Yikes Station!

Frontier Elite 2 Fansite

Welcome to Yikes Station, a haphazard collection of 'stuff' in honour of the game that redefined addiction and rendered so many promising young kids as academic failures: Frontier Elite 2. If you've not heard of Frontier Elite 2 either read on or press CTRL-ALT-DEL to leave. Yikes Station is updated with annoying regularity so add Yikes Station to your bookmarks or forever hold your peace.

Frontier: Elite 2 is the 1993 sequel to Elite. It is a 3D space simulation set in the far future (the year 3200). You are not confined by mission objectives (unless you want to be) or a linear game style. Frontier is totally open.

Elite, released in 1984, was the first wireframe 3D game and was years ahead of its time. Compared to Frontier, Elite is very simple. You can trade, fight, piratise other people and bounty hunt but planets and stars could not be interacted with in any way other than crashing into them. The modern gamer would need a lot of imagination to play Elite: The graphics are primitive and often people (fools) dismiss it as 'crap'. It is one of the greatest games ever and the single largest step forward from the simple arcade games of the time. Elite was disgustingly sucessful and was ported to almost every platform in existance. It was written by Ian Bell and David Braben and can be downloaded from Ian Bells website.

Frontier introduced a realistic 3D galaxy, planetary mining, fuel scooping, planet-based space stations and loads of other stuff (unfortunately a lot of bugs also). People often say Elite was the best game ever but Frontier wins in the realism department. Its gameplay can seem quite poor at times (particularly during combat, when you're new to the game) but with a little perseverance Frontier can become an absolute delight. The learning curve is quite steep at first and without a manual it can be difficult. HTML'd versions of the frontier manual are available here.

Frontier: First Encounters (often referred to as 'Elite 3' or FFE) is basically Frontier with nicer graphics, lots more bugs, a few extra ships and further reduced combat AI. Download this from Jades' FFE Page. I prefer Frontier.

Since the creation of Elite, clones have been available. Examples include Federation of Free Traders (FOFT) and the Privateer series. More recently, a new batch of commercial and non-commercial Elite clones are appearing. All of these projects are a long way from completion but look promising:

JJFFE: A reverse engineered version of First Encounters by John Jordan. Versions are now available for Linux, DOS and Win32 (including WinMe and Win2k in 'native' DirectDraw). If you want to play First Encounters, ignore the original and get this because JJFFE is so much stabler and doesn't require quitting to DOS or messing with DOS drivers, etc.
Elite 4 - Frontier Developments: From the company behind Frontier, First Encounters and Virus 2000. Their site now has new sections about Elite, Frontier and First Encounters so check it out! Notice the screengrabs in the Frontier section are the same as mine! David Braben emailed me asking if he could use them :-) Apparently Elite 4 (or whatever it's called) will be finished some time in 2002, but expect slippage.
The Elite Club: Part of Frontier Developments responsible for the release of the First Encounters source code and free distribution of Frontier and First Encounters. Despite being around for a year now, the Elite Club has achieved none of these objectives.
Elite - The New Kind: "The reverse engineered source code to Elite". Elite 1 re-written in C from 6502 ASM. This project is quickly moving towards Elite 1 feature completion. Binaries available for DOS and Windows, and compiles fine in Linux.
The Elite Project: A group of Elite fans and programmers developing a sequel to Frontier. The release date (if ever) is likely to be in a few years. TEP is probably the most ambitious project, being designed very cleanly from the ground up. Erm... or something.
Devil's WorldThe only Elite 4 website worth visiting! Devil's World has a great collection of rendered 3D Elite 4 "screen grabs" and an interesting plot section. Nice.
Millennium 3: Future's End: By Anti-Matter Productions. Alpha 4 can now be downloaded!
Galileo: A multi-player space sim in the style of frontier.

These projects are complete and have been released:

X: Beyond the Frontier: X is clearly intended to be a sequel to Frontier - missing some elements such as buying ships, landing on planets and Newtonian Physics ;-{ X just kept on being delayed and in the end disappointed me. It is really nothing like Frontier. Firstly the freedom of owning a hyperdrive is gone. The scale is really unrealistic. Combat is slow. The universe is small and unrealistic. The ship handles very sluggishly. On the bright side, it can probably be picked up for next to nothing in a bargain bin.
Hardwar: Hmm... Based on a single planet rather than a whole galaxy - a sort of trading & combat game. Hardwar has been available in shops for a while.

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Since 6th Sep 1998

rev41/16.2.2001

'tom' at the domain 'moretom' dot 'org'.