Elite Dangerous looks really rather good

It's nice to find a game that mentions your home town on its main screen.

I got an email in the week telling me that Elite Dangerous was now available and that I could install a trail version on my Xbox One just by clicking a link.

So I did.

Me and Elite go back quite a ways. To BBC machines with Cub monitors and Cumana disk drives. To hours spent learning how to dock with the space station so that you could sell your wares and earn enough money to buy a docking computer. To finding out that every now and then the docking computer crashes and you end up smashing your ship up anyway. 

There were games on the BBC machine before Elite that had 3D graphics. But Elite was the first one with "hidden line removal".  Hidden line remove stops an image looking like a wire frame model and starts to make it look "proper" 3D.

Elite was awesome. As a technical and artistic achievement that ran in a tiny amount of memory it was almost as far ahead of its time as the spaceships you could buy when you played it. The targeting view was superbly realised. And it just worked.

I lost quite a lot of my time to Elite. 

Elite Dangerous does a good job of building on its predecessor. The graphics are awesome looking and for the most part smooth (although we did have a few episodes of choppiness). 

We played for the free first hour that you get in demo mode, and then I actually ended up paying for the full game.