The other day I popped over to a friend’s place for a beer, some things that are legal in the state we were in and a few hours of screwing around with computer games on his LCD projector. He really wanted to fire up a new space game called Elite:Dangerous that gives you a ship with a star drive and invites you to start a new life as a trader, a smuggler, a pirate, vigilante, rebel, asteroid miner et cetera. Or, if you feel like, you can fly around exploring new solar systems. And exploring can be surprisingly cool – the game has a mind-boggling algorithm that recreates the milky way galaxy at 1:1 scale (really) with physics accurate enough that a team of players with some astrophysicists in it have set out to explore as many of the galaxy’s 400 billion star systems as a thousand or so people possibly can.
Exploring takes time, we did not feel like arbitrage (EVE Online has much deeper tools if you like space trading) and piracy sics the law on your head, so we decided to check the job board for for wanted criminals. And let me say that vigilante life in this universe is quite lucrative. Either violent crime will become an absolute epidemic in space (leaded space fuel?) or else the game simulates a horrible dystopia where where every infraction from murder one to a parking ticket results in an automatic death sentence. No wonder so many of these guys take their ship and run.
The Elite team made some of the best pew-pew space shooters of the past so combat is inevitably fun. However I kept complaining that it felt like flying a plane around in the air rather than Newtonian motion in a vacuum. This is the 21st century, people. Didn’t anyone watch Battlestar Galactica? I found out later that the game has great physics but it defaults to an idiot setting to keep newbies from getting spacesick. We just never thought to turn off. So kudos to the guys who made Elite. I blame the substances.
If you want you can fight a short-ish dogfight with some guy who will never see a jury and then head back to port for your bounty, but as I said either crime or capital punishment is just epidemic in this universe. For every ten ships not yet marked for death you inevitably find one or two just kind of milling around with a bounty on their head. Thanks to the world’s galaxy’s least deliberative justice system it pays pretty well to mill around the cooling debris of your last bounty and wait for the next jaywalker or credit fraud case. Eventually you start flying loops around the local area in search of suspicious folks so you can shoot them, like a trigger-happy neighborhood watch. At that point it dawned on me that this game was an almost perfect George Zimmerman simulator. It felt good. I mean these guys must have done something wrong, right? After all they’re fighting back. Then it felt a little queasy, and then we turned off the game and watched Venture Brothers.
lamh36
Mahn…I thought I was the only one I know who watched Venture Brothers.
My fav show on Adult Swim followed by Black Dynamite. Unfortunately BD was cancelled and this current 2nd season will be it’s last.
ETA: oh and it’s 70 degrees and sunny here in NOLA. I know …ugh..global warming. ..ugh…but this is PERFECT weather for parade season. Hope it last til Mardi Gras
NotMax
Spanakopita!
tybee
the game sounds fascinating.
Baud
The 1000 year space hibernation must be really exciting. :-P
Iowa Old Lady
@NotMax: I want some! Unfortunately, the chances of getting it where I live are slim.
D58826
OT but maybe time for some humor. An 8th grader in Vermont want the state to adopt a Latin motto. Well it didn’t take long for the STUPID to burn brightly. From over at Digby’s place :
The moronic comments went of for pages. It’s just so good top see our citizens manning the barricades against Latin. I’m waiting for someone to make the connectiuon the Sharia MUST have been written in Latin as well (sigh)
Tim F.
@Baud: The space drives go really fast, but it is implemented in a cool way. They accelerate at a constant rate, so at five second intervals you are going 100 kph, then 500, then 1,000, then 5,000 etc. all the way out to high multiples of C. You can pay more for drives that accelerate faster, and in the time that I screwed around with it I did not see a top speed.
To get an idea how big the galaxy is, you still could not hope to cross it if you minimized the window and let it run like that all day.
Iowa Old Lady
I guess this fits under pop culture, but in the new J-Lo movie, one character gives another a first edition of The Iliad. He says he picked it up for a buck at a garage sale. Who knew?
srv
Clearly, you didn’t watch the original BG.
In other news, Bruce Jenner’s media campaign jumps the shark. All we need now is OJ.
Bobby B.
There are some “Big Bang Theory” reruns on tonight. Just saying. PONG RULES!
debbie
@D58826:
Jeez, that’s depressing. I almost moved to Vermont at one point. On the other hand, the Republican state legislator actually sounds sane.
JGabriel
Tim F.:
Or both – which would be Republican utopia.
ice weasel
It’s totally based on another game, “Escape Velocity” by the now defunct Mac game maker, Ambrosia. EV was a game I really loved for a lot of the reasons you listed above. And yes, with power comes abuse of power.
srv
Oh, come on, that was DougJ
JGabriel
D58826:
I saw that one in the comment threads there when it was first posted. I’m pretty sure it was intended to ironic – i.e., mocking the people who didn’t know Latin was Ancient Roman.
But, unfortunately, not 100% sure. Bigots be dumb.
dmsilev
@Iowa Old Lady: I’m trying to wrap my head around the concept of a “first edition” of a set of oral-tradition stories.
Schlemazel
@Iowa Old Lady:
Perhaps they meant the ‘First Addition’ and the album with “Up, Up and Away”. I’d pay a buck for that LP
Iowa Old Lady
@dmsilev: I got stopped on a whole lot of unlikely events long before I got to the oral tradition.
dmsilev
@ice weasel: Escape Velocity (and sequels) were great games, but Elite’s heritage is older than that. The original Elite dates from 1984, about 10 or so years before the original EV.
Iowa Old Lady
@Schlemazel: There’s a picture of the book:
http://thedailyedge.thejournal.ie/the-iliad-jennifer-lopez-1926346-Feb2015/
Cookie Monster
@ice weasel: Nope, it’s based on the original Elite from 1984, which was wire-frame 3D. Nothing to do with the much later EV.
MattF
@Iowa Old Lady: I saw the report of that one. Do you really think the screenwriters had no idea? Seems more likely to me that they were punking the actors and the J-Lo fans.
Iowa Old Lady
@Schlemazel: @MattF: I tried to post a link to the story, but apparently it was out of bounds.
The writer denies she wrote any such stupidity. Punking is always possible.
Barney
@ice weasel: @ice weasel:
No, it’s totally based on ‘Elite‘, by the now defunct BBC Microcomputer game maker Acornsoft. In 1984, they had 1st person, 3D graphics (and a bit of colour – literally they switched the mode of the screen chip half way through the scan to get colour in the bottom section, and better resolution graphics in the top) – in 32K of RAM. They were geniuses. You could even play it on a computer with just a cassette player to load it from. “Elite:Dangerous” comes from one of the original writers, David Braben.
ice weasel
Thank you all. I had no idea.
I wish they had their Mac shipping. I really miss wasting time and brain cells on EV: Override. With the graphics they claim this game has, it would be much more fun.
Howard Beale IV
@Schlemazel: Wrong: “Up, Up and Away” was done by the Fifth Dimension. The First Edition (with Kenny Rogers) did “(what condition) My condition was in.”
buddy h
@lamh36: Adult Swim, I got addicted to Eric Andre. He takes every talk show convention and turns it upside down. A co-host who disrespects him. Guests who (instead of being ass-kissed) are purposely made uncomfortable. Sick man on the street stuff that mocks the tame stuff that Leno did.
Black Jesus was another addiction. I’m looking forward to season 2. Fred Williard bought the community garden property.
Triumph the Insult Comic has a new one on Adult Swim with the dude from 30 Rock. They make a great team of opposites.
I’m old enough to remember pacman in bars, feeding quarters into the “Phoenix” video game, playing “Doom” and “Wolfenstein” and “Carmagedon” (I loved how the cars could self-repair; I wish my own car could do that; I’d save a fortune in mechanic’s fees).
JGabriel
@Iowa Old Lady:
Oddly enough, I have a first edition of Galileo’s Two New Sciences. Picked it up at used book store in Long Island for $30.
More accurately, it’s the first American edition of Two New Sciences, translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso DiSalvio of Northwestern University, published by Macmillan, May 1914.
So, theoretically, the screenwriter could have intended it to be a first edition of some translation of The Iliad – say the 19th C. Samuel Butler, which could conceivably show up at someone’s yard sale because, IIRC, it had a largish printing for the time – but the extra details signifying that got cut from the movie for time or flow or because the director thought it was boring.
D58826
@JGabriel: On e more quote from the post ‘Later commenters jumped in to lampoon the earlier posts, of course. Wonkette and the Vermont Political Observer have more.’ So this one may have been one of the lampooners:-)
Citizen_X
@D58826: “What ‘ave the Latins ever done for us?”
Schlemazel
@Howard Beale IV:
D’OH!
Of course you are right, went for the joke too fast
Iowa Old Lady
@JGabriel: You’re no fun!
JGabriel
@Iowa Old Lady: Me buzzkill.
Cookie Monster
Pointless trivia: Acornsoft was the publishing arm of Acorn computers, makers of the BBC micro who later went on to create the original ARM (originally meaning “Acorn RISC Machine”) microprocessor architecture, descendants of which are now found in almost all smartphones.
David Braben and Ian Bell, the authors of Elite, were just a couple of students who show up with a mostly complete game.
Tim F.
@Iowa Old Lady: That has to be a screenwriter joke. I lol’d.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve been playing Destiny a lot lately, which is a shooter game set in a somewhat fanciful version of the solar system, in which alien terraforming technology has somehow made everything into a version resembling old-timey science fiction (jungles on Venus!)
Anyway, it doesn’t take too long for you to start wondering whether you’re really the good guy. These aliens who swarmed in to take our solar system after our interplanetary civilization collapsed… they’re basically doing what we’d do if the shoe were on the other foot. Some of them present as inscrutable horrors, but some just seem like your basic fighting stiffs. And you’re for some reason capable of mowing them down in enormous numbers.
Steeplejack
@lamh36:
I have loved The Venture Brothers since the start. Also Black Dynamite (movie and TV show), and I’m sad to find out it has been canceled.
On the bright side, I am ordering the new edition of Cowboy Bebop, which until a couple of months ago was available only in an out-of-print and heinously overpriced set.
Steeplejack
@Iowa Old Lady:
I guess it could be a first edition of so-and-so’s translation, but, yeah, doesn’t sound to smart in context.
Iowa Old Lady
@Steeplejack: Maybe it’s Chapman’s Homer.
Tim F.
@Matt McIrvin: That happens a lot in games. Yahtzee has a great review of one of the Killzone series that makes you seriously question why the good guy is good and whether the bad guys are perfectly justified in feeling the way they do.
Then you have Spec Ops: The Line, which makes the point pretty emphatically.
piratedan
ty for the anime comments, it’s good to know that there are some other VB fans out there, I have heard that season six is in the works, who knew that you could have some much fun turning tropes on their head?
May have to break out some BeBop myself, although I may have to do some Toradora instead…
Another Holocene Human
Wow, hanging out with you sounds like fun … not.
Culture criticism with your spaceships blowing up spaceships game.
TBF, you usually hear about how GTA3 was a moral monstrosity but in that game you know you’re a criminal asshole running from the law, but with this post you have just compared my beloved Space Cowboys (Cowboy Be-Bop) to unhinged G-Zims and I have a giant sad now. Go away.
Matt McIrvin
@Tim F.: I get the impression that an early version of Destiny’s storyline actually greyed things out explicitly, and had you turning against the mysterious alien entity that enabled humanity’s Golden Age. It may have been redacted due to executive meddling, but the game’s lore makes hints that things might not be what they seem.
The other thing is, all the different enemy species actually hate each other, and you sometimes jump into the middle of a huge firefight in which two different groups are shooting at each other. You’d think it might be productive to hash out an alliance with some of these folks. (The Awoken, these sort of posthuman space elves in the asteroid belt, apparently actually did.)
FlipYrWhig
@Iowa Old Lady: My guess is they just figured “first edition” means “really old book” and never thought twice about it. Like how people say Jane Austen is “Victorian” because there are like 4 time periods, ancient (togas), medieval (knights), Victorian (fancy dresses), and pretty much now.
Howard Beale IV
Joseph Grado, phono cartridge and headphone manufacturer, passed away, age 90.
Amir Khalid
@Iowa Old Lady:
I suspect some brilliant studio exec done thunk up the concept as a vehicle for J-Lo and ordered up a script, despite the writers’ protests over the lameness and general skeeviness of the idea. Such a “mistake” would have been the equivalent of a disgruntled animal dropping a deuce in its human’s shoe.
ThresherK
@lamh36: You really think you’re the only VB fan here? I would have imagined the off-kilter humor and trope deconstruction would align nicely with the comic sensibility of many a BJer.
My favorite little in-thing about it may be how The Monarch’s eyebrows are probably the most emotionally expressive appendages in cartooning since Bugs Bunny’s ears.
Second favorite: 21 and 24 singing along with Holst’s “Mars” (playing only on the soundtrack, mind you) while “getting the band back together”.
Amir Khalid
@Howard Beale IV:
I own a pair of Grado headphones. RIP Mr Grado.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@ThresherK:
I like “henching” as a verb and a career.
kindness
What weapons do they use in space?
Saw Jupiter Ascending yesterday so I know what they use.
Baud
ThresherK
@Steeplejack (tablet): “Wait, these wings are functional? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell us these things?”
Major Major Major Major
I was telling the husband about this game after reading this and said “and it’s only 30 pounds!” and he stammered and was like are you drunk? What the hell? And I was like. It’s british. It’s a unit of currency. And he was like oh.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@ThresherK:
The high point for me was the two-parter where Brock Samson led the Monarch’s henchmen into battle against the Phantom Limb (LOL) and his minions.
Chris
I’ve been playing Elite since it came out in December, I love it. What’s your CMDR name? I’ll give you a tip of the hat if we cross paths.
CMDR Selwyn
Tim F.
@Chris: It was on a friend’s computer and I do not know his name in the game. I can ask though.
chopper
I ruled at that game back in the 80s. It was when I first discovered how much more money there was in smuggling drugs than in honest work.
Chris
@Tim F.: Ahh I see.
Well you should buy the game, it’s a hell of a lot of fun! There’s still a lot to be fleshed out, the missions are repetitive and shallow, and interaction with players is hard, but given enough time, I thibk it’ll be a classic.
Big Picture Pathologist
ELITE for the C64 is an amazing accomplishment in programming considering the machine’s limitations.
Fast vector-type graphics, sound effects, and a “radar” in the bottom of the screen that showed the location and altitude of all spaceships and missiles in the area (not to mention a huge universe in which to play)….well, it impressed this serious gamer big-time back then.
Sly
There are very few space sims/games that properly model inertia in a vacuum. The Independence War series immediately comes to mind, though the second installment toned down the effects because people who played the first game found it too counter-intuitive. Still, both games are hidden gems.
Personally, I blame George Lucas, who wanted to replicate the movie WWII dogfights he saw as a kid in Star Wars. Having said that, TIE Fighter is unquestionably the best space combat game ever made, followed closely by Freespace which also doesn’t use an authentic zero-g flight model.
pseudonymous in nc
@Barney:
British games programmers in the 80s gained a special aptitude at 3D/vector-style graphics, especially set in outer space, mainly because British home computer hardware was terrible at 2D stuff: no sprite graphics, dodgy colour handling, no sound chips beyond beeps. Not just Braben and Bell, either. It created a very different game aesthetic: less frantic, more monochromatic, atmospheric.