okay i'm racking my brains here
i remember a spectrum game way back when, but I cannot for the life of me remember the title.
All I remember is that it had cockpit view sections, and you could plot your journey around a star map and stuff, there WERE space combat sections, and you could do the absolutely daft thing of trying to land on a sun.
Which would legit just melt your spaceship. You could escape certain destruction by aborting the landing, but yeah lol
This melting effect was pretty visual too. like, your actual cockpit would start to change colours, going more orange and then yellow and whatnot, and then right as your ship was destroyed, the graphics would make it look like your ship was actually melting, before you got a gameover screen.
it was NOT, i might add, Elite. For a start, it had colour graphics and such rather than wireframes.
I think there WAS some kinda tactical screen thing for plotting routes, or travelling around, rather than solely in your cockpit view, that was purely for the combat segments and planetary flying stuff. I think I only played a little of it, and lost the tape years and years ago. Mostly I just flew into suns a lot because I just could not work out what to do in it.
@Nine not one of the starstrike ones or something like 3d space wars?
@g1comics Nope! I found out what it was finally after doing a lot of searching. Like despite all my attempts before I could NOT find ANYTHING on it, but randomly I foudn it last night lol. It's called Star Raiders 2, and that game is ACTUALLY originally a "The Last Starfighter" license game, but retooled to be a sequel to Star Raiders for some reason, hence why it's so different to its predecessor and has elements from the first game seemingly shoehorned in.
@Nine That's really weird! Also, I may have had the released version on the old +2.. something about the scrolling planet surface and the E crosshairs looks really familiar
Searching turned up the Rebelstar series as well, and Lords of Chaos, both turn-based strategy things that were very much my jam back then~
@g1comics Oh heck yes Rebelstar and Chaos: Duel of Wizards were my jam too. I used to play Rebelstar a lot with my little brother. I really liked Lords of Chaos too but the demo I had was really, REALLY hard so I never completed it lol.
@g1comics It's super weird too. there was like... a 99% complete version of the ACTUAL Star Raiders 2 that is far closer in design and aesthetic and gameplay to Star Raiders 1, that was cancelled in favour of retooling the Last Starfighter tie-in game instead at the last moment. which is SO weird! The "real" version was released recently though and... dang it looks pretty great actually. Sparse, graphically, but... actually good, heck.