antiques-for-geeks

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Winter Games

US Gold/Epyx / 1985 / Originally £9.99 (£14.99 disk) / Commodore 64

Ding-dong-merrily-on-high, it’s another round of Christmas games on Antiques for Geeks! It’s been a while! Hope you’re well! Pull up a seat and let us tell you all about the games you couldn’t avoid owning, even if you wanted to!

Over to Tim...

Oddly, Christmas was not a rich vein of games for me. Whilst each year, festive editions of Zzap! 64, Commodore User or Commodore Computing International would tantalise with reviews for me to read, the games featured in them were not as readily forthcoming in the form of presents. No, as gifts, anything computing related would favour hardware purchases and whenever there was software bought, invariably it would be productivity titles. I think I was the only kid in my class that Santa decided needed Kindwords 2 for the Amiga in 1989.

Yes, while I was given the gift of word processing, everyone else was getting into Batman.

This time of year wasn’t a complete dearth of fun however. 1987 stood out as a vintage year; on Christmas Day morning that year, as it resolutely refused to snow outside, I unwrapped a compilation from US Gold. Solid Gold contained five of the publisher’s best-selling titles from the previous two years and offered them for the same price as a new game. As we know, especially with US Gold, best selling doesn’t always mean good, but there wasn’t a dud in the selection. I could wax lyrical about the different titles [And he did. For months. -Meat] but there were two that stood out from the others. Gauntlet and Winter Games.

Winter Games had been released for the C64 by Epyx in America during 1985 and had sold very well. Putting this on a compilation for Christmas in 1987 meant another bite at the sales cherry, but the timing was also well observed. After all, 1988 was an Olympic year...

Unlike later titles published by US Gold, Winter Games had no official licencing in place. Instead of playing out the Olympics, you are officially playing out a fictional event that by pure coincidence, pretty much mirrors the real Winter Olympics sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee. Complete with opening and medal ceremonies. Coincidentally, it’s also set in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1988, which just happened to be the location chosen for that year’s actual Winter Olympics. What are the odds?

Yes, there is an opening ceremony; it’s a rehash of the one used in Summer Games, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Once the Olympic, erm, Winter Games flame is lit and doves released, it’s off to select your events.

RELEASE THE DOVES!

Players can attempt all events, playing a combination of the seven events, just the one, or settle for practising. Generally, playing the game meant playing through all of the events. Winter Games is a heavy multi-load on the C64; in the US where a set-up with Commodore’s 1541 disk drive was ubiquitous this was irritating, but by no means, the end of the world. In the UK however, where most people used cassette, this was far more painful. Fortunately for US Gold, us Europeans didn’t know any better.

You can have up to eight players in one game; each can enter their name and select their country. In a nice touch, each player’s national anthem is played when selected; this is notably missing from the versions that were commissioned for the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC by US Gold. Personally, I always chose to compete under Epyx, mostly because it has a cool anthem and flag.

That done, it’s time to begin competing in the seven events...

Hot Dog Aerials

Freestyle skiing at it’s finest, each player has three attempts to combine different moves to try and impress the judges who score your performance much like you see in figure skating. There are ten points available and the aim is, of course, to get as close to the maximum on at least one of your attempts. All to a syncopating rhythm, that I always imagined was blasting out from behind the crowd for the benefit of the TV cameras.

No, I’d never heard of Hot Dog Aerials before Winter Games, or after it.

This is far harder than it looks. Launching from a slope with some beautifully drawn mountains as your backdrop, it’s very, very easy to perform basic stunts and get a reasonable score in the seven and eight and half points. When you start combining stunts with flips, that’s when it becomes hard. Mix two flips and you’re into the solid nines - two flips in different directions will score you that magical maximum of ten points. However, time this wrong and you’ll end up in a heap of broken skis (and you’d expect, bones) at the bottom of the slope. Better to bank a simple combination guaranteeing you a score over nine points and then use your remaining two attempts to improve your score.

Biathlon

Although there is some competition for this, Biathlon is probably the strongest event all round in the game. The whole thing is incredibly pretty, split over three screens of cross-country skiing and a fourth in the shooting range. While this does involve a fair amount of joystick waggling (or destruction, if your joystick wasn’t microswitched), what is really nice is that this is not a matter of hammering away at the joystick as quickly as you possibly can.

Doesn’t your biathlete look so snazzy in his grey unitard with yellow go-faster-stripe?

To master this, you need to build a steady rhythm to get the most out of the flats and climbs. Shooting is tricky, with you having to cock and load your gun with a back and forward flick of the joystick, then fire when the automatic crosshair is in location. Miss and there is a five second time penalty for each incomplete target.

The challenge of combining these three disciplines is hard and initially can be very frustrating, but time and patience is rewarded. If you’re really good, you can finish the event in around two minutes. If you were me, then doing it in under three was an accomplishment.

Speed Skating

Yeah, erm, not much to see here...

We’re now onto an event that is familiar to most; it’s a straight head to head sprint race against either the computer or your friends. There is more joystick waggling here and while it is a lot less subtle than the Biathlon, the key here is still rhythm to build and maintain speed. Go too fast, and the skater on the screen enters a kind of foetal position and does, well, nothing. This is a trap that is very easy to fall into and one that if you're playing against the computer, is punished as it does not make mistakes.

All said and done, this phase of the game is quite forgettable. That’s not because it’s bad, but because even in 1985 (and certainly in 1987) we’d seen this kind of thing over and over again. Sprinting in Activision’s Decathlon, sprinting in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, sprinting in Summer Games. The looks also betrays its heritage - it could easily be the Rowing game from Summer Games II repurposed with new graphics. Coming after the visual feast of the first two events, it’s a bit of a let-down.

It all feels very transitory, almost like a mini-game to entertain you while another event loads. Even though it isn’t.

Figure Skating

She’s beautifully animated, but that's where the excitement ends.

You have a minute to perform a programme of seven figure skating moves and score points. This plays out to a nice rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker suite, with a skater making her way down an infinite rink. The animation of the skater is superb, much in the naturalistic vein of the player in Impossible Mission.

But.

I must confess, I never understood the attraction of this event. It was for me the second most boring event in the game. The jumps and direction changes look great when executed correctly, but for me it seems hard to get anything over a three out of six. But as much as I disliked it, others loved it and I can see that for some, it’s a challenge, rather than something to endure.

Ski Jump

Life comes down to a few moments...

Although I really like the Biathlon event, this was my absolute favourite. It looks stunning from the get-go, with a beautifully drawn side-on view of the ramp. The aim here is to control the jumper as skillfully as possible so that they can jump as far and as stylishly as possible. Timing is key to this event. You need to successfully launch your competitor off the ramp (if you fail, it ends with a comedic flump from the bottom of the ramp), then once in the air, the action changes to a view of the beautifully drawn landing zone and it becomes a matter of keeping your athlete at an optimal angle at all times. The game will try as it might to knock you off-course by having the jumper cross their skis, lean too far back or too far forward. The quicker you correct these problems, the more style points you score and also, the further you fly. If you don’t, then your skier ends up in a heap on the floor.

...and this is one of them.

Sounds a bit dull doesn’t it? But no. The whole thing has real atmosphere to it; the opening music is cinematic, inspiring even, with a thudding baseline that is just that little bit foreboding. Yes, it does bring out the nerves, the more invested in the game you become. I love the skill and reaction time required to make this game work and a good jump rewards you with a roar from the crowd. Turn in a really good performance with a roar and a fan-fare. What more could you want?

Free Skating

And from the sublime to the ridiculous. Another two minutes of skating induced tedium. A repeat of the Figure Skating game, albeit with funkier music and two minutes to do your programme of moves three times. Much like the saying about insanity, doing the same thing provides the same results; your skater jumps and pirouettes (or falls over) in the same way and an inevitable score of around three out of six is awarded.

You again.

This really is the low point of the game; unlike Speed Skating whose criticism is that it’s just a rehash of similar style events from other games, Free Skating manages to take all the frustration of Figure Skating and draw them out with the extra time. Beautifully presented, but painful to play.

Bobsled

The final event is a real white-knuckle ride. You control your bobsled down a run, trying to keep your speed up while ensuring you don’t crash. This is far easier said than done. You have no control over the braking of the sled and just need to make sure that you steer hard enough in the right direction to stop the sled from venturing too high up the sides of the course and wipe out.

Despite the action really only taking place in the upper left hand corner of the screen, at no point does this compromise the experience. That says a lot about the playability of the event...

The forces acting on the bobsled are modelled quite well here, especially considering the computing power available and there is a really good sense of speed from both the graphics and sound.

Learning the course so you can anticipate the turns is vital to getting a good time. With just three attempts to run the course, knowing it inside out guarantees the best results. You see Bobsled drivers before a run with their eyes closed, visualising the turns they have to complete? Yes, that’ll be you.

If you’re playing on tape, you’re at a massive disadvantage here, as it’s the final event on the tape and locating it is a chore to play as a single event or practice. Although the same for all events, being the it is felt most acutely here.

Still, it was an event that I really looked forward to playing and a fair few times was a winner-takes-all high stakes affair as a gold medial here might just seal overall victory at Winter Games. 

Medalling

In between each event you get a brief medal ceremony and if playing through the current overall standings. Unlike the events, this is a little bland and no doubt so you don’t have to load a bespoke medal ceremony after each sport. However, where something more substantial is missed most is at the end of the competition. It would have been great to have something more special and a closing ceremony (as was the case in Summer Games II), but here you have to make do with a ranking of players, a brief fanfare and the winner’s national anthem.

But in the scheme of things, this is a small gripe; when the games are presented so stylishly with beautifully fluid animation and a great musical score, you really can’t complain much. Epyx were one of the first companies that thought this kind of thing through - the graphics artists and sound designers worked alongside the software developers to produce a polished product rather than have them all work in isolation. Bear in mind also, that when developed in 1985, the do-it-all bedroom coder was still very much a thing. This approach was special.

For me and my friends, the game provided hours of entertainment; while perfectly possible to enjoy on your own, it really came into its own with many players. Given the different skills needed to compete in each game, there are players who could be terrible at one event, yet win the next. Interest doesn’t automatically wane, even with the skating events thrown in.

The game also sparked something else. Come February of 1988, much like the kids who run outside to play football after the FA Cup Final, I’d watch the antics of the athletes in Calgary at the Olympics on the TV, then hurriedly dig out Winter Games to give it another go. Even today I view the Winter Olympics with fondness, the 1988 event firmly imprinted on my psyche.

I may not have ever given ski jumping a go in real life but for a brief moment in the late 1980s, as the sun struggled over the horizon in the depths of a British Winter, Epyx’s game allowed me to soar like an eagle. Just like Eddie.

Eddie. Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards. The British ski-jumper with the thick glasses. Yes, ski-jumper. The one they made that film about. What do you mean you’ve never heard of him?

Score card

Presentation 9/10

Epyx really pushed the boat out, even if they didn’t have an official licence. The whole package feels so consistent - from the player selection screen right the way through to the final medal table.

Originality 9/10

Though there were sports games out there, they were mostly focussed on summer sports. Winter sports, even today, are less well serviced.

Graphics 9/10

Hard to fault. The backgrounds are stunning, the player sprites fluid and well drawn. When it comes to criticism, we’re starting to come down to the way players prefer something to look, rather than thinking it looks bad. I know that I don’t much care for the way the speed skaters look, but that’s not to say they don’t look good to begin with.

Hookability 8/10

Immerses you so far you don’t even care if you have to sit through the figure and free skating events.

Sound 9/10

Great music, superb sound effects. It doesn’t have the work of the mighty Rob Hubbard, but to be honest, it doesn’t need it.

Lastability 9/10

This got played and played and played and played. Even now, it’s a go-to game on the Commodore 64.

Value for Money 10/10

Worth every single penny of the entrance fee.

Overall 9/10

Really hard to come to any other conclusion, even when taking into consideration it’s small faults. Epyx defined this kind of game in the 1980s, earning them their reputation and position as a well-loved developer. Had things worked out differently for the company, they might be on a similar scale to EA today, but hopefully without the loot boxes. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened; would have loved to have seen this series evolve over the years; Epyx Winter Games 2022 on the PlayStation 5 could have been epic (pun not intended).

Screenshots borrowed from Gamebase64 - playing this again for the review, I regressed to the junior me, became engrossed and forgot to take some screenshots. So kudos to them, and for spotting that the ZZap 64 review back in 1985 used screenshots from the Atari version.

#AFG #commodore #Commodore 64 #chrismas #antiquesforgeeks #review #retrogaming #retrocomputing

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Race / Spin-Out / Cryptogram

Philips (Magnavox) / 1978 / G7000 (Odyssey²) / sold with system

Ding-dong-merrily-on-high, it's another round of Christmas games on Antiques for Geeks! It's been a while! Hope you're well! Pull up a seat and let me tell you all about the games you couldn't avoid owning, even if you wanted to!

Ah, the console pack-in title. A perfect opportunity to show off what your new system can do. Would the Gameboy have been as wildly successful without the inclusion of Tetris? The SNES without Super Mario World? How about the Wii without Wii Sports?

Let me answer that for you. Yes, yes, and no.

Sometimes the quality of the included title gave a pretty strong hint about the blighted future of a new piece of hardware too. Who can forget the Atari Jaguar with the immortal Cybermorph? Imagine wrapping your mitts around the dinner-plate sized Jaguar controller in Christmas '94 to play that turkey...

I honestly can't remember if we received any extra games when we got our trusty Phillips G7000. The cartridges alone were expensive enough to be joint Christmas presents for my brother and I. Our household's greatest hits collection of Pickaxe Pete, Satellite Attack and Quest for the Rings have previously been covered, but what about that original system pack-in?

Well, that got lots of play too, despite being... well... a bit basic.

Like several other games on the system, the snappily titled 'Race / Spin-Out / Cryptogram' was actually 3 games in 1, selected using the number buttons on the machine's membrane keyboard. Atari pulled this trick too with some early VCS games, and though I don't know for sure who came up with the idea first I have a suspicion Phillips were copying taking inspiration from the market leaders. It's a solid idea; give the impression of value with a little compendium of games to get you started.

So, what about those games?

Race

A race against time - travel as far as you can before the two minutes are up, avoiding the competitor race cars. There is a time penalty for crashing.

Boom! That red blob is the mangled wreckage of your car. No walking away from this one.

The first game sees you maneuvering your 'car' left and right at the bottom of the screen while a simple line animation represents a completely straight 'road'. There's a constant stream of other cars coming down from the top of the screen, and you have to try to weave past as many as you can in the fixed time limit to get a high-score. Hit another car and you explode, losing time. There are a couple of difficulty settings which dictate how fast these cars come at you. That's your lot! It's a really basic experience, with no variation. Even the pattern of the cars is preordained. Many early games had very simple mechanics, but this is really pushing it.

Spin-Out

Race your opponent round the corners and barriers of the Spin-Out circuit. Press the action button to go faster. The first car to complete a set number of laps wins!

A cyan track against a purple background. The 70's was the era of good taste.

Now this is a bit more like it. Assuming you have a second player to race against, this simple top down racer could almost be described as fun, despite being nearly as minimalistic as 'Race' was. It's no Super Sprint, mind you, with the cars instantly moving in the direction you point the joystick. There's certainly no representation of momentum or other fancy gameplay features. At least a couple of difficulty levels are available, dictating the speed of the cars and the complexity of the track.

Cryprogram

A game of knowledge and deduction. Type a word or phrase onto the TV screen (don't let your opponent see it). The letters of the phrase are then jumbled up, and your opponent must unscramble them (each correct letter remains on screen). The screen shows the number of mistakes made. The player who makes the least mistakes wins.

Need a clue? Uridium. Paradroid. Tim's favorite twitter feed?

Making sure to demonstrate the G7000's unique functionality to the kiddies, Cryptogram is a game better played on paper, where your mistakes aren't punctuated by an irritating beep and you don't have to bruise your fingertips on those unyielding 'touch sensitive' keys.

Commentariat

Pop

I was all ready to really dump on this one, but it's partially saved by the fact that even basic multi-player games can still be really fun. The crash mechanics of Spin-Out are pitiful, but it's still quite playable despite itself.

Race is rubbish, though, and I'm mystified at the memory of playing and enjoying it. Despite it's seemingly obvious crapness, I recall playing this one a fair bit, and would sit, entranced, weaving through the traffic until the time limit was up. I suppose for a generation raised on Pong and game-and-watch games it counted as acceptable entertainment.

As for Cryptogram, about the only thing going for it is the ability to render a 'fuck' or 'cock' on the family TV in vibrant colour, a pleasure I was denied by virtue of being a tedious little goody goody. It was certainly the least played of the 3 offerings here, being barely a game at all. But, y'know it was educational. Who's to say what my reading age would have ended up without it?

Meat

I have a 'Cryptogram' for you. SHTI.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

In-game presentation is the very definition of bare bones, though to be fair that covers most games of this era. There are no introductory screens or music. Like all G7000 games, it comes in a sturdy plastic box, and also has appealing watercolour cover art to help get you in the racing mood.

Originality 2/10

Consists of inferior rip-offs of games like Sega's Monaco GP and Atari's Sprint, alongside a version of a pen and paper game as old as... pen and paper? That these don't play exactly like their inspirations is probably mostly due to their extreme simplicity.

Graphics 2/10

Even for the machine, these are basic and characterless. The cars in Race could be almost anything, with no animation present at all, and the sensation of movement amounts to some white bars moving from the top down to the bottom of the screen. The race track in Spin-Out is made solely from straight lines. No curves. At least the cars actually can visibly 'spin out' in this one, even if it looks laughable. Cryptogram is just multi-colour letters displayed on the screen, something the G7000 was born to do.

Hookability 4/10

These games are easy to pick up, and you won't need much instruction to get going. If things get competitive you could find worse ways to spend your time than a few laps of the track in Spin-Out.

Sound 1/10

BrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR BOOM! BrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR BOOM! BrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR BOOM! BrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR BOOM! BrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR BOOM!

Aural torture.

Lastability 5/10

A real mixed bag. You'll get bored with the single player only Race after a couple of goes. With 2 players, Spin-Out is definitely much more worthy of your time. While no Mario Kart, you could potentially be having some fun with this months later. Even thinking about Cryptogram bores me. They must have had some left over cartridge space to fill.

Value for Money 7/10

Can't really fault it here, since no more money changed hands. This a a decent effort for a late 70's games console, giving the new owner 3 (let's be honest and say 2 and a half!) new games to try.

Overall 4/10

Context is everything for this one. Whilst not as as good a multi player pack-in title as Atari's Combat, this is decent fare for the year the G7000 launched. It really doesn't hold up to later Atari pack-ins like Space Invaders, but Phillips's machine was fundamentally limited and quickly left behind on many fronts. With better and more characterful implementations of similar ideas on other classic gaming consoles, this is one title best left for Christmas past.

Want to have a go anyway? Play it here.

#afg #antiquesforgeeks #review #retrogaming #christmas #phillips #G7000 #odyssey2

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Goldeneye 007

Rare / 1997 / Originally £59.99 / Nintendo 64

As the sun sets on this strangest of years and a cold wind blows through an empty AfG towers this Christmas, the team cast their thoughts back to Christmas Days past, when your rich Uncle used to come round in the afternoon with your cousins and their latest full priced games that you couldn’t play because they had an Atari ST in 1987 and you were still pretty pleased with your Spectrum +2 bought last summer thankyouverymuch.

So once again, we’re looking back at the games we did get to play on Christmas Day. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing.

First for this year, Pop...

Now effortlessly installed as the most fondly remembered and critically lauded Bond game ever, the world needs another piece about Goldeneye like a donkey needs a second pisser... but I’ve been asked to write about a game that holds strong seasonal memories. There’s simply no way to avoid this bald fact: Goldeneye was simply the best gaming Christmas present I ever got.

So... I’m going to write about it... and some lucky donkey is going to empty its bladder in record time.

About the best thing about being newly employed in the late 90’s was having my own money to spend on whatever gaming rubbish I saw fit. I bought a Tiger ‘Game.com’, Satan's own handheld system. Why? Because it was there! (in the Argos catalog, that is). 

So when I wandered into a branch of HMV and saw an N64 demo pod with the first level of Goldeneye ready to play I knew straight away that my number one seasonal priority was to be able to take it home.

The first level lays it all out. I stealthily approach a guard tower, taking out a few unfortunate soldiers on the way. Up top is a sniper rifle... plenty of time to get a bead on the forehead of a distant and totally oblivious soldier. He has no idea what’s coming. My finger tightens on the N64’s trigger button. He’s thinking about how cold it is... how much he misses his family... how soon his commission is coming to an end… to be back in his wife’s warm embrace... borscht for dinner tonight.

BANG! His head snaps back and he crumples to the ground… ‘Hey! That’s sick!’ opines some random guy watching over my shoulder. But I can hear it in his voice. He knows, just as I know. This game is awesome.

I gifted myself a few games on Christmas day along with the console. I’m sure Mario 64 was one of them, and I’m sure I loved that too, but that year the holiday season belonged to Bond.

I’d played some first person shooters before, but those had all been riffs on the ‘Doom’ formula, with a corresponding feeling that you were floating through the levels, somehow disconnected. Goldeneye put you right in the film, dealing with changing objectives and with the ever-present possibility of sneaking up on enemies and dealing with them silently. Many levels were designed around the film’s sets before shooting was even complete, and they benefit greatly from feeling more like real places.

And so much fun could be had just experiencing this world! Somewhat shamefully, Tim and I would play the second level set inside a well guarded Russian lab with our own rogue objective: the scientist cull. What this involved was simply finding all the white coated lab personnel and gunning them down in the most extreme (and satisfying) ways possible. The detail that made this particularly fun was how well their biological whites showed up the inevitable blood stains, like some kind of terrible alternative universe Persil advert.

Sorry, this lab is over populated. I’m sure you understand.

This was a game that could be enjoyed as a quick blast on the easier levels, but provided a genuinely rewarding structure for extended play on the harder difficulties. The bad guys were tougher, requiring you avoid combat where possible and to master the precise aiming controls to take them out with head shots. Additionally, the mission objectives were extended with interesting additional tasks, taking in much more of the level. As icing on the cake, beating the game on higher difficulties unlocks a couple of extra levels, which are both well worth seeing - especially the ‘Aztec’ level from Moonraker where you get to face-off against fan favorite bad guy Jaws.

I suppose I should at least mention the groundbreaking multi-player element. The N64 supported 4 players, and 4 player couch co-op would no doubt have been awesome if I’d had 4 controllers, a decent sized TV and 4 people to play against. The few times I managed to rustle up an extra to battle against were good fun, if imbalanced, because I never got to play anyone else who actually owned the game. Single player was where I spent 99% of my time.

Apparently many of the team that put Goldeneye together hadn’t worked on a major game before, allowing them to build it unshackled by the past. In many ways this sounds like a game that came good because of dogged determination and a series of lucky accidents. It certainly shifted the goalposts for what was expected of a first person shooter for console generations of games to come. The way games develop over time often appears to be a series of big bangs, followed by copies, iterations and enhancements. Goldeneye is definitely one of those seismic bangs, a huge success that other developers wanted a piece of.

Rare did it all again, and technically better with the release of Perfect Dark a couple of years later, and though I loved that game too, for me it didn’t have quite the same bombshell impact.

I guess this is the point where we should address the elephant in the room. Goldeneye, like so many games from its console generation hasn’t actually aged very gracefully. The graphics were certainly pretty great for the time, with a long view distance and excellent character animation. They really do look hopelessly primitive in 2020 though, and the controls feel slow and clunky. Not to mention that the N64 controller, so ahead of its time in the 90′s feels like an alien object  to a modern player used to iteration after iteration of 2 stick gamepads for the last 20 years. It’s a real shame that licensing issues have prevented a cleaned up re-release (we’ll ignore the 2010 effort by Activision; it’s a characterless shadow next to the real thing).

So why does this game make me think of Christmas? Is it because many of the levels in Goldeneye are appealingly wintry? Maybe because a Bond film was an ever present pleasure for terrestrial TV viewers at yuletide in the UK?

Nope. This game basically lets you commit murder on a massive scale, again and again and again (oh, and those poor innocent scientists!) That hardly qualifies it as festive entertainment. It's probably just because a new console and a great game to go with it has been a staple requirement for so many of my Christmases. This was one of the greatest of all.

Score card

Presentation 9/10

The bond atmosphere is presented almost perfectly, from the iconic ‘gun barrel’ opening onwards.

Originality 9/10

Like nothing else released before, Goldeneye set a high bar that wasn’t matched anywhere during the N64′s lifespan... except by its ‘sequel’ Prefect Dark.

Graphics 8/10

Somewhat colourless, but very solid. The frame rate is acceptable for the time. The digitized faces of the guards looked great back then, but slightly ridiculous today. Animation, particularly the way enemies react to being blasted, is exceptional.

Hookability 9/10

The dam level is the prefect opener, giving you a chance to see what the game is all about. Play it on the ‘Agent’ (easy) difficulty and you can have a good time without having to be a dead eye with the manual aim controls. No game let you snipe an enemy from half way across the level before this one. Once you had, you were in for the long haul... or morally outraged.

Sound 9/10

Perfect music for a bond game, and a great accompaniment to the action. Gunshots, screams and other spot effects all enhance the action. No bad voice acting to spoil the effect.

Lastability 9/10

Loads of varied levels, each with new, interesting objectives when played on higher difficulty levels. Because the mechanics of the game were so good, it was fun just to pick your favorite level and just mess around or prefect your run. Then there’s the multiplayer...

Value for Money 8/10

£60 was an awful lot of money, but there aren’t many games that got more playtime.

Overall 9/10

One of the all-time greats, I can’t bring myself to mark it down just because the passage of time has been so unkind.

#retrogaming #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #N64 #bond #goldeneye #nintendo #christmas

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review: Aliens

Electric Dreams /  1987 / C64 

Also released on Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX and C16

With one eye firmly on Halloween, we’re going to review some games that used to make us breathe heavily, grasping our joysticks tightly in our sweaty palms...

Based on James Cameron’s sequel to the archetypal sci-fi body-horror Alien, Aliens is possibly one of the most panic-inducing games of the 8-bit era. It goes without saying that it’s hard to actually scare anyone on an 8-bit computer, unless blocky, jerky and flickery graphics bring you out in a cold sweat. What you can do, however, is force the player into having to make a series of quickfire decisions under stressful conditions, juggling resources and trying to keep order in the face of the impossible, like an air traffic controller in a power cut.

Aliens is played from a first-person perspective, and at first glance seems like a fairly simple game. You start in the middle of the operations room in LV-426, in control of Ellen Ripley and a team of 5 space marines who’ve been sent to find the alien queen and rid the base of her menace. You get a cross-hair, which is where your bullets will go. You can look around to the left or right, and you can step through a door to another room with a press of the space bar.

Nothing much is happening right at the start of the game, but don’t worry, it won’t stay that way for long!

The queen sits in a room right in the depths of the base. You use the keyboard to select individual team-members, but you can only directly control one at a time. Each member is represented by a nice little image and a stat bar showing how tired they are. There are no practical differences between each team member, which is a bit of a wasted opportunity, but the images are still a nice touch if you’ve seen the film, and help the player identify with their soldiers. Your team grows weary if they move too far without a rest; they’ll be unable to move and will aim more slowly until given time to recuperate. 

You can issue orders for any team member to move a number of rooms in any compass direction, and they’ll carry out your instructions to the best of their ability once you switch out. On the way you’ll encounter alien warriors, eggs and face huggers... or they’ll encounter you as they’ll actively try and hunt down your group. 

When one of your characters is in the same room as an alien you’ll hear a warning noise. This is a sinister beeping when you’re not controlling the character directly, and a panic inducing klaxon when you are. What ensues next is a desperate fumble to find the correct key to select the character who is in trouble, followed by an anguished pan around the room in search of the invader. Obviously you’ve only got a limited time to do all this, and the warning tone gets quicker and increasingly agitated to make sure you’re well aware of this fact. 

I see you!

Once you spot the alien, you’ve got to line him up and blast him before he gets to you. One head-shot should do it, but you won’t get a clean shot, because by now your heart rate is sure to be through the roof. He’ll run right at you too, making you waste a bunch of (limited!) ammo on him.

If you’re super lucky, several team members will be attacked at the same time, which is probably more tense than doing a driving test naked with a wasp in the car.

If the alien gets you the warning tone will change to a forlorn peep. That signifies your character being bundled up for immediate xenomorph oral impregnation. You’ve got a short time to get someone else to the room to take the alien out, but if you don’t get there in time you’ve lost them for good. Their little picture will disappear and you’ll get nothing but static if you switch to their screen.

Another nasty twist: if you blast an alien in front of a door it’ll leave a pool of acid blood which will kill your character outright should they try to exit that way.

There are a few things you can do to keep yourself alive. You can shoot out the control panels next to any door, which will prevent aliens coming through for a time. This is a one-time only deal, because you’ll have to blow the door open if you want to use it again. You can also re-stock a team member’s ammo at a specific room in the complex. This is useful, because running out of ammo is as good as a death sentence. You’ll also need a map. There’s no in game map provided, though the room number each character occupies is shown next to their image. The full price release provided a fold out map in the box, and you’ll need this. Make sure you have a copy handy, because the game is almost unplayably hard unless you have one!

One last thing. The aliens spread a sort of fungal growth around the rooms, which can cover doors and must be blasted away. There’s a generator room somewhere in the complex, and if the walls there get covered by alien fungus the LIGHTS WILL TURN OUT!

I can’t emphasise enough what bad news this is, because hunting for aliens by shadows alone is probably about as much fun as falling into the sharps bin in an STD clinic.

Film licenses had a pretty bad reputation for the discerning 8-bit gamer, tending to be shoddy and quickly thrown together efforts. Aliens is both an excellent game in its own right and perfect at evoking the tension and atmosphere of the film. There’s also quite a bit of tactical depth here too. Do you keep your group of soldiers together? Move as quickly as possible to the queen chamber? Maybe try to fan out and secure the generator room and armoury?

Ripley is looking a bit off colour today.

It’s also worth mentioning that there was also another Aliens game released for 8-bit micros, developed by Activision in the U.S. This takes a different approach to the license, presenting the film as a series of mini-game levels such as landing the drop-ship, fighting your way through the base to save Newt, the last surviving colonist, and the climactic one-on-one mechanical loader duel with the alien queen. This is also a good game, and well worth seeking out if you're a fan of the franchise, though for my money not quite as well conceived and executed as the U.K. version.

Playing it today

If you don't want to follow the obvious route of emulation and you’ve got a real C64, Amstrad CPC or Spectrum to hand, this should be easy to pick up for a few quid online. If you fancy something slightly more polished, there’s a fine looking windows PC remake ‘LV-426’ by Derbian Games that can be downloaded for free.

Commentariat

Tim: Ah, Aliens. Back when the franchise was actually scary and not a pastiche of itself.

As I suspect many others, I bought this on budget when it appeared on the Ricochet label from Mastertronic. This release really lacked the one thing that helped gameplay. A map.

The full price release had pull-out one included with the game; Mastertronic however, probably decided that including a separate sheet for just one title would have cost too much. And been yet another inlay for the staff at Menzies in the Clydebank Shopping Centre to lose. Zzap 64 published one for those of us without, but as I didn’t have that issue, I was in the dark. Quite literally, as it was more fun to play with the lights off.

Life is too short to make maps, so instead I ended up creeping about the complex, not really knowing where I was. Sounds dull, right? Well, no. The game oozes atmosphere; the graphics are tight and well executed, and though the C64’s SID chip is hardly taxed, the sounds that are there do the trick. The throbbing noise when an alien approaches, your exhausted marine out of ammo but still you frantically pull the trigger of their Pulse Rifle in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe there will be one last shell in there to give you a fighting chance. What I particularly like though is the freedom of gameplay, choosing to use your team as individuals or cooperatively as squads, investigating the different parts of the base separately. Pretty cool, when you consider it’s all done in just 64k.

Do I have fond memories of it? Yes. Would I play it again? Absolutely.

Meat: This game is an intense experience, likely to elicit some strong swear words if you’re not in the right mood for it. It’s certainly engrossing stuff though, and tough to beat. One thing though. Which genius decided that the ‘m’ key should restart the game? You know, the one next to the ‘n‘ key you use to tell your soldiers to move north? Nice one.

Pop: I played this a few years before seeing the film, but in retrospect it’s a very clever use of the license. It was also a really tense experience for an 8-bit game, particularly later on when your soldiers are assaulted by wave after wave of aliens and face huggers. Like many games of the era, it’s perhaps a little arcane for today’s audience, what with having to use the keyboard to select the different team members, but still playable and still enjoyable today. It’s the kind of game I can imagine working perfectly on a VR helmet, though that might be a little too much immersion for comfort!

Strangely enough, one of my strongest memories of this game was actually waiting for it to load off cassette tape. The Mastertronic re-release copy I played (borrowed off Tim, of course!) had a neat game of space-invaders that you got to play while waiting for the loading process to complete, accompanied by some very atmospheric music. This ‘invade-a-load’ appeared on a few C64 tape games, but in my head it’s always tied to playing Aliens.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

Very basic indeed. No intro screen, title crawl or music. The box contained a map, which is essential and should have been a part of the game itself.

Originality 8/10

An extremely novel use of a film license. The mix of first person perspective, team management and light strategy elements put this in a class of its own. Sadly, most licensed games of the 8-bit era tended to use cookie-cutter gameplay which was usually executed better elsewhere.

Graphics 7/10

Very clear and atmospheric, you’ll have no problem working out what everything is. The images for the team members are well drawn and clear for an 8-bit system. On the down side, rooms are drawn predominantly in a single colour and a little more variety in the room designs would be nice. The aliens walk like they’re going for a relaxing afternoon stroll, but the animation when they rush your position is very effective.

Hookability 7/10

Immediately intriguing, but the use of the keyboard and advanced controls for commanding team members require the investment of time to enjoy.

Sound 3/10

Played in near silence, except for gunfire and the alien warning siren. This actually makes the game more atmospheric. A title tune would have been nice.

Lastability 7/10

A decent challenge, it seems impossible until you form a good plan on how to tackle the assault on the base. Like many other games of the era, how much you get out of this game depends on how much you’re willing to put into working out how to play it effectively.

Overall 8/10

A fine example of how to compress the tension and drama of an action film into 64K.

#review #halloween #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming #c64

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review: Beyond the Forbidden Forest

Cosmi / 1985 / C64

‘An archer took a stroll through the deep dark wood…’

With one eye firmly on Halloween, we’re going to review some games that used to make us breathe heavily, grasping our joysticks tightly in our sweaty palms…

Beyond the Forbidden Forest starts dramatically with flashes of lightning against a starlit sky. With every flash comes a crack of thunder from the C64’s SID sound chip, before the title of the game is revealed against the darkness. It’s obvious even at this point that the game's author, Paul Norman, was aiming for something much more cinematic than the average computer game of the era.

You start, alone, in an overgrown forest. You are an archer, sent to slay the dreaded Demogorgon, who legend says can only be killed by a golden arrow to the heart.

Your character occupies the middle of the screen. You can walk through the forest to the left and to the right. You can also walk into and out of the scene. Sometimes trees or bushes can obscure your view. There’s a primitive parallax scrolling effect so that the trees in the foreground move more quickly than those in the background, which could charitably be described as decent for the time.

There’s nowhere to actually ‘go’ in this game, and the forest isn’t there to be explored. You’re not really alone, you see. This forest is actually the scene of a desperate fight for survival.

The first creature you encounter is the scorpion. The scorpion will enter from the side of the screen and will rush straight at you. Like all this game's enemies, he gets his own special musical theme that plays during the encounter. This is where you run away! If he reaches your archer he’ll messily jab your organs out with his stinger, to the accompaniment of a kind of musical shrieking noise generated by the SID. Imagine something like a primitive version of the score that plays in Alfred Hitchcock's ‘Psycho’ when Janet Leigh gets stabbed in the shower. This game doesn’t pull any punches for its death scenes, that’s for sure.

It’s behind you!

Luckily your archer can defend himself with his bow. Hold down the fire button and you’ll stand in place, aiming around the scene. A grey indicator bar moves up and down showing the elevation of your shot. Simply let the fire button go again to let loose an arrow. As you might imagine, it’s hard to keep away from a scorpion who is intent on perforating your innards while also stopping to pepper it with arrows, but this retreat, aim and fire mechanic is all a part of the game’s charm.

Plug the scorpion a few times and you get presented with a golden arrow, which appears from a spinning orb after an overly long fanfare plays. These golden arrows are important; you need to collect at least 4 to progress to the next stage of the adventure, and they also act as your ‘lives’. Every time the archer is killed you lose half of the stash of golden arrows, until the game is over. You will get very tired of hearing the victory fanfare, I assure you.

The next foe you meet is a massive worm, who rises out of the ground at various places in the foreground and background. Let him rise too many times without hitting him and he’ll swallow you whole, reappearing to regurgitate the bow, along with a healthy fountain of archer blood.

After that is a giant mosquito, who darts around the sky. He only takes one hit, but is tricky to get a bead on. He’ll drink your juices like a milkshake if he gets a chance, leaving only a crumpled heap on the forest floor.

Last up is… some kind of demonic frog / crocodile thing… who’ll jump about unpredictably and will mash your body like a pub piano at closing time.

He’s hungry for your offal.

One nice touch is the way that the game shows the passage of time in the forest. The sun sets, and eventually night comes, with the colours of the trees and sky changing appropriately. The day to night cycle welded to the ability to move in and out of the scenery prompted Cosmi to market this game as having ‘OmniDimension 4D`. This was sadly typical of the shameless bullshit marketing departments would churn out in the 80’s.

Once these 4 different foes are defeated, it’s back to the scorpion again, in an effort to gather enough golden arrows for an assault on the caverns, which lie... beyond the forbidden forest. See? Although 4 arrows are technically enough to progress, you’ll want more than that to have a realistic shot at what comes next. To progress to the caverns, you have to to pause the game with F1 and then press F3. If you don’t do this the forest encounters repeat until you die or your patience runs out.

Once within the caverns you face off against 3 final foes.

The Bats: A group of bats flutter around the cave. One of them is a golden colour, and that’s the one you need to shoot. You only need one hit, but it’s flight is fast and unpredictable.

The Hydra: This four headed monstrosity fills the entire screen! Each head can shoot fire, and you’ve got to dodge about to land a hit on each one. Succeed and he’ll stop moving and turn to stone.

The Demogorgon: Squatting over a pit, this massive beast follows your movements with his head, shooting deadly bolts from his eyes that will disintegrate you instantly. Shoot him in his glowing heart to win the game and free the land from his evil!

I appear to have misplaced my skin.

Beyond the Forbidden Forest surely must be the most ‘‘Commodore 64ish’ game of all time.

Chunky blocky graphics? Very. Lots of muddy browns and muted greens? None muddier. Bone rattling soundtrack courtesy of the SID chip. All present here.

It was also creepy, atmospheric, and with all the sudden and violent deaths, really quite nasty… for a computer game of the 80’s at least.

Trivia

This is the sequel to ‘Forbidden Forest’, which is probably a bit better known and generally held in slightly higher regard (even by the game’s author). There was a third game in the series released in 2003 for Windows PC. It’s a third person 3D effort, which sadly looks pretty generic and uninteresting. There aren’t even any gory death scenes!

Playing it today

Only released on the C64, and copies are getting rarer. Easily emulated, but bear in mind that the function keys are important on this one.

Commentariat

Meat: This game could be the poster child for anyone who considers C64 graphics to be dull and unappealing, but behind the ugly front there’s a lot to admire here. The ‘gore’ is also hilarious! With the notable exception of the head chopping in Palace Software’s ‘Barbarian’, games of the era were very timid in their depictions of graphic violence. I guess this is about as close as we were going to get to a survival horror game in the 80’s...

Pop: I got this one on a magazine cover tape, and was immediately hooked on its strange atmosphere, shocks and gory death scenes. I was a latecomer to the C64, and by that point these graphics really looked like a dog’s dinner. Despite that I still found myself playing this game quite a bit. Aiming the bow at enemies in the foreground and background feels a little tricky initially, but it can be mastered. My main issue now is how long the player resurrection and golden arrow presentation scenes take. Skipping repetitive cutscenes was a luxury you were so rarely afforded in those days.

Sadly I never went ‘beyond’ the forest, because I didn’t have a clue that the keyboard was required to progress to the next stage of the game.

Score card

Presentation 8/10

Starting with the fantastic cinematic introduction screen, this is a game that goes the extra mile to involve the player in its world. There’s even a proper ending sequence with its own musical theme. The various versions of box artwork are all, however, distinctly amateurish.

Originality 8/10

Made before all games started to look and feel the same, this is obviously the work of a single individual. It doesn’t look, sound or play like any other game of the time… except perhaps for its own prequel.

Graphics 6/10

Undeniably ugly, blocky, untidy and muddy. Also somehow atmospheric and appealing. The screen filling hydra is a pretty impressive piece of work for the time. Gets an extra point for splashing the pixelated claret about.

Hookability 7/10

From the first moment the scorpion scuttles over and messes you up with its stabber you’ll either want to see what other horrible fates await you in the forest… or switch the computer off in disgust.

Sound 9/10

A series of memorable tunes, played by the C64’s SID chip in the style of a demented horror film organ. Though it’s somewhat crude, few soundtracks at the time were better suited to the on-screen action.

Lastability 7/10

It takes some time to get used to hitting the different foes with your arrows, but there are ultimately only 7 different types of enemy to face in this game. Despite that, it puts up a decent challenge, and you'll want to make it to the caverns to see what horrors are lurking in the darkness.

Overall 7/10

A game with plenty of quirks and flaws, which it overcomes by sheer force of personality.

#review #halloween #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming #C64 #gory

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review: Dragon Buster

Namco / 1985 / Arcade

Guide hero Clovis on an epic journey to rescue Princess Celia, who is being held captive by a fearsome dragon deep in its underground lair. Fight your way through five different treacherous locations on your way to the fair maiden and glory!

I was looking for my brother who had wandered off on a trip to a local seaside town. Seaside towns were exciting for a number of reasons. The beach. Ice-cream. Cheap plastic toys. But chief among them for me was the opportunity to check out and play the latest arcade games. My brother was generally as excited at finding these games as I was, and so it was no big surprise when I finally caught up to him in a café transfixed by a glowing monitor in the corner. The game in question was one neither of us had ever seen before, or would ever see again… Dragon Buster!

Sigh... here’s yet another obscure little coin-op that I somehow remember in place of more meaningful things that may have happened to me as a boy…

I’m not sure exactly what it was that grabbed me about Dragon Buster, but it has a fair bit in common with other games I enjoyed much later on like Wonderboy in Monster Land and Zelda II. It’s kind of an early prototype for side view action games with lite RPG overtones. In many ways the game is more reminiscent of something you’d play on a home computer, with a level of choice and exploration completely lacking from the majority of arcade titles in ‘85.

Firstly, you get a kind of overworld map screen where you can choose your route to the dragon’s lair that ends each stage. OK, it’s hardly open-world exploration, but you do get the opportunity to choose a path with your preferred locations to fight though.

There are a mixture of five basic location types before your face off with the fire breathing princess-napper.

The Cave. A simple set of rooms and corridors in a straight line.

The Tower. Set over many floors, you’ll have to travel by ladder to find the way out.

The Boneyard. A spooky ossuary filled with winding tunnels where you’ll meet skeleton bosses at every turn.

The Mountain. Lots of descents down pits as you travel to the bottom.

The Ruins. A mix of bits from the other locations.

You also have a single life with a heath bar, which was a pretty unusual feature in the instant death world of the arcade. This makes the game feel fairly generous, at least in its early stages. I have also read that this was the place that the idea of a ‘double-jump’ was first introduced (where you can make a second jump while still in the middle of the first). The jumping mechanics are, however, notably poor here, so it’s possible this may not even have been an intentional feature.

Once you enter a location, Clovis is often presented with multiple corridors and ladders in search of an exit. As you explore you’ll uncover rooms containing mini-bosses that, once defeated, will drop either a useful item or reveal the way back to the overworld. 

The rooms in each location are dimmed out before you enter them, like you’re walking in on a surprise birthday party... with a tough wizard or skeleton as the lucky birthday boy or girl. It’s quite a pleasing effect that seems stolen from a more serious role playing game. The items you pick up here can be the difference between making it to the next set of levels or expiring down in the depths. They include heath restoring potions, improved weapons, a mushroom that increases the length of your health bar and fireball spells that you can shoot at enemies. The fireballs can be stocked up for later use and have been given their own dedicated button. After exiting every location a chunk of Clovis’s health bar will refill.

Shakedown. Breakdown. Takedown. Everybody wants into the crowded line. Breakdown. Takedown. You're busted.

Once you get to the dragon’s lair at the end of the road you’ll have a fight on your hands to reduce its health bar down to zero and move on to the next set of locations. These will be made up of the same basic set of five, but with more corridors and rooms filled with tougher and more aggressive enemies.

If you make it past the dragon on certain levels having found a crown or scepter you’ll get a brief scene where princess Celia shows her gratitude. If you have both she’ll be wearing a skimpy outfit and will give Clovis a kiss. Phwoar! As is usual for a game from the 80’s, there’s a tacit understanding that the player simply must be a white heterosexual male.

I believe this game is much better known in Japan, which is why it has appeared on various Namco retro arcade collections over the years, on machines like the PS1 and PSP. It even has a Famicom (Japanese NES) port. It appears that nobody gave a damn about it anywhere else though, with no western console or home computer conversions and nothing but blank stares and uncomfortable silences if you mention it today.

So, this is really quite an interesting effort for the time, but how does it hold up now? Sadly, it’s a pretty mixed bag. For every enjoyable aspect there’s an equal and opposite misstep.

The jumping is not assigned to a button, but to ‘up’ on the joystick, which makes navigating the ladders and escaping monsters a clunky mess. Surely ditching the dedicated fireball button would have made more sense?

Worse even than that, the combat feels mushy and unsatisfying. Your sword has a very short range, and enemy hits knock you back. You can easily end up being juggled in the air, taking damage without reply. The skeleton bosses are particularly annoying and can end up causing a lot of damage you'll feel couldn’t be avoided.

This was popular enough in Japan to be turned into a boardgame.

The graphics, while certainly acceptable for the era, are a little ‘off’, with the hero Clovis in particular looking like his arms have been put on back to front.

Finally, it also gets a little bit repetitive after a while, with the same 5 repeated level types and many of the same monsters appearing again and again.

So no forgotten classic then, but just about good enough to nudge into the bracket of ‘interesting failure’.

Playing it today

Easily emulated using MAME, but you can also pick it up (along with various other Namco arcade titles) on Namco Museum Volume 2 for the PS1, Namco Museum Battle Collection for the PSP or Namco Museum Virtual Arcade for Xbox 360.

It was also converted to the Famicom, and is playable via emulation or on Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 on Nintendo Switch. The Famicom version has quite a few changes to the arcade, with larger sprites and a more zoomed in view of the action. It’s alright as conversions go, but if you’re going to play this the arcade version is recommended.

Commentariat

Meat: This is quite an odd little footnote to Namco’s illustrious arcade heritage. They seem quite keen on it since it keeps popping up (along with Tower of Daruga) on various retro collections. It’s half a good game, and some of the ideas were really quite prescient, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s games that bounce you back and forward like a beach ball in the wind when you get hit. Worse, Clovis has a shocking mullet and looks like he’s spanking one out when he walks. 

Pop: I’ve always had a soft spot for Dragon Buster after first spotting it in an arcade all those years ago. I also recognise that it was quickly left behind by the rapid pace of game development at that time. You’d be better off thinking of it as a prototype for better things to come. The game mechanics of the best remembered ‘classics’ from the early 80’s are often still sound due to their appealing tightness and simplicity. The fact is that Dragon Buster is too loose and inconsistent to be worth a hearty recommendation today. Still, I got some enjoyment from dusting it off again, and there are certainly much, much worse games out there.

Score card

Presentation 6/10

A simple title screen and a fairly standard attract mode. Nothing bad here, but nothing particularly revolutionary either.

Originality 8/10

There simply weren’t any other arcade games quite like this at the time. The mixture of map screen, health bar and other ‘RPG lite’ mechanics made this a highly original offering, though it may not seem anything special today.

Graphics 6/10

A real mixed bag. Everything is bright and cleanly drawn, and the enemy designs are quite appealing. However animation is minimal, and the player character looks anatomically incorrect. It’s built on the same basic hardware as Pac-Land, but it certainly doesn’t make the same jaw-dropping ‘cartoon brought to life’ impression that game did on release.

Hookability 7/10

The game has a fairly approachable difficulty level, and there’s quite a sense of mystery to exploring it’s locations en route to battle with the dragon.

Sound 6/10

A jolly little tune burbles along while you explore the levels. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s also a total mismatch to the adventure being portrayed on screen. Something more spooky plays when you face off against one of the mini bosses in an item room. Sound effects are fairly perfunctory.

Lastability 6/10

Has quite a few levels to work your way through which become increasingly complex. These suffer from serious repetition, and you won't see anything genuinely new after the first few sets, which really kills any desire to keep playing.

Overall 6/10

Better examples of this type of game abound, but Dragon Buster got there first, and for that it deserves some recognition.

#arcade #namco #AFG #review #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Formula 1 Simulator

Mastertronic / 1985 / Originally £1.99 / ZX Spectrum

A promising start with a Lotus 72 F1 car on the loading and intro screen. Check out the size of the rear tyres on this bad-boy!

For many a small child, the dream of speeding along in a sports car is something of a pipe-dream. Past simple go-karts rented at a track, it becomes horrendously expensive to compete in a sport that has long been the plaything of the rich. Yes, the road to Formula One is paved in gold; yours. How far that road stretches depends on how much gold paving you (or more accurately, your parents) are prepared to lay down.

Even the competitors with the most humble of backgrounds will have made it thanks to a benefactor, be it a company such as Mercedes or individuals whose altruism may hide a burning desire to live out their missed opportunity through another.

Thankfully however, the computer revolution gaves those of us who can't afford the fire-retardant underwear, let alone anything else, the opportunity to give motorsport a go. Back in the early 1980s, games like Chequered Flag from Psion and Geoff Crammond’s Revs from Acornsoft put you in a single seater racing car, providing something of a sense of how it would be to race one around the world’s great circuits.

While these titles cost in excess of £6.95, the budget market was taken care of by Mastertronic whose title, Formula 1 Simulator tried to give you an opportunity to race ten circuits that were part of the Formula 1 season of the time. For modern motorsport fans, the names of the tracks might be familiar but the layouts will not. Much like a Hollywood actor feeling the pressure to look the way they did in their 20s while pushing 50, most circuits have had a lot of work done since 1985; Silverstone or Hockenheim as they are in the game are unrecognisable now. Even tracks that have only subtly changed over the years, like Monza seem radically different.

This however, is not just down to the passage of time; the circuits as they are realised in the game are not all that accurate. Back when Formula 1 Simulator was released, it is unlikely that track research involved taking the time to visit the circuits and capture the kind of information that would really be necessary to make this a detailed simulation. And, to be fair, the expense would not have been recouped in sales.

Monza’s been on the F1 calendar since 1950; it’s a solid place to start with long flowing corners.

The turns are in vaguely the right locations; but as you go round the tracks in your car, it soon becomes clear that even on a good day you and the apex of the corner are never going to get close enough to each other to be friends. Taking any kind of speed into a corner pretty much means trundling around the outside of the corner away from the racing line, no matter how hard you steer in.

Then there’s the exit of the corner. While it's hard to get the car into the corner at speed as you try to put the power down to make quick exit, the car becomes unstable. All too often this results you being flung off the track.

You might be as good as Lewis Hamilton down the kart track of a Thursday night; you might rival Damon Hill round the Tesco’s car-park getting to the last free parking space, or you might even be a credible contender to Nigel Mansell when it comes to passing a Rover 45 round the outside of a roundabout on the A34 to Stoke-on-Trent, but these skills will not help you with Formula 1 Simulator.

Each game starts with you choosing which track you’d like to drive, configuring your car with an automatic or manual gearbox to take you through the five gears and the weather (wet or dry). This is about as much setup variation as you’ll get in Formula 1 Simulator; you don’t even get to select which team you are driving for.

We’re off on a qualifying lap.

From there, it’s a choice between practicing a circuit or racing on it. Practicing doesn’t really add much here - it’s the qualifying for the race that is important. Although you can race, there is no championship to go with it. This really is a disappointing omission, the races feel a little aimless as a result. Mind you, there are times when just getting into the race is a victory in itself...

A race begins with qualifying - complete a lap of the circuit against the clock and you’re into a race. At no point are you told what time you are aiming at, which is a major disadvantage, nor is there any indication of how many laps you have to complete in the race should you get there. Everything here is implicit. You are expected to know that qualifying is a single lap by playing the game enough times.

Once a qualifying lap has been completed, then there is the race. While there are other cars on track to compete against, with no perspective on your rivals other than the graphic of their rear it becomes all too easy to hit them, either ramming into the back of them or unwittingly hitting them when you think you have passed them and resume the racing line. You really might think that this is an exaggeration but seriously, your opponents’ cars all seem to be simultaneously narrower and as wide as your car at the same time.

This game is very unforgiving; any mistake it seems and after a brief message to tell you that you’ve crashed you’ll have to start all over again. This starts to get old very quickly and what’s more, learning the tracks does not seem to make that much of a difference. With the handling of the car the way it is, crashing out feels more like a lottery, rather than down to anything else.

And they’re GO! GO! GO!

Some of Formula 1 Simulator’s shortcomings come from the game having been written with a 16k Spectrum in mind. Unlike a game like Beach-Head on the Commodore 16 where the lameness could have been avoided with some careful consideration and design, many of the problems with the game stem from trying to cram as much realism as you can into such a tiny memory footprint.

Mastertronic certainly took a different approach with the title on the Commodore machines; perhaps it was for the best. While Formula 1 Simulator isn’t going to win any prizes for realism, it should at least be rewarded for being a valiant attempt to try and lever a realistic driving simulator into such a low-spec machine.

Spirit Software and the Kensington CID

Mastertronic’s Formula 1 Simulator was a re-release of a title from another company called Spirit Software who, in 1984 had released the game for the princely sum of £8.95 promising their own steering wheel add-on.

This was quite something for the time; such devices were not really seen outside of the arcades, with games like Sprint or Pole Position having basic wheels and a simple Hi/Low gear shifter.

First versions of the game are alleged to have been sent out with what has been referred to in unflattering terms as a yellow plastic ash-tray that sat on the relevant keys. We’re yet to find a picture of this device in the wild, so it might just be a reference to the instructions in the Mastertronic version that suggested using a Sellotape tin along the keys at the top at the top of the computer.

The announcement from June 1984′s Your Computer magazine. [source - archive.org]

Sadly, while the cash for the enterprise readily appeared from Spectrum owners keen to try out the latest fad in games, the hardware did not and by the summer of 1984, Kensington CID (part of London’s Metropolitan Police) were investigating Spirit Software, eventually returning cheques that had not been cashed to those who had been keen to have a more realistic shot at F1 from the comfort of their own homes. Those that had been cashed, well, it seems that money was lost.

What became of the owners of Spirit Software? And more importantly the cash? It’s not entirely clear as the trail of the story dries up with the Police getting involved; presumably the enigmatic author of the game, S.C. Stephens must have sold the game on to Mastertronic, where it became a real money spinner. Across all formats, Formula 1 Simulator sold in excess of half a million copies for its new publisher...

Buying it today

Given it’s a budget title that was available just about everywhere, it’s not in short supply today. If you’re spending £5 including postage you’re spending a lot.

Commentariat

Tim : How I wish this game was different, just a few tweaks here and there could turn this from being a dog of a game into something far more playable.

The steering controls are shocking, and without the ability to change much about the setup of the car (given the release date of the game, this genuinely would be too much to ask), hobbling the game to such an extent that it’s a chore to play. The solution provided by both original developer Spirit and kept by Mastertronic, to have a control mode that needs you to roll - yes roll - a wheel across the top row of a rubber-key Spectrum’s keyboard is as much bizarre, as to how little it is future proof. Fortunately, Mastertronic also added joystick support as well as a more traditional keyboard control option.

After spending more time restarting the game after a crash than actually driving, I just pootled around Monza with automatic gears turned on at a slow speed to get into the race. Manual gears I found impossible due to their poor placing on the keyboard. I had no idea what time I was aiming for to secure pole position, so for all I knew I might be fastest. I wasn’t. Even so, I was in the race, but with no idea how long it would be. I went for it - and crashed right after passing a car.

That was pretty much it for me.

If you can afford to spend memory on a pretty title screen of a Lotus 72, you can afford to improve the in-game data. Or failing that, include a championship mode, or offer team selection, or just about anything from a long list of things that would have been cheap in memory terms, but have added a lot to the game.

With a simulation so poor it’s incredible, but entirely predictable, that Mastertronic stuck with it for the Amstrad and MSX machines instead of converting the far more playable Commodore 64 version.

If you are a driving sim fan, there is only one word for this. Avoid.

Score Lord : Hmmm. I remember this the first time round for all the wrong reasons. While many companies have taken your money and had a liberal interpretation of 28 days delivery when it came to some of their products, their kit usually turned up. Unless it’s a Spectrum Vega+.

I agree that this is hardly a realistic sim but think about what it did for society. First, it no doubt gave people the opportunity to say “I can do better than that” and produce racing titles of their own. Second, it put to bed the idea that an ashtray could be used as a steering wheel once and for all. Saved British Leyland a fortune in R&D, that.

Meat : The day I got my Spectrum, I bought this title. I was already starting to get a feel for motorsport, mostly thanks to an ever-present Nigel Mansell on the TV each Sunday lunchtime in the summer.

My disappointment as a child wasn’t the graphics or the sound, it was that the game was so hard. Even today, I like the way that the car accelerates away with a little chirp from the speaker to mimic wheelspin and that you have to brake properly into the corners. The sad thing was that it wasn’t arcade-y enough in the way it played for me and not simulator-y enough for my Dad. Formula 1 Simulator is kind of an in between sort of game with elements of both but not enough of either to make it work.

After a while I managed to get around the circuit without bouncing off to make it to the race, but when I did, I crashed more or less straight away. This cycle repeated so often I don’t really ever remember finishing a single first lap. I eventually lost interest. Even today, while I can get into the race most of the time, I don’t really want to go any further knowing that I’ll just end up hitting another car.

Due to a minor misunderstanding I was not allowed to try the Sellotape tin steering wheel back in the day, as my father misinterpreted what I intended to do and refused to let me try it out. Without my Dad to tell me otherwise, I’ve tried this as an adult and, yes, it does work but doesn’t make much of a difference. Just makes you look like a weirdo at a gaming expo.

This really seemed to be a game where the developer’s ambition was way beyond the capabilities of the technology at the time, rather than the other way round. Well, that’s how I like to think of it.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

The exciting cover art and well-drawn loading screen soon give way to a lack-lustre menu and garish colours in-game. Good choice of tracks if you had a 48k Spectrum, mind. The steering wheel control method is just, well, odd.

Originality 7/10

At a time when most driving games were top-down sprint-style games or variations on Pole Position, this certainly tried to be different and succeeds.

Graphics 4/10

Middling; the game’s colour palette is horrific, the other cars basic. The track moves nicely, but the sense of speed is diminished with a dearth of roadside objects. Corner markers while present, are so small you easily miss them, making them more or less pointless.

Hookability 2/10

Unfortunately, the game is unrewarding to play mostly because a tiny mistake means it’s all over.

Sound 2/10

While the C64 version had a cool soundtrack courtesy of Rob Hubbard, which also made it onto the Amstrad and MSX conversions, the Spectrum has some basic engine noises and that’s about all. This does add something to the game, but won't win any awards.

Lastability 3/10

Good selection of tracks, even if they are unrealistically modelled, but the unforgiving nature of the game you’d need to be a masochist to keep playing it.

Value for Money 3/10

It was £1.99 at the time of release by Mastertronic, which meant you got a half decent amount of car sim for your money.

Overall 3/10

It’s really difficult to work out if this was a valiant effort that just tried to do too much with too little, or just something that Mastertronic picked up to fill a slot in a software library. Either way though, it’s not good enough to keep you coming back.

#sinclar #sinclair specrum #AfG #zx spectrum #review #retrogaming #Retro #retro review #retrocomputing

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Space Harrier

Elite Systems / 1987 / Originally £9.99 / Commodore 64

In Space Harrier, save the ‘Fantasy Zone’ from certain destruction by flying into the screen and blasting stuff until you meet a bigger thing to blast at the end of the level. Then blast more stuff while looking at a differently coloured background!

The rate at which graphics and sound advanced in the arcades in the early 1980’s was genuinely astounding. As a kid I only made contact with this exciting world a few times a year, and I would be greeted with something new and potentially jaw dropping on nearly every occasion. A case in point: try comparing SEGA’s 1981 driving game Turbo with their 1985 fantastical 3D shooter Space Harrier. Turbo was a really impressive game for ‘81, but it was made to look colourless, jerky and ridiculously limited within just a few short years. 

Space Harrier was a notable early entry in SEGA’s ‘super scaler’ series of arcade games, which used hardware sprite scaling effects to provide a convincing into-the-screen 3D effect without the need to render a real 3D space.

In the arcade. Fast, smooth and colourful!

The effect of movement is amplified here by a smoothly animated checkerboard ground pattern. It’s a very simple game at heart; you view your flying character from behind as they weave in and out of columns and trees, trading shots with enemies that dance in front of them. At the end of each level you come to a dead stop and face off against a larger boss; basically a mobile bullet sponge who guards the way to the next level. 

Every few stages you get to ride a dragon and smash into trees to earn points. The battle is played out to a memorable theme tune, and has a few scattered speech samples thrown in for good measure (‘welcome to the fantasy zone!’).

From the very beginning, reproducing a game like Space Harrier on the C64 was a bit of a non-starter. Where 8-bit home computers could often produce a reasonable facsimile of arcade games at the beginning of their life-span, they were soon completely out-paced by the sounds and visuals offered in the arcade.

Despite this fact, arcade licenses remained sure sellers on home systems which could never do them justice.

You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky as we walk in fields of brown.  

The impossible job of converting such a technically advanced game to the C64 was handled by Chris Butler, whose efforts on the beige box I generally have a lot of time for. He produced very playable (if truncated) versions of Commando and ‘Ghosts and Goblins’. He also went on to make several other madly ambitious C64 conversions of SEGA’s super scaler arcade games, with some degree of success. His games though, had a definite tendency to look plain and functional. If you take a candy coloured fantasy like Space Harrier and replace 90% of the colour with turd-brown and battleship grey it’s hard to hand out plaudits for what’s left.

And yet, if you squint… and approach it with a lot of charity… this *is* a half decent effort for the time. It’s nice and fast and contains all the essential gameplay elements of dodging and shooting in a 3D space. It’s a shorter game, with much less variety in enemies, no dragon riding bonus sections and no character speech, but the graphical effect that renders the enemies and obstacles as they get closer until nearly filling the screen has been done fairly effectively.

It’s certainly much better than the laughably feeble Amstrad CPC effort, which rendered all the enemies and obstacles with vector graphics to keep the speed up. It’s also much less likely to give you a seizure than the Spectrum port, throwing its shaded monochrome sprites and horrible colour clash right into your retinas. 

The conversion is obviously a rush job; apparently Chris was given a stupidly short deadline and it would have been much better if he’d been allowed the time to finish. This is evidenced by the later US release which added a raster bar effect on the ground and tidied up the sprite work. 

U.S. Space Harrier. A slap in the face to British gamers!

Ultimately, what sinks this game on the C64 is that fact that in the arcade it was more of an attempt at sensory overload than a deep and engaging game. The deluxe cabinet even threw the player about courtesy of a hydraulic chair! It was about as imaginatively made a sensory overload as you were going to get back then, and I still retain a lot of fondness for it, but strip it of its theme park ride trappings and there isn’t really a whole lot left to keep you entertained.

Buying it today

This was a successful mainstream release, and there are plentiful cassette copies available for a few pounds.

Commentariat

Tim: The odd thing is, for years I never saw an actual Space Harrier arcade machine. Our local leisure centre was the point of reference for such things and while it was fine for Double Dragon, Thunderblade, Xenophobe, Outrun and Operation Wolf, they never seemed to ever get Space Harrier. So in my mind, this game has always really been a mish-mash of low res graphics and turgid colours. Oddly, it’s the arcade that feels wrong. Messed up, I know. 

The C64’s version is alright; it whips along at a decent pace and the music, what there is of it, is nicely done. True it’s nowhere near arcade accurate and at times makes little sense, but it’s a solid attempt even if it quickly bounces against the limitations of the hardware it’s running on. Compare it to some other versions and the arcade and sadly, it’s nothing to write home about.

Pop: When I think of Space Harrier, I’m always transported back to a specific moment in my childhood. Some of my friends were keen mountain bikers, and since I’d just been given a cheap imitation of a mountain bike I decided to join them on one of their weekend trips. This quickly resulted in me travelling at speed down a gravelly hill on my arse. Luckily Tim lived nearby; his mum was a nurse and with her expert help I survived. I remember coming home that evening battered and bruised and playing my new copy of Space Harrier for the first time. I can’t remember enjoying it that much, but it was certainly a surreal experience, still vivid in my mind.

In retrospect, this wasn’t much cop. The C64 was plagued by over-ambitious arcade conversions. There’s just not enough gameplay here, and it’s all quite unattractive to look at.

Meat: The graphics are ugly, the main character runs like he’s shat himself, there’s minimal gameplay, half the levels are missing, the bonus stages are missing, the synthesized speech is missing. Other than that it’s fine.

Score card

Presentation  5/10

A standard cassette jewel case with inlay instructions. The cover artwork is attractive courtesy of the original arcade game. There’s very little that’s special about the in-game presentation, with a very bare title screen. This has all the hall-marks of a rush job.

Originality 6/10

From a graphical design standpoint the arcade game was very original. The gameplay itself was only an iteration on what had come before. There weren’t too many games attempting this into-the-screen viewpoint on the C64 at the time, given how difficult it was to pull off successfully.

Graphics 5/10

They’re fast, but much more jerky than in the arcade thanks to the lack of any custom sprite scaling hardware in the humble ‘64. The effect just about works, but the lack of any ground animation is a let down. Everything is splotchy and ugly, and there’s far too much brown! 

Hookability 6/10

Very easy to get into, and nothing much to explain. There’s a certain appeal to seeing what comes next, for a while at least.

Sound 7/10

A well made rendition of the arcade Space Harrier theme plays on every level, with a separate end-of-level boss tune. The spot effects are pitiful, however. The C64 surely could have handled the synthesized speech, though this may have been cut due to memory constraints and to avoid having to make the game a tape multi-load.

Lastability 3/10

Space Harrier is not a deep game. There isn’t even as much incentive to see later levels as in the arcade, because the background and enemy variety has been cut right back.

Value for Money 3/10

1987 was something of a vintage year for the C64, with the release of original titles such as Wizball, IK+ and The Last Ninja. There really isn’t enough here to make this a worthy purchase at full price.

Overall 4/10

While this was a brave attempt at home conversion of Space Harrier, it was a minor disappointment at the time. It may have been the best on an 8-bit computer, but that’s clearing a pretty low bar. It also rankles that we got something half finished where the U.S. saw a significantly more polished release.

If you really feel the need to play an 8-bit conversion today, we would recommend the efforts on the Master System or PC Engine. There’s also a highly impressive modern homebrew for Atari computers.

#Commodore 64 #AFG #retrogaming #retrocomputing #antiquesforgeeks #C64 #retro review

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : On the Busses

Benny Games / April 1st 1988 / Originally £12.95  / ZX Spectrum

`Alright mate? I’ve just got back from the boozer! I’ll need a big plate of mash to soak it all up! Why don’t you give me a hand getting this bus back? Last run of the day, and if we’re quick we can be back in time to chase a bit of skirt too. Phwoar, what a pair! Don’t like the look of yours much though... 

…quick, hide the booze, ‘ere comes Blakey!’

‘On the Busses’ is a licensed game based on the hugely popular 70’s sitcom of the same name.

As paunchy middle aged ladies man Stan Butler your task is to drive your bus back to the ‘Cemetery Gates’ bus terminal within a strict time limit, whilst being as indolent and lecherous as possible. The course is split into 6 distinct levels: Suburbs, Park, Tunnel, Outer Limits, Inner City and Terminal. These are distinguished by the background scenery, obstacles and traffic encountered along the way.

Blakey the officious transport inspector is gunning for Stan’s job, so you have to get the bus back to the terminal on time and in one piece ...he’s a proper little Hitler!

No really. He’s a ridiculous caricature of Adolph Hitler. 

The bus is viewed from behind, and controls in a similar way to many other 8-bit racing games. You’re expected to weave through traffic to a strict time limit like those other games too. However ‘On the Busses’ has a few extra tricks up its sleeve which elevate it above the ordinary.

Keep that droop under control!

Being middle aged, Stan suffers from erectile dysfunction, and must try to remain ‘excited’ on the long journey back to the depot. He can do this in a couple of ways. Stopping at a bus-stop to pick up a young lady will steadily lower Stan’s ‘droop’, as long as the player furiously hits the space-bar to simulate making unwanted catcalls, winks and leery comments. But take care! Too much and cheeky Stan will be subject to a slap or knee to the groin, which is sure to send his droop meter soaring.

Stan can also maintain his ardor by doing as little actual work as possible. This can be effectively achieved by ignoring waiting pensioners and only stopping for busty women under 30. They love a rogue, and especially one who is twice their age and still living with mum.

Between levels you get to play out a short face to face exchange with Blakey, where you choose your responses in an attempt to take him down a peg or two ...and raise Stan’s peg a few degrees into the bargain.

These are rendered with excellent digitised graphics, and really add to the feeling you’re taking part in the nation's favourite sitcom. They’re also quite hilarious! Take for example this exchange:

Inspector Blake:

‘Touching her like that is indecent!’

Stan Butler:

‘It’s not indecent! It would have been, but her ticket machine got in the way!’

That’s pure gold.

Still holds up today!

Some might say that sitcoms (and games) like ‘On the Busses’ have become an embarrassing throwback to less enlightened times. Times where Britain had yet to awaken, tired and faded, from the post war era. Where foreigners were commonly treated with suspicion and disdain. Where society expected women to be homemakers whilst their husbands went to work as the sole breadwinner.

I say piffle! How can we be expected to win back the colonies with that kind of attitude!

Score card

Presentation 9/10

The big box packaging is one of the best examples on the Spectrum, fully justifying that high price tag. Inside you’ll find a clipped bus ticket, a comic book, a fold out map of the bus route, a stick on Blakey mustache, and a used condom. 

Originality 9/10

OK, it’s another racing game, but this is quite unlike any you’ll have played before or since!

Graphics 9/10

Excellently drawn sprites, with very clever use of the spectrum’s palette to avoid colour clash. The digitised exchanges between levels are simply amazing, and still hold up today. 

Hookability 8/10

Some might find the erratic nature of driving in this game irritating, but I found the traffic jams, stops and general leisurely pace to be fascinating.

Sound 7/10

Perhaps the one weak point in the game’s presentation, with a spirited rendition of the theme tune on the title screen, but little else other than beeps and tire screeches during the game.

Lastability 8/10

There’s a great deal of variety in the gameplay, with a much more complicated set of mechanics to get to grips when compared against the average Spectrum racer. You’ll want to play again and again to see all the hilarious responses from Blakey between the driving levels.

Value for Money 9/10

There’s a lot of game in here, even if we discount all the amazing extras to be found in the box. One warning; don’t attempt to re-use the condom. It is not an effective barrier.

Overall 9/10

For Benny Games (not exactly the best remembered of 80’s software houses) this was very much a make or break title. Sadly, and despite their best efforts, in the end it broke them. If only this had the marketing budget Ocean Software threw at their bang average ‘Are You Being Served’ license! 

They clearly worked hard to capture the speed and excitement of driving an inner-city bus route, spiced up with the illicit thrill of bunking off work to go to the public house. Just to tip everything over the edge, the developers effectively captured the complex sexual politics at play in a busy council bus depot at the end of the working day. Superlative.

#sinclair specrum #review #AFG #retrogaming #parody #antiquesforgeeks #retrocomputing

[antiques-for-geeks]

Review Special : Talking to Stuart Benny of Benny Games

It’s all the rage these days, tracking down the authors of games you used to play to find out more about them, their game and what happened to them. As you’d expect, some are more difficult to track down than others and even when you do, not all of them are willing to speak with you about the past.

Surprisingly, Stuart Benny was quite easy to find - a quick search on LinkedIn turned up a profile and a quick exchange of messages later, he agreed to do a short interview over Skype as like the rest of us, he’s isolating while the latest Pandemic plays out.

We caught up with Stuart from his home in the Midlands to find out more about Benny Games, how he came to write the seminal On The Busses, the aftermath and were intrigued to hear that he is back on the development trail.

The familiar, minimalist logo of Benny Games as it adorned software shop shelves for those fleeting few years in the 1980s. 

AfG : Hi Stuart, how the devil are you?

Stuart Benny : Not bad thanks. I’ve managed to avoid this Corona thing that’s going around up to now thankfully. Seeing all the news stories, it’s quite scary.

Yeah, it’s quite something isn’t it? We’re all working from home which seemed a bit inconvenient, but at least we no longer have to put up with Meat reading Twitter out loud at us all day and telling us every five minutes that we need to buy more bog-roll.

Fortunately I work from home these days, so not a problem for me. I don’t miss sharing an office.

So what do you do today?

At the moment I work with development teams out in India building commerce software. These days I don’t write the code, I just prepare a specification for the off-shore coders and talk to the clients here in the UK. IT is not as much fun as it used to be. Back in the day I worked in a team of coders that wrote the software the team in India now extend. Seems to be the way of the world.

Your early work led to a career?

Yeah. To be fair Benny Games ending was a good thing as it meant I was able to do things like go to University. I think I would have missed a valuable experience, but it would have been brilliant to have been up there with Peter Molyneux or David Braben.

Tell us about it. Pop, Meat and I tried our hand at a lot of programming but didn’t get very far.

It’s not an easy business.

How did you get involved in it?

I had gotten hold of a Spectrum in 1984, it was one of the rubber key ones that we got from my cousin who changed his for a Spectrum+. I’d played games round my friend’s houses but really wanted to create my own so I spent my lunch break learning how to write BASIC on the school computers. Getting the Spectrum was the final piece in the puzzle because now I wasn’t limited to an hour a day on a computer and had a proper manual that showed you how to write programs.

So I studied the manual and experimented. I created a basic Space Invaders clone called, imaginatively, Invaders from Space and sent it to budget labels, but they weren’t interested. That’s when Benny Games were born, I thought the game would be able to sell so I took some money I’d earned from my paper round, bought a pack of ten computer cassettes from Boots and my brother duplicated the game on his tape-to-tape. My friend Martin [Freeman, no relation to the actor] drew a cover, which I got photocopied on the machine down the library. Once they were all ready, I put a classified ad in the local paper and waited for the orders to come in.

And was it a success?

I managed to sell the ten tapes eventually.

I guess that not having the advertising push didn’t help.

At the time I was really disappointed, but I think that it was definitely a learning experience. It didn’t occur to send a review copy to a magazine, but to be honest, it was probably for the best.

But it still sold, so that must have been a small encouragement.

Maybe, but it underlined that I couldn’t do it all by myself. So I asked Martin if he wanted to help me on the next game. He had a Spectrum too and things like a joystick interface.

And that game would be Star Crash?

Star Crash, Yes. Martin had got a copy of the film on VHS from his Uncle and we used to watch it. We wanted to make a game that closely followed the plot, but we didn’t really know how to make it work, so we focussed on the space battle at the end of the game and made a shoot ‘em up. I did the code for the game itself as well as the sound effects and Martin designed the in-game graphics and box art.

It was a nice little game, influenced a lot by Galaxian, but subconsciously. There was one of those machines at the youth centre and Martin played it a few times. The big difference technically was that we did it in machine code, which sped the game up.

Again, we sold it direct for £4.99, but this time we put our money together and bought an ad in one of the Spectrum magazines and got more orders than the first time.

Looking back, at the time it didn’t occur to us to think about licensing for Star Crash. We were working in such a niche and at such a small scale, we got away with it I guess.

I must confess I struggled to find Star Crash. It’s not on sites like World of Spectrum.

No, I think it’s been largely forgotten. I think that Martin sent a review copy to Crash, but we never heard back from them. Must have got lost in the post.

I recorded over the original tape I saved the game on in the 1990s with a Menswe@r album.

So when would this be?

Probably 1995.

No, I mean when was Star Crash released?

That would have been 1985.

You’ve released two games now, so how did you go from that to writing On the Busses?

Well, Martin and I decided to leave school at 16 and set up for ourselves. We got a small loan with my Dad from the Local Government Enterprise scheme and set up in our garage.

Our plan was to release our own games, but a couple of our mates wanted us to release their efforts. That’s how Fletch (Andrew Fletcher, musician for On the Busses) got involved. He had written a text adventure version of a Doctor Who story called The State of Decay on the Commodore 16 and gave it to us. We changed the names of the characters and the planet and put it out as The Vampires of Proximus 3. It had this in-game music that really added atmosphere. It sold pretty well.

We also were sent a rough and ready version of Track and Field for the Spectrum by a local man who had bought one of the copies of Invaders from Space and wondered if we’d be interested in releasing his game. That was an ego boost. It had this weird bit in it where if you medalled, you had to negotiate with the doping control about why your wee smells funny. No-one else was doing it, so we left it in.

We tried to tie it into the buzz about the 1986 Commonwealth Games. It was called Edinburgh Games ‘86. That was less successful because we rushed it out.

Again, we struggled to find any trace of them online.

Yeah, I’m not sure where they ended up in the end. When Fletch sold his Commodore 16 in the 1990s, he sold his development tapes too. Probably someone out there still has it.

Point is, we were a bit fed up having to compromise bits of our games because we didn’t have access to the IP so decided to set our aim much higher. We were all better at coding, we had better hardware. It just seemed the right thing to do.

A scan of the cover is the only trace of The Vampires of Proximus 3 that we could find. Anywhere.

While Vampires is not licenced, On the Busses is. How did you come by that licence?

It really annoyed Fletch that we changed his game because we didn’t have a licence. My Dad, who was basically acting as manager for our company, said it was too risky to release it without the consent of the BBC as it was.

So, with the monies from Vampires we decided to see what we could do.

Initially we were going for a licence for OutRun. I was writing a game based on the arcade already - the busty woman sprite in On the Busses was originally for that game - and had a version of the first level done. It wasn’t very complete as I had to do it from memory, but it proved the point. At this stage it had no music.

We had no idea that US Gold had that relationship with Sega all sewn up, so after a very polite exchange of letters with Sega to see if they would do a licence with us, it looked like the project was going nowhere.

However, my mind cast back. My Grandma used to love watching On The Buses on a Saturday evening. When I was little we used to go round to hers for our tea and it would be on. I loved the antics that Stan and Jack got up to. So the thing held good memories for me.

I called the film and television company and they weren’t interested in doing a licence. After searching in the library, I eventually found a defunct publisher who had got the rights to produce new fiction books based on the series, but had never used it so I approached them.

The liquidator was only too happy to sell on the licence as they thought it was worthless.

Did it cost a lot?

I think it cost us £500 at the time. The liquidator was just pleased to get something for it.

What inspired the game?

Well, OutRun played a massive role obviously, but also games like Maniac Mansion with it’s dialogue and Infocom games like Hitch-hiker’s Guide with their in-box feelies that we copied in a unique way [the game infamously came with, amongst other things, a “used” condom in the box].

We wanted the game to be as close to the series, in spirit at least, as it could be. We wanted it to be like a new episode. Martin was doing a course in the evenings at the local college where they were digitising video, which is how we got the pictures of Stan and Blakey in and Fletch spent ages learning how to code for the AY chip in the [ZX Spectrum] +2 to get the music right. It took up so much memory though, we didn’t have anything left for the in-game music we’d planned. He was always a lot happier coding for the Commodore 16.

And the droop meter to monitor Stan’s ardour?

Yeah, we got that from Martin’s Mum. She said that she had no idea why young women in their twenties would be attracted to middle aged men with a gut who probably had the droop when there were plenty of virile young men about. Martin’s Dad shuffled awkwardly when she said it.

We put it in there because it was funny. If I did the game again today I’d probably leave it out because you can get Viagra now so there’s no need to worry about that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think that there might be other reasons.

How do you mean?

I mean, it’s a bit inappropriate isn’t it?

Loads of men have a wives half their age. You see them all the time in the celebrity pages of the papers. I think that Stan and Jack were proved right in the end.

Erm, the attention to detail in the game, like the digitised cut-scenes, were a bit of a breakthrough for the time and lauded in the reviews. How long was development in the end?

It was something we were all proud of, the lengths we went to to recreate the experience. It meant development took ages though, like nine months in the end. To get the dialogue for the arguments between Stan and Blakey, I spent ages watching tapes of the original series and writing it down. Things like that ate in the schedule and we were lucky to get it out for April 1988.

Why is the name spelt wrong though?

This again. I’ve had to explain this so much over the years. It was spelt wrong on the licence document we had so we followed that on my Dad’s friend’s advice; he was a solicitor.

So when the big moment came, the launch, were you happy?

I was thrilled. We rented a room at the local pub and invited the gaming press as well as the local paper and some people from an On the Buses fan group.

We had a bloke turn up from Video and Computer Games and he went very quiet when he saw the game. He took it away and after some negotiation with my Dad, we managed to get a full page advert opposite the review. We scored 91% from them which we were all ecstatic about.

The local paper did a nice article on us - you know, local boys done good - and said some nice things about the game. The On the Buses fan mob put us in their quarterly magazine for Summer 1988 complete with a glowing review.

Which was absolutely useless as we were out of business by then.

Out of business?

Well, yes. After we put out the game, it became clear that we’d not followed the rules of the licence. It was for original content only. As we’d used the digitised grabs and also the dialogue from the episodes, it didn’t count.

Ah, I can see why that might be a problem…

Always read the small print. After a couple of days on sale, we had to pull the entire thing for risk of getting sued.

So what happened then?

We ended up with a load of tapes duplicated that we could not sell, promotions we couldn’t run that still had to be paid for and so on. We were not able to absorb the cost of all of it and with no money coming in to fix it or release new games and try to keep going, we had no choice but to pull the plug.

Everything we had relating to the retail version of On the Busses ended up being thrown away, it had no value.

Closing the company must have been tough.

Fletch took it hardest; he had nearly finished a Commodore 16 game called Road Racer that was an unofficial port of OutRun. It was seriously good considering how weedy the system was. Our plan was to release it to the duplicators when the first payments for On the Busses came in. We’d have cleaned up with that one. It had started as a port of On the Busses, but we quickly realised it would be better to make it it’s own distinct game.

After we collapsed, he took it to a couple of other labels but could not find a market for it; everyone said it was two years too late. No doubt he felt like he’d wasted a year of his life, I know I did.

And you all left the industry at that point?

As I said earlier, I decided to quit while I was still not too far behind and get myself to University while Fletch and Martin decided to carry on with another company of their own. Sadly theirs didn’t see out the transition to 16-bit, but they had some success with a couple of budget games on the Commodore 64. Not sure what they are up to now.

Benny Games was a name that seemed to disappear without much explanation and there is precious little on the internet about them.

Now you know!

Are you involved in the retro scene these days?

Not really, I’m aware of people streaming games and things like that, but I’ve not sought the limelight.

I have been doing some coding though to keep my skills sharp. I’ve wanted to go back to OutRun for some time and do it like I wanted to back in 1987. Now there’s stuff like MAME I can see the reference material without shovelling 20p coins into a machine and get your mate to make notes.

Sounds interesting. We can’t wait to see what happens next. Thanks for your time Stuart!

Thanks; it’s been nice. It’s not often I get to talk about Benny Games these days outside of a job interview.

#sinclair specrum #interview #AFG #retrogaming #parody #antiquesforgeeks #retrocomputing #commodore 16

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Exodus

Firebird / 1984 / Originally £2.50 / Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Yes, the Christmas spirit has even managed to permeate AfG towers and in the last editorial meeting those memories of games from Christmas past came flooding back. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing. So naturally, the team were asked to find one game each to write about.

Next up, Meat…

Sparkly

Picture the scene. Christmas Day is fast disappearing for another year. The family Spectrum has been tidily packed way in its’ box after a morning of abuse at the hands of the Meat household, eagerly having made their way through the pack-in Horizons tape and playing Hungry Horace until our fingers bled. We’ve settled down to watch the late afternoon selection of TV when the usual Christmas interlopers, Grandma and Granddad, arrive coincidentally at just the right time to be fed. 

Crucially, they’re bearing gifts for all the family. Everyone is overjoyed to see them, most of all me, because in my Grandmother’s hands is the unmistakable shape of a cassette box and that can mean only one thing. Yes; there is to be another game to play. More meat for the grinder, so to speak.

In my grubby little hands is placed the treasured item and after a flurry of scrabbling at the wrapping-paper, the contents is revealed. Exodus from Firebird. This is a title I’m not familiar with, but from the screenshot on the package it looks not too dissimilar to Tempest, which I’d seen on holiday. This could be good.

Naturally, I was not allowed to play it until they’d left, their stomachs filled with left-overs and sherry. Come 8pm though and they were away; I was allowed to hook up the Spectrum to the TV once again.

I slid the tape into the cassette deck, and waited for it to load…

Exodus was an early title from Firebird from the prolific John F. Cain. He’s better known these days for Booty, a platformer that proved to be one of the label’s best selling budget games. That you hear a lot about Booty and little about Cain’s other titles might give you a clue as to how good this game actually is.

It’s a tough game. If you gaze long enough into the pit, the pit will gaze back into you.

Sadly, unlike Pop’s immersive experience with The Quest for the Rings, Exodus is quite a throw-away title. There are no bespoke booklets or cartridges with a gold label. Being a budget game, there’s not much to treasure. A nice sparkly title screen gives way to the game’s menu screen that has a nice ditty playing over it. Sadly, it’s not too long and repeats, meaning that it tires quickly.

The game itself borrows heavily in style from Tempest, but swaps the arcade game’s 3D vector graphic splendour for a more conventional and flat 2D experience with a couple of perspective tricks played to try and give depth to the field of play. You have a ship at the edge of a pit and have to shoot whatever comes out; not quite everything mind. In the melee you’ll find your mate Spud (a Dizzy-esque character), who must not be shot. Catch him with a stray shot by mistake and it’ll cost you a life.

Melee is the right word; there are no shortage of things to shoot at with galleons, flying saucers, hover mowers, witches on broomsticks, Cylons from the show Battlestar Galactica, televisions (with a bonus when they are tuned to Channel 4) and cheekily, Commodores.

Enemies fling themselves out of the pit at varying speeds, getting progressively bigger as they reach the edge of the screen. If you fail to stop them it’s no big deal unless, in what appears to be a good humoured dig at Jeff Minter, it’s a Llama. That will cost you a life it it manages to get past the edge of the screen.

Onto the second screen and the action is really hotting up...

What quickly becomes apparent, is that the key to Exodus is focussing only on those things you can’t afford to let escape from the pit. A couple of attempts and you’ll have it sussed. However, after a couple of plays, you’ll probably have given up and started to load something else.

And there we come to the problem with the game and why it got the reputation it did in the Meat household that fateful Christmas evening in 1985.

While colourful and well drawn, the graphics flicker and the collision detection is abysmal. There are times when your ship can be facing your foe head on with you hammering the fire button, but yet your shots sail through the miscreant only to kill the one behind. This is not such a big deal when you have time to get out of the way, but more often than it just ends in a collision that costs you a life.

I’ve hit Spud. I’m aiming at the Llama. I’m in front of the Llama. Shooting it. Yet I I hit Spud. Behind the Llama. Anyone else see the problem here?

Whereas in Tempest, your ship moves quickly and accurately around the playing field unleashing electric death, in Exodus the ship is inaccurate and the firepower of your craft feels feeble. Then there’s the attempt to create a 3D effect by scaling the sprites emerging from the pit; at source they are small and unrecognisable, especially when multiple appear at once and are overlaid. Shooting them at this point is logical as this means that you don’t have to move much, but by the same token you run a very high risk of shooting Spud by mistake. Don’t shoot them early and then there’s a very real chance of two Llamas getting out in opposite directions, meaning that you are more or less guaranteed to lose a life.

So back to Christmas evening, my attempts to play ended in tears. Frustration set in quickly as despite my best efforts, the game just didn’t seem to behave the way it was supposed to; Mum was duly dispatched to see if she could work out what was up. She couldn’t figure out the odd behaviour either and the sad truth was quickly determined. There was nothing wrong with what I was doing per se, it was just the flaws in Exodus meant it wasn’t very a good game.

Coming back to it today, my assessment (and that of my Mum) hasn’t changed. Adding a joystick, not something in my possession when I first had the title, made little to no difference. The faults were all still there. You might say that John F. Cain’s attempt at copying Tempest was not too bad, that it had heart. Sadly, that wasn’t enough.

CAIN!!!!

Redemption for both my Spectrum and Exodus’s author was soon on its way. With my some of my Christmas money I bought Booty, but that’s for another time.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

Nothing to set the world on fire here - neat packaging, and the game itself is neatly executed. The intro screen, for all it’s faults, is quite nice in reality.

Originality 5/10

A fairly standard shoot-em-up in the mould of Tempest. Minor plus point for gentle in-scene joshing with a poke at the Sinclair/Commodore rivalry and Mutant Llamas, but it’s not going to set the world on fire.

Graphics 4/10

While well drawn, the sprites are basic and flicker. Boy do they flicker.

Hookability 3/10

Infuriating players does not mean that you gain the attention for the right reasons.

Sound 4/10

Sparse, but with it being coded prior to the Spectrum 128 that had a sound chip, it’s acceptable. Forget in-game music.

Lastability 3/10

I’m not sure I played it much after Christmas day. When you have to wait several minutes for a game to load that is so unrewarding, you’re not going to waste your time with it.

Value for Money 4/10

Well, it costs £2.50 and when stacked up against the competition at the time, wasn’t all that bad.

Overall 4/10

Known in the Meat household as the destroyer of Christmas, and with good reason.

#sinclair #sinclair spectrum #ZX Spectrum #AfG #review #retrogaming #antiquesforgeeks #retrocomputing #retro review

[antiques-for-geeks]

Games of Christmas Past : Quest for the Rings

Philips (Magnavox) / 1982 / G7000 (Odyssey²) / Originally £19.95

Yes, the Christmas spirit has even managed to permeate AfG towers and in the last editorial meeting those memories of games from Christmas past came flooding back. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing. So naturally, the team were asked to find one game each to write about.

First up, Pop...

When we were asked to write a piece about a game which held strong Christmas memories it took me a while to decide on a single title to tackle. There are so many to choose from! As a kid, Christmas was often the best (sometimes only) chance to get something to play on our gaming machines, and even when I was earning a paycheck I still enjoyed the ritual of making my purchase of a newly released games console or computer during the festive season. 

As a terminal man-baby I still enjoy that ritual; when I finally cracked and bought a Nintendo Switch I needlessly made sure I was unwrapping it as a Christmas gift to myself.

There are a few standouts amongst the many. The year I got a SNES with Street Fighter 2, Pilotwings and the distilled awesomeness that was Zelda 3. The Christmas after I started my first job when I was happily unwrapping an N64 with Goldeneye and celebrating the peace on earth and goodwill to all men with festive long distance sniper head-shots on unfortunate guards.

I honestly wasn’t intending to review this, the last significant G7000 game of my childhood on AFG. That’s certainly not because it isn’t worth remembering; I just have a preference for writing about games that I can actually do justice to by playing them in something like their original form ...if not always on the original hardware. My G7000 is long gone, but I felt the reviews of system classics Satellite Attack and Pick Axe Pete were justifiable because they are simple enough games to get the measure of when played via emulation. Quest for the Rings is a very different story for reasons that will become apparent.

“ You are about to become a legend in your own time and enter an alternate world where dreams (and nightmares) come true with fire-breathing reality. Special microcomputer circuitry will generate the alternate time frequencies and dimension warps necessary for finite control and monitoring of your alter-presence via television - while you remain physically secure in the relative safety of your home dimension. ”

Billed as a part of the Phillips ‘Master Strategy’ series, Quest for the Rings is a very basic game by today’s standards. You and another player travel across the kingdom to try and gather up the 10 rings of power before time runs out and the evil ringmaster plunges the world into darkness (or some Tolkien inspired guff to that effect!). 

There was obviously no way the primitive G7000 was going to produce a credible role playing experience, so most of the richness of the game is generated with a printed game board, counters and a set of written rules. 

That’s right... this is basically one great big board / video game hybrid. That may sound awesomely crummy to you, the sophisticated gamer of 2019, but back in the early 80’s this was very clever stuff. It allowed the designers to deliver scale, complexity, tension and surprise, all while working within the restrictions of a machine that could draw you a few lines and stick people, and sound out with some tuneless beeps and burps.

A box of delights!

This was a game that required collaboration (2 to 5 players!), communication (working together to outwit the enemies!) and imagination (shite graphics!) to get you over the line. That, my friends, is why it’s one of my most fond Christmas retrogaming memories.

Ideally played with 3 people, one takes the part of the nefarious Ringmaster, while the other players choose one of the 4 hero classes:

Warrior: a stick man with a sword! The sword is useful, in that it can actually kill some of the enemies! It’s really short range though, and can only be slashed horizontally.

Wizard: a stick man that can fire asterisks! Not just any asterisks, these are magic asterisks! These confuse some of the enemies, making them spin for a while, and they travel horizontally across the screen for as long as the action button is held. The effect is only temporary.

Phantom: a stick man that can walk though most walls! But not walls of fire! When you’re in the wall enemies can't get you, but they’ll stand around waiting for you to come out, and when you do you’re toast…

Changeling: a stick man that can turn invisible! Invisible stick man cannot be seen by enemies, though he can still be killed by touching enemies. He’s invisible to you too, dear player, which is a pain.

Our bitter experience was that while all the hero classes had their moments you really needed at least 1 warrior on the crew to avoid getting mobbed by the smaller enemies.

The green warrior has a quick slash against the dungeon wall.

The Ringmaster has the important task of setting up the game board. This is done by hiding monster tokens and the 10 ring tokens under location pieces and placing them around the map.

Once this is complete, the players have a limited number of turns to move around the map, entering the locations to gather the rings. The contents of each location is hidden until turned over; the combination of dungeon type and monster type are entered using the G7000 keyboard (keyboard overlay included!). This is one of the few games on the machine that makes real use of that keyboard. Finally the 2 heroes attempting the dungeon are chosen and the next bit is played out in living colour on your TV screen.

There are 4 types of single screen locations the heroes will be met with;

Dungeons: some black blocks randomly spread around the screen! You can’t go through them unless you’re the Phantom. These places are a breeze compared to the rest.

Infernos: some red blocks randomly spread around the screen! Touch ‘em and you die! The phantom is almost entirely useless here. 

Crystal Caverns: some invisible blocks randomly spread around the screen! Like dungeons, but you can’t see the walls until you touch them. A real pain in the ass.

Shifting halls: some black blocks randomly spread around the screen! They shift to the right at regular intervals. You and the monsters can get trapped inside the walls until they move again. A REAL pain in the ass.

The locations are usually populated by the standard bad guys - orcs and firewraths; basically just white and red stick men that shuffle slowly toward you and will kill on touch. However… the crafty Ringmaster can protect his rings with one of two extra perils!

A location with spydroths and doomwinged bloodthirsts will come with a few spider and winged elephant things scattered about. These cannot be killed, can jump at you when in range and are all in all pretty deadly.

A location with a dragon will have a clear band running right across the middle of the screen where a nicely drawn (for the ‘7000 that is) dragon patrols from left to right. If you enter this band he will rush you, shooting deadly fireballs, and will gobble you up upon reaching your burning corpse. The dragon is a real headache; the further away he is when you start crossing open ground the better, and another player running distraction helps too.

The dragon will mess you up... again and again...

Your goal in any location is to reach a ring or an exit. Both players have 1 life per dungeon, and failure means you have to try the location again on the next turn.

There’s one extra twist if you’re playing the game with a third person as Ringmaster; they have a small number of possession tokens that can be played on any location. When that happens the Ringmaster takes over one of the players and can annoy the other player by blocking or attacking them. A simple idea, but great fun!

Having fairly slated the crummy graphics, I’ll just take a paragraph or two to wax lyrical about how good the rest of the presentation was for this game. It came in a sturdy cardboard case that opened out like a jewelry box. Inside sat a beautifully illustrated board and manual, and a plastic tray full of nice solid counters and tokens.

The artwork was top-notch throughout, and really helped our imaginations fill in the massive gaps left behind by the pitiful graphics.

...also, the cartridge had a GOLDEN LABEL! It was beautiful, and I will never forgive myself for selling off my pristine copy a few years back…

Excluding the board-game aspect to Quest for the Rings, I can’t honestly find enough to recommend playing it today. It’s slow paced, and can be in turn frustrating and confusing. What I can’t deny is that it brings back pure waves of nostalgia - much more so than the other games we owned for the G7000. I think this is due to the social nature of the gameplay; though you could mess about in a dungeon by yourself, it really came alive with the full complement of players. Having enough people to play properly was a special occasion in its own right.

So picture the scene: the tree is lit, you’re all stuffed with the first of many turkey dinners. Your cousins are visiting, and you’ve spent the day in a state of hyper-active near meltdown. 007 Moonraker has just finished on the television, and you’re still chuckling about that awesome bit where a pigeon does a double take when Bond takes to the Venetian streets in a hovercraft-gondola. What better way to end an 80’s Christmas evening than to set up a monster 5 player game of Quest for the Rings? 

Score card

Presentation 10/10

The game itself has as much detail as you could ever expect to find in a game for the Philips G7000. Where this really scores is in the packaging, manual and board-game elements, all of which are of the highest quality.  As far as I’m concerned, there are few games of any era that were better presented.

Originality 9/10

The machine was packed with games inspired by arcade hits of the day, but this is a wholly original effort. The bit you actually play on the console is really quite basic, but the way it’s blended with simple board game mechanics made it fairly unique for the time.

Graphics 4/10

It’s a G7000 game, so stick men and blocks abound. The generous 4 is all down to the the dragon, which is pretty spectacular given the general standard on the machine. 

Hookability 5/10

This isn’t a ‘hooky’ game. You have to read the manual and have enough players for a start! Once you had the hang of it the game became a very engrossing challenge, but still some way off a pick-up-and-play title.

Sound 2/10

Very sparse, with some some grating high pitched tones thrown in for things like the Wizards’ spell. No music, unless you count the atonal ear-bleeding loop that plays after you’ve selected your characters that is.

Lastability 8/10

Pretty damn deep for a game from 1982, especially because the unpredictable human factor is built in. If you had at least 3 willing participants this could very well be dusted off regularly for years.

Value for Money 8/10

More expensive than a standard G7000 game, but you could really see where that money went.

Overall 8/10

This score is doubtless tainted by nostalgia, and since I can’t actually play the game any more you should take it with a pinch of salt. One thing I can say for sure is that playing games with other people in the same room as you, either on a board or on a TV screen will never cease to be fun. That remains true no matter how good technology gets at allowing us to physically avoid each other.

Merry Christmas everyone! Stay in school! Try your best not to do drugs!

#G7000 #odyssey2 #phillips #review #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming #christmas

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Satellite Attack

Philips (Magnavox) / 1981 / G7000 (Odyssey²) / Originally £14.95

“I’ve been lost in this damned asteroid field for what seems like days. I snuck into the launch bay and climbed into a waiting mining cruiser… hoping to scoop enough precious space rocks into the hold to feed me, my wife and our 7 kids for the rest of our lives… but those flashing red lights on my nav-com were there for a reason. This sector is a death trap! Maybe if I keep flying toward galactic central I’ll find my precious ore and a way home…”

Many of the games for the G7000 were barely concealed copies of popular arcade titles of the era. There were a couple of licensed conversions by Parker Brothers late on in the machine’s lifetime, but almost everything else was an original work or an unlicensed facsimile of some kind. This tac eventually ended with Phillips being court ordered to withdraw their excellent Pac Man ‘homage’ KC Munchkin from sale.

What I really appreciate about these games is that they attempted to retain playability by re-working each game within the heavy limitations of the machine, leading to interesting and enjoyable twists on the copied game’s mechanics. 

Take Satellite attack for example. One of the best games for the G7000, on paper it’s a shameless copy of Asteroids. Worse, it’s Asteroids with the rotational controls and thrust-physics completely removed! Thankfully we get smart new mechanics to replace what was lost. 

There are, of course, floating asteroids. These come in two different flavours; the bog standard aimless ones and the fast spinning magnetic ones that get spawned when two of the basic ones collide. These are worth more points, and follow your ship around like an affectionate puppy. 

There are also vicious enemy saucers which periodically fly across the screen trying to tag you with their laser blasts.

Hovering just out of range, shield up!

Your ship can move in any direction on command within the bounds of the single screen asteroid field. Unlike Asteroids, you cannot ‘wrap’ your ship or your shots from one side of the screen to the other. You are surrounded by a rotating dot ‘shield’, and whilst it is active you cannot be destroyed. You temporarily lose shield cover by smashing into an asteroid, firing your lasers or being shot by an enemy saucer. Take a hit while the shields are down and it’s game over ...yeah, G7000 games are almost all single life score attacks for some reason. The shields will restore to full cover within a couple of seconds, but until then you’ll need to be careful. 

So you have 2 ways of destroying the asteroids for points; bash into them while your shield is up or shoot them with your laser. How you aim the laser feels highly original, though it does take some mastery. One of the dots which make up your shield is brighter than the rest, and this indicates what direction you’re aiming. When you move your ship in one direction, the bright dot begins to rotate that way too. It takes a little time to get there, and since you usually need to keep your ship on the move, this means that you have to carefully manage its position to nail those asteroids. Firing the laser brings your shield down too, so drawing a bead on the fast moving saucers without getting tagged by one of their shots is pretty difficult! You can always smash them with you shields up, but be sure to approach them from a cardinal direction as their diagonal shots are fast and deadly.

Zapped by a saucer. This looks better in motion, honest! 

There’s not too much more to the game than that, but this game retains a satisfying depth that still makes it an enjoyable game to play today. Note for example how when the asteroids are destroyed their debris can hit and destroy other rocks nearby (or even saucers) causing a satisfying chain reaction... or the balance of risk and reward, the ebb and flow of defence and attack caused by the shield recharge time. These are the small details which so many other contemporary games lacked. 

Buying it today

This was a ubiquitous title on the machine, and there are still plenty of copies floating around. There also isn’t a high collector demand for the G7000, so you should be able to pick up a nice boxed copy for under a tenner.

Commentariat

Tim : It’s like asteroids, but it’s not. That’s the best way I can describe Satellite Attack (or UFO! depending on your territory). I love that it’s colourful and crisp, even if it’s look is basic.

The game is sadistically hard and the way the controls are changed from those you'd expect from an asteroids homage doesn’t make life easy. Yes, we are into difficulty as a replacement for variety territory here. Oddly though, that did not put me off, instead drawing me further in, determined to do better with each attempt. It’s good fun and I could easily see Pop and I wasting a good afternoon trying to best each other with this title...

Pop: I feel like some kind of crazy apologist for the Philips G7000 sometimes, but I honestly think this is ‘good retro’. I often find more enjoyment in talking and reading about games on these second generation consoles than actually playing them, but found myself hooked in straight away, transported back to a Saturday morning 35 years ago trying desperately to best my brother’s high score. The only shame is that I can’t play this on the original hardware with the original joysticks anymore.

I’d also rather have this than Asteroids on the Atari 2600. That’s not a bad version per-se, but the concessions made to get it to work on much more basic hardware really knocked my enjoyment of it down a notch or two.

Meat: Are the graphics in all these G7000 games just a bunch of + and x signs flashing over each other? I’ve seen more detailed ASCII art! My first feelings were of pity for the kids playing this when they could have had Pitfall on the Atari, but after actually sitting down to play I can see how it could be fun once you get past how basic everything looks. I’d still have snatched your hand off for an Intellivision or Colecovision instead.

Score card

Presentation 8/10

A nice sturdy plastic box (these things will last forever!) with appealing cover artwork. No real in-game presentation, but that’s a given for games of this era. 

Originality 7/10

The premise is as unoriginal as it gets, but this plays like it was created by somebody who overheard someone else talking about Asteroids while drunk in a bar. The way the ship and shooting mechanics work make it feel like something quite distinct.

Graphics 4/10

As simple as G7000 games always are, but everything is clearly defined. You have to give some recognition to how much is done with a few colours and simple sprites here. You can clearly tell what the condition of your shield is and where you’re aiming with basic visual cues.

Hookability 7/10

A premise so simple anyone could grasp it, but there’s some subtlety to getting the best from the ship. If you try and play it like asteroids, only using the blasters you’ll soon come unstuck.

Sound 3/10

Very basic sound effects only, but at least not actively annoying!

Lastability 8/10

As a score attack game or for a quick occasional blast this does the trick, in much the same way as asteroids does.

Value for Money 8/10

Game cartridges were expensive back then so this is subjective, but this one had tonnes of re-playability.  

Overall 8/10

Might well be the best on the machine, and a fine example of the genre.

#G7000 #odyssey2 #philips #review #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Space Raiders

Sinclair ZX81 / Sinclair Research/Psion/Mikro-Gen / 1982 / Originally £3.95

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the golden age of cover art.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal. A comment that is often associated with the late Steve Jobs about his appropriating the GUI concept from Xerox PARC in the 1980s. It’s not an unromantic ideal - the young upstart company taking a technology from another, bigger organisation that had gold on its hands but didn’t know it.

Except Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the quote. He said as much in Triumph of the Nerds when interviewed. He didn’t claim to be the father of the modern GUI either; he just happened to see the potential of putting a low(er)-cost computer in the hands of the public that had a GUI.

The early days of the computing revolution were a kleptomaniac’s dream; intellectual property was respected, however it was done very much in a homage sense, rather than a paying-a-licencing-fee-and-doing-an-official-conversion sense.

Bedroom coders everywhere were getting in on the action, developing home versions of popular arcade titles, safe in the knowledge that Atari, Taito or Namco would not send the lawyers after them. After all, this was the early 1980s. Most of the time these companies didn’t know the kids were making these clones in the first place.

So, enter Space Raiders published by Sinclair Research. No prizes for guessing which arcade machine is being ripped-off here. It seems rather pointless to go through the gameplay; it’s so famous after 40 years of public consciousness that going through the mechanics of the game would seem a waste of time.

Let battle commence!

This version does not deviate too far from the golden formula. Some features are missing, like the bonus saucer craft that you can shoot. That said, alien ships come down the screen, and you with your moving gun must defend. Clear the screen and it continues. Over and over and over until they finally manage to land or you lose all of your lives.

Or get bored and unplug the computer.

Or stand up, knock the desk causing the memory expansion on your ZX81 to wiggle and the machine to promptly crash.

So, with the game being so ubiquitous, it’s difficult to stand out without ‘ruining’ the pure Space Invaders experience. Also, at the time there was little need to; this game would come at a time when recreating the arcade was impossible on home machinery - the Atari 2600 might have been the reference hardware for the home in the US, but even that could not hope to live up to the experience you’d get shoving small change into arcade machines. Though you could get some distance to replicating the feel by turning the lights off, have your younger brother spit out his half-eaten sweets on the floor near the machine to make the carpet nice and sticky and get your Mum to shout at you “This is a cafe, not a change machine. If you want change for those bloody machines you’ll have to buy something you little prick. They should bring back conscription. You’d learn some proper respect!” each time you ventured from the gloom into the kitchen.

Your shot is the upper case I, the alien bomb is the *. Interestingly neither you nor your foe can fire again until the projectiles hit their mark or whizz off the screen.

While released by Sinclair in 1982, the game is actually the older Space Invaders coded by Mikro-Gen in 1981. That release had the usual (for the time) monochrome packaging and was not available on shop shelves as games would come to be. The Sinclair release sees the title packaged with another, Bomber, a Blitz variant on the B-side of the cassette. Sinclair seemed to have worked with Psion (later of Organiser fame), who developed the ZX Spectrum version of Space Raiders to bring a similar game to the ZX81 at the same time. Shame that Psion did little more than just recycle an old title.

Buying it today

There are two versions - the ZX81 and Spectrum. The covers are more or less identical, so it’d be easy to get the two mixed up if you were not too careful.

The Spectrum version seems to be the more prevalent on auction sites. The ZX81 version reviewed here was not produced in as great numbers and so commands a higher price. Prices do vary from £10 to £50 depending on condition and how gullible the seller thinks people are. Expect to be able to get it for the lower end of these two figures at the present time.

Note that there is a cartridge version for the Spectrum. These are quite rare and can cost around the £60 mark. If you end up with that, well done. Now you just need to find a ZX Interface 2 so you can play it.

Commentariat

Tim : I’m going to be straight with you. This was the first game that I ever played, so my opinion of the game is really tinted. Back when I first got my ZX81, I absolutely loved it and played it for hours and hours. One particularly epic game was played at the end of the day with the prospect of bed-time looming. I made it count, going further than ever before; my parents, failing to understand the seismic nature of what they had just seen, sent me to bed instead of cracking open the champagne.

Playing it again, I can’t pretend it’s not a disappointment; it certainly isn’t how I remember it, but in these situations, it never is...

Graphically it’s not impressive, even for the ZX81; the coders could really have got more out of the hardware especially as game requires a 16k expansion in order to play the game. That said, it certainly plays well enough. It is harder than other Space Invaders clones out there, but it kind of has to be to ensure you get your money’s worth, which probably says more about the higher quality of the opposition than anything else.

The hardness kept me coming back for more when I first had it, but given that it was this, Bomber or the ICL “Fun to Learn” educational series tape that my folks had bought me in the vain hope I’d learn geography from the computer, it was an easy market to please. Now, it can grip me enough to play it, but the longevity isn’t there.

So is there much to recommend it today? Sadly no. A trip down memory lane, but not a particularly good one.

Pop : Ah, gaming on the ZX81… a tricky proposition on the painful and unresponsive keyboard. If you’ve never experienced it, try to imagine using the buttons on your microwave to play your PS4. Luckily this game of space invaders can be enjoyed at a slow pace! I can’t honestly remember if it was this or another invaders clone I played back in the day, but it’s barely passable fodder for the ‘81. Space Invaders is already a simple game, so leaving out stuff like the saucer is and the invaders speeding up as they get fewer is criminal. At least the bunkers are all present and correct. Still, I’d have happily played this back in may games-starved youth. If you’re going to (re)visit the machine today, check out something like 3D Defender or even better 3D Monster Maze...

Meat : Really, have we reached the bottom of the barrel this quickly? In some ways I jest, but really you’d only want to play this for nostalgia’s sake. Given that it needs a 16k expansion to run, I’d want to have something far better than this. Even for the time. It’s not that the aliens don’t traverse the screen properly sometimes. It’s not the missing saucer bonus alien. It’s not the absence of sound (which I can forgive - you can’t magic up sound from a machine with no ability to generate it). It’s not the lack of bitmap graphics. It’s just that in 16k you’d expect them to do something half decent. Like redefine a character set. For heaven’s sake, they could squeeze a game of chess into 1k at the same time, so I expect better here.

There is so little recommend this today. A couple of goes and the fun is exhausted. Unless you are a collector, save your money and head for better titles on the machine. If you really must have a Space Invaders clone from the era, try Avenger for the Vic 20. Hell, even the dull Atari 2600 Space Invaders cart is better than this.

Score card

Presentation 6/10

At a time when a photocopied inlay with a dour pencil drawing was the norm, the cover was incredibly stylish and smart. Seriously, look at it!

Originality 2/10

Sadly it can’t score highly here. Even in 1982 Space Invaders clones were ‘me too’ products.

Graphics 2/10

Uses the inbuilt graphics character set - plenty of scope (and memory) to do something else, even without a bitmap display.

Hookability 7/10

Plays well and draws you in quickly and effectively.

Sound N/A

The ZX81 has no sound output so unsurprisingly, neither does the game.

Lastability 3/10

While it hooks you in, at the end of the day it’s still ‘just’ Space Invaders. While tough, the missing features means there isn’t the depth to bring you back too often.

Value for Money 5/10

Will give you a fair amount of fun, even with its’ drawbacks. Plus there is a second game - Bomber - on side B.

Overall 4/10

You will get some fun out of it on your ZX81 but if you’re emulating, it’s not really worth the effort, sadly. Nostalgia will only get you so far. If you must play Space Invaders on a ZX81, try QS Invaders.

#zx81 #sinclair #sinclair zx81 #afg #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming #retrocomputing #retro #videogames #space invaders #space raiders #retro review #review

[antiques-for-geeks]

LCD Golf Games

Somebody, somewhere has to review these things?!

OK, first a little context. While my wife was in hospital waiting for the arrival of our daughter my brain desperately looked for some sort of worry release valve in the long hours between hospital visits. I did what any normal man would in this situation. I set about trying to put together the best damn collection of handheld LCD golf games the world has ever seen! They were mysterious! (nobody was interested enough to discuss them). They were plentiful! (as unwanted gifts often are). They were super cheap! (the sellers could barely give them away). Now, a couple of years later I have a happy and healthy daughter but also, crucially, a box full of assorted unplayed handheld golf games.

…and I’m going to tell you lucky people all about them!

Outside of the Nintendo’s Game and Watch series, LCD handheld games are often disregarded in the world of retro gaming. In a lot of cases this is fully justified; they lack the appealing mini-arcade aesthetic and bright colours of the larger tabletop VFD games, and there’s so much low quality landfill to be found, especially in some of the later licensed efforts from companies like Acclaim and Tiger. Let’s be honest - we only ever played them for want of something better.

Despite this I still find something fascinating about the attempt to create engaging gameplay using such limited technology. LCD games can only display their images in a series of fixed positions, so that’s a pretty severe limitation. This goes doubly for something like showing an 18 hole golf course with a variety of hazards like bunkers and lakes. Yet here are a handful of games that attempt to do just that - recreating your favourite ruined walk with what amounts to a slightly beefed up watch display.

Pro Golf 

Bandai / 1985

The first, and earliest of my collection is this effort from Bandai, a well respected and prolific handheld game maker back in the 80’s. Many of these golf games were aimed squarely at the bored executive market, and were therefore often found in plastic-leather slip cases. This one has a nice little ring bound course guide attached, filling in the details that an LCD display can’t. This is definitely the simplest of these games; your only input is to select your club and time the swing. There are no complications like shot positioning, wind direction or the camber of the green to contend with. The courses do have a selection of water hazards and bunkers to avoid. This simplicity really works in the game’s advantage, because there’s a pretty clear relation between what you think should happen and what gets shown on the screen.

All these games seem very similar when it comes to taking a shot, with a single action button. You press the button, you see your little LCD golfer take his swing, you press again (or maybe release) at the end of the up swing to select power, then again when the downswing reaches the ball for accuracy. Between this and club selection there’s enough going on to make this 100 times more engaging than what the majority of arcade style handhelds could offer at the time. It’s also worth noting that all these golf games have a two player mode where each player alternates their shot, adding to the longevity. In a twisted sort of way golf is the perfect subject for the humble handheld!

Despite this I would like to see you have tried to make me choose this over my Astro Wars tabletop back in 1985.

Summing up, there’s enough variety for this to have been a decent time waste on a long train journey (assuming you didn’t hate golf) and the graphics are nice and clear. The sound is just beeps and a crappy tune, but you can switch if off to avoid a riot in the quiet coach. A thumbs up!

World Challenge Golf 2 

Bandai / 1991

Here’s another effort from Bandai, and this one is quite a bit more involved. It’s stored in another leatherette slip case …but this time there’s a set of laminated cards provided, with the hole numbers written on each side. One end of each card has a background for the course, with the par and length to the pin, as well as a small map. The other end has the layout of the green, with some arrows showing which way it runs. Before playing each hole you slide these cards into a slot so they show behind the LCD screen, providing scenery ‘graphics’. This is exactly the kind of thing I find very cool about old tech - an ingenious solution to get around the inherent limitations of the LCD handheld. Ignore the fact that the classic Gameboy had already been released by this point and Nintendo’s Golf kicks all of these dedicated handhelds right into the gutter… using laminated cards as the background is awesome, and should be applauded.

Anyway, back to the game, you can now select shot direction, though in a very limited way. You can also see where you ball lies on the small course map, though the 3D view of the course and the swinging golfer are smaller and less detailed than the earlier game. Once you get to the green, you can see the ball position in a top-down view against the background card, and need to adjust for the camber.

Despite my admiration for the sheer ingenuity shown by this game, I have mixed feelings about it. It feels like the designers have bitten off more than they can chew. It is playable, but in trying to provide all the features of a fully fledged computer golf game it only highlights the fact that you’re not playing something better. It’s also significantly less easy to pick up and play than before.

Despite my misgivings, I like this one a lot as a collectible curiosity and it does come the closest to feeling like you’re actually in control of where the ball is going on the course. The sound is still beeps and a crappy tune which can be turned off.

Championship Golf 2

Radio Shack / Tandy / Late 1980’s?

I’ve seen various different re-branded versions of Radio Shack’s Championship Golf, but this one is a larger two screen effort, with individual buttons for club selection. No slip case this time, but it does have a built in screen protector with the course maps in a pouch on the underside. It’s less pocketable than the Bandai games but on the upside it takes AAA batteries, and it feels robust and well built. This one has 2 different 18 hole courses - apparently these are Japan and the USA. You can’t see storks dipping in ornamental koi ponds in Japan or try to nail Trump with a wayward drive in the USA, but the course layouts do change. The left screen shows a top-view of the course, while the right shows the traditional behind-the-golfer view.

You can’t select the shot direction, though your shot can wander into the rough if you mistime your button press on the down stroke. Though the golfer view is slightly lacking in detail, you’re shown exactly where your ball is on the overhead map screen, and this really adds to the playability. There is a wind indicator, but it’s only ever toward you, behind you or calm.

This is a really nice effort, with most of the simplicity of the earlier Bandai game, but with sensible additions to add some extra depth.

The sound is still beeps and a crappy tune which can be turned off.

Tournament Golf 

Radica / 1999

This Radica unit has a nice big screen, with lots of detail on the golfer and the course, though I don’t like the plasticy case much - I miss the fake leather and solidity of the earlier games! The swing button is shaped like a golf ball, and is fairly satisfying to press. There are 4 different courses to play though, which is very generous.

The representation of the golfer’s swing is the best yet here, with a large and very clear meter prominent in the bottom right of the screen. This shows power, indicates fade and draw (your shot veering left and right) and gives a power indicator for putting. This game features a really detailed wind effect, with direction and strength. The wind even changes as you wait to take your shot for extra realism. Choosing power and correcting left and right for the effect of the wind should a lot to this game, but the limitations of that LCD display spoil the effect for me. Because there’s no overhead course view it’s quite hard to reconcile what you can see on the screen with what’s happening in the game, and that really matters when you’ve got so many game variables to deal with. It’s also a pig to time a shot when you’re close to the pin without pinging out the other side.

One excellent feature of this game is the sleep mode. There’s no off button, but if you leave it alone for a minute the screen turns off, and you can pick up your game at a later time. This is perfect for gaming on the go.

I’m perhaps being unduly harsh, but this is probably my least favorite so far. Despite the clear graphics and greater complexity it lacks the charm of some of the earlier efforts.

On the up side, this one at least has a digitised swoosh when you hit the ball. You’ll still want to turn it off though…

Talking Golf Master

Systema  /1997

On to the final of our selection of games, this effort is from Systema, a well known maker of really average LCD games. This one has a plastic flip cover, with course maps and club distances on the inside. It doesn’t exactly feel premium, sharing that cheap plasticy feel with the Radica game. Worse, the action buttons are recessed little behind the cover, making it slightly awkward and uncomfortable to press them. I figure LCD game designers had given up trying to impress anyone by the mid 90’s.

The game itself is largely OK, with a very basic direction control and simple wind conditions, but the graphics are about as basic as the two screen Radio Shack game, without the benefits that the overhead course screen brought. The sound seems to be a real selling point for Systema, but it’s irritating beyond belief, with constant super loud bleeps punctuating your play. There are some sound samples; a brief compressed second of bird song or occasional encouragement from your caddy. You’re sure to love the attention you get on the bus as he waxes lyrical about how good your hole was.

You can turn it off, and you’ll want to. I’d give this one a miss.

The 19th Hole

At last we’ve come to the end of our review! Back to the clubhouse for a steak pie... I feel like a complete golf casualty now. The games can lie safely in their boxes for another few years. My daughter is sure to love LCD golf time with daddy, no?

#antiques-for-geeks #LCD #golf #retrogaming #videogames #afg #review #handheld #bandai

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Slipstream 5000

PC / Gremlin Interactive / 1995 / Originally £29.99

Ah, the future.

Everything is shiny and new. All the time. The womenfolk are all improbably thin and dressed in tight fitting spandex or bikinis. Because that’s that happens in the future, we just go nuts for the man-made fibres. Just look at Buck Rodgers. Or Star Crash.

“Girls of 25th Century”, as envisaged by a boy aged 15 and a quarter with his bedroom door locked...

And in the future are sports; not sports as we know them, sports that are just a little bit different and played out to a pumping electro soundtrack that might just sound like Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten or Nitzer Ebb but played on a cheap Casio organ to avoid royalty payments.

Yes. The future. And it’s here in the shape of a racing game.

Set at a nebulous point in the near future, Slipstream 5000 brings us pilots racing their aeroplanes around courses around the world. There is no dystopian backstory, no settling our differences through sport rather than war - this is an out and out racing between between ten characters and their flying machines.

This is something of a relief. It gets a bit tedious to constantly be told that society has collapsed and to settle our differences we now play Bridge or Whist, all as an excuse for a developer to hide their slightly naff obsession with Gin Rummy behind a smokescreen rather than run the risk of them being discovered in a latex old-man bodysuit down the WI of a Thursday night.

Each race begins with a fly-through, showcasing the game’s graphics engine. It whips along at a good pace on Pentium level machinery without a 3D graphics accelerator.

Slipstream 5000 belongs to that first flush of 3D games where texture maps were planted on large polygons rather than using smaller and smaller polygons to create the landscape the developers wanted to convey. Sure, even at the time it never was the prettiest but is a fair compromise given the power of the machines it was designed to run on.

Controlling your plane takes full advantage of the 3D environment, allowing you to fly in all directions and creating a feeling of freedom. Playing with a decent joystick really adds to the game, although keyboard control works well enough. Oddly, no provision has been made for a mouse in-game, which combined with the keyboard à la Quake would have been as good a choice at the time as a joystick.

Some circuits verge on the spectacular; not just underground but underwater too. Don’t worry about hitting the glass sides, they won’t break.

The circuits that make up the championship are split between the metropolitan and the natural - one minute you’re flying through the Grand Canyon or Icelandic Fjords, the next it’s London and under (or over, you can choose) Tower Bridge. There are ten tracks in total; before you race each track, you’re treated to a fly-through to help you plan your approach to the race. Presented in a TV style, it can be quite like marmite. You’re going to either love or hate the way it’s done, which comes down to the in-game commentator. More on that later.

Slipstream 5000 makes the most of the axes you can fly in. Each course has its own challenges; enclosed circuits where you are racing through caverns or tunnels require skill and dexterity as the elevation of the circuit changes. Clattering around the courses, scraping the sides of your vehicle will work, but at the cost of performance. Each time you connect with the circuit, another player, or are hit being an opponent’s weapons incurs damage, either to the engine or the controls. As more damage is inflicted, your craft becomes less and less performant, making it easier to compound the damage to meaning that too much damage and it’s game over. Fortunately, each circuit has a pit tunnel where damage is remedied in blaze of lightning. Race wisely and taking the pits each lap can also make you quicker, even when you are not damaged.

Cash bonus? That’ll do nicely.

Each track is lined with bonuses and forfeits, either positioned randomly or dropped by shooting the drones that fly along as you do. Cash is the most valuable thing, but you can also pick up engine and control repair which fix your maladies on the spot, turbo recharge or a short boost of turbo. If you’re unlucky though you get a disrupter that’ll reverse your steering and is more or less guaranteed to chuck you into the walls.

You start the game by choosing your plane and unlike some games, they’re all equal. It’s not how they start, it’s how they are upgraded that is key. For a single race, it’s not that important, in a championship it can be the difference between first and midfield. Some upgrades and weapons just aren’t worth the money and it really becomes a matter of making sure that you chose wisely.

And, you’re going to need weapons. The AI pilots give as good as they get.

The point where you chose your plane is, erm, very much of it’s time. Cheesier than a pack of Wotsits and presented in a very stereotyped way. Clearly the developers were going for a Wacky Races vibe. This extends to the virtual characters in the game: Lyall Mint, the deliberately unlikable, ex-racer and his prim and proper career presenter, Crystal Eyes, as well as the game’s AI pilots.

This is one half of your commentary team, Lyall Mint. He's about to crack a funny, the zany ex-Slipstreamer that he is. Pity all of his comedy material is made up of Dad jokes and insipid sexual innuendo.

Each of your adversaries has their own traits and this is emphasised by their on-screen presence. You get transmissions periodically during each race - sometimes taunting, sometimes bemoaning that they’ve been hit or crashed. It’s a nice idea, if the implementation is rather cliched and adds to the feeling of rivalry in the game. This was something that was not common at the time and unique to the CD version of the game.

Flying against the AI players is good and fortunately Gremlin’s developers added the ability to go head to head with real players; old school two player splits the screen, but there is an option to connect two machines together. It’s not really network play as it’s known today, rather it’s via serial cable (yes, physically linking two machines together) a modem connection or being on the same physical network. Slipstream 5000 fell at that awkward time where the internet was a thing, but standards weren’t.

Yes, multiplayer is not for the casual gamer of today. Those of us playing games in the 1990s were made of sterner stuff. Man-up if you don’t want to be billy no-mates.

Dog fights are fun but can be time consuming. Sometimes it’s better to fly low, turn on the turbo and leave the other pilots to it

So Slipstream 5000, offers you a slice of the future like no other. Or, truth be told, like any other. This so easily could have been a franchise like WipeOut; maybe this would have really taken off (excuse the pun) with the console versions that had been planned. The game would have been really good on a Playstation or Saturn. It’s just a shame that this never happened.

Like so much of Gremlin’s catalogue around that time, this rather smacks of an opportunity missed.

Buying it today

You have lots of options for this today. You lucky, lucky, people. If you are looking to buy it on an auction site, you can pick up a copy pretty cheaply. The original big-box release will set you back in the region of £15, but be later re-releases in their paper sleeves, jewel or DVD cases can be anything from £2.50 to £5. If you’re going this way, make sure that you don’t end up overpaying for a budget version...

Finally, you can skip all this retro media nonsense if you have a PC and get it on Steam or GoG; you won’t have to faff about with DosBox or worry about converting those 3.5” floppies to disk images. Unfortunately, if you’re using anything other than Windows, you’ll have to make your own arrangements.

Commentariat

Tim : Slipstream 5000 was a firm favourite of mine; I first played it as a demo that came on a CD with PC Format in 1995 and excelled on the Pentium that I got to play it on. Although nothing to do with Magnetic Fields, the game had a ring of Super Cars about it in terms of tone and presentation. A sort of Super Cars ++ as it were.

Having played the demo to death, I bought it when it came out on budget - I was not, and am still not, made of money - I bought the title. The demo pretty much summed up the playing experience of the game and although there were extra circuits and a championship mode, it didn’t really add a huge amount to the fun in single player mode...

With only three levels of difficulty, it’s not that hard to finish quite high up the pecking order in every race. This may be ok in a single race, but in Championship mode it reduces the sense of jeopardy. Where the game does come alive is just right - when you’re racing. The action can be fast and frenetic; one minute you can be first, the next 8th after a misjudged corner or a missile strike from another pilot.

That the computer pilots can also mess up on their own adds to the excitement. Nothing more satisfying than seeing the computer pilot hit a drone and be faced with a disrupter. Even more so when it’s your mate in multi-player mode.

The other thing that disappoints - for me anyway - is the music, both in-game and between races does not do the game justice and feels more like an afterthought. That’s not to say it’s not well done; it is, it’s just doesn’t suit the game in my opinion. Add in the flight-computer voice that tells you you’re being shot at when you can hear the shots bouncing off the hull of your plane and it becomes an irritation rather than asset. We’re not talking Cybermorph levels of irritation, but let’s say it’s getting there. Good job you can turn it off.

Overall though, these are minor objections. I love the game and was one of the first titles I got working on DosBox once got that working properly. If only Gremlin had chosen to have taken it further...

Score Lord : I told you lot last time. I’m not reviewing games for you. Even this, which I quite liked when it came out and think it’s a crime it’s been forgotten. No. Go away and stop bothering me.

Meat : The explosion of 3D games at this time wasn’t a blessing; looking back today, there are some really, really ropey titles. Slipstream 5000 might have avoided this fate, but has trodden a fine line to do so. The cross between flight sim and racing game is novel and explored at around the same time by Bullfrog’s Hi-Octane, but there really is only so much you can do and a fair few tricks have been missed here. I’d have liked it to have been a little harder, with differentiation between craft being, well, present. A career mode rather than just a flat championship, where you could have more control over the different elements of your ship and crew would have made all the difference.

This doesn’t mean that the game is bad. Not at all. There are neat little extras, like the rear-view camera which although useless is pretty cool. It plays well, so much so that there is depth in the gameplay to last more than one run-through. For all my gripes about 90s 3D games down the pub, I like the way it looks too. It’s begging for a modern version with proper network play and slightly less patronising tone in the cut-scenes. I’d pay to have that on my phone, provided it came with a branded spandex flight-suit to wear while you are playing, natch. We are in the future after all, right?

Score card

Presentation 7/10

Stakes had been upped in the mid 1990s by the arrival of the fifth generation consoles, Slipstream 5000 holds its own against the kind of stuff coming out on those machines. The whole thing feels rather slick, with quite an authentic TV feel, even if its tone and jokes have dated quickly since the 1990s. PC games had yet to fall to the DVD-box format that is ubiquitous with today packaging, so you’ll still treated to the big-box experience if that’s your thing.

Originality 8/10

The idea of a racing game working on four axes that you can explore, rather than the traditional horizontal is still a pretty neat idea. The elements of rivalries that are generated by the computer characters comments feels a little synthetic, but the game is the better for it.

Graphics 8/10

From beginning to end, the games looks really good; sure it has aged, but more endearingly than some that feel like they have a certain something missing.

Hookability 6/10

The first course is well designed and eases you into the game nicely. From there on in, it’s a challenge, but not always enough of one. 

Sound 7/10

Sounds fine, as long as you have the right sound card, but having different background music would have made all of the difference. The floppy disk version loses out on some of the speech, but that’s not the end of the world.

Lastability 7/10

Easy to learn, difficult to master. It can be a difficult but not impossible to play using the keyboard, but there is a lot there for you to explore and those jibes and taunts from your fellow competitors press just the right buttons to make you want to come back for more. Unless you’ve got the floppy disk version...

Value for Money 7/10

Was good value back in 1995 and it’s worth the price of admission today.

Overall 7/10

Gremlin did themselves proud with the game itself and the TV styling, the cliched and stereotypical characterisations of the pilots and presenting team less so. Slipstream 5000 really had the feel of a series in the making. The shame is that it never made it there; with today’s VR tech the game would really have been something else.

#pc #afg #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming #retrocomputing #videogames #slipstream5000 #review #gremlin #gremlingraphics #retro

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Pickaxe Pete

Philips (Magnavox) / 1982 / G7000 (Odyssey²)

“I’ve been lost in this damned mine for what seems like days. I pried off the rotting boards nailing the hillside entrance shut… hoping to fill my pack with enough shiny metal to feed me, my wife and our 7 kids for the rest of our lives… but those boards and warning signs were there for a reason. This place is a death trap! Maybe if I keep going deeper I’ll find my treasure and a way out…”

As miner Pete, you wander a single screen of platforms, connected by ladders and holes. You can only climb up the ladders, and only drop down the holes. You can safely drop any distance, but have no control over the character as you fall, leaving you vulnerable. As in all G7000 games, you only have 1 life. On every other level is a door. These doors can be different colours, and periodically spew out boulders which bounce around the levels. They’ll flatten you given half a chance, so you’ll have to jump, duck or otherwise avoid them. Under normal circumstances if you try and enter a door it will send you flying straight back the way you came.

Pete starts the level with (guess what!) a pickaxe, which is a clear duplicate of Mario’s barrel smashing hammer, and similarly runs out after a short time. You’re completely safe from all harm while toting the ‘axe and rack up points for every boulder smashed. Sometimes 2 boulders meet and smash together, and when this happens they form a single golden boulder that drops straight to the bottom of the screen. When it hits bottom it might drop a new pickaxe, or a key might fly up to the top of the screen. These items  will remain on the level for a short time to be picked up.

In COLOUR!

The pickaxe makes Pete invulnerable again, but the key gives him the ability to leave the current screen via any one of the coloured doors. A word to the wise - the doors are very dangerous, so jumping rather than walking into them is usually a good idea. Even if Pete gets thumped by a boulder mid jump as long as his flailing body hits the door you get to see the next level.

Once you’re through the door a brief close up animation plays of Pete … what is that, dancing? Yes, dancing and slamming the door like a nutter. Then its on to the next level, where a chunk is randomly removed from one of the platforms to make getting about trickier.

Little fish, big fish, cardboard box!

That’s almost all there is to it - the only other element is the colour of the doors. If you travel through a red door you get a screen with red platforms, a blue door has blue platforms etc. But a black door? That’ll send you to a screen where the platforms are the same colour as the background, and you have a real nightmare to deal with.

The G7000 (or Odyssey² for our american friends) is a little celebrated machine these days, and had way less support than its much more famous peer the Atari 2600. Almost no third party software was released in its lifetime. Most games use the same set of predefined characters to save memory, and all of them look impossibly primitive today. Despite these facts it is home to a handful of excellent titles, some of which retain their raw playability today.

Pickaxe Pete is one of the best games for the machine. On first inspection it seems to be a totally stripped down Donkey Kong clone, but it’s actually a really interesting twist on the same formula, where you can develop your own strategy to score points and stay alive. Do you hang around at the top of the level waiting for a key? Or at the bottom for new pickaxes? Do you take the points gained for moving on to the next level, knowing that there will be slightly less platform to stand on every time you do? Amazingly, most of the games on the machine were the work of one man, Ed Averett, and he certainly had a flair for making the most of basic hardware. This is one that deserves to be played and remembered.

Score card

Presentation 8/10

G7000 games came in a nice sturdy clam shell box. The manual sits inside the clear plastic box lid, and the artwork is usually well drawn and enticing, unlike the game graphics!

Originality 7/10

It’s clearly inspired by Donkey Kong, but plays nothing like it. The meat of the gameplay remains fairly unique to this title.

Graphics 3/10

I predict no G7000 game will ever score more than a 5 here! Second generation consoles were originally designed to handle very simple graphics, so what we get here is a stick man character running around on coloured lines avoiding asterisks. There are a few nice touches like the way the pickaxes and keys sparkle before they disappear. The door slamming intermission could potentially cause a seizure…

Hookability 7/10

Has a pretty simple premise, but can be tough and unforgiving.

Sound 2/10

I predict no G7000 game will ever score more than a 3 here! The sounds are etched into my brain from extended childhood play sessions, but they consist mostly of bleeps, bloops and explosion noises. Some of them, for example when you get stuck in a door without a key are actively annoying.

Lastability 8/10

Taken in the context of what was available at the time, this is a very replayable score attack game. 

Value for Money 8/10

I played this one endlessly, which is just as well because the cost of cartridges was such that we only ever got one a year max.

Overall 8/10

Something of a forgotten classic.

#G7000 #odyssey2 #philips #review #AFG #antiquesforgeeks #retrogaming