It’s been a while since I last did a Friday Let’s Play, but here’s one you really should have a go at – Freddy Hardest. I recently played and recorded it for Game Over, Yeah!!, and got almost nowhere – see this video: Can you do any better with your first life? I doubt it.
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.
I got out my calculator, and worked out that this is exactly 44279762.89% better than Sonic 4.
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 …
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.
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 …
Look at this amazing 1984 advert featuring a very energetic Sir Clive Sinclair jumping over the QL’s closest (and more popular, though more expensive) rivals – the IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh and the BBC B (no, really). £698 for a QL? Bargain! That’s about £1700 in today’s money. Compare that with the £3325 PC (£8300!).
Warrior is about to die! Elf needs food badly! Eat your food, don’t shoot it! Try this level now! So many quotable speech samples, none of which appear in the Spectrum version I have here. Tch, eh? My first memories of Gauntlet are when my cousin Richard came to stay with us, and him and I played Gauntlet for about zleventyfivesix hours non-stop. Both on the same Spectrum keyboard. With the Symbol Shift key sellotaped down because that activated the …
Apparently, it’s Christmas soon. Who knew? Back in the dark ages (when games only had 8 colours) there was an Official Father Christmas Game. Obviously the bearded one himself authorised it or something. And here it is. Do enjoy it, because I didn’t.
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 – …