I was 17 years old back then and still a high school student. I was interested in astronomy and had a telescope. When I got this game I was absolutely blown away and overwhelmed by the flight physics that outshone any arcade "space" game I had before (in fact i even learned to understand keplerian mechanics with this game it was the kerbal space program of the 90ties). I looked at the floppy disk and thought wow there is the entire Milky Way on there.
I can but concur. I'll tell you more... even the pc version textures (well, excluding that incomprehensible "gravel texture" on some orbital bases' surfaces) have aged pretty well, I'd say. If nothing else, the ground spaceports look so much better in the pc version, than with the plain, solid colour textures typical of the amiga version. Long Live Frontier!
That opening intro of yours Jim is exactly why I love early attempts at 3D graphics and CGI. There's just a certain amount of minimalistic artistry to them that I love. It's also staggeringly hard to believe that the entire game is only 880kbs in size
When there still was artistic control of colors it looked really good. Its when the early shading comes in and everything is multiplied down to black and plastic white highlights are added that it started looking crap
When I was a kid I spent weeks hidden away in my bedroom with the blind down so I could immerse myself in this game. I played it non-stop. Sometimes I would just check out random systems and fly by their planets to see what they looked like. Never did quite master harvesting fuel from gas giants, but I'll keep watching your videos. Maybe you'll explain that.
Excellent video Jim! This game was the reason I didn't get any As during my GCSEs haha (Bs and Cs only) but it was worth it! Okay, so lots of my mates got an A* in Maths or an A in Geography - but did they have 20 million credits, a Panther Clipper and a great reputation with the Federation Army? NO! lol
Hehe, thanks, yeah I know what you mean. I wish I had the old saves from back then though. It's an addictive game and I spent a lot of my teenage years playing it. This and UFO and Civilization.
Heh - For me I think Frontier was the last game I spent any serious amount of time playing before I turned 15 and disappeared into a world of playing guitar badly and attempting to fondle girls... ;)
Used to love playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum +2, and Frontier on my friend's A1200. Currently teaching my youngest the ins and outs of Elite Dangerous, but your videos are amongst his favourites to watch. 07, commander!
Just want to pop in and say THANK YOU for making this series, I wanted to try this game on a whim but ended up loving it and you onboarded pretty well into this magnificent experience!
This is great! I used to play this game all the time, but when I tried to play it again a couple of months ago, I became frustrated because I couldn't remember the controls. I was busy testing around a hundred other games at the time, so I put it back away again. This guide'll have me on my feet again in minutes -- thanks for reopening this game for me!
Absolutely brilliant channel. Stumbled upon it while on a nostalgia trip and searching for games from my childhood. Such fond memories of this game and those times in general. Down the park playing football with jumpers for goal posts then an evening spent with your mates playing games like this. Was truly a classic and utterly mind blowing at the time (For me at least). Really enjoying the channel and the fantastic commentary :) Great sense of humour
Also agree, one of my favourite games of all time, one of the few games up there with Dungeon Master imo. I preferred Frontier to the original Elite....
Thank you very much for doing such a great series on this game. Everything you run through is clear and helpful... Unlike the rest of UA-cam, and the internet at-large. If not for your series, I would have been completely lost getting started!
i've just been looking at these gameplays of frontier and now im super excited for the new elite on kickstarter! this proceduraly generated universe is what i always wanted on a video game! realism on space!! athmosphere/space transition! exploration that makes sense! this is trully the best and most immersive game i know!
I was much the same. So many hours exploring in this game. I did manage to get the fuel scooping working. By the time you could afford to do it you didn't need to, but it was fun to do anyway. It requires some manual flying and a fast ship and the smaller gas giants are better for not falling into uncontrollably. I've been putting off the rest of this series for a while, but when I return to it I will indeed be covering fuel scooping.
I've played both Elite and Frontier on the Amiga (I also played Elite on the C64, but it was too slow, it worked better on the C128). I became Prince and Elite in Frontier, in Elite I never managed to become Elite (I have been close though). Now I'm playing again on pc (Dosbox), less buggy and still the same fun as 30 years ago! I fly in a 60k+ tonnes Eagle long range fighter (using the rubbish jettison trick), with a class 7 hyperdrive (max jump is around 240ly) , 4MW beam laser, 75 passenger cabins, 25 shield units, naval ECM, autorefueller and so on. For travelling to the planet I use the autopilot break, it saves more than 50% space flying time. This game never turns old!
Love the series Jim. I've watched the whole thing. You really captured the feelings I had as I played this game on my dad's 386sx. One thing I would say is that the units of speed are represented as kmh^-1 This means 1000kmh^-1 = 100kmh, an order of magnitude smaller.
Great My Friend !!! The Pc Conversion was made by Chris Sawyer.Playing Frontier, in some Space Ports, I have found the advertisment of "Transport Tycoon" and that was very exciting because I consider "Transport Tycoon" in its Deluxe version, the best Transport Tycoon game ever :). I like that you choose Frontier as the greatest one :) I cannot choose a best one in my dos games history, but probably 20 or 30 best ones :)))
I definitely plan to get back to it at some point. I had ambitious plans for episode 5 that didn't work out, so I'm rethinking that. I have also come back to this game many times over the years. I had heard of Pioneer, but I forgot about it and haven't checked on it's progress. It's looking great and I hope they manage to get it done. Then it will definitely be getting a video series.
Great game - I didnt really need a tutorial, but I enjoyed this so much, I might just watch the rest :) Very funny, very well delivered tutorial. Really glad to see you favour the Amiga version too.
Took me forever to understand how to progress and all, when I did, somewhen ended up in dead space between star systems. Instead of loading a save data, I deleted it or something and that was the end after many many weeks of playing this game. I absolutly loved it. Just started playing Elite Dangerous some days ago. Yeah, cool thing.
I was a huge fan of Elite and when Frontier was first announced, I got very excited. After actually playing it, I came to the conclusion that it was an amazing tech demo, but not much of a game. Besides the fact that it still had massive slowdown, even though I had a Turbo28 accelerator for my Amiga and that every single session ended with the game crashing for one reason or another, it just wasn't that much fun to play. I got more enjoyment from just sitting in space and watching the stations rotate. The Newtonian physics, which all the reviews praised, sucked all the fun out of the game for me. Because of the "realism" of the game, you needed to get your ship up to about 5,000,000KPH using the time acceleration to get anywhere in any reasonable length of time. Then you get attacked and it drops you back to normal time, but your inertia has you locked on course, so even if you turn your ship 90 degrees to the side and fire the engines full blast, all you'll succeed in doing is altering your course marginally while you hurtle through space sideways. You could try facing in the opposite direction and blasting the engines to slow down, but at normal time, that will take you about a week. It's like being strapped in an office chair that's rocketing down a track. You can spin in place, but there's not much you can do to change your course. So dogfights amount to you and the other ship occasionally zipping past each other as you take pot-shots at it. Why couldn't the game have dropped your speed back down to something manageable so that the fights would be more like Elite? Please don't say that wouldn't be realistic because in real life, the chances that two ships would be traveling on parallel courses would be a billion to one. In reality, they would be on mostly perpendicular courses and wouldn't even see each other as they whizzed past, unable to stop and fight. Besides, the autopilot can stop on a dime when it reaches its destination. Even if combat were conducted at maneuvering speeds, it feels inferior to Elite. Go into space, shoot the station and then try to take on the police ships that come after you. With a decent ship, this could be done in Elite, but in Frontier, you're lucky if you can shoot down one or two. Combat just feels like an afterthought. Like Braben never expected that you would ever face combat at less than jousting speeds. Since all the planets have orbits that they follow, it means you have to plan ahead to intercept them, but since you also have to use time acceleration to avoid the trip taking days, it's incredibly easy to overshoot the target. You then have to stop, re-adjust your course, speed up, hit the time acceleration and try again. Of course by this time, the time limit for whatever your current mission is has expired and you get nothing for doing it. The only practical method is to use the autopilot, but that risks about a 75% chance of it instantly crashing you into the planet about half a second after it arrives at the destination. It's an impressive accomplishment, it just doesn't feel anywhere near as polished as the original Elite, nor as fun to play. Plus, the bugs were the final nail in the coffin. While playing I found a couple different star systems that would instantly crash the game if you tried to view their information. For a game that's supposed to have thousands or even millions of star systems, it's not a good sign that I was able to stumble across two that crashed the game. How many others would do the same thing?
turricaned The thing about Elite is that the combat was a large part of the game. You actually had to follow your opponent's ship, use the radar to figure out where they were and avoid their shots. It was like dogfighting in a plane. Then Frontier came out and the combat was reduced to shooting at a dot in the distance that occasionally goes whizzing by your ship at 9,000 KPH. You can't maneuver, you can't follow them, you can't really change course, all you can do is turn as you rocket through space at 5,000,000 KPH because there's no practical way to slow down to maneuvering speeds. The combat in Frontier is like two people shooting at each other after they dive out of a plane without parachutes. Maybe they can move sideways a little, maybe they can speed up or slow down a little, but there's nothing they can do to substantially change direction. No matter what they do, they're still going to be hurtling toward the ground at high speed. Beyond that, where Elite felt polished and fluid (even on older systems where lag was a problem), Frontier always felt unfinished and clunky to me. Piloting the ships around near the space stations never felt anywhere near as fluid as in Elite.
lurkerrekrul Understood. I think we're kind of on the same page in the sense that Elite and Frontier are different games as a result of the technology they were designed for. I suspect Braben and Bell would have gone the "Newtonian" route in Elite, were it not for the limitations of the BBC Micro and other machines of the era. Obviously in Frontier it makes the ships harder to control, and the player is very reliant on the autopilot! I also suspect that Braben intended Frontier to have a greater emphasis on exploration rather than combat - Elite's galaxies were procedurally-generated (again due to hardware limitations), whereas Frontier was for the most part astronomically correct, making the exploration aspect more compelling. I don't think Frontier is less "polished" than Elite, it's just an inescapable fact that when hand-coding a game in assembler, there's a lot less to go wrong in a game which fits in 32K of RAM than one which requires 1MB (1024K). Elite took two years to write, and Braben spent five years on Frontier, so it's hard to argue that the latter was rushed. It appears that "Dangerous" is pitched somewhere between the two - hopefully the best of both worlds!
@DjayAmiga thanks, and thanks for the feedback. I'm glad it turned out well. To be honest I wasn't sure how well it was coming across. I've been getting back into playing it in preparation for this series. The shots of the Asp were my current ship in the game I've been playing.
Sorry about the late reply. I'm also using WinUAE, but I use the A3000 option in the quick start setup. It ran much slower on my old A1200, but it runs lovely under A3000 emulation.
@PaintBeforeAssembly you're most welcome, glad it's helpful. I covered most of the basics in the episodes I've done so far. The next one (episode 5) is taking a while because there's a lot of research I want to do for it. Hope you enjoy the rest of the series and have some fun on the frontier yourself :)
Awesome video series. I hope you're going to finish it one day. I get kind of a Frontier-Elite-2-fit every 2-3 years, where I have to play the game for 3 weeks straight, without sleeping much. Then after that I go back to my normal life ... Have you heard of Pioneer?
Keep up this series mate - I was really into the original elite, but never got around to playing this one. Really interesting stuff. I'm impressed at the graphics - another level above Mercenary 3! Is this on a OCS amiga, or a AGA one?
Thanks for this! You inspired me to dust off this old classic after a very long time. Now I have something to help me endure the wait for the upcoming Elite: Dangerous.
You'll need to get an Amiga emulator such as WinUAE. Load it up and on the quickstart panel that shows up, select A1200 from the top drop down menu. Then click "select image file" for the main floppy drive and select the image for the game disk. For more details there are a bunch of videos explaining things if you search for "WinUAE tutorial".
Ok, here are some tips if you want to start out on Mars, or in the Lave system. On Mars, sell your laser back to the shipyard, sell your interplanetary drive, sell your 2 missiles... buy a class 1 warp drive. I'd also get an auto pilot, and then just make runs between Sol and Barnards star system. It's not impossible if you do those things and save often. You do basically the same thing on Lave, you just downgrade your ship, and that gives you the $$$ to do runs.
Yeah that's how I would start generally, but I think the recommended start position is good for total beginners because they don't need to mess about with equipment they can just get going.
Fa Kenews I believe features like space legs are coming December-Early next year, along with Atmospheric Landings(Like gas planets, not just spherical lumps of rock) I currently play elite on Xbox
Yes that is Privateer 2. Check out Star Citizen, which is being made by Chris Roberts, which is the guy responisible for Wing Commander and Privateer. After a long pause of making games, he returns to fulfill his lifelong dream, as technology finally advanced enough.
You're welcome. Sorry about the delay in responding. The music is Dreamy Flashback from the Incompetech site, which provides excellent creative commons music that I've used in many videos.
I'm playing this on my Amiga 600 as I type. I get roughly one frame per second. Pretty unplayable without a turbo. I do plan to buy a Furia turbo card for my Amiga at some point so then it will hopefully be more like in your video.
I love how he says Frontier is the greatest game ever made - I totally agree. GTA has nothing on this. When/If Frontier Developments get this right they're going to clear up
@DjayAmiga thanks for the tips. I might fiddle around with the settings, but it seems to run very smoothly in this setup though. I only have a vague sense of what many of these terms mean really. I'm not much of a hardware guy.
@marcopolo735 the first two results of that google search are pages where you can download various versions of the game. Frontierverse and FrontierAstro.
Watching these episodes and seeing how much you enjoy the science fiction setting and freedom this game allows, I couldn't help but wonder if you've ever played EVE online? Also another game I remember being quite difficult yet also captured my imagination was a game on the Amiga called Armour-Geddon. Not sure how well it would lend itself to a play through but even so it had a certain something that just grabbed my interest.
I haven't played EVE. I've heard mixed things about it. Some say it's brilliant. Others say it's a spreadsheet with graphics. I'm not sure if it's still a monthly subscription thing. Armour-Geddon is probably one of those games that you'd need the nostalgia factor to get into today, and alas I never played it back then.
This game kind of reminds of a game I saw when I was very young, so young I can't even remember what it was called and had forgotten it up until now. It might have been Privateer 2. You play as Lev Arris and begin the game waking up with amnesia in the hospital on Crius. I don't think I even played it myself, but watched my father play it, I was that young. You know it?
Yeah it's really a special game, unlike any more. I did play the sequel. It was quite similar but with more stuff. Very buggy though, but I liked it. I intend to do some videos later in the series talking about that.
@ZXAmiga64 unfortunately not. It was a pretty demanding game. It was even a bit clunky on a standard A1200, which I had. I'm running this on an emulator which is emulating an A3000. I doubt it would be very playable at all on an A500. However I have seen it on ebay with all the packaging and manuals for around £10, which I've considered getting just so I can have the manuals and other stuff again. There's also the PC version which runs well under DOSbox and even an opengl conversion.
This looks amazing for 1993.
Cooper McKay yeah it was unlike anything else in those days.
This plays amazing for 2015.
It looks ahead of itself for 93
This is still good even for 2017 (Star citizen where are you?)
Star citizen when is release date @@AAhmou
I was 17 years old back then and still a high school student. I was interested in astronomy and had a telescope. When I got this game I was absolutely blown away and overwhelmed by the flight physics that outshone any arcade "space" game I had before (in fact i even learned to understand keplerian mechanics with this game it was the kerbal space program of the 90ties). I looked at the floppy disk and thought wow there is the entire Milky Way on there.
The simple vector graphics are just beautiful!
Yeah I think they've aged pretty well.
I can but concur. I'll tell you more... even the pc version textures (well, excluding that incomprehensible "gravel texture" on some orbital bases' surfaces) have aged pretty well, I'd say. If nothing else, the ground spaceports look so much better in the pc version, than with the plain, solid colour textures typical of the amiga version. Long Live Frontier!
This doesnt even look old, it just looks 'artsy' like proteus.
Andreas Michael Design yeah I think this flat shaded look could have a place still. I really like it.
It's precisely that artsy look that makes me nostalgic. I'd really like a modern space game with those looks.
My thoughts exactly. I've just discovered this. Cel-shaded like 3D clounds in 1993? Very interesting.
it doesn't look old because its not running at 8 fps like on the original Amiga systems.
@@TANMAN9095 yeah,ran badly on the A500/600 ok on anything above that. weird palette swaps going on too.
When you turn the graphics down all the way low in the current Elite it really should make everything look like this.
That is a smashing idea -- it would be incredibly psychedelic in VR
I would be able to run it prolly then....and I would to
I can't believe this is from 1993! It looks amazing. I had no idea about this series until elite: dangerous.
That opening intro of yours Jim is exactly why I love early attempts at 3D graphics and CGI. There's just a certain amount of minimalistic artistry to them that I love. It's also staggeringly hard to believe that the entire game is only 880kbs in size
+tripdefect87 Yup a universe on a floppy disk is amazing still today....
More like 440kb, it only took up about half of one floppy.
When there still was artistic control of colors it looked really good. Its when the early shading comes in and everything is multiplied down to black and plastic white highlights are added that it started looking crap
When I was a kid I spent weeks hidden away in my bedroom with the blind down so I could immerse myself in this game. I played it non-stop. Sometimes I would just check out random systems and fly by their planets to see what they looked like. Never did quite master harvesting fuel from gas giants, but I'll keep watching your videos. Maybe you'll explain that.
Perhaps the most time consuming game ever on the Amiga. It was amazing and years ahead of it's time (just like Elite)
Excellent video Jim! This game was the reason I didn't get any As during my GCSEs haha (Bs and Cs only) but it was worth it! Okay, so lots of my mates got an A* in Maths or an A in Geography - but did they have 20 million credits, a Panther Clipper and a great reputation with the Federation Army? NO! lol
Hehe, thanks, yeah I know what you mean. I wish I had the old saves from back then though. It's an addictive game and I spent a lot of my teenage years playing it. This and UFO and Civilization.
Heh - For me I think Frontier was the last game I spent any serious amount of time playing before I turned 15 and disappeared into a world of playing guitar badly and attempting to fondle girls... ;)
Those three games exactly sums up about a decade of my life as well :)
Still more content than No Man's Sky
:(
@@acklord7145 it was true at the time
It’s crazy to think how games have evolved.. what a night/day difference..
Surely one of the best and most impressive games ever, on any platform!! Fantastic video! Thanks mate!
Used to love playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum +2, and Frontier on my friend's A1200. Currently teaching my youngest the ins and outs of Elite Dangerous, but your videos are amongst his favourites to watch.
07, commander!
Just want to pop in and say THANK YOU for making this series, I wanted to try this game on a whim but ended up loving it and you onboarded pretty well into this magnificent experience!
You're welcome! I'm glad people are still finding it and making use of it after all these years :)
It still blows my mind how much they crammed into such a tiny (bytes size) game. Great video, cheers!
Played this on my Amiga 1200.. played it for years.. could have done with these tutorials in 1993 lol
This is great! I used to play this game all the time, but when I tried to play it again a couple of months ago, I became frustrated because I couldn't remember the controls. I was busy testing around a hundred other games at the time, so I put it back away again. This guide'll have me on my feet again in minutes -- thanks for reopening this game for me!
Absolutely brilliant channel. Stumbled upon it while on a nostalgia trip and searching for games from my childhood. Such fond memories of this game and those times in general. Down the park playing football with jumpers for goal posts then an evening spent with your mates playing games like this. Was truly a classic and utterly mind blowing at the time (For me at least). Really enjoying the channel and the fantastic commentary :) Great sense of humour
Also agree, one of my favourite games of all time, one of the few games up there with Dungeon Master imo. I preferred Frontier to the original Elite....
Yeah I did too.
Loved this game.. seen all your frontier fundamental videos.. absolutely fantaatic
Great video, I've been playing Frontier for a few weeks after a break of two decades, forgot a lot of these controls.
Thank you very much for doing such a great series on this game. Everything you run through is clear and helpful... Unlike the rest of UA-cam, and the internet at-large. If not for your series, I would have been completely lost getting started!
WE LOVE YOU TOO FAM!
You're welcome. Glad to have been of help :)
i've just been looking at these gameplays of frontier and now im super excited for the new elite on kickstarter! this proceduraly generated universe is what i always wanted on a video game! realism on space!! athmosphere/space transition! exploration that makes sense! this is trully the best and most immersive game i know!
"An object stays in motion, unless you give it a kick up the arse"... Ah, yes, Newton's famous 1st law!
Ah, this takes me back... This game caused many sleepless nights 🙂🙂
I was much the same. So many hours exploring in this game. I did manage to get the fuel scooping working. By the time you could afford to do it you didn't need to, but it was fun to do anyway. It requires some manual flying and a fast ship and the smaller gas giants are better for not falling into uncontrollably. I've been putting off the rest of this series for a while, but when I return to it I will indeed be covering fuel scooping.
I've played both Elite and Frontier on the Amiga (I also played Elite on the C64, but it was too slow, it worked better on the C128). I became Prince and Elite in Frontier, in Elite I never managed to become Elite (I have been close though). Now I'm playing again on pc (Dosbox), less buggy and still the same fun as 30 years ago!
I fly in a 60k+ tonnes Eagle long range fighter (using the rubbish jettison trick), with a class 7 hyperdrive (max jump is around 240ly) , 4MW beam laser, 75 passenger cabins, 25 shield units, naval ECM, autorefueller and so on. For travelling to the planet I use the autopilot break, it saves more than 50% space flying time.
This game never turns old!
Even with the slowdown on the Atari ST i would still have loved this work of art, real miffed that i missed out on it!
Excellent vid, keep em' coming.
Indeed. I'm very excited about the new Elite game. I think it really had a chance at being as amazing as this was.
Love the series Jim. I've watched the whole thing.
You really captured the feelings I had as I played this game on my dad's 386sx.
One thing I would say is that the units of speed are represented as kmh^-1
This means 1000kmh^-1 = 100kmh, an order of magnitude smaller.
+TH3G0D5 The ^-1 is applied to the h partof the unit, therefore kmh^-1 is km/h, therefore 1000 kmh^-1 is exactly the same as 1000 km/h.
+450AHX You are correct. I stand corrected.
Great My Friend !!! The Pc Conversion was made by Chris Sawyer.Playing Frontier, in some Space Ports, I have found the advertisment of "Transport Tycoon" and that was very exciting because I consider "Transport Tycoon" in its Deluxe version, the best Transport Tycoon game ever :). I like that you choose Frontier as the greatest one :) I cannot choose a best one in my dos games history, but probably 20 or 30 best ones :)))
Still as fantastic as I remember :)
I can't believe this was uploaded over a decade ago. How time flies.
I am equally astonished
what a beautiful game
I was looking up elite dangerous then found this looks nice for playability
Indeed. I am already a backer and very excited :D
I think it's about time to revive this series in celebration.
Thanks. Yeah it's amazing what a skilled programmer can do with procedural algorithms.
Nice Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy reference there.
This is brilliant! can't wait for the next one mate!
wow, this brings up nice memories
Love your comment about Traffic Control being mental :D
Yes, there's a few that look promising coming.
I definitely plan to get back to it at some point. I had ambitious plans for episode 5 that didn't work out, so I'm rethinking that. I have also come back to this game many times over the years.
I had heard of Pioneer, but I forgot about it and haven't checked on it's progress. It's looking great and I hope they manage to get it done. Then it will definitely be getting a video series.
Nice one, thanks. Glad you're enjoying them. I hope to get around to doing a new episode soon... ish.
Sweet! Love this concept!
Great game - I didnt really need a tutorial, but I enjoyed this so much, I might just watch the rest :)
Very funny, very well delivered tutorial. Really glad to see you favour the Amiga version too.
Took me forever to understand how to progress and all, when I did, somewhen ended up in dead space between star systems. Instead of loading a save data, I deleted it or something and that was the end after many many weeks of playing this game. I absolutly loved it. Just started playing Elite Dangerous some days ago. Yeah, cool thing.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)
Thanks for making this playthrough, as much as I enjoy playing frontier it's nice to kick back once in awhile and watch somebody else :-)
This game looks amazing. I knew about Elite but I had no idea about Elite 2.
WTF i had no idea the game was this beautiful
so many hours.... figuring this game out sans manual was a frustrating joy. so was murdering everyone with a panther clipper haha
I liked rampage at starport. No police left to kill.
Like the man said... You just keep coming back.
If you like the look of this for a 1993 game, check out Armour Geddon by Psynosis. It's 3d graphics really wowed me in 1991 and it ran on a 286 PC!
I'm watching this for the third time now! I guess I need help. 😁
Love the series, thank you so much!
Glad you're enjoying it multiple times! I guess I need to make more actual video tbh :D
I was a huge fan of Elite and when Frontier was first announced, I got very excited. After actually playing it, I came to the conclusion that it was an amazing tech demo, but not much of a game. Besides the fact that it still had massive slowdown, even though I had a Turbo28 accelerator for my Amiga and that every single session ended with the game crashing for one reason or another, it just wasn't that much fun to play. I got more enjoyment from just sitting in space and watching the stations rotate.
The Newtonian physics, which all the reviews praised, sucked all the fun out of the game for me. Because of the "realism" of the game, you needed to get your ship up to about 5,000,000KPH using the time acceleration to get anywhere in any reasonable length of time.
Then you get attacked and it drops you back to normal time, but your inertia has you locked on course, so even if you turn your ship 90 degrees to the side and fire the engines full blast, all you'll succeed in doing is altering your course marginally while you hurtle through space sideways. You could try facing in the opposite direction and blasting the engines to slow down, but at normal time, that will take you about a week. It's like being strapped in an office chair that's rocketing down a track. You can spin in place, but there's not much you can do to change your course. So dogfights amount to you and the other ship occasionally zipping past each other as you take pot-shots at it. Why couldn't the game have dropped your speed back down to something manageable so that the fights would be more like Elite? Please don't say that wouldn't be realistic because in real life, the chances that two ships would be traveling on parallel courses would be a billion to one. In reality, they would be on mostly perpendicular courses and wouldn't even see each other as they whizzed past, unable to stop and fight. Besides, the autopilot can stop on a dime when it reaches its destination.
Even if combat were conducted at maneuvering speeds, it feels inferior to Elite. Go into space, shoot the station and then try to take on the police ships that come after you. With a decent ship, this could be done in Elite, but in Frontier, you're lucky if you can shoot down one or two. Combat just feels like an afterthought. Like Braben never expected that you would ever face combat at less than jousting speeds.
Since all the planets have orbits that they follow, it means you have to plan ahead to intercept them, but since you also have to use time acceleration to avoid the trip taking days, it's incredibly easy to overshoot the target. You then have to stop, re-adjust your course, speed up, hit the time acceleration and try again. Of course by this time, the time limit for whatever your current mission is has expired and you get nothing for doing it. The only practical method is to use the autopilot, but that risks about a 75% chance of it instantly crashing you into the planet about half a second after it arrives at the destination.
It's an impressive accomplishment, it just doesn't feel anywhere near as polished as the original Elite, nor as fun to play.
Plus, the bugs were the final nail in the coffin. While playing I found a couple different star systems that would instantly crash the game if you tried to view their information. For a game that's supposed to have thousands or even millions of star systems, it's not a good sign that I was able to stumble across two that crashed the game. How many others would do the same thing?
turricaned The thing about Elite is that the combat was a large part of the game. You actually had to follow your opponent's ship, use the radar to figure out where they were and avoid their shots. It was like dogfighting in a plane.
Then Frontier came out and the combat was reduced to shooting at a dot in the distance that occasionally goes whizzing by your ship at 9,000 KPH. You can't maneuver, you can't follow them, you can't really change course, all you can do is turn as you rocket through space at 5,000,000 KPH because there's no practical way to slow down to maneuvering speeds.
The combat in Frontier is like two people shooting at each other after they dive out of a plane without parachutes. Maybe they can move sideways a little, maybe they can speed up or slow down a little, but there's nothing they can do to substantially change direction. No matter what they do, they're still going to be hurtling toward the ground at high speed.
Beyond that, where Elite felt polished and fluid (even on older systems where lag was a problem), Frontier always felt unfinished and clunky to me. Piloting the ships around near the space stations never felt anywhere near as fluid as in Elite.
lurkerrekrul Understood. I think we're kind of on the same page in the sense that Elite and Frontier are different games as a result of the technology they were designed for. I suspect Braben and Bell would have gone the "Newtonian" route in Elite, were it not for the limitations of the BBC Micro and other machines of the era. Obviously in Frontier it makes the ships harder to control, and the player is very reliant on the autopilot!
I also suspect that Braben intended Frontier to have a greater emphasis on exploration rather than combat - Elite's galaxies were procedurally-generated (again due to hardware limitations), whereas Frontier was for the most part astronomically correct, making the exploration aspect more compelling.
I don't think Frontier is less "polished" than Elite, it's just an inescapable fact that when hand-coding a game in assembler, there's a lot less to go wrong in a game which fits in 32K of RAM than one which requires 1MB (1024K). Elite took two years to write, and Braben spent five years on Frontier, so it's hard to argue that the latter was rushed.
It appears that "Dangerous" is pitched somewhere between the two - hopefully the best of both worlds!
@DjayAmiga thanks, and thanks for the feedback. I'm glad it turned out well. To be honest I wasn't sure how well it was coming across. I've been getting back into playing it in preparation for this series. The shots of the Asp were my current ship in the game I've been playing.
Thanks for that, a perfect primer!
Thanks!
Nice one, thanks. I've heard of Pioneer and tried it out ages ago, but I haven't seen it recently. I'll probably do a video about it at some point.
You're welcome. I hope that Dangerous lives up to it's legacy.
Lightweight! I used to land on manual. lololol. What a game!
An amazing game.
Geate game, greate serie!
Nice. Hope you enjoy the series :)
Sorry about the late reply. I'm also using WinUAE, but I use the A3000 option in the quick start setup. It ran much slower on my old A1200, but it runs lovely under A3000 emulation.
This game is so much better than Elite Dangerous.
I would love to know what processes occurred within your mind that lead you to express that opinion.
@PaintBeforeAssembly you're most welcome, glad it's helpful. I covered most of the basics in the episodes I've done so far. The next one (episode 5) is taking a while because there's a lot of research I want to do for it. Hope you enjoy the rest of the series and have some fun on the frontier yourself :)
Awesome video series. I hope you're going to finish it one day. I get kind of a Frontier-Elite-2-fit every 2-3 years, where I have to play the game for 3 weeks straight, without sleeping much. Then after that I go back to my normal life ...
Have you heard of Pioneer?
Great video. Wish I had these videos 20 years ago. Though they would have to be on VHS. lol.
Haha, this is great! I loved your commentary
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it :D
I've played FPS games before, but only on console. I usually use my PC for RPGs and RTSs
I don't know how console gamers manage with FPS games. I need a mouse to be anything close to accurate.
Thanks, glad you like it :)
Keep up this series mate - I was really into the original elite, but never got around to playing this one. Really interesting stuff. I'm impressed at the graphics - another level above Mercenary 3! Is this on a OCS amiga, or a AGA one?
@nukinetix I agree, and thanks, glad you liked it :)
Great game wish my Amiga 1200 still ran.
@HoraceAndTheSpider thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)
Thanks for this! You inspired me to dust off this old classic after a very long time. Now I have something to help me endure the wait for the upcoming Elite: Dangerous.
You'll need to get an Amiga emulator such as WinUAE. Load it up and on the quickstart panel that shows up, select A1200 from the top drop down menu. Then click "select image file" for the main floppy drive and select the image for the game disk. For more details there are a bunch of videos explaining things if you search for "WinUAE tutorial".
Ok, here are some tips if you want to start out on Mars, or in the Lave system. On Mars, sell your laser back to the shipyard, sell your interplanetary drive, sell your 2 missiles... buy a class 1 warp drive. I'd also get an auto pilot, and then just make runs between Sol and Barnards star system. It's not impossible if you do those things and save often.
You do basically the same thing on Lave, you just downgrade your ship, and that gives you the $$$ to do runs.
Yeah that's how I would start generally, but I think the recommended start position is good for total beginners because they don't need to mess about with equipment they can just get going.
Thanks. I love Hitch Hikers.
wow it had seamless planetary landings? Why did these features vanish in modern space sims?
Elite Dangerous has them now.
I hear they plan on adding the ability to walk around on planets someday, but I have my doubts
Fa Kenews I believe features like space legs are coming December-Early next year, along with Atmospheric Landings(Like gas planets, not just spherical lumps of rock) I currently play elite on Xbox
@@zuita7748 you did it you predicted it
yea, i did, and i played it! its really cool, but more limited then frontier is i think, but i like what they did with the planet surfaces!
Yes that is Privateer 2. Check out Star Citizen, which is being made by Chris Roberts, which is the guy responisible for Wing Commander and Privateer. After a long pause of making games, he returns to fulfill his lifelong dream, as technology finally advanced enough.
@slenkar thanks, the freedom is really something in this. It's absurd almost.
Indeed. I'm planning to do a video about all the different versions that have been made, inclufing JJFFE which I played a lot.
You're welcome. Sorry about the delay in responding. The music is Dreamy Flashback from the Incompetech site, which provides excellent creative commons music that I've used in many videos.
@alex76gr thanks, glad you liked them :)
I'm playing this on my Amiga 600 as I type. I get roughly one frame per second. Pretty unplayable without a turbo. I do plan to buy a Furia turbo card for my Amiga at some point so then it will hopefully be more like in your video.
Turning the settings down as low as they go made it more playable, especially outside of planet surface.
I love how he says Frontier is the greatest game ever made - I totally agree. GTA has nothing on this. When/If Frontier Developments get this right they're going to clear up
@DjayAmiga thanks for the tips. I might fiddle around with the settings, but it seems to run very smoothly in this setup though. I only have a vague sense of what many of these terms mean really. I'm not much of a hardware guy.
Oh wow. That looks pretty interesting. Might be worth a video.
@marcopolo735 the first two results of that google search are pages where you can download various versions of the game. Frontierverse and FrontierAstro.
Watching these episodes and seeing how much you enjoy the science fiction setting and freedom this game allows, I couldn't help but wonder if you've ever played EVE online? Also another game I remember being quite difficult yet also captured my imagination was a game on the Amiga called Armour-Geddon. Not sure how well it would lend itself to a play through but even so it had a certain something that just grabbed my interest.
I haven't played EVE. I've heard mixed things about it. Some say it's brilliant. Others say it's a spreadsheet with graphics. I'm not sure if it's still a monthly subscription thing.
Armour-Geddon is probably one of those games that you'd need the nostalgia factor to get into today, and alas I never played it back then.
This game kind of reminds of a game I saw when I was very young, so young I can't even remember what it was called and had forgotten it up until now. It might have been Privateer 2. You play as Lev Arris and begin the game waking up with amnesia in the hospital on Crius. I don't think I even played it myself, but watched my father play it, I was that young. You know it?
Yeah this game was ahead of it's time. In the context of something like a modern flight simulator it does seem simpler now.
Yeah it's really a special game, unlike any more. I did play the sequel. It was quite similar but with more stuff. Very buggy though, but I liked it. I intend to do some videos later in the series talking about that.
Play this in 4K and it will not look bad, it will look 'artistic'
@ZXAmiga64 unfortunately not. It was a pretty demanding game. It was even a bit clunky on a standard A1200, which I had. I'm running this on an emulator which is emulating an A3000. I doubt it would be very playable at all on an A500. However I have seen it on ebay with all the packaging and manuals for around £10, which I've considered getting just so I can have the manuals and other stuff again. There's also the PC version which runs well under DOSbox and even an opengl conversion.