BBC: Classic video game Elite turns 25

Elite co-developer David Braben takes the BBC’s Daniel Emery on a flight in the BBC Micro computer game.

The space fantasy involved trading in slaves, narcotics and minerals as you flew around a fictional universe.

Pirate and police ships threatened to disrupt your journey or kill you.

I never got to the rank of Elite, but I did make it to Deadly.

• Docking in Elite

Turns out I don’t need an XBox to play the new(ish) Pac-Man Championship Edition; it’s also available on mobiles.

I’ve had a go of it… great graphics, and the gameplay is a really clever twist on olde Pacman. Very cool. Though oddly the sound doesn’t seem to work…

The problem is the controls. You can either use the phone’s numeric keypad (2/4/6/8 for up/left/right/down… pretty logical)… or the directional buttons. But on my Nokia N95 phone, it’s hard to find the right numerics to direct Pacman, and if you use the directional buttons you’re at constant risk of pressing one of the surrounding buttons, some of which will unceremoniously throw you out of the game.

I expect I’ll get used to it.

I’ve been trying out Oolite, the open-source Elite clone.

It’s got its niggles, but it’s a very good copy of the BBC Micro original — I took a look at that again to compare. I’ve found myself wanting the original keyboard controls, and may go ahead and reconfigure it to match.

While playing around with the BBC version (actually the slightly-enhanced Master version) I refreshed my memory of how to dock without using a docking computer. I was a bit rusty, but managed to do it without too much trouble. (Well, okay, it was actually my second attempt — BeebEm includes an option to record output to an AVI.)

Over the weekend the Byte Back retro-gaming event was on in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Here’s a set of pictures from it, and there’s also some video. Check the Stormtroopers queuing up to play the Star Wars game!

(Click through to watch in HD; lots of detail to be seen.)

Evidently the Herald Sun thinks predators commonly use the Commodore 64C to access Facebook and MySpace.

Or maybe it’s just an old photo from the library.

Never mind the present day troubles with IE, how about some good ol’ fashioned nostalgia?

For those remember coding on the Commodore 64 (rather than just using it), check this terrific essay from pagetable.com — to go with a forthcoming talk on the subject.

It took me back to bits of knowledge about 6502/6510 and the VIC II chip that I thought I’d forgotten, and I’ll certainly be watching out for the slides.

The Game On exhibition, which recently showed in Melbourne, has recently opened in Brisbane, and new retro/indie gaming blog Just One More Game has an extensive review of it (in three parts).

State Library of Queensland: Game On!

Game On from GameOn Slq on Vimeo.

Just another baby BASIC variant in an apparently crowded market: Microsoft Small Basic. It includes Turtle graphics!

I’ve previously highlighted BBC BASIC for Windows.

Now there’s Commodore BASIC for Windows, Linux and Mac.

Try this: retro computer quiz.

I got 6 out of 10. It was mostly the unrecognisable late-80s/early-90s consoles that let me down.

Game-On at ACMI in Melbourne closes this Sunday, and ACMI have told the Herald Sun that they’re close to reaching the high score attendance record for the exhibit.

So do go along if you’ve been considering it. We liked it so much I took the kids twice.

Show a valid Metcard on Thursday nights (open until 9pm) for concession rate entry.

Space Invaders is thirty years old this month. 1Up has done an article on ten things you didn’t know about it.

(via Vintage Computing and Gaming).

But have you heard the song/seen the video clip?