This came up in a conversation on ugvm this week (in Tuesday’s A-Z of Games thread, under V, obviously) and generally although people remembered it nobody had a clue what to do. Lets see if we can fix that, yes? No instructions. No clues. No nuffin. Go!
Happy 20th birthday, Sonic! Not that you can hear me, being a) fictional, and b) dead. Dead to me at least, with Sega’s stream of memory-raping crapbaskets they call Sonic games. I’ve done all that before. Moaned about Sonic games. At length. To anyone who will listen, read or otherwise take an interest (or not). It hasn’t done any good: Sega still keeps making them. Today, to mark his birthday, Sega have released a demo of Sonic Generations for the …
Just watch and spot the games and other references! Goldfish – We Come Together (OFFICIAL) from Goldfish live on Vimeo.
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, …