Oolite until 2am

It's over two decades since I achieved Elite status on the Commodore 64 version of Elite. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Elite was a space trading game. In a nutshell, you start out on a space station with a very poorly equipped Cobra MkIII spacecraft and 100 credits. You buy some stuff and fly to a new system where you hopefully sell it for more than you paid for it. The game has two major elements, the first being the trading part with maps and data about the systems to give you all the clues you need to decide what to buy and where to go sell it to make a profit. The other element is the flying which involves docking with rotating (2001 style) space stations and doing battle with pirates who are out to steal your cargo.

There's a lot more to it than that and if it grabs you, which it did me, you end up leading a parallel life that can become strangely real. I still remember the baffled look I was given by workmates who asked what I'd been up to at the weekend when I told them, without thinking what I was saying, that I'd swapped the rear beam laser on my Cobra for a mining laser and been out harvesting asteroids.

Anyway, the point is that after a long absence from computer games - I gave up on them after a number of bad experiences with Windows 95 games that reconfigured my PCs graphics display to the extent that I couldn't do any proper work on the damned thing - I found myself wondering if anybody had ever reworked Elite for the Mac. Thus I discovered Oolite, a version for OS X written in ObjC (hence the name).

They've done a really nice job of it too. All the old charm with updated graphics (20 years ago they were wire-framed) and a bunch of new features. Consequently I was up until 2am last night shipping computers and foodstuffs between Lave and Zaonce in order to save up for a beam laser and an ECM system (don't leave your home galaxy without them).

Chances of me getting any 'proper' work done between now and Christmas: not much.