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Frontier: Elite 2 (1993)            

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Gametek
Strategy

512K

Yes
Eng

3.5" Floppy disk
Worldwide


Commodore Amiga






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Your Reviews

Nov 1993 (CU Amiga)   5th Dec 2011 04:27
Well, it looks like dreams can come true, as CU's fairy godmother – Slingsby – grants Tony Dillon his lifelong wish of having the first look at the longest-awaited sequel of the decade.
If I had to pick my all-time favourite game, it would have to be Elite. I bought that particular title the very day it came out on the Spectrum and spent the best part of the next year playing it. When I moved up to the Commodore 64, I bought it for that system. And when I first got an Amiga, it was the first game I bought. Nine years later and I've finally got my sticky little mitts on the sequel. It might have taken an age and a half to arrive, but Frontier – Elite 2 is finally finished and in the shops, and it's an absolute corker!
RUMOUR CORNER
There have been a million rumours concerning what would eventually be in Elite 2. Tales of planets exploding, moon landing and two-way conversation with intelligent opposing pirate captains have been running riot. A lot of the rumours were at least partly correct. You can land on planets. There is some contact with other ships. The rumours of exploding planets bit, though, was greatly exaggerated.

Enough of rumours, though. Time to answer the big question – what is Frontier actually like? Well, it isn't a game, that's for sure. Oddly enough, there seems to be very little in the way of game plot other than the political backdrop to the game. As far as you're concerned, your grandfather has died leaving you a small amount of money and a semi-well prepared ship. After that, you're on your own to do whatever you want. It might sound a little pointless at first, but, in fact, this leaves room for all sorts of adventures and a game that you'll be playing for a lot longer than the five years it took to program!

DO WANT YOU LIKE
In Elite, your main aim was to attain an Elite rating, gained through a combination of trading, destroying other craft and generally excelling in all fields of the game. Not much of an aim, you'll agree, but it was this freedom that made the game so popular – a fact that David Braben knows only too well, which is why Frontier is more of the same. Everything that was in Elite is in here, so you can play it in exactly the same way as the original, but there is so much more to the game that you'd be wasting a lot of the genius that went into creating it if you only followed that route. What your aims are is completely up to you. You could, if you wanted, visit every single planet and moon in the game, but this would take a few months of solid gameplay – even Braben himself hasn't seen every planet in the game! You could aim to become the highest-ranking officer in either of the two military organisations, become the most successful miner in the galaxy, provide the most efficient taxi service ever, be the most notorious pirate in the western spiral arm, the most ruthless assassin, the hottest stock market trader... the list is seemingly endless. In a sense, Frontier is almost a simulation of a completely new life. True virtual reality, if you like!

Elite fans will be happy to know that the old Elite rating is still in the game, but will be amazed at all the other ratings you can collect. As before, you have a criminal record with the galactic police. Do something wrong, and you'll be a wanted person, so keep your nose clean. There are two new ratings for you to aim for, and to explain these I'll need to give you a little background info. The galaxy is in a state of cold war, between the two superpowers of the Federation and the Empire. Both have spies, soldiers and assassins all over the galaxy, and if you should do any work for either, you too will receive a rank. If you want to, you can progress through the ranks of either, but not both at the same time. As your rank increases, so will the levels of missions that you are offered, giving you more and more money and generally helping you to reach the status of god.

MISSION YOU ALREADY!
But hold on a minute, did I mention missions? In the original Elite, there were only a couple of missions to be done, and if you managed to get sent on either of them, you were lucky. Frontier has over 70 different types of missions, and each can be varied in hundreds of different ways. You are offered missions wherever you go, thanks to the handy bulleting board found on every single space station and base. Whenever you land, you can read through the messages which are scrawled there, where some people will be asking for passage, some will be looking for information and the military will be asking for recruits. To begin with, all you will be asked to do is carry a message from one base to another. Do this well and you'll be offered bigger and better missions until the military start asking you to kill people, destroy enemy bases and start spying on them. Remember, this is only one route through the game.

Of course, you can't be perfect all the time, and messing up on any kind of mission costs something. In the military, you might be demoted, or they'll just loose faith in you. This isn't too bad, as you can quickly get back in their confidence. The worst thing that can happen is that your reputation drops. Reputation is something you can't see directly, you can only see the reaction. If your reputation is high, then you will get offered loads of jobs and people will be willing to pay extra. If your reputation is low, you won't get offered much, and it's probably a good time to try another star system.

SPONDULICKS
You might have noticed that a lot of the game seems to based around making lots of money. Unlike Elite, money can get you a lot more than just items to trade with. Of course, there's a massive stock market to trade in (see panel) but money does a lot more than that. You can buy all sorts of additions for your ship, such as bigger and better engines; Hyperspace Cloud Analysers which can check where a ship has gone once it has gone into hyperspace; passenger cabins so that you can run a taxi service; and dozens of other toys too complicated to detail here. Best of all, though, is the fact that you can, if you like, buy a completely new ship! There are over thirty different ships for sale, from small and zippy single crew fighters perfect for combat to huge, lumbering cargo ships that can just about fit inside space station docking bays, You can still fly a Cobra if you like, but why would you want to?

But enough about the background and basics of the game. What is it actually like to play? I'm surprised you need to ask, just take a look at the 97% rating! It doesn't get that for looking nice, I can tell you. It goes without say that the mouse control is incredibly responsive, and that the icon based control panel gives you full access to starmaps and information screens alike and is logically arranged and easy to follow. What makes this game so good is that it feels right. You actually get very involved in the game, right to the point where you really feel like you're in that Eagle fighter, closing in on the Planet Sol, ready to swoop low and land next to the mountain. It's hard to describe the thoughts that go through your head when you're leaving a planet surface and heading for the sun, but the awesome view from your rear window is enough to make you sit back and sigh heavily. If you've ever wanted to be an astronaut, but find that like me you're a couple of inches below regulation height and a few points below the regulation IQ, then just flying around will be enough to keep you entertained for hours.

There are two separate control methods in the game, both accessed by either mouse or keyboard. You can use the original Elite controls, whereby left and right rotate the ship through the z-axis (the one that runs from the nose of the ship to the exhaust port), or you can choose a 'yawing' option, where the ship turns through the horizontal, rather than rotating. The latter definitely feels a lot more comfortable when using a mouse.

PASS THE BUCK
Mind you, half the time you don't need to be flying the ship anyway. Remember how handy the docking computer was in Elite? How you could just point yourself roughly at a space station and the computer would do the rest? In Frontier you have a fully automatic navigational computer, that you can use from the moment you enter a system. Just target a base from the depths of space and computer will mark out the route on the HUD for you. Then kick in the autopilot, and just let the electronic brain take the strain. You could do everything manually if you wanted to, but who would really want to?

Five years is an immensely long time to spend on a game, especially if you're not Lord British, but this game looks like it's been worth every minute. Visually it is the most impressive game I have ever seen, bar none. You have never seen polygons like this before. By this point, you will have loaded the coverdemo and seen the impressive light sourced (with the light taken from the nearest star in the correct colour!) polygons, but you won't have seen the half of it. The detail in this game is simply staggering. Awe inspiring. Toe curling. Of the first water. Stunning. Unbelievable. And loads of words not available in my Thesaurus. From the depths of space, where a planet is nothing more than a single pixel, you can fly in a straight line right up to a building, complete with doors, windows and even signs if it's a ship. You can see cities from space. You can sit on a planet and watch nightfall, or if you've picked the right planet, you can watch a planetfall. Ever wanted to see Saturn set from one of its moons? You can with this game! Ships are displayed with full external numbers and even ID numbers!

MORE PRAISE
The most impressive thing is that it does all of this with little loss of speed. However, the A500 can struggle with some of the cities. For the lower machines, you can turn off the detail, so it isn't much of a problem. It works on a hierarchical system of detail, where the computer only draws the polygons that it really has to. It works like this. Firstly, the machine checks if you can see the planet. If you can, it'll draw it. Then it'll see if you can make out coastlines, and add them. Then it'll add cities, blocks of buildings, then doors and windows. It really puts most flight simulators to shame, I can tell you!

I'm not really sure I can come up with a description of Elite 2 that really does it justice. It's certainly the best game I have ever seen, on any machine. It throws enough challenges at you to keep you going forever, and the amount of things you can change about the game means that you will never get bored of it. A million games in one, Frontier is the game that should earn David Braben a knighthood, if not actually have him canonised. Worth every second of the nine-year wait, without question.


HOW BIG?!?
Elite had eight galaxies, with approximately 2000 planets strewn across them. Frontier has only the one galaxy, but before you start sighing, check out the size of it. For a start it contains around 211 star systems (that's '2' with eleven zeros, or 200,000,000,000 if you really want to be gobsmacked) and each system can have up to twenty planets. Even if, on average, each system only had ten planets, there would still be two billion planets for you to visit! Only about thirty thousand of the planets are inhabited or inhabitable, but that doesn't stop you pushing back the frontiers and checking out the rest of our galaxy. Yes, that is where the name of the game comes from!

WHAT'S NEXT?
What happens next in the Elite saga is in the hands of David Braben himself. Firstly, and most likely, there could be add on disks, as well as new versions of the game, including an Elite war simulation and a serial link version (due to the time advance facility in Frontier, a serial link option wasn't viable). There could also be an enhanced A1200 version, as David strongly believes that the game could run as fast as the A4000 if changed for the A1200. A CD32 version could also be in the offing, which could be more like the PC version, complete with full texture mapping on the ships and space stations. We wait with baited breath.


TRADING MAD!
The International and Interplanetary Stock Exchanges are huge and complicated affairs in Frontier, far more so than the original Elite. Prices fluctuate rapidly during the course of the game and differ from base to base, not just system to system, and they change every day too. If you really want to, you could sit on a starbase and make your money by just buying and selling to and from the same market as it changes, but this is a very slow way of making money. You can predict what sort of price differences exist between systems just by calling up the list of imports and exports, but it's worth remembering general prices in systems you visit regularly as certain trade routes will bring bigger bucks than others.
Interestingly enough, there are a couple of items on each market which are priced in minus figures, which means that you pay someone else to take them away from you. Predictably enough, these are rubbish and radioactive waste, and removing them can be a costly affair. If you really wanted to save money, you could just jettison them into space, but this is highly illegal and strongly discouraged!


THE ORIGINAL, BUT THE BEST?
Probably everyone has played Elite at one point or another, but if you haven't then here's a quick guide. Elite placed you in the shoes of Commander Jameson, space pilot, in the middle of one of eight imaginary galaxies. Trading and fighting your way through the ranks, your aim was merely to achieve a ranking of Elite. Played across 2000 planets and with over 20 different ship types (although you could only fly a Cobra), the game wowed 8-bit owners with its very fast (for the time) wireframe graphics and exciting space battles. The Amiga version was basically a port of the C64 version, with one or two differences. The text menus had been replaced with an icon based system, and the inky black spacecraft had been coloured in with garish primary colours!




THE STAR OF THE SHOW
David Braben is one of the few programmers you can really name in the same name as Geoff Crammond, Sid Meier or Archer Maclean. A digital living legend, his games are few and far between, but each one has been even more spectacular and groundbreaking than the last. From Elite, through to Zarch (later renamed Virus) and finally Frontier, he has strived to create games like never before. We caught up with him at the recent ECTS to find out all about Elite 2.
Q: How long have you been working on Frontier?
A: "About five years, but it seems like 20! It took so long because there's a lot in there! I had a few minor problems with Konami, and that's caused some of the later delays. There have been various problems, such as problems with the music but there's no point in having a detailed autopsy of what happened."

Q: When did you first decide to do a sequel to Elite?
A: "We originally started the second Elite not long after completing the original in 1983/84. I was then working with Ian Bell and we decided what we wanted to do was something that was much more than Elite. However, we found that what we wanted to do wasn't practical on 8-bit computers, so we left it. For one reason or another, we went our separate ways, so I've been doing all the coding."

Q: What was stopping Elite 2 from feasible before?
A: "It was too slow for the complex 3D graphics we wanted to use. It's easy to forget the difference between current machines and the Commodore 64 and it was impossible to add all the extra gameplay features we wanted to do. Once you start to make things general, the whole thing becomes a lot more work. For example, all the other ships do their own things – acts as pirates or whatever – so there's a lot of work that the computer is doing that isn't immediately apparent."

Q: What was in your original design for Elite 2?
A: "One of the things that we thought was sorely missing from Elite was visiting individual planets. There were a lot of other things we wanted, of course. The original Elite was fairly asymmetric in the sense that the player was special, everything else was centred around the player. That's much less so now. Really, the spec that we had then was for a very different game to the one we have now. Then, Elite 2 was a purely military simulation with all the original Elite feel to it, but these are things that in time change and evolve.
Different things become possible. We never really set out with a detailed spec. The way I like to work is to think, 'I've got this idea, that idea and I'd love to do this' and just get down to writing it. Usually, as you're going along you realise that there are other things you can do. For example, one of the things I never planned for Elite 2 was this internal concept of reputation. It's something you can't see, and it's kept secret from the player and, put simply, is what the people of a certain locality think of the player. You can take passengers, and if you don't get them to where they want to go on time, they start bad mouthing you and your reputation drops. Depending on that reputation, different people will have different attitudes to you. One of the things that struck me relatively late in the day, which is slightly perverse but relatively amusing, is that there are charities in the game. If you donate money to charity, it helps your reputation, but only if you donate quite a lot!"

Q: What things did you want to include, but couldn't?
A: "There are always things that either you can't do or don't have time to do. As you're going along you're always thinking of ideas. I think that most of the things I wanted to put in are there. It's not really a case of things I couldn't put in. It's just that life is only so long. There are things that have struck me recently that I would have liked to have done, but I'd have to unpick quite a lot to put them in. I'm sure that over the next few years I'll release add-ons and things – I'm not promising anything but I'm sure I will. I've put a lot of work into this, and one of the advantages of doing add-ons or new version of the game is that anything extra I do is immediate from my point of view. It's soul destroying, working on something for a very long time when you don't see any change in it. You're just doing the background stuff, whereas the stuff that is added late in the day you get an enormous impact from because you can instantly see the difference."

Q: What's your proudest moment?
A: "Probably the astronomical side. It's one of my hobbies as you probably know. The backdrop to the game is very accurate. I've talked to various people in the University Astronomy department about it, and it's as near as I can make it to fit into all the current theories. The most important one as far as I'm concerned is how often planets occur. What I've done is taken all the data for the nearby systems, and that's what they are really like as far as we know. You see, even with the most powerful telescopes we can only tell where the stars are. We can't see if they've got planets or what they're like except for in one system. Those are all in there, right down to Saturn's moons, and they are all orbitally correct. For the other systems, the ones we don't know about, I've tried to generate the planets according to the current theories of how planets form, so you end up with systems that are there. Obviously it cannot show you what is really there, because we don't know, but it's likely to be very close."



I WANT YOU!
One of the best things about Frontier is that there are literally dozens of different roles for you to play, and you can play any one you want, provided you have the cash and equipment to follow though. Here are just a small collection of different trades, plus the items you'll need to be able to pursue that particular career. Trader
This is the backbone and crux of the game. Before you can possibly be anything else, you'll need to spend some time as a trader, ferrying goods from one starbase to another, buying low, selling high and all the rest of it. To be really successful, you'll need a large ship with plenty of cargo space, plus enough armaments to keep you safe in combat.
Pirate
This is just one of the trades all open to you in the original Elite. All this requires is a hard ship and a liking for sitting out on the edge of systems and looking for cargo ships to attack. You'll need a fuel scoop to collect the goods that get dropped, and not mind too much when your legal status drops horrendously, making you the most wanted man in the galaxy!

Taxi/Courier
The ultimate test of your navigation skills. You'll need some passenger cabins in your ship, plus a fairly long range ship. Just check the bulletin boards at each station, collecting people who offer the most money and ferrying them as fast as you can. As your reputation increases, people will offer you more and more money. If you want to ferry packages, you don't need to worry about cargo space, as packages are deemed small enough to travel on your lap without a seatbelt.

Assassin/Spy
If your reputation is high enough, you will be asked to carry out assassination contracts for the two opposing forces in the cold war. Do well, and you'll be promoted through the ranks, offered more and more money for more and more dangerous contracts. A good way to get rich, but incredibly risky, as sooner or later the opposing side is going to send an assassin after you!

Miner
No, not the young kind. This is something else you could do in Elite, just by blowing up asteroids and collecting the rocks with a fuel scoop. In Frontier, you can buy mining rigs, set them up on small moons and mine for minerals which you return and collect later. A slow but sure way to make money.



Iss 54 Christmas 93 (Amiga Format)   5th Dec 2011 04:25
(Anonymous) (Unknown)   24th Nov 2010 10:27
Konnrad (Unknown)   24th Mar 2013 09:16
DJ Spunk (Unknown)   24th Mar 2013 09:15

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This title was first added on 24th April 2009
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