🚀 go-pugleaf

In news:CXQyg.768$jt.680@trnddc04,
DocScorpio <DocScorpio@strupra-spammeros.com> typed:

> "Dunny" <paul.dunn4@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:mWKyg.8719$oo2.2594@newsfe4-gui.ntli.net...

>> In news:vKbrg.23101$Ap2.12826@trnddc03,
>> DocScorpio <DocScorpio@strupra-spammeros.com> typed:

>>> What bothers me most is that you only have one
>>> ship.  Not one ship at a time as in FL (which was bad enough), but
>>> one ship.....period.  This is a totally weird game-design decision.
>>> Having many ships, even one at a time, is not a novel concept.  It's
>>> been around since Elite.

>> ISTR that Elite only allowed you to fly one ship.
>>
>> That storyline mentioned (flying your ship looking for the ship that
>> killed your dad) sounds awfully like the Elite story too.

> I may be confusing it with FE2.

Ah. Yes, that would account for it :-)

Buyable/Flyable ships first made an appearance in FE:2, and continued in 
FFE. Not that FFE was a patch on FE:2, but some people seem to like it.

Original Elite came with just the one ship, Cobra MkIII, and no chance to 
fly others. There have been hacks to some of the 8bit versions which allowed 
you to buy other ships and I even heard of a version that allowed you to 
utilise wingmen, but I've personally never seen them.

Elite also came with a story - in the form of a novella, "The Dark Wheel", 
of which the Dark Star One story is basically a ripoff. Of course, in the 
days of 64kb of RAM there wasn't much room for a story so you made do with 
the bonus material included in the box :-)

Nowadays they ruin every single space game with either a story-arc, 
jumpgates or crappy flight systems. Freelancer is about as close as I've 
found to the ease-of-flight of the original elite, but it totally cripples 
the gameplay in much the same way as the X-BTF series by forcing the user to 
utilise jumpgates rather than having an onboard hyperspace engine. I've 
always wondered why that was.

D.