.
So sad.
I remember the days of playing this in DOS, where first I'd need to run Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker so that it would load a mouse driver that could then work in Elite 2
By whom is it actually underappreciated ?
By the people too young to have known or played it back then ?
It was mindblowing !
It fit on a single floppy for god sake !
a lot of people can't really fathom how crazy this game is.
they see a ship flying and leaving Earth, and they think, "Oh, cool. flight sim"
they see a planet looming in the sky, and they think, "Wow, cool skybox."
the scale is hard to grasp even for people familiar with the universe, so unfortunately it goes over some people's heads.
It's so crazy because I remember playing this on my Atari 1040 STE, with one meg of RAM. The game fit on a single 720K floppy disk. It was amazing.
Wow! There better be hyperspeed in that game, because I am not waiting thousands of years (perhaps quite literally) to get to another star 💀
There is.
@@CptJistuce thank the stars, lol 💀
you can hyperspace jump between stars and can fast forward extremely fast to move through solar systems
@@Shroom-Topp Ah, got it
@@Shroom-Toppexcept not always, certain systems are just too big to cross even with time acceleration. Looking at you, Alpha Centauri.
I've never been any good at them, but I've always respected the hell out of the early Elite games. The sheer scope and ambition on display is astounding, especially considering the hardware and software limitations of the time.
@1:24 even comes with some buildings arranged like Swastikas. Still relevant 30 years later I guess.
I saw this too lmao
Beat me to it, but wait till you see notice the big middle shape LOL.
Ill… just assume it’s a coincidence
I loved this game as a kid, a friend gave me a floppy disk of the game, but with no manual, I had no idea what I was doing and had to figure things out by trial and error, I remember taking passengers and putting them out of the airlock, also remember running from the Police a lot, which were both unrelated.
Imagine how much better and more accessible and optimized star citizen would be with these simplified graphics.
it'd still be a miserable experience, but at least it'd be playable.
I spent so many hours meaninglessly flying around and landing at places as a kid. Core memory unlocked.
Ok seemless take-offs and landings in the 90’s. Bethesda should have been taking notes.
Yep one the best games imo of all time. Spent hours doing missions, exploring, trade, trying out the various ships and equipment. A game for me at the time was simply mind blowing.
The graphics engine for this is also amazing even by todays standards, those arent 10000 polygon parabola dishes, they are literally smooth curves in 3d space, as in each face of that thing is a third order function, this is something you never otherwise see in real time, and only really in serious business engineer CAD software
yeah, people roll their eyes at these graphics and call them "simple" and "primitive"
not only are they absolutely stunning for 1993, but they're still pleasing to look at 30 years later.
absolute marvel of programming and game design.
Yep, the game is not interpolated polygonal 3d, it has function defined vectors for edges.
Its also fully texture mapped, and has that insane scale.
This is technology that is impressive today, and it predates fucking wolf3d
@@Shroom-Topp the entire engine design is amazing, rendering is done with a VM, the models are programs, there are so many aspects of the engineering in this that just make me cry tears of... many feelings at once knowing this was not what became the trend in video game development
@@egoalter1276 it is so criminally underrated from a perspective of engineering and design!
Very cool! I have only ever played the original Elite and the Elite Dangerous. This is just an amazing accomplishment for 1993. I do remember around that time spending many many hours "playing" Microsoft Space Sim, which was also an amazing piece of software. It contained so much of space on just 2 floppy discs. I'm going to have to fire up an emulator and give Elite II a play. Thanks for the video!
3:20 globers propaganda
...
It's not propaganda, it's a fact
It was purely sarcastic
that's just an illusion caused by magnetic declination
Watching the earth pixels turn off as the star pixels are refreshed at 1fps reminds me of my childhood.
Isn’t this the game that was the father of the elite dangerous franchise?
Context: This game released the same year as:
- Street Fighter 2
- Street Fighter 2 Turbo
- Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition
- Mortal Kombat 1
- Mortal Kombat 2
- Star Fox 1
- Disney's Aladdin
- Super Mario All-Stars
- Super Bomberman
- Streets Of Rage 2
- FIFA International Soccer
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Super Mario Land 2 6 Golden Coins
- The Legend Of Zelda Link's Awakening
- Sonic CD
- Sonic Spinball
- Tecmo Super Bowl
- Kirby's Adventure
- Tetris 2
- Star War Rebel Assault
- Samurai Shodown
- Virtua Fighter 1
- Ridge Racer
- NBA Jam
- Star Wars X-Wing
- Myst
- Sam & Max Hit The Road
- Doom 1
- Mega Man X
- Phantasy Star 4 The End Of The Millennium
- Virtua Racing
- Secret Of Mana
same year as jurassic park is actually NUTS
@@Shroom-Topp Game not Movie
I loved this game! But to be very honest, in the original version combat was pretty much unplayable because you didn't have control over the lateral thrusters. So your only chance was to have the bigger ship. That was fixed only much later with GLFrontier. With direct thruster control, you could make actual use of your spaceship.
I used to spend so much time on this game, it was so very engaging. Figuring out how to got to a planet faster than the autopilot could (without cratering onto it). Using the time accelerator to pick off groups of pirates/hostiles one by one (they fixed that in the next, super buggy iteration). And using my "reverse jousting" technique to destroy 'em all (I once destroyed an Imperial Courier in an Asp using pulse or mining laser). Good times !
I reached Elite status but I'm still a Lieutenant, Federation. I have 12 000 000 in the Bank but I don't like big ships, Constrictor forever! I use a real MT-32 on a 2004 eMac to play this masterpiece
This is incredible, especially considering how old this is. The scale and how it never cuts or anything is so so cool!
I just remember that the first thing I did while playing this back in the day on PC was flying from earth and landing to the moon. Despite the level of graphics it was a magical video gaming moment for me and any modern game hasn't been able to replicate the feeling quite like Elite 2.
I just wonder what kind of modern space sim we could get if we kept the graphic fidelity around the same but pushed everything else to the limits?
omg, yes. More brains should produce these kinds of thoughts!
Carrier Command 2 was fascinating in that they kept the original polygonal look but applied modern terrain scale and lighting. I'm screaming inside to see more games mine this aesthetic.
@@granttlcuk I'm getting annoyed about these limitations that modern games prevent doing things because they cannot provide us what we want because it would be impossible to do with the level of graphics they target.
Things have gotten very stale already (everything is ever increasingly more expensive and takes longer to produce) and my answer for that would be: just drop the fidelity already and get innovating in other areas instead!
I used to play a flash game as a kid that looked a lot like this but it was like a futuristic jet fighter game and I can't for the life of me remember the name of it
RADICAL ACES I FOUND IT
As decades ahead of its time this simulation is it also shows what a crazy leap technology took in the last 30 years.
The intro knocked me out of my shoes back then.
Countless hours... 😊
it's SO good!
Wow! Thank you for making this video! I tried the early installments in the X series but have not tried the early versions of Elite! Even though I played Elite Dangerous far before I got into X4! Hah. I really aught to give these a try.
That is very cool for a game. That must have been AMAZING back in 93. I wonder how it would have been to have been a video game enthusiast back then trying this out for the first time.
Addicted to the original Elite a decade before this. An astonishing piece of programming.
Back in high school, I heard network admins complain about the folder "FRONTIER" that was popping up constantly on lab computers.
Of course, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
I was playing it from a 5 1/4" floppy disk I had in my backpack. 😼
it's amazing how you still got radio signal that far away from earth, only to be interrupted by the occasional solar flare
This was my first ever space game that I got in 1995... Hooked ever since
This is insane. I love that this exist, i have never hear of it until now.
I remember playing this game from 2002-2004. It was impressive and I came to know about space, Sol (Sun), and planets from this game.
Love it. I was a huge fan of Elite (I played the Plus version for DOS) and when I found a copy of this game at a big box electronics store back in the day, I immediately snatched it up. It was definitely a learning curve, though. The first time you accelerate to interplanetary speeds and realize that you have to turn your main engines around and slow down before you reach your destination is a little jarring. Because the alternative is you either overshoot by several thousand Km or you become a pancake. It was the first time I really appreciated the distance between objects in space.
that's what makes this game so mindblowing to me.
it makes you appreciate how truly ENORMOUS space is.