Oolite Bulletins

chaos syndrome wrote:

Tried ArcElite and hated it (never could get the hang of the mouse controls, and keyboard, while still an option, just wasn't manoeuverable enough).

It was awful at first, but rewarded perserverance well.

flirted with BBC elite, but never matured into a full on affair - i was young and shallow...

Speccy - bit older, bit wiser, knew a class game when i saw it. I was hooked for ever more...

BBC B Micro Tape Version.

I dreamt of the time when I could buy a disk drive and get the disk version.

There were only a handful of ships on the tape version, amongst other things, but I still played it to death.

C-64, loading from a floppy disk. Piloted the Cobra with an aftermarket Atari stick and keyboard. I HATED that stupid Lenslok!! Which idiot though that up, and why wasn't he shot?

Tried Elite Plus later on, on a PS/2. Goodbye Lenslok, hello improved graphics, but I didn't think the play was any better.

Messed with FFE some after that, but the bugs, one-sided combat model, and overcomplicated flight model made it a painful experience at best.

Then came TNK, xElite, and Oolite in that order. Spacer's Nirvana at last!

I got the first Elite from a friend for PC. Immediately loved it! Didn't play it enough to become actually Elite, though. And I never got the secret mission (assuming it was in the version I had)...

Next, I bought Frontier and FFE when they came out.

Frontier being the better game of these two as for controls and stuff, but the broadness of FFE was also very appealing to me. I just love this type of games.

On Amiga, a game was released with the name Federation of Free Traders (FoFT), which was heavily inspired by Elite, but also allowed the user to trade in space whith whomever was around and not hostile... Never saw that on PC, unfortunately.