In 2005 I played host to the Annual comp.sys.sinclair Crap Game Competition. I’ve been working on reinstating the competition archive to my site this week, and part of the process involved making the entries playable online! Which means YOU TOO can play them online! Hurrah! Head thee over to the CSSCGC2005 page and see for yourself!
In the Spectrum days, some of the most graphically impressive games came from Don Priestley. Oversized graphics were his trademark, and his games were a mixture of puzzle and arcade. The first I ever played was Flunky, where you play a hard working butler in the Royal household. Find freckles for Fergie! Help Prince Andrew play boats in his bath! Avoid being shot by beefeaters, for seemingly no reason! Amazing.
Over on That Newsgroup Wot I’m In, we were talking about whatever the first proper FPS game was. Back before Wolfenstein, before Doom, before Faceball 3000. I think we pretty much established that if you widen your definition of “First Person Shooter” enough, then Atari’s Battlezone was one of the very first. Apparently there were older, but none that many people really remember. Anyway, part of the discussion threw up the old Incentive Software “Freescape” games. Although technically adventure, puzzle, …
Embarrassing fact: This game was one half of a compilation tape I got as a kid. You can see a copy of the original inlay over there. Thing is, I didn’t know that Bouncing Berty and Eskimo Capers were, in fact, two different games. I always referred to the Eskimo game as “Bouncing Berty in Eskimo Capers”, and hated my poor gaming skills as I was seemingly never good enough to get to the “pyramid level”. Then, one day many …
These mock-ups of some recent games as they might appear in the 80s and 90s are amazing. And not just amazing – in many cases they’re actual games I’d really want to own. I also like how they’ve been imagined – Bayonetta as a bullet-hell shooter, and Brutal Legend as a point-and-click adventure game. I’d like SNES Pikmin and Super Mario Sprint made first, please! See the rest here.
Pete Cooke was one of the “heroes” of 8-bit game programming. He had a talent for slickly presented games, and many of his creations also had some sort of Easter Egg built-in. In the case of Zolyx, the best Qix clone for the Spectrum, he included an entire Game of Life routine. For no reason. You can play with that if you like (pick Freebie from the menu), but I suggest you get stuck in to the game proper – …
In a change to previous Let’s Play Friday posts, today’s game isn’t a Spectrum one. Nor is it a retro game in the truest sense. It’s not even right here on this page to play. No – instead, it’s Ed Fries’ Atari 2600 port of Halo. That you can play in your browser here. It’s amazing. Probably.
Well, there are probably some missing. And many aren’t games consoles. In fact, some didn’t have all that many games at all, and some are really one-title TV games and not actually video games. But anyway. The Insane Console History Video 2.0 from Elder-Geek on Vimeo.
Derided in the magazines, KP Skips adver-game Action Biker (starring one-tip corn snack shill Clumsy Colin) was actually pretty good. Well, I played it a lot anyway, which is sort of the same thing. Unlike the more action-based C64 version, the Speccy game had you visiting houses looking for items to make your bike better. Items that let you drive through the mysterious “Dark Area”, prevent you from skidding on oil, and so on. Oh yeah, and you have to …
I completed Super Mario Galaxy 2 this week, and although it was very good, it was very, very easy. Easier than the first game (so far at least – I’m on 82 stars). It wasn’t so much disappointing than unexpected, as all the reviews have suggested it’s actually substantially harder. Anyway, it got me thinking about difficult games, and how they don’t make them any more. Yeah, there are hard games, but compared to difficult 8-bit titles? Pff. Walkovers. All …
To celebrate Germany’s defeat at the hands of a (surprised) Serbia this afternoon, why not sit back and enjoy a couple of games of Match Day II, the Spectrum’s best football game? Well, aside from Football Manager, of course, but that has Kevin Toms on the cover. Anyway!
I got given an MSX this morning. Not only that, but it works! Not only that, but it came with some games! What an amazing day. First up was Pairs. It’s a pelmanism-style matching pairs game, but you have a little man you have to guide to the cards to flip them, while avoiding the baddies. It was fun for a bit. Then I played Eric and the Floaters. The original Bomberman game. Coincidentally, I’d actually blogged about this very …
You know that there Bomberman? Of course you do. There have been over seventeenhundredbillionandfive Bomberman games. Remember the first one? On the NES. WRONG! The very first Bomberman game was older than that. And was, in fact, a Spectrum (and MSX) game called Eric and the Floaters. Yeah, that’s right folks – Bomberman’s first name is Eric. Eric Bomberman. Mind… Blown. And here it is, in all it’s primitive glory. Barely indistinguishable from the newer titles in the series, right?
Kane came up in conversation about some other “wild west” game over on the ‘muk last week. It’s another game I used to play a lot, but (like Crazy Caverns) totally forgot about until the name came up. It’s hard. I mean, it was rare I ever got past level 3, and I certainly never completed it. What was great though was that the levels were completely different to each other – the bow-and-arrow bird shooting, the train chasing, the …
BMX Racers was probably the first game my sister took an interest in playing. She used to pester me to put it on my Spectrum. She made up some back story about the Granny-with-a-walking-stick too. She was very odd. Many years later, I got to play a Master System game (actually, a Sega Mark-III game – in Japan only) called Alex Kidd BMX Trial, and it reminded me very much of BMX Racers. In fact, I did wonder if one …
