Back in the early to mid 80’s, an unassuming game hit the personal computer world – “Elite”. It had wireframe graphics, which was revolutionary at the time. It had SEVEN, count them, SEVEN different galaxies for you to romp around in! All on 32KB of RAM. Yes that’s right, you didn’t read it wrong – 32 KILOBYTES of RAM. It let you choose how you want to play the game – the very first “open ended” game I have ever played if I remember correctly. You can either be a trader, carry cargo
from planet to planet, or be a pirate, or be a mercenary, or a mix of everything.
Not that amazing, seeing as back in the 80’s, computers typically come with 16K or 32K of RAM. Total addressable size was 64K – of which 16K to 24K were used by the ROM, the remainder for RAM.
I remember playing that game for hours and hours on end, staring at the black screen with white dots and lines for graphics… it was freaking amazing if you think of how much the game contained, and how it all fitted into 32K or 48K of RAM. Yeah if you’re a tech geek, you’d know that 32K is the size of one single cluster on your harddisk today. For those less techie among you, a “cluster” is the smallest unit available on the harddisk, in which your data is stored.
So yes, a game like Elite back in the 80’s fitted snugly into ONE cluster! Cool huh?
Fast-forward to the 21st Century. 20 years later, Darkstar One appears. It now features whiz-bang graphics, amazing sound, and – the same gameplay as Elite. When I played it, I was happy. It *WAS* Elite all over again! With better graphics! Better sound! Now, it even has a main story-arc in the game!
The problem with having a story-arc in the game is this – once you complete the story, you have little incentive to continue, even IF the gameplay is open-ended like the original Elite. At the end of the story, you get a “zero-point field drive”, which essentially is a warp drive which allows you to zap yourself to ANY part of the galaxy, without a range limitation.
I felt that was the biggest game-killer of all. With the ability to zap yourself anywhere, without having to trudge through anarchic systems with all its dangers, where’s the challenge? That was the immediate game-stopper device. The devs are telling you “game story is done, stop playing now”.
And, although the galaxy is broken up into “clusters”, it’s still just ONE galaxy. The original Elite had SEVEN (I played mine on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it had 7 galaxies in 48K of RAM). Darkstar One is about 1 GB in size on my harddisk. ONE GIGABYTE! 100 million times bigger than the original Elite, and it just had 1 galaxy…
While I do like Darkstar One, and wished it would stay on my harddisk forever, the game-stopping plot device made me dread to continue playing it. What’s the point? You can’t even see how much money you have once you pass the 10 million credit mark – screen just shows all 9,999,999. There isn’t an incentive to get the rating equivalent of “Elite” in Darkstar One, because frankly, even the manual doesn’t list the ranks. You really have no idea whether you are already “Elite” or just “Dangerous” (equivalents).
