Haha! That was actually better than I thought it was going to be, they've treated their subject matter with respect. Thanks for share.
Jumping in to unknown systems still terrifies me.
- Thread starter Ulrich Wolfe
- Start date
Haha! That was actually better than I thought it was going to be, they've treated their subject matter with respect. Thanks for share.
Prophetic visions of Elite Dangerous? Must have been some particuarly bad acid...
That actually sounds pretty horrifying to me!
I am sure the original Elite contributed (although I don't remember that bit specifically) to my childhood nightmares, but I was always very much interested in astronomy. Being born the year Voyager left Earth, I remember seeing those first close up images of Jupiter and Saturn, and it absolutely mesmerised me. Something about the enormity and power of those objects must have found its way in to my dreams. I remember being keenly aware of how small and insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things; our pale blue dot and all those other planets forever locked in a deadly embrace around a star; and the more I learned about stars, the more that thought terrified me. Sometimes Elite tugs at that childhood conceptualisation, and I feel that emptiness again. Of course, everything I envisioned as a child was in fact terrifyingly real, but it was harder to process back then.
Having some prior knowledge of astrophysics (aided by Pink Floyd and a little suspension of disbelief) does make the game more frightening. After all, a person who has no idea about the true nature of lions would not fear putting their head in a lion's mouth. Jumping so close to uncharted stars (especially stellar remnants) is clearly an insane thing to do, childhood memories aside.
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Black holes do the same thing to me. I know that they are not dangerous but they make a shudder go up and down my spine.
That was a great mission. On the Spectrum version you could also rescue people, but you had to go to the Buy screen to get the request, and you'd end up with 20T or 35T of Refugees if you accepted. A limitation of the UI, I guess. Understandable that some players may have missed it. There was also a minor bug of sorts with this because when you got to another station the survivors would reward you with 100 units of gemstones, and the Sell screen would only accept two-digit values for transactions. You had to sell it in two lots. Not a game-breaker by any means (unlike the bazillion-credit Save bug that was basically click-to-win), but an early example of programmers not thinking through the consequences of adding extra features.
It was my second favourite Spectrum mission after the cloaked Asp. And yes, it was terrifying.
Years ago I gave a copy of that album to an old-school Floyd fan as a gag gift. Once the eye-rolling had stopped he got quite into it. He and his missus were fans of a range of musical genres, which probably helped. I can imagine some prog-rock purists wanting to set fire to their own ears.Haha! That was actually better than I thought it was going to be, they've treated their subject matter with respect. Thanks for share.
There used to be a way to deal with this. If you clicked on the next star/jump, you would se any other stars in the system pop up in the galaxy map, and they would be in their correct position (in terms of orbit location, not distances), so if you looked at your approach line and if it crossed a star, you'd know there is a chance things may get interesting. Of course, you did not know if it as a contact binary, or just a partner star 500000Ls away.
Now that you end up facing towards your next jump, it'd take a slightly different approach, but should still be viable. Thing is, it happens so rarely (I think I've had a proper emergency twice in over 10000000 light years), that I just wouldn't ever bother.
Z...
You should hear their version of the Seargent Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album.Haha! That was actually better than I thought it was going to be, they've treated their subject matter with respect. Thanks for share.
I've listened to the Dark Side album twice now, but I've just found the Radiohead album...
Edit: Sorry 'Radiodread'