Elite is a space trading video game, written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell and originally published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers in September 1984.Elite's open-ended game model, and revolutionary 3D graphics led to it being ported to virtually every contemporary home computer system, and earned it a place as a classic and a genre maker in gaming history. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of "Elite". Elite was one of the first home computer games to use wire-frame 3D graphics with hidden line removal. It added graphics and twitch gameplay aspects to the genre established by the 1974 game Star Trader. Another novelty was the inclusion of The Dark Wheel, a novella by Robert Holdstock which gave players insight into the moral and legal codes to which they might aspire.
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Juego 73: Elite (1984)
Me tiro 5 minutos más flotando por ahí y poto el monitor (motion sickness gang 😎), pero vaya gozada. Adelantadísimo a su tiempo. Y sí, la versión de NES es la correcta, la de DOS es completamente injugable a día de hoy.
A limited, but stunning space exploration game with completely fluid 3D play. You have an overworld and a huge universe to indulge in, but really your options and what to do are limited, when you mostly stick to trading things inbetween planets and shoot pirates who attack you. Buying additions makes life easier, but the primary objective of the game, reaching the Elite rank, is only attainable after you destroy about 6000 ships, which demands an impossible ammount of dedication for one person. More fascinating today as a tech demo, than as a skeleton of a gameplay that somehow wasn't even updated with Elite: Dangerous either.
On the original, BBC Micro version, the controls are nice and tight, and I recommend it. (3.5)
The ZX Spectrum version has nicer wireframe rendering(to be perfectly honest, any port after the BBC Micro hardware is an improvement), but the controls have suffered and for some reason are slippery. The steering never centers but almost as if it intentionally veers off into the sides. I don't know if the programmers tried to make the game more tricky by providing this element of instability to the controls, but it is not useful in the slightest, and makes flying and navigating the cosmic waters a lot more taxing than it already is. (1.5)