Best Review oif Elite: Dangerous Ever.
- Thread starter shadragon
- Start date
Goose4291
Banned
Last edited:
Allow me to help. With non-zero punctuation, of course.
Man, you don't see this kind of thing much these days, a title consisting of two adjectives. Remakes of nostalgic games that rely on crowdfunding to pay for all the rose-tinted glasses on the other hand, that's slightly more common. But let me skip to the end for a moment - I quite enjoy playing Elite Dangerous but that comes with the qualifier that I am a bit weird. And also quite enjoy playing Euro Truck Simulator.
There's something relaxing about completing incredibly long-drawn-out but totally uncomplicated tasks. Set your GPS, put your favourite podcast on and while away the hours sticking your head out the window pretending to be a King Charles spaniel. In Euro Truck Simulator I mean, not in Elite, that would end horribly. I think this would be a better world if we could all be more open about our weird pleasures. We might find that perhaps they're not as weird as we imagine. When I finally had the courage to stand up and say, "you know what, I actually really like taking crystal meth", you'd be surprised how many of my cellmates were on the same page.
Being over 30 and everything, I may be one of the nostalgia suckers Elite Dangerous is aimed towards but I'd have been interested nonetheless. A bit of space trucking to catch up on some podcasts and, every now and again, fight someone to the death with lasers. There's long been a tendency for PC space sims to be rather dry affairs caught somewhere between Wonders of the Universe and Microsoft Flight Simulator where you need to use half the something keyboard to activate the cupholder, but thankfully El Dangeroso seems to be on my level, and all the essential functions could be mapped to my 360 controller. Most of them, anyway - oh for one single solitary additional button I could map to the something landing gear. But no, I guess I'll just have to keep the keyboard on my armrest like Wesley Something Crusher.
Of course, the game was starting out with negative points because I hate games that make you download a special installation client for it alone. I hate uPlay and Origin enough for forcing me to leave the Steam comfort zone, but they're for all the games by a single company so it makes sense, in a treehouse fort, no-girls-allowed kind of way, but installers for lone games? That's the kid who stays alone at home smashing frogs with a hammer. I know it tends to be de rigeur for MMOs but I'm not sure why you'd think Elite Dangerous was an MMO, I mean they have the Solo Play option right there on the title menu. Anyone who clicks on anything else has only themselves to blame. I get quite enough grief from all the NPC ships thankyou very much, and at least their dialogue has been spellchecked. I hasten to add of course that Solo Play apparently doesn't mean the same thing as Offline Play. You still have to have an Internet connection even when you're not playing alongside other players and I have no idea why - maybe they're constantly gathering data on who's the best pilot so they can pass the details on to those aliens from The Last Starfighter.
But anyway, the usual sales pitch of Elite is that you can fill whatever role you want - Space Trucker, Space Explorer, space Blackbeard if you can figure out how to set your beard on fire in a low oxygen environment... Before any of those though, you do have to put in some hours as Space Carpout. There are a few things the game is bad at explaining because it hails back to a time of manuals longer than Anita Sarkeesian's list of grievances. I scraped through combat training and thought I was ready to blaze the trail of Space Commander Yahtzee, Hero Of Space. What's that? A notorious pirate whose name is an oblique reference to twentieth century science fiction is wreaking havoc in the next system? Leave it to me, chief! I'll just warp right over there and then there's only five hundred trillion cubic kilometers of space the scoundrel could be hiding in. Turns out if you've been sent to find something in a star system you're supposed to investigate random unidentified signal sources, and if you roll a six it'll be the thing you're looking for. So after a few false starts I tracked down my prey. "Your days are numbered, villain!" I declared, and then I opened fire with my starting lasers, which had about as much impact as an attempt to spread marmalade on an angry walrus. "Erm, well I never said it was a small number," I said, before being smeared across time and space.
Probably smarter to keep your head down with looting and trading until you can replace your twin laser pointers with actual weapons. So I found some ways to make money, it's hard to predict what the best cargo to move will be but for that reason it's very satisfying when you do start making profits. Yes indeed, I'd say to myself, call me Space Commander Yahtzee the Second, Hero of Shopping. And then I investigated a signal and found some crates of fine art floating in space. I would swiftly learn that cargo found in such a way is classified as illegal goods and a lot of space ports fine you for showing up with illegal goods. In fact more than once I was fined for showing up with illegal goods that I needed to complete a quest in that spaceport, which struck me as very unfair, and illegal goods can only be sold in the black market which [a] not every spaceport has and is on the Contacts menu rather than Commodities so the trial-and-error that was needed to figure this all out made me feel like the world's worst undercover cop. "Hello, could someone direct me to the BLACK MARKET so I can sell all this HIGHLY ILLEGAL CARGO? Thankyou Mr BLACK MARKETEER, I will certainly think of you next time I have some STOLEN GOODS, would you mind spelling out your name and address into this microphone?"
So Elite Dangerous does take a bit of learning. But once I was a savvy star pilot it became very absorbing. It controls intuitively enough that space battles are fun but because they're the exception rather than the rule and most of your time is spent space trucking, then they feel more special because they're just a small part of a larger life you're building for yourself and I kind of like that in a game but again, do bear in mind that I am a weirdo largely shunned by the daywalkers. Maybe I like Elite for the stories it lets me make up in my own head. Don't know if it should score points for that, that's just leaving blanks for me to fill in. Space Commander Yahtzee the Second, for example, met his end after a galaxy-wide police chase when a pirate organisation that had seemed so nice at the time suckered him into shooting down innocent traders. Embittered, his son Space Commander Yahtzee the Third eschewed human company and chose a life of exploring the furthest stars - until his own tragic death when he warped into a sun. Details are sketchy as to why he did this, but his last known transmission suggests that his podcast had just ended and he must have alt-tabbed out of the game to find another one.
Repped!!! That was an uncommonly decent thing for you to do and I'd ask everyone to rep you for putting in that level of work for a simple question.
You sir, rock.
Not to be a , but it's not that big of a deal since he probably just copy-pasted it from http://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
All his reviews are there in written form in case you wanna see them and you have trouble following the audio-form.
Another option is to just watch them on youtube with 0.5 speed for a slower, hilarious drunk Yahtzee.
Oh no, not him again >_> (I think someone else posted that on this forum, I forgot who)
Already pointed out his bias in single-player <_<
Before fanboys eat me, it doesn't mean that what he reviewed is inaccurate, but rather the overall scope of the review is very narrow and doesn't encompass all prominent features of the game.
Already pointed out his bias in single-player <_<
Before fanboys eat me, it doesn't mean that what he reviewed is inaccurate, but rather the overall scope of the review is very narrow and doesn't encompass all prominent features of the game.
This was fun review 
I'd argue he only covers the prominent features of the game - everything else is peripheral (multiplayer, Powerplay, what have you).
The game without those features he talks about wouldn't be a game at all. The game without multiplayer and powerplay and all the rest is still a playable game.
I look forward to Horizons coming out on the XBone so he can do a review for that next
Last edited:
Key wording I'll bring up there is my touching on probabilities.
I've not seen any other videos, so I was running essentially without knowledge on him so I came to the conclusion I had based on my own knowledge of our demographic.
Just stating my reasoning, doesn't change that you're correct :3
I'd argue he only covers the prominent features of the game - everything else is peripheral (multiplayer, Powerplay, what have you).
The game without those features he talks about wouldn't be a game at all. The game without multiplayer and powerplay and all the rest is still a playable game.
I look forward to Horizons coming out on the XBone so he can do a review for that next
And that argument would be flawed in the sense that he clearly have done reviews for multiplayer games that have single player like Evolve where he at least provide proper criticism.
Thus to ignore multiplayer is an intended bias toward solo gameplay, hence why a failure to cover all prominent features of the game, hence why it is an incomplete review in a standardized sense.
I think I argued this already on that last thread.
Last edited:
I don't think he did. First the two texts are not the same. Even a cursory glance shows significant differences in formatting, the spelling of some words and grammar / punctuation. Plus the difference between real English and the sort the Yanks use.
Wiki Version: There's something relaxing about completing incredibly long, drawn out, but totally uncomplicated tasks: set your GPS, put your favorite podcast on and while away the hours, sticking your head out of the window, pretending to be a King Charles Spaniel. (In Euro Truck Simulator, I mean, not in Elite, that would end horribly.)
OffTheRails: There's something relaxing about completing incredibly long-drawn-out but totally uncomplicated tasks. Set your GPS, put your favourite podcast on and while away the hours sticking your head out the window pretending to be a King Charles spaniel. In Euro Truck Simulator I mean, not in Elite, that would end horribly.
If that is a cut and paste, I'll print and eat it. However, even for the sake of argument, lets say he did. He posted it in full, instead of just dropping a link. He formatted it and made it family friendly by removing the swears and words that are objectionable on this board. That puts it above and beyond and is deserving of a pat on the back for that effort.
Credit where credit is due. Yahtzee does have unique presentation. I just binge watched a couple of dozen of his reviews and they are hilarious. He trashes everyone equally, but usually (IMHO) for the right reasons.
The date on the vid is Jan 21/15 so this was just after release. Wings, planetary landings, pretty much everything that has been introduced from 1.1 to 2.0 would not have been there, so he reviewed what he saw. Fair dinkum.