Inspired by the FANTASTIC piggy I drew earlier, I decided to have a look for the previous “pixel art” I’d done about 12 years ago on the Amiga. I shouldn’t have bothered – they were far worse to look at than I remembered. There was a system on the Amiga for higher quality (than standard) icons for programs, games, files and folders called NewIcons. I’d installed it on my Amiga, but couldn’t find icons for a few things. So I …
If there’s one game that defines my childhood gaming more than any other, it’s Chuckie Egg. From clocking it on my Spectrum, to beating my friend’s high score on his MSX, to the covert Chuckie Egg competitions on the BBC Micro in the school library, it was THE 8-bit game of choice. Of course, you’ve all played it, right? If not, DO IT NOW RIGHT HERE!
I don’t really like side scrolling shooters. There are a few in the genre that have interested me over the years – Side Arms, Zero Wing and Sol Feace. Of course, I loved Parodius and Ai Cho Aniki too, but they’re “comedy” shooters. I was never a fan of most of the “big name” shooters – Gradius, R-Type, Thunderforce, etc. I don’t know why. I played an unhealthy amount of Gynoug, but never really liked it. But one game I …
Just look at this! It’s AMAZING! You know the OneStation handheld Famiclone? What do you mean “no”? I wrote about it right here! This, the “Digital Dragon System”, is actually just another OneStation. It even says “OneStation” on it. But it’s a different shape! And! It has 999 games built in! And! The cartridges are a different shape! Gasp!! Other than that, it’s the same thing. A poor quality handheld Famiclone with fewer than advertised games (they’re almost all duplicates) …
Just to finish everything off, here’s my other remake of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator – for the Game Boy Advance. I wrote it in 2004, and it was actually a lot easier than writing the Game Boy version. I even added a “SNES Mode 7” style rotate to the title screen, and included music (from the film The Lawnmower Man). Sadly, the only onlineable emulator I could find (Boycott Advance Online) runs too fast and without sound. Ah well.
In 1999, I entered the Bung (remember them?) Game Boy homebrew coding competition with a version of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator. It was the first, and only, Game Boy game I’d ever written, and required me to pretty much learn C just to be able to code it. The other day, I found a Java based Game Boy emulator (JavaBoy), and so, combined with my GB version of ALS, I present to you an online playable version! Woo! Oh, and in …
Since I’m working on a version of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the Amstrad NC100 Notepad Computer (see this post), I thought “Lets Play! Friday” this week should be the original. If you’ve never played it before, prepare to be blown away.
I am programming a version of Duncan MacDonald’s seminal Spectrum classic Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the Amstrad NC100 “Notepad Computer”. Yeah, and NC100. Who needs an iPad, eh? (Answer: Me). Here’s the “game” in its current state!
I’m thinking of making Friday “Lets Play! Friday”. What do you think? One of the most visually impressive Speccy games, with huge sprites and colour-clash-be-damned graphics, Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper was rated highly but then mostly forgotten. With just 90 seconds before the bombs in his body explode (they don’t make ’em like this any more!), Trantor must find the items to slow the detonation.
You know the advert I found the other day with Crazy Caverns on it? Well, I used the advert as my computer’s lock-screen wallpaper. On the advert, along with Crazy Caverns and the acemazing Best Game Evar Run Baby Run, was Booty! So, Lets Play it, yes? The emulator used is Qaop.
I stumbled across an advert for some old Firebird Spectrum games this week. One of them was Crazy Caverns, a game I used to love but completely forgot about. So now! I present it in Java Speccy Emulator form! The emulator used is Qaop.
After scraping together all my Club Nintendo stars loyalty points at the end of last year (some were due to expire on the 31st of December), I had a look through the Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue for things to spend them all on. Of course, it had to be this: It’s three old Game & Watch games – Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House – all for the DS. Which is oooh shiny enough in itself, but becomes even …
I think with Issue 03, our retro issue, we really hit the big time. The ugvm site got slashdotted, the bandwidth costs spiralled to ¬¨¬£244 for just one weekend, and we were swamped with emails. Mostly complaints about Tim saying interaction fiction was dead, which he didn’t quite say, but still – the publicity took us to over 10,000 subscribers. 10,000! Thats more than many print-based magazines! [issuu layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml showflipbtn=true documentid=090519132232-8fafbec832be47149b8cd797e636fcc0 docname=ugvm03 username=deKay loadinginfotext=ugvm%20Issue%2003 width=420 height=297 unit=px] EDIT: Oh, and …