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Hands-on with the Elite: Dangerous alpha
I don't have much history with Elite. I played the original, circa 1985 on my dad's green monochrome Apple II, but frankly I didn't understand a bit of it and subsequently went back to Sundog and subLOGIC's fledgling wireframe Flight Simulator as a result. By the time Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters shipped in the early to mid 1990s, I was already losing copious amounts of my adolescence to Wing Commander, Privateer, and X-Wing, all of them of course indebted to the space trading flight sim thing that David Braben and Ian Bell published a decade earlier. For all intents and purposes, then, I'm an Elite virgin despite a lifetime of playing nearly everything in the genre it inspired. And if the Elite: Dangerous alpha client is an accurate barometer, gosh have I missed out.
Here's an Elite: Dangerous alpha preview
If you're curious about the Elite: Dangerous alpha but don't have an extra £200 lying about, Rock, Paper Shotgun's preview article is likely the next best thing. The first impressions are largely positive, though they're gleaned from a tiny slice of Frontier's sprawling procedurally generated space sandbox. The alpha is basically a linear series of combat missions, see. So you'll have to content yourself with voluminous amounts of prose devoted largely to the game's aesthetic. That said, the article does conclude that "sci-fi dogfighting this good is a rare treat."
