Staying with Mastertronic, as I have been for the last few weeks, here’s another much loved title. Well, loved by me, anyway – who knows if anyone else even played it.
Loco-Motion (or “Locomotion” according to the title screen) is a slide puzzle game, against the clock, where you rearrange train track to guide the train back to the station it just left. Why it needs to do this isn’t clear, but then since when did video games (especially in the 80s) actually make any sense? It’s really very difficult, as the train is pretty nippy and although you get a stopwatch you can use to pause it temporarily, it has a gauge which is used up. Extra points are scored for collecting water or using certain pieces of track.
What disappointed me once I got to play it on an emulator, is that what seemed like a really impressive loading screen at the time: As the game loads, the scrambled screen rearranges, turned out to be a massive con. After the game has loaded, it pretends to load for another minute while the screenshuffle takes place – and you can’t skip it! You can see this below – press a key to start it.
[includeme src=”http://torinak.com/qaop#l=https://lofi-gaming.org.uk/tools/speccygames/LOCOMOTI.Z80″ frameborder=”0″ width=”440″ height=”330″]
Controls: Pick Sinclair from the options, and then use 6 (left), 7 (right), 8 (down), 9 (up) and 0 (stopwatch).
The emulator used is Qaop/JS – a rather spiffy HTML5 Spectrum emulator.
