h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As far as I can remember, this only ever appeared on the Commodore 64 conversion. The "blocking of the viewscreen" could also be the result of shooting a cargo pod full of Tribbles, then flying through the resulting multicoloured cloud...

Rumor had it that this was not specified in the conversion brief, but just added by the programmers because they thought it would be "cool"...

btw, while it's a nice thought to call the Acorn Archimedes a "supercomputer", it was actually just a fairly decent desktop microcomputer.

Ooh, that's fightin' talk, Peet!

The only missions I got to play were the BBC and Arc ones, which is a shame. I wish they'd managed to create a missions editor, so people could create their own missions and circulate them. I guess if it had been written in this age of the Net, then that would have been an obvious thing to do.

Nothing beats the Beeb version for atmosphere. And the BBC *was* a supercomputer, right?

Perhaps if you stuck enough Ethernet nodes together...

I used to sell BBC Micros at the height of Elite's popularity, and our shop was an impromptu meeting place for pilots to swap stories and exchange tactics... Fully in character, of course...

It really freaked out all the "business" customers...

I'm a bit concerned that there's no mention of the specially commissioned novella in the "Box and packaging" paragraph, but otherwise this is a great article.

Peet
("Dangerous")

Yeah, The Dark Wheel. I wrote to Acorn as a timid 14-year-old to ask them if they were planning to publish a sequel, as the novella said: "A sequel to this novel is planned for publication in 198x" (can't remember when they said it was due). It never appeared, so I wrote to them, and got a nice customer support letter back, some months later.

I kept it, and now I'm older, I can almost feel the poor customer support guy having to type yet another boring answer to a kiddie nerd. Poor sod!

That can't be right, The Dark Wheel got a mention in the original entry, how come it slipped though the Edited one?

It's in there, under 'Later Versions and Missions', same place it always was. Only a brief mention, but then, it was only a brief book! The text is available online, btw.

Commander Gif

That would be an error of an altogether different nature then, since "The Dark Wheel" was included in the very original BBC cassette release (I used to sell it, in the days when it was the *only* release!) and thus only releases *without* it would have been unusual.

Uh oh.

Where's that invisibility module when you need it?

Gif Rating: Dangerous and falling