You're at a basketball game. The two teams are neck and neck in the fourth quarter. Suddenly, the crowd starts chanting, "Chum, chum, chum!" Kevin Garnett steals the ball and makes a breakaway down the court, when suddenly a shark comes from underneath the floor to swallow him whole! While such an event will never happen in real life, it's a regular occurrence in the game of #IDARB, the crowd-sourced, minimalist platform arena ball game.

In #IDARB, your objective is to get the ball into the opponent's goal. The level is set up as a 2-D platform-based arena, and the only tools at your immediate disposal are the ability to move, jump, double-jump, shoot, and, in the case of playing in teams rather than 1v1, a pass option.

That may not sound like much, but it is all that #IDARB needs. The initial rush for the ball sets the pace of the game. You and your opponent dash and drop to get to the central platform. You've grabbed the ball! Do you drop through the platform and try to ascend for an easy shot, or do you play footsie with your foe to try to slip past them as they attempt to swipe the ball from you? Ah, you've managed to evade their attempts to steal! You're on a path to an easy lay-up! But there's that familiar pulsing sound of your opponent frantically spamming their "shoot" button to swat the ball away and deny you your easy points. The ball goes flying across the stage, and the two of you take off to reclaim possession.

Every moment of a #IDARB match is filled with energy because, at any second, you or your opponent could get the angle necessary to set yourself up for points. Of course, if the easy lay-ups aren't your style, the more challenging three- and five-point shots are there to fill the void. The level's design is deliberately put together to offer perfect angles for long-range shots so that, once you've learned them and added them to your arsenal, you've gained a new tool for your adversaries to fear.

The scoring system further enhances the competitive drama. Your opponent has taken the ball. He stops on the central platform and aims at the platform above him! He shoots. The ball bounces off the ceiling above him, then off a platform below … and into the goal? Each bounce multiplies the shot's score by another factor. Fifteen points for a single shot! And you thought you were clever with that five-pointer from the bottom of the stage. You won't make that mistake again. As you face off for the ball rush again, you charge and activate your Fizzics, flying across the stage and barreling through the otherwise unpassable white platforms on a collision course with the the opposing goal. You miss, but the opponent foolishly waits below you. You jump downward, smashing his head and leaving him dizzy as you line up a three-pointer at the buzzer and take the round.

#IDARB's seemingly simple action is filled with depth and tons of trick shots to discover. The game also features social media integration into both Twitter and Twitch.TV stream channels that allow viewers or random passers-by to interfere with your game through commands called hashbombs. Muscle memory reigns supreme when a viewer drops the #light hashbomb and turns off the lights, leaving the illuminated ball and your player indicator triangle as the only clues to what's going on. Some hashbombs are more benign, such as a visit from Rick Astley or the transformation of the entire stage into a circus, with each player replaced by clowns. Others have drastic effects on the physics of the game, such as flooding the stage (with water OR beer!) or covering the stage in ice.

The single-player story mode of #IDARB is simple and does its job of introducing you to the game's features. Each stage is preceded by a short conversation with the AI opposition before you are set loose to play ball. Many of the conversations managed to elicit a chuckle or two from me, whether through silliness or dry humor. Your game escalates from a 1v1 starting point with no extra features to your being joined by a coffee mug and two other players as you take on 4v4s with randomly selected hashbombs interrupting your play. I personally never lost any of the matches, but I also felt like I wasn't the primary contributor to my victories. The coffee mug had several ounces of talent to slow-roast my opponents. Even if you aren't the leading scorer, however, the post-game victory screen allows you to waggle your right thumbstick to raise your victory pedestal and claim Most Valuable Player status.

If you have a gambling itch that needs scratching without bleeding actual money, the game features a fantasy mode where two AI-controlled teams face off against one another, allowing you or any of your Twitch viewers to bet on the teams, as well as drop hashbombs to attempt to influence the game in your favor. I found myself frustrated with this particular feature, but only because Murphy's Law insisted on bankrupting me every time I attempted to bet on a team.

Online play allows you to host and invite anyone from your friend list for a 1v1 match-up or hop into matchmaking with one to four players on your console to face off against an equal number of online opponents. Unfortunately, you cannot invite an Xbox Live friend to join your team as you queue up for matchmaking, so you're stuck only with friends you've acquired in person if you wish to play anything other than 1v1 online. The matchmaking process is fast, though no skill differentiation exists to ensure that your opponent will be able to keep up with your mad skills. Additionally, laggy games occur from time to time (especially when matched against opponents overseas or across the continent), and rather than one person being slightly desynchronized and having to compensate for latency, the game ensures that players are synchronized in every frame, causing the game to play in slow motion. These hiccups are mostly minor stumbling blocks and don't regularly interrupt the ability to take the game's good time online across the globe, but they are still worth noting.

Every moment of a #IDARB match is filled with energy.

The pixilated characters are divided amongst customizable teams, such as the standard Red and Blue teams, as well as the story mode opponents such as the Moustache Cops, Your Moms, the Barbarian Horde, Old McDonald’s farm (and their later forms, Breakfast). Other pop culture teams have found their way into the game as well, such as 8-Bit Halo characters, Retro City Rampage, Intellivision, and my personal favorite, the entire roster of Iron Galaxy's Divekick.

Players may edit character appearances or even create their own characters, which can then be shared through QR codes--take a picture of the QR code on your phone, and then use the Xbox One's Kinect to scan the code. Beyond just characters, players may make team logos and even team theme songs with up to four layers of a variety of instruments. Occasionally, you encounter player-created characters in matchmaking. Don't be surprised by the Internet, however, as you get matched against literal piles of poo and phallic drawings from time to time. The realm of possibilities is expansive, and anyone who seeks to do so can make a personalized impact on the game through the game's creative tools, leaving a fallback should one ever start to find the gameplay repetitive.

For me, the game's thrilling competition is more than enough to earn the stamp of approval. #IDARB doesn't look like much, but it brings a feast to the table. It stands as proof that all it takes to make a fantastic game, even with today's available technology, is a solid set of core gameplay mechanics with inherent depth.

Welcome back to Keepin' It Reel! In this week's podcast, Jim Vejvoda, Roth Cornet, and Chris Carle bring you the latest in genre movie news.

We discuss the latest movie news, including Jurassic World, Furious 7, X-Men: Apocalypse, Gareth Edwards' Star Wars standalone movie, Star Trek 3, G.I. Joe 3, Fifty Shades of Grey, and more.

Finally, we also wager whether The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Jupiter Ascending, and Seventh Son have what it takes to finally topple American Sniper from the top spot at the box office.

Download Keepin' It Reel, Episode 276!

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The Deadpool movie is full steam ahead now, with Fox setting up test deals with several actresses to play the female lead in the comics adaptation opposite Ryan Reynolds.

According to Deadline, the potentials are Morena Baccarin (of Homeland, Firefly and, more recently, Gotham fame), Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black), Crystal Reed (Teen Wolf, Crush) and Rebecca Rittenhouse (The Red Band Society), Sarah Greene (Vikings, Noble) and Jessica De Gouw (Arrow and Deadline Gallipoli).

Top: Morena Baccarin, Taylor Schilling, Crystal Reed; Bottom: Rebecca Rittenhouse, Sarah Greene, Jessica De Gouw

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You may have noticed that superheroes are much bigger than just comics these days. Franchises like the Avengers, Batman, and Spider-man rakes in billions of dollars for their respective movie studios and inspire all manner of video game, animated TV, and toy offshoots. Many of these spinoffs wind up circling back around and impacting the evolution of the comics in turn. It's all one big circle. But as neat as it is to see these properties become gigantic entities that appeal to millions of people across different media, there comes a time when too much superhero synergy is a bad thing. Marvel and DC should be celebrating the unique qualities that distinguish the various incarnations of these characters, rather than working to unify everything.

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We haven't heard much on it for awhile now, but producer Chris Morgan assues fans that The Legend of Conan is still in the works. Gangster Squad's Will Beall is writing the script for the long-awaited sequel, which will see Arnold Schwarzenegger return to the role that made him a movie star.

"Literally right now we're talking about when it can go ahead. We're figuring it out. I can't really say," Morgan tells Empire, "but it's sooner than you might think!" Morgan stresses that both he and Schwarzenegger remain "super excited" about the project.

Morgan also said The Legend of Conan will owe more to 1982's Conan the Barbarian movie directed by John Milius than it will author Robert E. Howard's source material.

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Playing Apotheon is like being an archaeologist exploring and unearthing the mysteries of an unknown world. You find your hands stretching thousands of years back in time to discover a story you didn’t know had unfolded. The art is immediately distinctive. While the same could be said for a fair number of independent games, this time it’s more than just a pretty background. Like the ochre-stained walls of an Athenian temple circa 500 BC, Apotheon’s characters are little more than black silhouettes. The environments are elaborate, sprawling, two-dimensional cutaways. They beg you to imagine this wondrous world in its full glory, but they resist conventional beauty.

These paintings are all we have left. Beneath that veneer is a run-of-the-mill action platformer. You make a few jumps here, and fight a few baddies there. Throughout, the minute-to-minute play stays simple. You grab weapons and shields lying around, using one button to attack, one to block, one to jump, and the two sticks to move about and aim your strikes with added precision. There's a basic crafting system as well, but it's a straightforward one. Instead, Apotheon expounds on these basic ideas with a string of apropos twists. When venturing into the underworld, for example, you often have to give up the use of a shield to navigate by torchlight, unless you've found a shield kept by the servants of the sun god, Apollo, that can light your path. Each area has something unique to uncover that make some parts of your journey harder, others easier. Such flourishes greatly add to Apotheon’s character, and support the game's mythological inspirations.

Our hero in this neo-Classical myth is Nikandreos. While not a member of the traditional Greek pantheon, his epic sticks to the conventions of Classical tragedy. In the prelude, his hometown, Dion, is out of favor with the gods. The forests have no game, the fields yield no crops, and the sky is stuck in perpetual twilight. Nikandreos, seeking to restore the mantle of humanity, journeys to Mt. Olympus, the realm of the deities. There he learns that Zeus, king of the gods, has grown to hate people and will not rest until they are destroyed.

If that sounds clichéd, that’s because, from a modern lens, it is. Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling. Greek tragedy, and Greek heroes in particular, are far different from the super-powered defenders of good we see today. Greek heroes were flawed, difficult people who accomplished great things, though were often cruel and awful as well. Classical tragedy is even more unusual. These stories draw on themes such as the conflict between men and gods, and depict arrogant heroes that unravel themselves with acts of great hubris.

The ancients were a scared, superstitious people. We frequently forget their struggles, remembering them instead as creators of grand, monolithic civilizations. We forget these people believed not only in divine providence, but also in retribution. We forget the limits of their understanding, and that for these classic civilizations catastrophe was evidence of the wrath of the gods. From that perspective, Apotheon is hauntingly poignant.

In his quest for salvation, Nikandreos partners with Hera, queen of the gods. She’s been brewing over her husband’s many affairs and now lusts for justice. She guides Nikandreos, pointing out to him the weaknesses of the mighty Olympians. At every turn, figures from Greek myth appear--each with their own grudges, their own motives--to help Nikandreos. As he gathers power, he leaves nothing but death and destruction in his wake. Between each act, he sees that his people are suffering and dying--punished for his own arrogance. However, he, or rather we, never once waver. On we march to claim our prize, and to topple the gods.

This drama works because it’s relatable. At some point, every person who has ever lived has experienced pain. Suffering is a fundamental human experience. When we’re at our worst, we seek relief, no matter how destructive it may prove to be. The gods aren’t much different. Hera is driven by her lust for revenge, Zeus by his disappointment in his people. The other gods and goddesses you meet have their own motives, their own goals, and a slew of victims that want you to succeed. You become the vessel for hope, relief, and peace, your only failure being that you’re so damned foolhardy that you can’t see the consequences of your actions.

Apotheon shares many of its narrative threads with God of War, but the differences pile up quickly. Where God of War sticks to video game tropes, Apotheon is content to ground itself in myth. This is a fantastical world where gods and goddesses roam the earth, but beyond that, there’s no need for the suspension of disbelief. Where God of War is flashy and bombastic, Apotheon is soft and personal. Every battle is slow and careful. Each hit is quite damaging, so you hold your shield up and bide your time for a perfect strike.

Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling.

Your weapons and shields also have limited durability. At best, a spear lasts you a few small battles. There are no flaming chain blades here. Instead, you have a small assortment of conventional blades, axes, and pikes. Shields can cover only a limited part of your body so you also have to predict the direction of incoming strikes. It’s similar to a two-dimensional Dark Souls in that respect. Unfortunately, that lack of depth is one of the few knocks against Apotheon. Repeating the block-wait-attack tactic for ten hours gets thin. The only respite is the bouts with the gods themselves.

Each deity has an individual domain with its own rules and challenges. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, for example, transmutes you into a deer and try to lay traps to kill you. To best Athena, goddess of wisdom, you must navigate three concentric, rotating labyrinths. These contests serve two purposes. They reinforce your smallness and their godhood, and add variety to an otherwise monotonous trek.

My time with Apotheon reminded me of a conversation from the film Prometheus. David, an android, discusses with Charlie, a human, the relationship of creators and creation. David asks Charlie why people created robots. The response, “We made you because we could,” upsets David. “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?”

Apotheon asks these same kinds of questions. Zeus, consumed with regret for how petty mankind has become, wants to unmake us. Nikandreos, having observed the same pettiness in other Olympian gods, conquers them and creates a new world where he is god. The names Apotheon and Nikandreos both allude to this chain of events, meaning “one who is elevated to godhood” and “victorious man,” respectively. Victory, and even deification then, are fated from the beginning. You will win. You are the hero, after all, but I can only wonder if in time his creation will bring him relief or despair.

Playing Apotheon is like being an archaeologist exploring and unearthing the mysteries of an unknown world. You find your hands stretching thousands of years back in time to discover a story you didn’t know had unfolded. The art is immediately distinctive. While the same could be said for a fair number of independent games, this time it’s more than just a pretty background. Like the ochre-stained walls of an Athenian temple circa 500 BC, Apotheon’s characters are little more than black silhouettes. The environments are elaborate, sprawling, two-dimensional cutaways. They beg you to imagine this wondrous world in its full glory, but they resist conventional beauty.

These paintings are all we have left. Beneath that veneer is a run-of-the-mill action platformer. You make a few jumps here, and fight a few baddies there. Throughout, the minute-to-minute play stays simple. You grab weapons and shields lying around, using one button to attack, one to block, one to jump, and the two sticks to move about and aim your strikes with added precision. There's a basic crafting system as well, but it's a straightforward one. Instead, Apotheon expounds on these basic ideas with a string of apropos twists. When venturing into the underworld, for example, you often have to give up the use of a shield to navigate by torchlight, unless you've found a shield kept by the servants of the sun god, Apollo, that can light your path. Each area has something unique to uncover that make some parts of your journey harder, others easier. Such flourishes greatly add to Apotheon’s character, and support the game's mythological inspirations.

Our hero in this neo-Classical myth is Nikandreos. While not a member of the traditional Greek pantheon, his epic sticks to the conventions of Classical tragedy. In the prelude, his hometown, Dion, is out of favor with the gods. The forests have no game, the fields yield no crops, and the sky is stuck in perpetual twilight. Nikandreos, seeking to restore the mantle of humanity, journeys to Mt. Olympus, the realm of the deities. There he learns that Zeus, king of the gods, has grown to hate people and will not rest until they are destroyed.

If that sounds clichéd, that’s because, from a modern lens, it is. Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling. Greek tragedy, and Greek heroes in particular, are far different from the super-powered defenders of good we see today. Greek heroes were flawed, difficult people who accomplished great things, though were often cruel and awful as well. Classical tragedy is even more unusual. These stories draw on themes such as the conflict between men and gods, and depict arrogant heroes that unravel themselves with acts of great hubris.

The ancients were a scared, superstitious people. We frequently forget their struggles, remembering them instead as creators of grand, monolithic civilizations. We forget these people believed not only in divine providence, but also in retribution. We forget the limits of their understanding, and that for these classic civilizations catastrophe was evidence of the wrath of the gods. From that perspective, Apotheon is hauntingly poignant.

In his quest for salvation, Nikandreos partners with Hera, queen of the gods. She’s been brewing over her husband’s many affairs and now lusts for justice. She guides Nikandreos, pointing out to him the weaknesses of the mighty Olympians. At every turn, figures from Greek myth appear--each with their own grudges, their own motives--to help Nikandreos. As he gathers power, he leaves nothing but death and destruction in his wake. Between each act, he sees that his people are suffering and dying--punished for his own arrogance. However, he, or rather we, never once waver. On we march to claim our prize, and to topple the gods.

This drama works because it’s relatable. At some point, every person who has ever lived has experienced pain. Suffering is a fundamental human experience. When we’re at our worst, we seek relief, no matter how destructive it may prove to be. The gods aren’t much different. Hera is driven by her lust for revenge, Zeus by his disappointment in his people. The other gods and goddesses you meet have their own motives, their own goals, and a slew of victims that want you to succeed. You become the vessel for hope, relief, and peace, your only failure being that you’re so damned foolhardy that you can’t see the consequences of your actions.

Apotheon shares many of its narrative threads with God of War, but the differences pile up quickly. Where God of War sticks to video game tropes, Apotheon is content to ground itself in myth. This is a fantastical world where gods and goddesses roam the earth, but beyond that, there’s no need for the suspension of disbelief. Where God of War is flashy and bombastic, Apotheon is soft and personal. Every battle is slow and careful. Each hit is quite damaging, so you hold your shield up and bide your time for a perfect strike.

Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling.

Your weapons and shields also have limited durability. At best, a spear lasts you a few small battles. There are no flaming chain blades here. Instead, you have a small assortment of conventional blades, axes, and pikes. Shields can cover only a limited part of your body so you also have to predict the direction of incoming strikes. It’s similar to a two-dimensional Dark Souls in that respect. Unfortunately, that lack of depth is one of the few knocks against Apotheon. Repeating the block-wait-attack tactic for ten hours gets thin. The only respite is the bouts with the gods themselves.

Each deity has an individual domain with its own rules and challenges. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, for example, transmutes you into a deer and try to lay traps to kill you. To best Athena, goddess of wisdom, you must navigate three concentric, rotating labyrinths. These contests serve two purposes. They reinforce your smallness and their godhood, and add variety to an otherwise monotonous trek.

My time with Apotheon reminded me of a conversation from the film Prometheus. David, an android, discusses with Charlie, a human, the relationship of creators and creation. David asks Charlie why people created robots. The response, “We made you because we could,” upsets David. “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?”

Apotheon asks these same kinds of questions. Zeus, consumed with regret for how petty mankind has become, wants to unmake us. Nikandreos, having observed the same pettiness in other Olympian gods, conquers them and creates a new world where he is god. The names Apotheon and Nikandreos both allude to this chain of events, meaning “one who is elevated to godhood” and “victorious man,” respectively. Victory, and even deification then, are fated from the beginning. You will win. You are the hero, after all, but I can only wonder if in time his creation will bring him relief or despair.

Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has once again been teasing the plot of the further adventures of Star-Lord and the gang, stating that the sequel won’t be based on an existing Guardians comic story.

While appearing on the Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend podcast (via Coming Soon), Gunn said the following:

“It’s not really based on anything,” said Gunn. “The story for Guardians 2 is an original story that I came up with that I started working on actually while I was shooting Guardians 1, and it’ll answer some of the questions that were put forth in the first movie about Peter Quill’s father and who he is and what’s going on with that. We’ll get to know some of the characters a little bit more and then we’re going to meet a couple of new characters who will be very important to Guardians movies and probably important to the Marvel Universe as a whole.”

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I am skillfully piloting my Zorgon Peterson brand Hauler through the rotating port of one of the eighty bazillion space stations in Elite: Dangerous. I fiddle with system checks on the holographic dashboard, wearing an expression of self-satisfied disinterest. Almost casually, I flip on the landing gear, invert my ship, and reverse thrusters, deftly drifting into landing pad number 44. I'm master and commander at the far side of the galaxy. I'm an ace. I'm the Star Lord. I'm...not docking?

Well. In a Whedonesque bit of bathos, Elite: Dangerous has glitched, and instead of the chirps of the landing guidance system, I'm being rewarded with the angry, electric snapping sound of my shields grinding on raw space station. No problem--I'll just cancel my docking request and resend it. I make the requisite clicks. And that's when things go very, very bad. "TRESPASS WARNING" flashes in deadly red text, and a timer begins counting down from thirty. "Loitering is a crime punishable by death," a female voice helpfully intones over a loudspeaker, as I'm perforated by what is, frankly, an irresponsible amount of laser fire from station security. End scene.

Lasers, explosions, dystopian public service announcements...that was one of my more dramatic deaths in Elite: Dangerous, but it's actually in the routine of the parts preceding my demise that I experienced the quintessential sci-fi experience. It's the genre's unique thrill: seeing the incredible trappings of futuristic life fade into the background, turn second nature, become mundane. It's Chris Pratt punting alien lizards while dancing along to a cassette, or the way Cowboy Bebop segues from interstellar gateways to bell peppers and beef. The science is still there, of course, doing all the work to keep the cold void of space safely on the other side of the glass. But all the fussy details have been neatly elided, the edges gently worn and rounded from use. That's my kind of sci-fi, and Elite: Dangerous often delivers it, like a spacefaring Euro Truck Simulator.

But in Elite, that sort of familiarity is hard-won. Even if you do your due diligence in the game's tutorial--tampering with the controls, pitching and rolling until you can parallel park at half the speed of light--the game's vision of spaceflight simulation still proves aloof. It's quite a thing, to dump a player into a scale representation of the entire Milky Way galaxy with only the vaguest hint of direction. There's no expressed goal in Elite: Dangerous; if you're looking for signs of progress they might be found in your reputation, a one-word descriptor ranging from "Harmless" to "Elite." But you could just as easily mark your improvement by the accrual of bigger and better ships, or in cold hard credits. A few intersecting occupations are accounted for: trader or smuggler, pirate or bounty hunter… and miner for those who prefer the company of floating bits of rock.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time. There's the inscrutability of your cockpit dashboard to contend with, loaded for bear with functionality that never gets articulated. That, and the imposing galaxy map, with its disorienting scale and legion of similar-sounding star systems. There are the glitches, like the time I spawned into the game to find a shiny new "Wanted" label I'd earned for no reason, or the aforementioned docking snafu. And there's all the missing data that can only be found outside of the game, from critical trade information to a plain-words explanation of how your ship's fuel tank actually works.

It wasn't until I totalled the shiny new spacecraft I'd been loaned and tried to make a go of it with the chintzy, standard-issue Sidewinder that I came to better grasp Elite's systems. The Sidewinder's rinky-dink frame shift drive forced me to take a more considered look at the galaxy map or risk leaving myself stranded between long system jumps. The absence of a docking computer meant that I'd be guiding the little craft into station on manual instead having the autopilot unceremoniously dump me onto landing pads. Elite is at its best when it’s forcing this more deliberate level of engagement, and I wish it happened more often. Tellingly, there's a pre-flight systems checklist that you can run through every time you take off, but Elite pulls its punch and lets you opt out. Even as I write this, I'm hurtling through space on a trade run at 16.64c, window minimized. It's perfectly possible, as it turns out, to conduct an intragalactic smuggling operation en passant. All that's necessary is the occasional alt + tab to make sure I'm not about to plow headlong into a star.

Once you've gotten your space legs under you and upgraded to something resembling a viable ship, it's easy to settle into semi-comfortable routine. Check the station bulletin board for courier missions or a tantalizing bounty payout, or the commodities market for a decent-looking buy-low option. Set a course, leapfrogging from star to nearby star. Arrive at your destination system, drop out of hyperspace and into a slightly slower supercruise, and throttle down so that you don't overshoot the beacon for your target station or combat zone. Deliver your supplies, ply your wares, blow up your mark, and repeat. Profits can be reinvested in your ship once you're safely docked, towards upgraded cargo holds or, say, advanced lasers. The nuances of kitting out a good ship are as obscure as any of the rest of Elite's systems, but generously, anything bought can be sold back for the same price if it turns out you've made a colossal error. Elite is less charitable when it comes to trading outside the garage. The game plays it coy when you look for trade data in other star systems--the best you can hope for is a suggestion that "maybe" a given product is "sometimes" exported from some station therein. Often times it isn't there, however, and let me tell you: there's a real novel frustration in traveling eighty light years away to find out they're all out of tea this week.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time.

It’s enough to drive a fellow to tea piracy, which happens to be well accommodated for in Elite's laissez-faire frontier. One can buy interdiction systems that forcibly drag an NPC or a player character's ship out of supercruise, opening them up to predation should they fail a minigame of “keep the crosshairs aligned.” Thus engaged, combat unfolds with straightforward but precise dogfights, where momentum and trajectory are the secret killers, not the missiles or lasers. I confess that I’m not particularly good at this sector of Elite, whether it comes to gauging an enemy’s skill from afar, or sticking to his six in the heat of battle. I even have trouble remembering to keep my speed at the sweet spot that lets you turn quickest. But a more practiced hand can make use of the more advanced tactical offerings, redistributing power to the parts of one's ship in the most need, or pulling the slick-looking maneuvers conferred by a stick and throttle system or Oculus VR headset (the peripherals pair so naturally with Elite that the game almost seems built just to leverage them). That's a wrinkle I've yet to master, but the promise of dramatic, large-scale battles between federal armadas tucked away in distant systems is more than enough incentive to learn the ropes. Would that you could effectively team up with other players to run them--Elite’s tools for inter-player cooperation are almost nonexistent.

The little joys of Elite: Dangerous' solo play suffice, though. Peals of thunder rumble past your ship in supercruise, and I don’t care if they're as fake as the pumped-in crowd noise at the Georgia Dome, because they sound great. Ditto for the sudden, 18-wheeler horn that accompanies a drop out of hyperspace into close proximity with a giant, iridescent star. The hottest of these visibly cook your ship if you get too close, which happens to be a requirement if you want to use a fuel scoop to replenish your stores on the fly. They're also functional light emitters in the game's engine, and you can see the shadow of your craft ripple down the side of a station if you get between the two bodies. There are a few curiosities out in the ether, too, though they’re harder to appreciate if you’re not an astrophysics hobbyist. For example, the chance discovery of a station orbiting, well, nothing, struck me as odd. There’s a term for this, apparently: a “LaGrange Point,” but instead of making me contemplate the wonder of the universe, it mostly brought ZZ Top to mind. Still, this a game where light years can be hopped in a moment, and yet the prospect of traveling from one end of Elite's map to the other remains inconceivable. It's hard to overstate how remarkable that is, how the simple act of playing a game can engender such an acute awareness of size and scale.

It's an accomplishment in its own right, but that breadth doesn't come into play elsewhere in the experience. Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous partitions the universe into discreet "rooms," in this case representing individual star systems. At a glance, it appears that almost a third of these systems purport to be in open rebellion, though you'd never know it from the pervasive quiet. Slaves are purchasable and tradable commodities, an inclusion that's sometimes played for ironic humor in the missions but usually rings as off-putting. The only way to interact with that underbelly of rebellion and slavery is from the comfort of my captain's chair, through a market speculation interface or a salvo of missiles. I pick up contracts for the assassination of high-ranking government officials on the same screen that I get my tea delivery requests.

The old problem remains: when time and distance are bumped out to these impossible ranges, the only systems capable of following them out there are the most discreet and elastic ones. Trade just happens to scale well, a daisy chain of supply to demand, demand to supply, all the way to the white nothing at the edge of the universe. Perhaps the next true frontier is the search for a procedural generation system that can create something more ostentatious, something that can surprise…something not so visibly derived from an underlying system of ones and zeroes. But then, maybe it's there in Elite: Dangerous, in its way, and the problem is that I need to learn to start being more impressed by LaGrange points.

I am skillfully piloting my Zorgon Peterson brand Hauler through the rotating port of one of the eighty bazillion space stations in Elite: Dangerous. I fiddle with system checks on the holographic dashboard, wearing an expression of self-satisfied disinterest. Almost casually, I flip on the landing gear, invert my ship, and reverse thrusters, deftly drifting into landing pad number 44. I'm master and commander at the far side of the galaxy. I'm an ace. I'm the Star Lord. I'm...not docking?

Well. In a Whedonesque bit of bathos, Elite: Dangerous has glitched, and instead of the chirps of the landing guidance system, I'm being rewarded with the angry, electric snapping sound of my shields grinding on raw space station. No problem--I'll just cancel my docking request and resend it. I make the requisite clicks. And that's when things go very, very bad. "TRESPASS WARNING" flashes in deadly red text, and a timer begins counting down from thirty. "Loitering is a crime punishable by death," a female voice helpfully intones over a loudspeaker, as I'm perforated by what is, frankly, an irresponsible amount of laser fire from station security. End scene.

Lasers, explosions, dystopian public service announcements...that was one of my more dramatic deaths in Elite: Dangerous, but it's actually in the routine of the parts preceding my demise that I experienced the quintessential sci-fi experience. It's the genre's unique thrill: seeing the incredible trappings of futuristic life fade into the background, turn second nature, become mundane. It's Chris Pratt punting alien lizards while dancing along to a cassette, or the way Cowboy Bebop segues from interstellar gateways to bell peppers and beef. The science is still there, of course, doing all the work to keep the cold void of space safely on the other side of the glass. But all the fussy details have been neatly elided, the edges gently worn and rounded from use. That's my kind of sci-fi, and Elite: Dangerous often delivers it, like a spacefaring Euro Truck Simulator.

But in Elite, that sort of familiarity is hard-won. Even if you do your due diligence in the game's tutorial--tampering with the controls, pitching and rolling until you can parallel park at half the speed of light--the game's vision of spaceflight simulation still proves aloof. It's quite a thing, to dump a player into a scale representation of the entire Milky Way galaxy with only the vaguest hint of direction. There's no expressed goal in Elite: Dangerous; if you're looking for signs of progress they might be found in your reputation, a one-word descriptor ranging from "Harmless" to "Elite." But you could just as easily mark your improvement by the accrual of bigger and better ships, or in cold hard credits. A few intersecting occupations are accounted for: trader or smuggler, pirate or bounty hunter… and miner for those who prefer the company of floating bits of rock.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time. There's the inscrutability of your cockpit dashboard to contend with, loaded for bear with functionality that never gets articulated. That, and the imposing galaxy map, with its disorienting scale and legion of similar-sounding star systems. There are the glitches, like the time I spawned into the game to find a shiny new "Wanted" label I'd earned for no reason, or the aforementioned docking snafu. And there's all the missing data that can only be found outside of the game, from critical trade information to a plain-words explanation of how your ship's fuel tank actually works.

It wasn't until I totalled the shiny new spacecraft I'd been loaned and tried to make a go of it with the chintzy, standard-issue Sidewinder that I came to better grasp Elite's systems. The Sidewinder's rinky-dink frame shift drive forced me to take a more considered look at the galaxy map or risk leaving myself stranded between long system jumps. The absence of a docking computer meant that I'd be guiding the little craft into station on manual instead having the autopilot unceremoniously dump me onto landing pads. Elite is at its best when it’s forcing this more deliberate level of engagement, and I wish it happened more often. Tellingly, there's a pre-flight systems checklist that you can run through every time you take off, but Elite pulls its punch and lets you opt out. Even as I write this, I'm hurtling through space on a trade run at 16.64c, window minimized. It's perfectly possible, as it turns out, to conduct an intragalactic smuggling operation en passant. All that's necessary is the occasional alt + tab to make sure I'm not about to plow headlong into a star.

Once you've gotten your space legs under you and upgraded to something resembling a viable ship, it's easy to settle into semi-comfortable routine. Check the station bulletin board for courier missions or a tantalizing bounty payout, or the commodities market for a decent-looking buy-low option. Set a course, leapfrogging from star to nearby star. Arrive at your destination system, drop out of hyperspace and into a slightly slower supercruise, and throttle down so that you don't overshoot the beacon for your target station or combat zone. Deliver your supplies, ply your wares, blow up your mark, and repeat. Profits can be reinvested in your ship once you're safely docked, towards upgraded cargo holds or, say, advanced lasers. The nuances of kitting out a good ship are as obscure as any of the rest of Elite's systems, but generously, anything bought can be sold back for the same price if it turns out you've made a colossal error. Elite is less charitable when it comes to trading outside the garage. The game plays it coy when you look for trade data in other star systems--the best you can hope for is a suggestion that "maybe" a given product is "sometimes" exported from some station therein. Often times it isn't there, however, and let me tell you: there's a real novel frustration in traveling eighty light years away to find out they're all out of tea this week.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time.

It’s enough to drive a fellow to tea piracy, which happens to be well accommodated for in Elite's laissez-faire frontier. One can buy interdiction systems that forcibly drag an NPC or a player character's ship out of supercruise, opening them up to predation should they fail a minigame of “keep the crosshairs aligned.” Thus engaged, combat unfolds with straightforward but precise dogfights, where momentum and trajectory are the secret killers, not the missiles or lasers. I confess that I’m not particularly good at this sector of Elite, whether it comes to gauging an enemy’s skill from afar, or sticking to his six in the heat of battle. I even have trouble remembering to keep my speed at the sweet spot that lets you turn quickest. But a more practiced hand can make use of the more advanced tactical offerings, redistributing power to the parts of one's ship in the most need, or pulling the slick-looking maneuvers conferred by a stick and throttle system or Oculus VR headset (the peripherals pair so naturally with Elite that the game almost seems built just to leverage them). That's a wrinkle I've yet to master, but the promise of dramatic, large-scale battles between federal armadas tucked away in distant systems is more than enough incentive to learn the ropes. Would that you could effectively team up with other players to run them--Elite’s tools for inter-player cooperation are almost nonexistent.

The little joys of Elite: Dangerous' solo play suffice, though. Peals of thunder rumble past your ship in supercruise, and I don’t care if they're as fake as the pumped-in crowd noise at the Georgia Dome, because they sound great. Ditto for the sudden, 18-wheeler horn that accompanies a drop out of hyperspace into close proximity with a giant, iridescent star. The hottest of these visibly cook your ship if you get too close, which happens to be a requirement if you want to use a fuel scoop to replenish your stores on the fly. They're also functional light emitters in the game's engine, and you can see the shadow of your craft ripple down the side of a station if you get between the two bodies. There are a few curiosities out in the ether, too, though they’re harder to appreciate if you’re not an astrophysics hobbyist. For example, the chance discovery of a station orbiting, well, nothing, struck me as odd. There’s a term for this, apparently: a “LaGrange Point,” but instead of making me contemplate the wonder of the universe, it mostly brought ZZ Top to mind. Still, this a game where light years can be hopped in a moment, and yet the prospect of traveling from one end of Elite's map to the other remains inconceivable. It's hard to overstate how remarkable that is, how the simple act of playing a game can engender such an acute awareness of size and scale.

It's an accomplishment in its own right, but that breadth doesn't come into play elsewhere in the experience. Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous partitions the universe into discreet "rooms," in this case representing individual star systems. At a glance, it appears that almost a third of these systems purport to be in open rebellion, though you'd never know it from the pervasive quiet. Slaves are purchasable and tradable commodities, an inclusion that's sometimes played for ironic humor in the missions but usually rings as off-putting. The only way to interact with that underbelly of rebellion and slavery is from the comfort of my captain's chair, through a market speculation interface or a salvo of missiles. I pick up contracts for the assassination of high-ranking government officials on the same screen that I get my tea delivery requests.

The old problem remains: when time and distance are bumped out to these impossible ranges, the only systems capable of following them out there are the most discreet and elastic ones. Trade just happens to scale well, a daisy chain of supply to demand, demand to supply, all the way to the white nothing at the edge of the universe. Perhaps the next true frontier is the search for a procedural generation system that can create something more ostentatious, something that can surprise…something not so visibly derived from an underlying system of ones and zeroes. But then, maybe it's there in Elite: Dangerous, in its way, and the problem is that I need to learn to start being more impressed by LaGrange points.