I console myself with the thought that I've wasted far more beer tokens elsewhere and that in the grand scheme of my profligacy it's a drip in my gin glass.
Also, it is quite a fun game.
There are three special, halcyon maps which owe a considerable debt to Roger Dean. I absolutely love the piece of music that accompanies them. The climax of the game is great, too.
Does that mean you get 6 times as much fun from it?
Sadly not. However, I do feel obliged to try harder now.
6 times the pressure to actually play it :) You might not bother if you'd only spent £4.50.
I played the Elite Dangerous training missions last night. It's complicated. Mouse and keyboard controls are interesting. I'm sure a proper controller would make it easier. I managed the first combat training but failed miserably at advanced combat.
Not so far, though he has as cut-and dried a case as he had with Avatar. But what's a poor boy to do when the strength of his artistic vision gently tweaks art history? cf. Bridget Riley.
I chatted to him on the phone a couple of times in the mid-nineties. I borrowed his first album cover painting - for Gun - for my Sound & Fury exhibition on the iconography of heavy metal.
He was amiable & grounded; more to the point, he kindly agreed a - ludicrously underestimated - £45k insurance value for the work because he knew that anything realistic (bearing in mind that he held for some years the record for the most expensive artwork by a living artist, eclipsing de Kooning & Hockney) would be way beyond Bradford AGM's means.
Was it cut and dried? I've seen plenty of comparisons and I'll admit that was my first thought too. But then again, what's the relationship between plagiarism and following a paradigm that another artist has established? After all, you only need to stick "Chinese landscape" into Google and it starts to look as though Roger Dean may just have 'followed a paradigm' or two himself. And as for floating islands - they date back through Swift to Homer and probably earlier. Should Braque have paid Picasso royalties? For that matter you can see the pre-echoes of cubism in the painting of Cezanne. I'm not saying Roger Dean wasn't plagiarised, I just think he may have beel ill-advised to sue.