Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: dac@prolix.apana.org.au (Andrew Clayton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Frontier Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 2 Dec 1993 15:13:38 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 406 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2dl0n2$780@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: dac@prolix.apana.org.au (Andrew Clayton) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, shoot-em-up, space, trade, flight, exploration, commercial PRODUCT NAME Frontier (also known as Elite II) BRIEF DESCRIPTION Frontier is a space exploration/trading/shoot-em-up game that is a sequel to "Elite," a very successful program available for a number of computing platforms. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: GameTek UK (Konami is also mentioned) Address: 5 Bath Road, Slough, Berks SL1 3UA England Telephone: None supplied FAX: None supplied LIST PRICE I paid $69.95 (Australian) for this product from a local computer software shop. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 1 MB of RAM is required. Works with all Amigas. 68020 CPU and upwards provide smoother animations and better detail, but the gameplay is supposedly the same on any CPU. SOFTWARE Works under all Kickstart versions. The program does not use the operating system, and will not multitask. The program requires a stack of at least 70,000 bytes, but most people feel safer with a stack setting of 100,000 bytes. COPY PROTECTION "Look up a word in the manual" protection. The program is hard drive installable, but works from floppies. The program is a single executable. Save-game data can be saved on any read/write device. (Floppy, hard drive, recoverable RAM disk, etc.) The copy protection mechanism gets a rating of "acceptable": you notice it, but it is not too bad. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/40 2MB Chip RAM, 4MB 16bit Fast RAM, 16MB 32bit Fast RAM Kickstart 39.106, Workbench 39.29 1.1 gigabytes of hard disk space INSTALLATION The program may be played by booting on the master floppy disk, or it can be copied to the hard disk by any normal Amiga mechanism (drop the icon, use the Copy command, or use a directory utility program such as Directory Opus). This is a very simple operation. Anyone who has used an Amiga for more than 30 minutes should be able to cope. I created a Frontier directory on my GAMES: partition, and copied the executable and the six "saved game" files into this directory. REVIEW Years ago, my father raved about a game he was playing called Elite. I didn't take much notice, at the time, until I saw it available for the Amiga. I purchased it and was entranced. Although I didn't get anywhere near the rank of Elite, due to an unfortunate conflict between the game and my Amiga 1000, I did have a great deal of fun and "wasted" many hours playing the game. Late in 1992, the British computing magazine "The One" had an interview with David Braben, the programmer of Elite, and revealed that he was working on the successor to Elite, with the inspiring title of "Elite II." The working title was revised to be "Frontier" sometime in late 1992. Rumours of this game's existence and "imminent release" were rife within the comp.sys.amiga.games newsgroup, but the official news was always bad, with unexpected delays, and broken release-date promises galore. Then, the Frontier demo was uploaded to the Aminet ftp sites and much ooh-ing and ahh-ing (and slamming of the demo for being lame) was to be heard. The demo turned out to be the opening sequence for the game itself, and sparked off a huge discussion in comp.sys.amiga.games. Eventually, news came from people who had actually seen and played the game. The rush was on; and after a few weeks of scouring the local scene, I finally acquired a copy from a local computer software shop. The installation was a breeze; once done, I put the original disks away in their box, and set about playing the game. Commander Dac, in charge of his shiny inherited Eagle Long Range fighter, snapped into existence. Firing away with his powerful engines, he took off from the spaceport on the planet Ross, and was promptly shot down by hordes of angry police ships, sent by a militant base commander who was offended by my lack of manners in not asking for take off clearance. Game time: two minutes. Real time: five minutes. And I was toast. A quick succession of restarting the game, and wild attempts to evade authority always ended up with my being declared a criminal and getting shot down by the atrociously piloted police ships. I decided that asking for clearance to take off isn't just a formality, it's the LAW. Later on in the game, when I accrued some fines for doing something considered illegal, I managed to evade the police ships and escape; however, I was spontaneously killed for not obeying the police, whilst minding my own business beside an asteroid, trying to blow it to smithereens. The moral is PAY YOUR FINES! The game isn't lenient here: you either pay your fines, or you die. Frontier is based on the same principles as Elite. You have a spaceship with a Hyperdrive, and you carry cargo from one planet or spaceport to another, hoping to make a profit in the process. On the way, you meet with other spacefarers, most of whom look at you and decide that you're easy pickings, and start shooting first. They do not desist until you obliterate them or they destroy you. Space combat is an integral part of the game. During the early stages it is very difficult to fight other spaceships - your firepower is limited to a 1-MWatt pulse laser that fires once every 5/8ths of a second, and you have no shields to protect you from the clumsy pilots of other spaceships. Later, combat becomes less life-threatening and more tedious. With a 20-MWatt beam laser, you rarely get touched before you've atomised any prospective opponents. However, "rarely" doesn't mean "never." Sometimes, you get only a blip of a warning, and you're suddenly breathing space, and the dreaded "Game Over" tombstone is on your screen. Tactics and weaponry play an important part in the game. I find combat to be quite a simple affair these days with my 4-MWatt continuous beam laser. Some people think combat is too easy, and they even go back to 1-MWatt pulse lasers to have some challenge. I think they're ego-tripping though. Getting to where you want to go is one of the main problems with Elite. Your interplanetary systems can get you going only a few thousand kilometers per second. Distances within solar systems are realistically portrayed in Astronomical Units or AU's (one AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or about 150,000,000 kilometers). Travelling more than 50 AU's is a tedious process. The system map is a scalable, three-dimensional representation of the various stars, planets, satellites and space stations in your star system. The mouse controls your point of view. Zooming is accomplished using the function keys F7 or F8, or by clicking on their icons on the screen. Everything "works" in the system map - you can watch moons orbiting planets, and planets orbiting stars, and other spaceships going about their business. All of this functionality is fairly intuitive. Braben has supplied an option to reverse the left/right up/down function of the mouse if "real motion" confuses you. You can zoom in to look at planets, and then look at the surface of the planet and see starports. Orbital starports or orbital cities are also displayed, with movement in real or accelerated time so you can plan how to get there in the least amount of time. Frontier's galactic map is huge. The galaxy is about 75,000 light years across in this game, and the central part of the galaxy has many star systems within a light year of each other. Navigation is fairly simple, but there doesn't seem to be much out there to look for outside of the Core systems and the Imperial sector. The responsiveness when updating in the system display is very pleasing. Details such as gas-giant rings are visible, with background scenery (space dust, stars, motion indicators) selectable on or off, in the main program options page. Zooming in on planets, asteroids, space stations or other spaceships is all possible. So is communication, but this aspect of the game is very limited. The premise of Frontier is trading between the two star-faring groups - the Core Systems, centred on Sol, and the Imperial Sytems, centred on Achenar. The Imperials are wholly capitalist: almost nothing is banned, and police protection must be purchased. Lots of contraband items are available - drugs, slaves, weapons - and life can get hectic, due to the increased pirate activity in Imperial space. The Core systems are more "refined" and actively clamp down on drug-runners and slave dealers. Do not go to a Core system with a hold full of slaves! Each faction has a ratings system - the Imperial side choosing serfs, squires, prince and that sort of thing, whilst the Core systems have Colonels and Majors etc. Acquiring medals, awards, and passes is almost essential to advance in the game. Ship types are many and varied, ranging from 4 tonne planet hoppers, with only interplanetary drives, to 2,000 tonne cargo behemoths (which turn really slowly, and chew through fuel like it was going out of fashion). A very large ship will cost you about 500,000 credits. Considering you start off with 100 credits, this might take a while to acquire (if it weren't for the bugs... see below). Some trade runs are extremely profitable, and these sort of runs will be your bread and butter for the first few hours of the game. You upgrade your ship with bigger and better weapons, defenses, and add-ons such as scanners, radar viewers for scanning other ships, Electronic Counter Measures to foil missiles, automatic hull repair systems, and Large Plasma Accelerators (weighing in at 900 tonnes!). The game supplies you with a seemingly endless stream of hopelessly piloted enemies who seek to destroy your ship. With adequate shields and a steady hand, you can wipe out most opposition easily. But not all opponents are braindead. Some are plain deadly, and running away would be the best option when you encounter them with their shielded ships and 20-MWatt beam lasers. Frontier has a huge scope, but most players I know have expressed some disappointment that 99% of the galaxy is either unexplored or uninhabited. In this review, I haven't discussed the special missions you can take, the "small parcel" deliveries, paid passenger services, assassination offers, military missions, mining asteroids, mining planets, blowing up Lynx bulk Ore carriers, the way the police Vipers tend to crash into each other, the penalty for not having atmospheric shields, or how simple it is to die repeatedly in situations that are seemingly standard fare. I do hope I've given some useful information to some people though. The bugs can be irritating. The flight simulation is excellently handled with Braben's smooth 3D graphics engine. I like this game a lot, and recommend that any ex-Elite players check out this game. DOCUMENTATION Frontier comes with three manuals and a quick reference card. A reference manual, 106 pages long, provides most of the information about how the program interface works, and a guide to what functions are available, enhancements and upgrades to ships, weaponry, and miscellaneous devices. A 40-page "Gazetteer" contains descriptions of several dozen star systems. It also contains clues about the game. "Stories of life on the Frontier" is 82 pages long. It contains several chapters of short stories about various characters in the game. I haven't read this manual much, but what I have read indicates that it contains clues about possible game strategies and locations of interest. The quick reference card indicates how to start the game, what the various icons indicate, and situations in which the icons do become available. The game controls are minimally explained. There is no further documentation on the two disks. I found the documentation to be of adequate quality. There are a number of glaring typographical errors and incorrect pieces of information. Most of the information you need to play the game is buried in the game manual, which lacks an index (but does have a table of contents). I would say that the documentation is aimed at people who have played this sort of game before. I didn't have any specific problem other than the lack of an index. LIKES AND DISLIKES LIKES: I really liked the processor support for 68040's. The program is smooth and responsive on my computer, and works without having to disable caches, play with memory settings, or turn off the AGA chipset. Hard disk installability was a key selling point. I have reached the stage where I refuse to purchase programs that will not load onto my hard disk. This is a problem specific to the Amiga computing community. The PClone users of the world aren't treated to idiotic floppy-disk based games and protection schemes, and haven't been for years. I'm pleased that Gametek marketed the game in this format. DISLIKES I dislike the Save Game "requestor," which consists of a screen full of drive names and directories. AmigaDOS "Assigns" are invisible. Finding saved-game files is a matter of knowing which drive to look at, and finding the directory. I resorted to saving games into a recoverable RAM drive and then copying the saved games back to disk when I finished playing the game. David Braben originally programmed the game so that it was "system clean", and would exit back to the AmigaDOS operating system when you quit the game. For some inane reason, the game was distributed with this feature disabled, so the only way to exit the game is to reboot your computer. Very unfriendly. The program doesn't multitask, since it takes over the display, but neither does it clobber what is already running on your system. A patch exists (by Teemu Suikki, tsuikki@cc.lut.fi) which enables you to modify the Frontier executable, and quit back to the operating system. I highly recommend this patch. I am constantly disappointed with the number of program bugs that my version (1.00) has. Apparently later releases (up to 1.05 at the time of this review) have fixed some bugs, but other bugs remain. Most can be circumvented, but some of them require you to go back to a saved game, or have the ability to ruin the gameplay, by giving you unlimited sums of money if you do certain bug-affected sequences. A word of warning: money is a signed value, and anything over 214,000,000.00 Cr will "roll over" to negative values. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Frontier is a logical extension to David Braben's Elite; and as such, the game most resembles Elite. It could also be compared to Warhead, StarFlight 2, Universe 2, or any of the other "pilot a space ship and trade, whilst killing anything that moves" sort of games. BUGS There are many bugs: far too many to enumerate. One Usenet poster was disappointed that any attempt to hyperspace into to Beta Lyrae causes the program to crash (replicated on the IBM version of the program). There is an annoying bug with the Bulletin Board showing items from the Stockmarket. This can be circumvented by accelerating time until the next day, when the Bulletin Board will be reset. Many people report not being able to "take off" from planetary surfaces, even though they have refueled their internal engines. Apparently maximum time acceleration will get you going, but your ship may suffer considerable damage as it crashes through various obstacles (walls, buildings, mountains, etc.) There are a number of bugs involving money. One planet "sells" usually expensive items for negative amounts of money! Take one tonne of material, and they GIVE you 3,000 credits. Very silly. Another bug lets you sell your ship for the going rate, but not complete the transfer -- you get to keep the money but not change the ship. Do this a few hundred times, and you can make a hundred million credits in a few minutes of furious mouse-clicking. Surely ruins the game though. One ship has an unfortunate knack of being able to aim its turret laser at itself. Excellent way to commit suicide. There are many more. Most of them can be avoided, and the general advice given in comp.sys.amiga.games is to SAVE THE GAME a lot, unless you want undue heartache. VENDOR SUPPORT I haven't contacted the company, and doubt the efficacy of a support request directed at a British company, coming from Australia. WARRANTY There is a registration card that does not mention any kind of warranty. CONCLUSIONS I like the game a lot. It recaptures the feel of Elite, with some upgraded graphics and a much larger galaxy to explore. I hope that David Braben comes out with the (rumoured) add-ons to this program, since most of the galaxy is unexplored and lifeless. The 3D graphics engine used in the game is very smooth. Certainly this is what I expected of something like Wing Commander (which was a great disappointment on the Amiga). The introduction sequence (available as a "Frontier Demo") is quite neat, and I'm sure it sold more than a few copies of this game. I'd have preferred to have had a properly tested game, with the major bugs removed, but I still recommend that people go out and buy the game. It's a whole lot of fun. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review is freely distributable, as long as mention of the author (David Andrew Clayton) is included with the review. (Dac 'Average, Serf, 2M Credits, Imperial Courier.') David Andrew Clayton. // _l _ _ AmigaUUCP v1.16D Phone +61 6 290 2215 Canberra, Australia. \X/ (_](_l(_ dac@prolix.apana.org.au --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews