FRONTIER (Elite II) by David Braben - Licensed by Konami. Distributed by Gametek

ED. - An OOPS from your infamous editor... I inadvertently left out this excellent review of Frontier written up by Michael McCarthy last issue and I'm making restitution! I hope you all enjoy it. My apologies again, Michael.

Reviewed by Michael McCarthy

          Computer       Graphics        Memory        Disk Space 
Minimum   386            MCGA/VGA        2MB           720KB

Control:  Keyboard,Mouse,Joystick. I recommend a mouse.
  Sound:  Soundblaster, Adlib, Roland.
  Notes:  Needs 590KB of low memory, and 1MB of EMS.

Reviewed version 1.0? on: 386/40, 4MB, no sound board.
     Reviewer recommends: 386/40 or 486/(50/66).

A long, long time ago, two people called David Braben and Ian Bell wrote a game called Elite. The first time I ever saw it was on a friend's BBC microcomputer. Ever since then I wanted to have a computer, and soon after I got one (an MSX). I think I played Elite for about three years. (And that DOESN'T show my age. It just shows I started playing games when I was very young ;-)

Elite, for those of you who were on a desert-island since computer games were invented, is a 3D vector-graphics, space-buckaneering game with a difference: You have to trade to stay alive. And there is only one objective: To become Elite.

Elite is one of those games that create a genre. A few PC-wannabees: There's Space Rogue, Wing Commander, X-Wing, and, most recently, Privateer. I haven't played Privateer, but from what I've heard and seen it seems that it's Elite with a linear plot and bitmapped graphics. The distinguishing mark of Elite however was and is that you're free to do anything YOU want to do. Even when you've become Elite, there's no 'Congratulations, you've finished the game, now go and drink a cup of tea and talk to your friends again.' message. You just keep flying. There's no end, and no objective other than staying alive. Many people these days find that very disconcerting. People expect there to be only one thing that they can do in order to progress in a game. With the result that some people cheer if there's two different things they can do in order to progress. That doesn't make a game non-linear though. It merely makes a game bilinear. Elite gives you complete freedom.

Why do I go so deeply into Elite ? Because in many ways Frontier IS Elite. Not for nothing is its title Elite II. David Braben decided a long time ago that it was possible to write a better Elite than Elite and five years ago he started writing Frontier.

First of all he included a (nearly) infinitely large universe. There are about 100 billion star systems in one galaxy. This is supposed to be our own galaxy in the year 3200, and indeed the Solar system is modeled to the last moon. The nearest few stars are also modeled, so you can fly to Alpha Centauri or WX Ursa Majoris. The rest are more or less randomly generated. You start of as the grandchild of captain Jameson, the protagonist of Elite, with 100 credits and a very basic spaceship. (There are three different starting positions available, but I've found that you should use the recommended one unless you know what you're doing.)

Piracy is rampant and the universe is in a state of cold war. There is the Empire, which is basically the bad guy, (but that didn't stop me from working for them because they offer more missions :->), the Federation the good guy, which has Earth as its capital, and the Independents, which owe allegiance to neither. Usually an entire star system belongs to one of these, but there are also star systems where the Federation occupy one planet and the Empire another. None like any of the other two.

One objective is still to become Elite by killing as many other ships as possible (without getting the cops so annoyed that they'll place a bounty on your head.) This time however there's a few more ratings to be improved. You have an imperial and a federal military rank. The two are not really mutually exclusive, but neither likes you working for the other. You advance in ranks by doing missions. In the beginning these will be parcel- ferrying missions, but as you advance there will be assasination missions, spying missions and bombing missions. You can do as many of these as you feel like. Of course you can also choose not to work for the military at all.

You also have a hidden reputation. If you don't deliver parcels on time, don't fulfill contracts etc., this will go down, and you won't get those types of missions anymore or won't be able to demand more money.

Whenever you're docked at a space station or landed on a planet you can trade your cargo on the stock market, upgrade your ship, buy a different type of ship, talk to the police (in order to pay your fines), get your ship serviced, or read the Bulletin Board (BB). The BB plays a very important role in this game. Here you can pick up passengers, hire crew, buy and sell illegal goods, find assasination missions, find packages to be carried and sometimes find exceptional offers for the cargo you're carrying.

All in all according to the box there are 82 basic missions, but I suspect a good few of those are 'take a parcel/military plans/etc. from here to planet Y'. There is an opportunity to follow any career you want to : Intergalactic trader, space pirate, miner, passenger liner, mercenary. If you feel like it, you can do it. I think the mercenary career is the one that is most encouraged by the game's structure, but nobody forces you to become one.

The graphics engine is one of the best available. There are texture mapped polygons, and curved surfaces. Unfortunately Braben neither had the graphic artists that Origin has, nor the Star-Wars licence that LucasArts has, so the colours are a bit tacky now and again and the atmosphere while flying is good, but not great. Also, because the game was simultaneously developed for the Amiga, only 16 out of 256 colours seem to be used for most graphics. On the other hand, the colour of the star determines what shade all objects look, which is a nice touch. I do have one major gripe: space is blueish. Dark-blueish, mind you, but any sort of blue is too blue for me. Space should be black with white dots.

The best part of the graphics engine is the immense amount of detail you get. You can fly over and land on planets, and the feeling of flying down to a planet and seeing its atmosphere slowly grow is quite stunning. The same goes for taking off from a starport in a city and slowly seeing it recede in the distance from your back window. (with your receiver dish twirling round on the back all the time.) As you get closer to objects, the amount of detail increases, so you can, for example, read the writing on the bill-boards. On my computer, graphics don't really get jerky even in the highest detail mode, with texture mapping on, near large objects, unlike in X-Wing, which, to my mind anyway, got really jerky near large ships. The graphics are a bit 'blockier' than X-Wing's. I find the graphics better than X-Wing or Wing Commander II, but some people will inevitably disagree.

If you buy a game in order to impress all your friends with its graphics, don't even think about getting Frontier. Go and get Rebel Assault or something. Frontier is good looking, but it's not the oh, wow, I-never- thought-games-could-be-so-sexy kind of good looking.

On sound, I have no opinions, since I don't have a sound-board. (Yes, it is possible to play games without sound. But if anyone has a spare GUS lying around, please donate it to me :-) You can turn the tunes that are played on and off individually, which is a nice touch, but as far as I know SoundBlaster support is achieved through using the old Adlib standard, which just about says it all. I just turn on my stereo and listen to Jimi Hendrix, which is good enough for me.

Playing the game consists of two stages: First there's the docked/landed part, where you figure out what you're going to do next. (And how to do it most profitably.) And then you start flying. Usually this consists of hyperspacing to the nearest system where you think you can sell the cargo you've just bought for the highest price. When you've arrived there, it takes about 3 days to get from your hyperspace exit point to a space station. Fortunately, you can compress time and if you've got an autopilot you don't have to do anything until you're landed or docked safely, unless you're attacked.

The first time you're attacked, you'll be confused. Frontier models its spaceflight on real physics, which means you can do things like turning around while not changing your velocity. Also your speed will be measured relative to the nearest large body, which means it's useless for determining how fast you're going relative to the attacking ship. You get used to it after a few times, and it becomes quite easy to kill other ships. People tend to get frustrated because they're used to Wing Commander's model (which is wrong) though. RTFM. In the beginning it's much better to trade anyway, in order to get a bigger and better ship.

The biggest shame about Frontier is that after all the effort that was put into developing the graphics engine, the universe, and the tremendous opportunity that is created by the bulletin board system, David Braben forgot to perfect the interface. The HUD (Head Up Display) works quite well, but if you set your target to an attacking ship, you've got to reset your autopilot to take you to your destination after the other ship is blown up. The icons at the bottom of the screen are not intuitive at all and some of them display the current status while others display the status you would get if you clicked the icon. When you're attacked, a message flashes up on your scanner display saying so for about 5 seconds, which means you can't look at your scanner for those crucial seconds.

Computer controlled ships have very weak AI. The police are particularly pathetic. If you shoot at a space station, about 16 police ships will try to launch, but at least 14 of those will never even make it out of the landing bay, because they crash. There are also a few real bugs around. None of these bugs or the inconveniences make the game unplayable, but they take away from what could be a superb game. Don't be deceived by the size of the universe either. It's massive, and you're not going to see all of it even if you spend your lifetime playing Frontier, but one star system is very much like another, and outside the central systems (which still amount to one or two thousand), there isn't an awful lot of human habitation. Braben has said that Frontier is nothing but the skeleton on which modules will be hung (i.e. aliens and more missions). If that turns out to be true, and he fixes those annoyances, Frontier could still become the best game ever. As it is, it's a must-have for any (ex-)Elite player, and a very, very good game for everyone else. It's going to stay on my Hard Drive for a very long time. It only takes up 620KB (not including saved games) after all! And when I get sick of being an imperial mercenary, I can always become a miner, or a smuggler, or even the richest person in MY universe...