Let’s Play! Light Cycle

It’s been an age since I had a Friday Let’s Play! Before I’d even heard of Tron, or seen another one of the 8962398146238 game clones of the Tron Light Cycle sequence, I had this – Light Cycle (Light Cycles on the title screen, for some reason) by PSS. It was awesome. Looking back now, it looks basic even by Spectrum standards, but the gameplay is still there. I also don’t remember any other variant having the little “blips” around …

Let’s Play! Daley Thompson’s Decathlon

Remember Daley Thompson? He was that guy in the 80s who was always in the Olympics. Who was reasonably good. And had AWESOME facial hair. Like a brush, it was. Well, in gaming circles, he was known for his ability to break joysticks. Many a Quickshot 2 was destroyed in the playing of his waggle-tastic sports games. And this, was the original – Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. It’s possibly worth noting that Ocean were a bit colour blind when they made …

Let’s Play! Hunchy

In the 80s, whenever a new, popular, game came out twenty million other white rappe…uh games that were the same appeared. Also, back in the 80s, it was quite common for us kids to think the real game was actually a clone of the clone we’d known first. For example, I had a game called Road Toad, which Frogger blatantly copied. It didn’t, of course – Road Toad was the “fake”, but that didn’t matter. See also Orbiter/Defender, Maze Chase/Painter, …

Let’s Play! The Steelyard Blues

That Harry S Price was a card, wasn’t he? Ripping off loads of Spectrum games, altering their graphics, selling the game on as his own. Nawty. One of these game was The Steelyard Blues. Which I loved, until only a few years ago when I found out it was a shameless clone of “Cheekah’s Exploits” by Julian Wood – a game published as a type-in in Your Computer. Tch. Still, it’s a competent and difficult collect-em-up platformer, complete with level …

Let’s Play! Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo

Look! A Commodore 64 game! I finally got the Java C64 emulator working, so you might see some more of these in the future. It’s a bit picky about what will and won’t work though. Anyway! The bunnysamurai game! I’m pretty sure he was in one or more episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Did I make that up in my head? He wasn’t attacking straw there, anyway.

Let’s Play! Tubaruba

In the days of 8-bit gaming, there were over $hlmun platform games. It’s not really surprising, given the excellence and popularity of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. One of the platform collect-’em-ups I remember most vividly was Tubaruba, not least because of Tooba Zaidi, the horrifically named programmer who appears in the game. And the frightening way he speaks white noise at you. Also, despite what one of the possible commentators on this post may tell you, the Speccy …

Let’s Play! Ricochet

Woo! A rhyming Let’s Play! Ricochet was the best Breakout clone ever, at the time. Well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even nearly the best. And Arcanoid and Batty and Krakout were all much better. But the thing with Ricochet was the scrolling message on the title screen. It’s amazing. Seriously.  And it goes on for hours.

Let’s Play! Virus

One of the things I certainly never did when I was at high school was play games on the Acorn computers at lunchtime when we weren’t allowed to do so. And one of those games I certainly never played was called Lander. Lander was a free game that came on one of the RISC OS disks, and was, in fact, a demo of a bigger game called Zarch. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Zarch was actually an …