Games I Hate: Donkey Kong 64

Until the release of the technically fantastic, utterly huge, and gloriously lovely to look at Donkey Kong 64 for the Nintendo 64, I was a big fan of Rare’s stuff. Or at least, I thought I was. I mean, I did really, really, enjoy Banjo Kazooie. So much so that I almost completed it many times (the end boss proving too much), and even got the XBLA remake – finally 100%ing it. But looking back at their other titles, I’m not …

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 …

Happy Birthday, Sonic the Hedgehog

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 …

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 …

Massive 128K Memory

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!).

Let’s Play! Gauntlet

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 …