ScuzzBlog: Diaries July 2020
Entry 3rd July 2020: Post 1: Frontier Elite II - Games without boundaries.
Frontier Elite II - Games without boundaries.
The essence of the blog is to record what I do each day whilst I
maintain the collection. Sometimes you trip across things you
have done before, but, in the spirit of the blog it is what I was
doing. So I make no apologies for featuring Frontier Elite II,
yet again. Some things are worthy of an extra mention.
My challenge today was to find homes for my most treasured Amiga
games boxes. I will not dwell too much on this as it is the
subject of another blog. However, I was again drawn to the Elite
box art and style of game that is truly unique. I have played and
searched so long to find a suitable alternative. I guess Eve Online
is the closest, but even here it never gets close to capturing the
joy and freedom of a 'plotless' game.
In Frontier Elite you really are free to explore and do just what
you want. For years, I had the wall chart of the Elite universe
on my wall. The chart had been hastily removed and re-pinned so
many times it became more a pin cushion than a chart.
I have lovingly kept the box or should I say boxes. I never did
play the original game, which I have somewhere locked deep in
a tub somewhere. There really was never any need to play the
earlier one as version II suited my needs. This is truly an
Amiga classic and an essential for any collector. Forget the
bloody download... GET THE BOX.
This game is a simulator and a very good one at that. It features
a trading combat system on an epic scale. It is the creation of
David Breben and published in 1993 by GameTek as a follow up to
the 1984 classic Elite. It is truly an open ended game that utilises
an accurately modelled universe for you to traverse. The Universe
is a magical wonder generated by the game and which obeys the laws
of physics with its distribution of materials to give the star
system a random yet accurate structure. And all on one single DD
floppy disk.
I played this game almost from launch and it has stayed with me
the whole era of my Amiga interest. I would place it on a par to
Sensible World of Soccer when it comes to game depth. Both games
are of a scale that defies the laws of disk capacity to game content,
to the point you are left believing that magical mystical powers
are at work, to be able to create so much from such tiny disks.
Try it !!
Anyhoo, my boxes are safely in their new home as are the others.
I did pause for a while to fire up another classic ' Wing Commander '
but chose not to blur my Elite experience with detail on what is
yet another magical game for the Amiga.
So get in your ship and go explore, trade and fight and take full
advantage of those 250,000 lines of code on a single 880KB floppy.
Frontier Elite II - Games without boundaries.
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