agollum@engr.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron) (06/26/89)
After waiting since the beginning of the year for _Elite_ to be released for the Amiga, I can now say with some certainty, "Don't Buy It." The game has a serious bug: After some arbitrary amount of playing time, the screen will fill with garbage. To my inexpert eye it appears that a pointer to one/more of the screen bitplane buffers is being trashed. The only fix is to reboot the game. I've just finished restarting the game three times in a row; the screen didn't stay stable for more than fifteen minutes at the most (though I've known it to last longer). The following is a letter I've sent to Rainbird a few days ago. When (if) I receive any reply I'll post it here; if they ever fix this bug they'll have a killer game. (BTW, if you want to back up your game disk, use the SGII (Starglider II) minitool in the most recent version of Project D. Works fine for me, though about 1 out of 4 times the screen flakes out on bootup, forming this nice pastel rainbow :-) Anyway: Kenneth Herron 325 Douglas Avenue Versailles, Kentucky 40383 June 21, 1989 Rainbird Software PO box 2227 Menlo Park, California 94026 Dear Sirs: After waiting since last year for your company to release _Elite_ for the Amiga, I just received my copy earlier this week. I must say I'm disappointed. The game has a serious bug; after playing for some amount of time (ranging from five minutes on up) the screen will suddenly go haywire, displaying random garbage on top of the usual graphics. The game itself continues to run but it's not what I'd call playable. Even "behind" the scrambling most of the screen graphics seem "damaged," for instance, if you call up the "Planet" screen the usual picture of a life form is rendered as a shapeless blob. The lettering is virtually unreadable. Switching screens does not help. The only way to "fix" this porblem is to reboot--which only works until the screen scrambles itself again. I know I am not the only one to have this particular problem. I have seen it reported by at least two other people on USENET (a computer network public discussion system not unlike BIX or CompuServe). There have been other bugs reported as well, such as one report that the game will not boot on the Amiga 2500 (I have no personal experience with that one). At least one person has labelled _Elite_ a "travesty." These bug reports have no doubt cost you sales. I am running with a large amount of expansionmemory, and I noticed your manual warns against it. Since _Elite_ will run fine for a while, I assume that's not really the problem here (and I refuse to unplug my memory card every time I want to play _Elite_; if you had a $600+ piece of hardware you wouldn't treat it like that, either). Even if it is an expansion memory problem, it is still a bug in need of fixing; I think it fair to say that MOST Amigas have some sort of expansion memory. I've been a Rainbird customer for a long time; I originally bought Elite for the Commodore 64, and played the heck out of it. I have serveral other Rainbird titles, including that turkey, _Space Cutter_. I realize that your company was under a lot of pressure to get this version of the game ready, and I realize that you had an outside company do the Amiga port. Still, as it stands this game is almost unplayable and therefore a waste of money. Does your company have any plans to release a corrected version of Elite? I do like what I've been able to play, and I hope to be able to recommend it to my friends who, like me, have traded up from C-64's to Amigas. As I've stated, I have access to the USENET computer network, and I'll be posting a copy of this letter there. Unless you specify otherwise, I'll also post any reply I receive from you. If you have any comments you'd like to make to the USENET community at large (which represents a large cross-section of the computer and scientific community), feel free to include them. I realize that Elite is "just a game," but I think you owe us some kind of explanation. I hope to hear from you soon. Very truly yours, Kenneth Herron cc: Telecomsoft, London England [British publishers of Elite--KH] The USENET computer network (200,000+ readers worldwide)