As a current employee of what used to be NEC Electronics, I couldn’t resist sharing this page from the August 1989 issue of Crash magazine. But I’m really not sure what caught my eye first – a very unexpected “advert” from NEC in a Spectrum magazine, or the the proper advert it shares the page with for Bimbos of the Death Sun! Actually, it was the latter, but I think they both deserve a bit of attention…
I started working for Japanese electronics monster NEC just under 12 years after this was published, but you’d still see occasional material with this old, very Japanese logo, especially when you visited one of the two offices I used to frequent in Tokyo. As well as being very Japanese, I really had to laugh at how typically corporate the message on this advert was, even though the readership of Crash was mainly kids who owned Spectrums – if we did it now, I’m sure it wouldn’t be all that different either!
This is all about the PC Engine, and how “NEC Corporation, NEC Home Electronics Ltd, and NEC (UK) Ltd (collectively ‘NEC’ hereafter)” didn’t want it being sold in the UK. Therefore, you need to know it’s not compatible with our old European PAL TV’s, and if it is then it’s been surreptitiously modded by someone that shouldn’t be selling it to you regardless, and if anything goes wrong with it, tough!
Obviously, it probably wouldn’t be wise for me to offer too many more opinions than I have already, but all the same, this is such a wonderful snapshot of the transition from our beloved 8-bit machines to 16-bit computers and consoles. I’d just about moved to my Atari ST at the time, but I do remember the PC Engine was a very exotic-looking piece of kit, with its exotic-looking arcade ports and just generally stunning graphics in screenshots. I also remember it seeming very expensive to own, even once you’d got hold of a console you could actually connect to your telly!
In hindsight, through emulation then much more recently my beloved PC-Engine Mini, it’s also become the one machine I wish I’d owned at the time, but personal favourites like the wonderful Devil’s Crush, Pac-Land and Victory Run, and all the other stuff it’s probably better known for, are maybe stories for another day!
What I can offer an opinion on is the second advert, featuring “MURDER MOST FUN!” with Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb. Firstly, why has this never been made into a movie? You might be surprised to hear that in 1988, this won the Edgar Award for Best Original Paperback Mystery, though apparently it was less well received from the sci-fi and fantasy scene it parodied. And in that case, I assume it parodied it very well.
It’s all about a nerd convention called Rubicon, where the guest of honour Viking fantasy author, Appin Dungannon, gets murdered with a bullet through the heart. Everyone hates him, so who done it is anyone’s guess, but according to the back of the book, fellow author James Owens Mega, “…dons the role of Dungeon Master, and solves this uproarious whodunit in the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons role-playing climax!”
It’s still in print (and digital), and apart from some out-dated technology references, seems to still be pretty much spot-on in terms of nerd culture and their stinky gatherings, as well as being a decent pulpy thriller.
Previously on Retro Arcadia, we took a look at Deathstar Interceptor – a game I first came across being advertised in the May 1985 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, liked the look of, but wouldn’t play for decades.
I won’t bore you with any more recapping because you can read all about it right here, but I will just mention again that the Commodore 64 version was very much an afterthought in the advert…
I recently went back a year or so further into the C&VG archives, to July 1984 specifically, and that gives us a bit more to go on than the assumption that it was an afterthought because it’s a stinker in comparison to the Spectrum version. Which it certainly is, but with this new context, it’s all about the Spectrum because the C64 version had been the subject of previous advertising. And the headline might confirm this, with the fight continuing on the Spectrum because the C64 version appeared already. Maybe?
Apart from the word “Deathstar” we are not really getting the very in your face Star Wars vibes of the Spectrum advert, so we are possibly pre-licensing of the Star Wars theme tune. And when we previously mocked the C64’s hamburger and coat hanger enemies, they might simply have been what was there in this original(?) version before any Star Wars association – as loose as it was – materialised on the Spectrum.
A disservice then? Absolutely not! It’s still garbage, though that does make the outrageous advertising blurb even more comical. And I quote…
52K of pure machine code giving you 12 screens of 3D graphics, super smooth 3D animation, unbelievable sound effects music, 4 skill levels and hiscore table… this is the ultimate challenge? This game has to be played to be believed! You have not seen what the Commodore 64 is capable of until you have played Deathstar Interceptor! – Commodore 64
You’re really better off not knowing what it’s capable of if that means playing this awful game! However, thanks to this advert you don’t even need to, because look closely and in one final twist, their strange insistence on showing every gameplay element on offer in tiny numbered screenshots includes “Victory (Screen 12)” – the end game screen!
History once again teaches us everything if we care to look. And I’m glad I came across this older advert and could maybe shed a bit more light on this version – and a bit more context on the Spectrum version – of a true Star Wars (or not?) curio.
Monument Valley 2 has sat on my iPad home screen since it was given away free on the Apple App Store for some reason at least a year ago. I liked the first one well enough, but never felt I needed more until I was just fed up of seeing it there! Which is a shame because it turned out to be incredible!
It was released on iOS in 2017, which is about when I eventually played its very slick and quite groundbreaking predecessor from 2014. And it takes much the same format too, where you are manipulating Escher-inspired surreal isometric environments to move your character on their merry way.
This time it’s mostly two characters you’re moving along though, with the original protagonist joined by her daughter in a 14 chapter parable of growth and independence and the like.
Not sure why it caught hold of me more than the original – the aesthetic is evolved to be a bit more narrative and even more polished, as is the gameplay to an extent. But it strangely felt like Journey this time, partly in theme but also in its sense of drama, with the sensory controls pulling you in even further. And that manages to make it one of the most accomplished, and frankly stunning examples of iOS or any other kind of gaming you’d care to mention!
It also has a nice photo mode, which is the main reason for the post – I thought some of these just deserved to be put out there!
If this is still sitting on your phone or tablet because it was free or cheap or even full price, do yourself a favour! And if not, do yourself a favour!
It’s easy to forget there was TV outside of Miami Vice in 1986, such was its influence on the style of a 14-year old at the time, but it did exist! The Chart Show started a 12-year run, and would become almost equally influential later for its indie or rock chart every other week… Winona by The Drop Nineteens, in my top three favourite songs ever (behind The Cure’s Pictures of You and Ride’s Vapour Trail, if you’re interested) was found there. I seem to remember Today by The Smashing Pumpkins too, and bands like Faith No More and Suede. Shame you had to sit through so much crap to get to those five minute slots, though we were, of course, entertained by Samantha Fox’s Touch Me on there in its first year, so you got something else worthwhile out of it sometimes! I was also a big fan of courier-cum-detective Boon, which would be around for another six years from then, though I always feel that over time it got a bit eclipsed by the adventures of sexy antiques rogue Lovejoy, who first appeared in 1986 too. We also got Neighbours for the first time, most hours of the day from what I remember!
Over on kids TV, which I was becoming a bit more choosy about by this point, the biggest thing happening was probably Zammo’s ongoing slide into heroin oblivion on Grange Hill; if only he hadn’t made such a big deal of winning the moustache-weighing competition, he might have got away with it, and we’d have never had to suffer Just Say No… We also suffered the end of Bananaman, Robin of Sherwood and the wonderful Terrahawks, but we did see the launch of Gaz Top’s Get Fresh on Saturday mornings (though he was still no Sarah Greene), The Trap Door (which also spawned the best looking Spectrum game ever), and a quiz show that no one remembers called First Class…
No one remembers First Class because the majority of the programme was completely forgettable – a BBC1 kids quiz show with general knowledge and popular culture rounds for teams representing their schools. But make it through those, and things got interesting because the last round was an arcade game round, where members of the team were nominated to compete against each other on Hyper Sports or Paperboy, and I think 720 too. And for me at least, there was no better advert than seeing any of them for the first time than on the living room TV! If only they had home computer versions… If only I didn’t have a VIC-20… As an aside, when I said the majority of First Class was “completely forgettable” I was doing a disservice to its presenter, Miss Great Britain 1984, Debbie Greenwood, who could definitely give Sarah Greene a run for her money!
Of course, in the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t take long for the home versions of all three to arrive – and fine ports they all were – and my Spectrum +2 wasn’t far behind either. But for another 20 years, my only experience of arcade Paperboy was that tantalising segment on First Class! I eventually got my hands on the arcade version on the PlayStation Portable no less, as part of the Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play compilation, which also included 720 and around 20 other arcade wonders. The whole thing was a modern wonder, but it was on a tiny screen, and it would be another 10 years (2016, in case you’re keeping track) before it turned up in Lego Dimensions Midway Arcade level pack and I got to play it on a much bigger screen than originally intended via my PlayStation 4!
But now we’re way ahead of ourselves, and we need to get back to the origin story. Paperboy hit the arcades in 1985, complete with its bicycle handlebar controls that were actually a modified version of the yoke found in the greatest arcade machine of them all, Star Wars! This meant you were pushing forwards to speed up, back to brake, then steering your bike left and right as normal… If you’re bike had an X-Wing yoke instead of handlebars, which is now the greatest bike of them all! Anyway, there was also a button on either side that allowed you to chuck your newspapers…
The game had you, the paperboy, delivering newspapers to your subscribers down Easy Street, Middle Road or Hard Way (also the three difficulty levels), every day from Monday to Sunday. You start with a minimap of the street showing where your friendly neighbourhood subscribers are, and also where the villainous non-subscribers are, though you will pretty much ignore this as one lot live in bright houses and the others dark houses. You need to deliver the newspapers by throwing them at the mailbox outside the house, ideally, which gets you the most points, and if you get them all you’ll double your score. This will also win back any non-subscribers you’ve lost previously because you missed their house. You also get points by vandalising non-subscriber houses, and smashing one of your newspapers through a window is still one of my favourite things in all of gaming! (Closely followed by breaking what I think are gravestones you can bust in half)! But don’t go too nuts because you’ve got a limited supply of newspapers so keeping your subscribers happy needs to be your priority, though you will come across refills on the way.
All the way down the street you’re avoiding hazards like bins and rampant tyres and lawnmowers, cars, go-karts, pets, skateboarders, breakdancers and all kinds of crazies that will spell instant death, losing you a life but thankfully allowing you to carry on your journey until you run out of them. Get to the end of the street and you’re rewarded with a go on the training course, with ramps to jump over, moving obstacles and targets to throw your remaining papers at for more points. Including this was a genius move, because whilst they already had a unique game in an isometric racer that involved delivering newspapers, they also hit on the massive BMX craze in the mid-eighties with the training course that pretty much sold the game by itself! Anyway, get to the end (or not) and you’ll get your daily totals and any cancelled subscriptions, and you’re onto more of the same but harder and with different things to kill you on the next day.
The home versions started appearing in 1986, and would eventually be available on pretty much everything you could imagine, but I guess I picked up my Spectrum version around Christmas 1987. And it’s a fantastic conversion! The main gameplay area – about two-thirds of the screen – is presented in a blue and black monochrome with some lovely colour-clash provided by the odd garish obstacle! Apart from the lack of colour and things being a little on the small side, the impressive attention to detail of the original is all present and correct, and that transfers to the gameplay itself, which feels exactly how it should at it scrolls along at a fair old whack. It’s just as tough too, but like the original is never overly punishing once you get used to what’s happening and where you need to be to avoid it – for the first couple of days at least!
I did get the Atari ST version a few years later, in one of those awkward oversized cassette-style cases it used to favour, though I don’t really remember playing it much. From what I do remember, it was pretty much the arcade version, with big colourful graphics and a lot more sound than the incidental beeps the Spectrum version managed! I played a fair bit of the Game Boy version too, which was like a mash up of my previous two versions – big graphics, great sound, all monochrome! Very impressive though, but not as impressive as the final version I’m going to mention, which I’ve only played on emulation but is a real technical marvel – the Commodore 16 / Plus 4 version! Considering this would have been squeezed into about 12K of code, it still manages to at least resemble and, more importantly, feel like the arcade game (if it was slowed down a bit).
I’ve only ever played the SNES version of the 1991 sequel, Paperboy 2. This time you could be a papergirl if you wanted, and you were delivering to both sides of a more elaborate road as even more bizarre obstacles got in your way. It’s fun but it’s all a bit soulless though, and there’s no way I’d ever load this up when there’s so many ways to play the original… Which I probably still wouldn’t load up while my Spectrum +2 is sitting right here in front of me!
I’ve been reading a wonderful book called Attack of the Flickering Skeletons by Stuart Ashen. So wonderful I bought it twice… “More terrible old games you’ve probably never heard of” and the sequel to Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, which I haven’t read yet. I bought this for my cousin for Christmas because he has read it (because I bought it for him), then I bought it again because I forgot I’d bought it!
I didn’t get very far before I got to a game called Rik the Roadie for the Amstrad CPC, all the way from 1988. And I’m not going to say what he thought about it because you can read it for yourself, or use your imagination, but at the end of his rant he mentions that there was a Spectrum port… And, despite everything he said, I still wasn’t convinced it sounded that bad…
You’re the roadie for alternative rock band Alternative Rock. You’ve got to drive them 200 miles to their gig in your van. Then you’ve got to carry their stuff from the van into the music venue. Then the last stage has you sorting out their gear so they can play. As I said, doesn’t sound that bad, right?
You hit the road in what seems like the driving bits from the brilliant Ghostbusters, minus the road markings, seeing your van top down in four lanes of traffic. Get moving and you’ll soon be hitting 100mph, though until you get there you won’t notice any physical change in speed. At this point, Stuart Ashen mentions an actual acceleration until you get to your top speed of 128mph, though that might be a CPC thing because I didn’t notice this. And while all this excitement is going on, you’re weaving in and out of traffic. Occasionally. And all the traffic is moving at the same speed as each other, and relative to you, so it doesn’t matter how much you slow down or speed up to avoid them, it’s just left and right, assuming you have that option… Actually, once you’re moving at all, there’s no need to worry about what speed you’re going whatsoever! There’s even less driving skill needed here than in the Ghostbusters driving filler. It’s just luck if you don’t come across enough unpassable rows of cars to crash into – which knocks your timer down – before you’ve driven 200 miles. Did it first time, took many more attempts before I did it again. And this all takes so long that it genuinely feels like you’ve driven 200 miles by the end!
Now you’re at the venue, and this level is a bit like the biathlon in Winter Games – you’re waggling or pressing left and right to move nondescript gear from the van to the stage door at a specific rhythm against an endurance bar, which in reality is a timer that depletes in about 3 seconds regardless of your rhythm. What you need to do is like Han Solo’s flying casual technique; you know, keep your distance but don’t look like you’re trying to keep your distance… In this case, there’s a specific fast but not fast cadence that is pretty much impossible to judge! Should you get your equipment to the stage door – which has a cat in it – you’re going to have to do the same again several more times before all the gear is in!
I’ve no idea what happened in the third level, and I’m not going back to find out! I think you’re now at the sound desk because there are four volume level indicators and four volume controls on the screen, and you have to do something with them to stop the audience getting deafened, which apparently I’d successfully done before I even worked out what was going on. At less than ten seconds though, whatever happened at least happened quickly! Actually, that reminds me of a Lauren Harris gig I was DJ’ing at a few years ago, at a 250-capacity venue in Bedford. The resident sound engineer had been slowly going deaf, so the volume had been slowly going up month by month, and her dad, Steve Harris from Iron Maiden, claimed it was the loudest gig he’d ever been to!
Back to equally rock and roll circumstances, your job is now done, and the screen switches to the sight of Alternative Rock on the stage under flashing lights (meaning the whole screen just changes colour over a static picture every few seconds), and having got your band all the way here, you’re treated to their gig as your end game sequence! Which reminds me, all the way through this game is some of the worst music you’ll ever be subjected to in a game. And it just continues its mercilessly short loop through this end-game treat! Which you can’t skip…
Speaking of can’t skip, before we hit the closing credits, in the form of the most painfully slow scrolling, lengthiest and incredibly harsh high score table you’ll ever see (but don’t go anywhere because it still has merit!), I need to mention spelling (not to mention punctuation) throughout the game. Now, we know mistakes happen even today, just like they did in pre-spellcheck, bedroom-coded games in the eighties, but we’re at a whole new level here! Before you even turn the ignition key, I quote, “Guide Riks van allong the road to the next gig, dont hit any other cars, or you loose time……….”
Things do briefly pick up when you start the second level, when loose becomes lose, but just a couple of seconds later you’re inevitably going to be told that “you have droped the equipment!”
But all of this pales into insignificance once you get to the high score table, which is effectively a chart rundown of the big hit makers of the day, like U2, Simple Minds, Bruce Willis (Bruno, surely?), Erasure and Sam Fox. And Banarnarama, Des O’Conner, Madona, Kim Wild, Jean Michel Jarr… And it doesn’t end there, but typing things that incorrectly is a real struggle in this day and age, and you also need something to discover when you play it for yourself!
One last thing… spare a thought for the BBC owner. Not only did they own a BBC, but if they also owned Rik the Roadie and they also got this far, they were rewarded with this. And it moves…!!!
For a good few years after the disappearance of the video shop, you had the DVD rental by post service. I used LoveFilm, eventually bought out by Amazon, but I’m sure there were others. And for the horror film collector with a PC that could copy DVD’s, these offered a wonderful service! For a fixed price of a tenner or so a month, you were getting up to three films from your wishlist of every genre title that ever got released in the post. If you were lucky, you could get them all copied and back in the post on the same day, then have a new batch two days later! And they soon mounted up to more than you could ever watch, and even 15 or 20 or whatever years later, I’ve still about a dozen 50-DVD spools worth of rented films I still haven’t got around to (or brought myself to) watching!
If I had to name one film that typified those boxes of unwatched films, it would be Alone in the Dark, the 2005 Uwe Boll classic starring Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff and Tara Reid. Paranormal detective follows clues to the death of his friend, ends up on Shadow Island with its demons and gateway to hell. Sounds great, and I recently added it to my Amazon Prime watchlist now its evolved from DVD to streaming obscurity, but still have never had any real inclination to watch it… Despite it often being nominated as one of the worst movies ever made!
The plot doesn’t sound that disimilar to Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare on the Game Boy Colour (and other platforms), and that’s because it was loosely based on it. Also known as Alone in the Dark 4, it’s a kind of reboot of the original game from 1992. Which is why the plot doesn’t sound that disimilar to that either! In 2008, Alone in the Dark was recognised by Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition as the first ever 3D survival horror game. It was originally released on PC (MS-DOS) then ported to the 3DO a couple of years later. It has you going backwards and forwards around a haunted mansion in 1920’s Lousiana, solving puzzles, killing or running away from spooky stuff and, of course, managing your inventory like all good survival horror games that followed it! I remember it looked cool at the time, with hand-drawn backdrops behind some vintage 3D polygons, but like the film, I was never that inspired to get involved – and actually, by the time I could, Resident Evil had completely superceded it.
The 2001 Game Boy Colour game has your partner being found dead off the coast of Shadown Island, which is apparently off the coast of Massachusetts. It turns out he’s been after some magical tablets, which you get roped into searching for while you’re trying to solve the murder. And that means going to the island and wandering around the spooky woods, mansion grounds and mansion itself, looking for a clue that will lead you to the next through the story.
This all manifests in a mostly point-and-click feeling game, where you’re on the lookout for a glinting object that will turn out to be a key or a crowbar or a secret switch in the bookshelf that will open up the next place you need to get to. It’s relatively well signposted if you’re paying attention, especially once you get the lie of the land and stop getting lost in the often labyrinthian mansion! Now and again you’ll get something like the random encounters that drive you nuts in the old Final Fantasy games, where the game switches to an isometric scrolling shooter and you’re taking out werewolves and spiders and the like with your pistol or whatever weapon you find and prefer on the way. Apart from the final boss battle, which also takes this form but is a little more enjoyable than the rest of these encounters, it’s not going to take long for you to dread these happening. They’re really not fun and they are where you’re going to die, often through sloppy controls and the rubbish semi-auto aim rather than anything you did yourself. That said, it does a good job of forcing you to manage your ammo, to the point where most of the tensioni in the game comes from the prospect of running out, and finding more is always a huge relief.
And now you’re really wondering why I dismissed the original game, the star-studded movie adaptation by the master of the video game to movie adaptation, and indeed the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 versions of this very game (Windows and Dreamcast also exist), when it’s already apparent that I’ve not only played this, but also finished it on the Game Boy Colour…
Some context is necessary here! Obviously, the original Game Boy was a revolution and a revelation in handheld gaming, but whilst it was great to have some colour graphics, the Game Boy Colour never really made much of an impact because it didn’t really add anything more than that – more of the same games, different screen; like moving from the crappy green monitor Amstrad CPC option to the colour one fifteen or so year previously!
For me, that was until Alone in the Dark came along. Nothing had looked like it on such a tiny screen before, and if you were making comparisons, then look no further than the aforementioned PlayStation version because when screenshots first started appearing for this, it really was that good! And as you play through it, every location is absolutely sumptuous, oozing atmosphere in the palm of your hand like you’ve never seen before – to the point that I needed a second playthrough so that on almost every other screen I could crawl under my desk where there’s no reflections and get some photos of the screen!
Alone in the Dark didn’t only push the limits of the Game Boy Colour, but went beyond them! It benefitted from a rarely used but very cool high colour programming exploit that could get 2000 colours on the screen at once, rather than the typical maximum of 56, though I think it for most games was generally a lot less than that. And that made the environments look spectacular on the system. Or most of them… There was no way you were going to be anything but a 2D sprite, and there was definitely no way that sprite was doing anything more than moving around those beauties, so the crappy combat had to switch to a more traditional Game Boy Colour look, then switch back when you’d killed everything (or been killed because you’d run out of ammo).
To the modern eye, playing this is very early Resident Evil-lite in almost every respect (if it was on a handheld and needed a lacklustre combat mode for some reason), and if that sounds alright, then you’ll struggle to find a better looking and more enjoyable, atmospheric and surprisingly immersive few hours on your Game Boy Colour!
A couple of weeks ago at the time of writing, I picked up the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, which included a staggering 1,741 video games, RPG’s, sountracks, development assets and a few other bits of content from 1,391 creators, all for as little as $5. I doubt there’s ever been better value in the name of a good cause or otherwise, with a retail worth of over $9,500, and it’s been a massive success, raising almost $8.2million as I speak!
There’s a few big indie headline-grabbers included, with things like Overland, Night in the Woods, Celeste and the wonderful Minit to name just a handful, but the real joy I’ve had so far is browsing through the rest of the content, deciding on a few priorities, and discovering some really cool stuff on the way… Far more enjoyable than actually playing anything!
Despite that, it is nice to feel you’ve actually made some progress into a giant heap of stuff like this, and that came when I accidentally started a browser-based choose-your-own-adventure called American Election, then spent a bit over an hour playing through it. Very simple, nothing revolutionary, but well written and engaging. With that quick win out of the way, I also couldn’t resist jumping straight into Wampus – an actual NES game in actual .nes file – when I came across it. It’s a very linear take on the original Zelda, nothing too taxing and is over in an hour and a half, but it’s a nice time.
With games that play in your internet browser, it’s often just as easy to click Run Game as it is to read a description, and that’s what I nonchalantly then did with a game called Intrepid. “You are an intrepid explorer hunting for artifacts. Can you survive?” This was developed by Jambudd for the March 2018 Archeology Bitsy Jam, with Bitsy being a simple HTML 5 game and world editor, and archeology being the theme for that month’s game jam.
And this one properly caught me by surprise! I’m still not sure how such a tiny, 1-bit browser game can be quite so affecting, but a week on from finally getting the ending I wanted, I can’t stop thinking about it! From how a two-colour opening scene can be quite so descriptive of your enviroment and convey such atmosphere, to its commentary on colonialism that dictates the “good” ending, I was really blown away by this!
In the space of four of the most basic-looking but perfectly beautiful screens you’ll ever come across, and over the course of less than a minute of gameplay, you’re finding a cave in the desert, inching your way across a rickety bridge, climbing to reach an artifact, then getting out of there, Indiana Jones style.
And there’s multiple ways of doing that, most of which end in your demise, but think long and hard about what you’re doing (and I did, over days!) and things might work out a bit better!
The minimal look, complemented by equally minimal text that gives you literally just enough to make progress one way or another, does a wonderful job of inspiring your imagination – as was so often the case in the early 8-bit days – and as a result comes across as far more atmospheric than the sum of its parts. And it all combines to keep nagging at you until work what you should be doing!
The bundle might be over, but if you missed out you can still check out Intrepid here. And I can’t recommend doing that enough!
Before I go, another quick couple of recommendations to help you to tick off some more games in the bundle if you did manage to pick it up… First up is a surprisingly powerful browser-based text adventure called Masks, about being in a university under siege by riot police. It’s inspired by last year’s Hong Kong protests, but seems equally relevant as I write now. It takes just minutes, though you’ll probably want to play again a few times, and it’s very unique in that genre as far as I’m aware, but regardless is just very impressive.
There’s a few other game-jam type browser games there that are definitely a look too, but I don’t want to spoil your browsing fun, so I’ll just close with recommending you check out I’m Bored, Let’s Explore (Ruins). It’s another quick, simple treat with a lovely art style, so check it out and don’t forget that small is occasionally beautiful!
I always thought the Amstrad CPC 464 was an exotic-looking machine, with its splashes of green and red and blue around the keyboard, and its separate cursor keys and keypad, and, of course, its built-in cassette deck (or datacorder, as I think it was officially termed)! The fact that none of my school friends owned one also added to its exotic nature – my world involved arguing about Spectrums over Commodore 64’s, and whilst I knew all about it from poring over every issue of Computer & Video Games magazine through its whole lifespan, I think seeing one on the shelf in Boots and Dixons was my only experience of it in the wild during that time. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1990 – also the year that Amstrad stopped producing it – that I properly got my hands on one.
1990 was also the year I went to university. The University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, which had proximity to London going for it and not a lot else… Apart from a big Asda supermarket in the centre of town, it had pioneered the death of the high street years before even Bedford caught up! I think that year saw my sole contribution to Hatfield’s town centre economy in my whole time there – a Gun cassette single from a tiny independent record shop that I can’t remember the name of; I can remember it was on a wet and miserable Wednesday afternoon, and the Gun cassette single was Shame on You, with a live version of Better Days on the B-Side.
There really wasn’t a lot to do outside of the university – which was hardly a cultural mecca in its own right – until a big A1 motorway-spanning shopping centre and leisure complex, The Galleria, opened there in my last year, after four years of being teased by building work. And I think that had an HMV where I did contribute far more to the local economy than I should have given my financial situation then!
In stark contrast to the person in the last sentence who, within just a few months, would be singing with his still-to-be-formed band at the legendary Marquee club in London, back in the autumn of 1990 I was hardly the social butterfly, and most of my “socialising” at the start of my university life was a bit forced as a result of various fresher’s week attractions. A short-lived participation in the role-playing club involved coming up with a Nazi dominatrix in slingshot bikini as a character for some sci-fi fantasy game I’d decided to join in with, though I don’t remember ever actually playing it; and some kind of horror film club that gathered in a lecture room every Tuesday night to watch Young Frankenstein and other such classics on VHS. There were also single visits to a shooting club in some cool old World War 2 era military huts and a paintball club too. Rock and roll!
Anyway, all of those were history within a couple of months, during which time I’d learnt that someone I knew was living in a hall of residence just around the corner from me… I’d been to school with Scott since the age of nine, but apart from sharing the same birthday, we’d had little in common until we’d both started going out with two best friends from the year below us in sixth form, just before starting university. Through them, we eventually discovered we were not only at the same university, though he was studying at a different campus, but we were living literally 200 metres apart. After that we started sharing lifts to and from home which wasn’t that far away and hanging out in the evenings; and then I fairly quickly ended up becoming lifelong friends with the little group attached to him and his roommate, who owned an Amstrad CPC!
From around November 1990, the five of us spent every night together, either sat eating chips (having run the gauntlet into a nearby estate not known for their tolerance of students to the fish and chip shop) and watching videos in their room; or heading down the hill and through the main campus to the big student union bar; or gadding around the bounteous number of pubs in St Albans or Hertford in Scott’s Ford Escort. And by “gadding around” I mean being involved in the scariest and most insane driving I’ve ever experienced that didn’t involve one of the three life-threatening crashes I’ve been involved in since! Overtaking a car which was already overtaking another car around a series of blind bends on a national speed limit single carriageway is a particular highlight that immediately springs to mind! Anyway, whatever we were up to, there was always time to take turns sat at the big laminated wooden desk that separated their two beds for a game on the Amstrad beforehand. And there was literally one game! And that, of course, was Chuckie Egg…
I think I first came across Chuckie Egg on one of two BBC B computers at my middle school around 1984. One of them was kept in a repurposed store cupboard in a completely unrelated classroom, and I remember being in a crowd at the door one lunchtime watching someone play something that reminded me of one of the few arcade games I knew at the time, Bagman, that I would later learn was Chuckie Egg. That said, I’d also learn that it was first and foremost a Spectrum game, and is a great example of the eighties bedroom coding industry in the UK, where a 16-year old Nigel Alderton took his half-finished Spectrum game to A&F Software who snapped it up and started developing a BBC version in parallel. Those versions got released in 1983, at the unusual price on the Spectrum at least of £6.90, although in retrospect I think Decathlon was advertised at that too (more on that here) so maybe not so unusual. Anyway, it then got ported everywhere else, including the Amstrad CPC, a couple of years later, and would go on to sell over a million copies. The Amstrad version is most likely a port of the BBC rather than Spectrum version though because they both share more “realistic” physics where you can leap about a bit more freely and dangerously – I think the arc of the jump is a bit different and maybe slightly quicker on the BBC / CPC which makes it a little harder, though the grating running sound of the Spectrum version probably equalises things!
Chuckie Egg is the classic arcade platforme premise. Your little guy, Hen-House Harry, sets out on a screen with a load of eggs to collect against the clock, a load of corn he can also collect to slow the clock and get a few extra points before it gets eaten, and some ducklings that look more like ostriches chasing you around platforms, ladders and lifts. This all goes under the gaze of mother duck, trapped in a golden cage at the top of eight increasingly fiendish screens, but if you conquer those then she’s out, and unlike her little fixed-path duck-ostriches who’ve now disappeared, she can chase you anywhere on the screen. Go round all the screens again and she’s back, the duck-ostriches are back, and you’ve got no chance!
Apparently there are forty levels all together, and if you get through those I believe you go back to effective level thirty-three and loop again. But that’s not something I’ll ever need to worry about! The countdown timer is reasonably generous, and I don’t really recall ever running out of time before I’d lost all of my lives in other ways! Whilst the corn can be used for some bonus time and score, it’s maybe more useful as a distraction for the baddies who will stop and eat it like Road Runner would if they come across any! As well as the duck-ostriches and the mother duck(er), if you fall through one of the gaps at the bottom of the screen you’re losing one of your five lives. Same if you don’t get off a lift before it gets to the top, or get a bit too close to the duck in the cage while its in there. Falling from a height isn’t so much of a concern as bouncing off of one of the platforms in an unpredictable direction, or missing (or overshooting) one of the lifts, which is where you seem to die the most, but there’s some cool tricks you can pull off through seeming leaps of faith in the general direction of a ladder that you can seamlessly catch the bottom of and start climbing if you’ve timed it just right! Actually, getting on a ladder is pretty easy wherever you hit it, but getting off requires you to either jump or be perfectly positioned (Donkey Kong style) and can also be the cause of some frustrating deaths.
I don’t like to use the word frustrating here though. This game is massively playable and hugely addictive once you get into the zone of how it wants you to play. Despite it being harder for me to replicate my original and most fondly remembered experience of playing now – not having the hardware – the Amstrad version I used to play in two, three or four player mode (taking turns for scores, of course!) is still the version I’d rather play over the Spectrum’s. It looks very much of its time, with simplistic single-colour sprites and level features on a black background, just like the Spectrum version, but everything is a bit chunkier and seems a bit more well-defined here; mother duck is a bit bigger and more intimidating too! There’s not a lot going on in the sound department – just some very basic (though not annoying like the Spectrum!) running and jumping stuff, and a very basic (though not annoying like the Spectrum!) chip tune when you die. But all of that is all it needs to do when it’s such a masterclass in gameplay on either that strange, exotic machine or my beloved Spectrum.
If you look really hard you’ll find a sequel that appeared in 1985 on the usual 8-bit suspects, as well as the Atari ST (yay) and Amiga (boo). By this time, Nigel Alderton was working for Ocean and the Mr-Do! style sequel that had been hinted at previously never materialised, but A&F attempted to cash-in on the success of the original undeterred with Chuckie Egg 2. This time Hen-House Harry is collecting stuff in a 120-screen factory, like a big Jet Set Willy, but nowhere near in that game’s league, and nowhere near as playable or addictive as its predecessor.
The sequel never dared show its face in the laminated furniture, laminated carpet tiled grubby hall of residence room that five 18-year old nerdy students effectively called home for that first year at university. Nor did any other game for that matter, making Chuckie Egg on the Amstrad CPC not only one of my favourite games ever, but also still the only game I’ve ever played on that platform almost exactly thirty years later (and thirty six years after the machine first appeared) at the time of writing.
I’m going to leave you with one more car related story from then though. One of the guys in our circle, Ian, lived in one of the university’s other halls of residence, Roehyde, which was also known as Rawhide for it’s wild west reputation. Such was my fear of this reputation that the only time I ever ventured into its prefabricated, temporary classroom-styled walls was to roll one of four wheels from Ian’s Mini down to his bedroom door in the dead of night so we could pile them up there, knock on his door and run away! Yes, that’s what happened when you decided you were staying in to work on an assignment rather than play Chuckie Egg with the Hatfield Hard Men!!! And the car? It was safely sitting wheel-less in the middle of a roundabout half a mile away where we’d rolled it to, without keys or access to the handbrake! Great days…
When we celebrate the classic magazines of the early days of gaming, such as Crash, Zzap 64 and C&VG, Home Computing Weekly is unlikely to get a look in.
During its lifetime from 1983 to 1985, I remember buying a few issues, but I always found it to be really dry. Even when they added a bit more colour and made games feature a bit more prominently than industry news, I’d only really get it for any VIC-20 type-in games – reading the rest was always a bit of a chore.
About 20 issues in, they obviously realised they needed to do something to expand their audience, and in issue 21 went for the strangely punctuated headline feature “GIRLS MICROS ARE FOR YOU, AS WELL” which for the time was a very forward-thinking move – I don’t remember any girls playing games back then, but there were certainly a lot of them around in the 80’s, and I’m sure a few could have been convinced. The feature on page 36, where Susie helps you out with your typing speed on a ZX Spectrum surely converted a few to the hobby too.
Obviously thinking they’d done enough to attract the female audience, it was business as usual in issue 22. Then in issue 23 a strange thing happened – after all that effort to be inclusive, they became a lad’s mag, years before Maxim and Loaded thought of it!
This went on for four issues, with the stars of Page 3 smothered all over the cover, holding Spectrums more provocatively than issue 21’s Susie could even dream of doing! The highlight was surely one of the biggest (if not one of the biggest) tabloid honeys, Linda Lusardi, pouting in a bikini with an Oric held up to her face!
I can only imagine why it went back to dry business as usual again after that. Perhaps being put on the top shelf next to Razzle and Escort did as much to help sales as Susie and her typing class did a short time earlier! There was a brief reintroduction of sauce on the front cover in issue 37 with a naughty Bug Byte t-shirt competition, but the best you were going to get now was a bit more colour and your type-in games.
If only Home Computing Weekly hadn’t tried quite so hard, so often, it might not be struggling for our attention (four issues aside) 35 years on.
You can still get your fix, and all the VIC-20 type-in games you could ever need, over at the Internet Archive here.
I don’t think I ever spent as long making so little progress as I did with Auf Wiedersehen Monty on the ZX Spectrum +2! But I adored it all the same, and was never happier than jumping around what can only have been a quarter of the 80 screens that brilliantly and ingeniously characterised the whole of Europe, collecting items and cash so Monty Mole could buy his own island. Which he never did that I’m aware of! It was hard as nails but it was enormous fun, and you never tired of trying to get just one more flick-screen further into your travels!
That was the fourth Monty Mole game, released in 1987 by Gremlin Graphics. I think I’d played the first one, Wanted: Monty Mole somewhere; I was aware of the second, Monty is Innocent, but wouldn’t play that for several decades after its release; and I definitely played Monty on the Run on a friend’s Commodore 64. I’ve never played its cannon successor, Impossamole – by the time that came out in 1990, I was all about the Atari ST and the Game Boy.
There was actually another game between the fourth and fifth entries though, but blink and you missed it! Moley Christmas was only available on the cover of Your Sinclair magazine, in the Christmas 1987 issue, in what for me ranks as one of the highlights of what would become the Spectrum cover tape wars! I know I was long gone by the time they were all abandoning actual magazine content and just sticking about ten AAA games to a few bits of glossy paper, but before that, this and Ocean’s Road Race (which we’ll come back to one day) and, of course, the seminal better-than-Arkanoid Arkanoid rip-off, Batty, were way better than most of what you’d pay full price for!
Moley Christmas might have been short, with only six screens, but the Monty Mole stamp of quality was everywhere to be seen on each of them. And as you’d expect, it was hard as nails first time around, though spend enough time on it and you weren’t just trying to do it without losing any lives, but you were doing what would one day be called speed-running too! Not sure why that never worked out for me in Auf Wiedersehen Monty though…
In Moley Christmas, you – Monty – are running about the place as usual, picking up objects, jumping over bizarre meanies, generally dodging death through perfectly timed, pixel-perfect leaps, and just working out how to get from one screen to the next, which isn’t always immediately apparent. And all of this in a bid to get the Your Sinclair cover game to the printers in time for Christmas!
In the first screen you’re at Gremlin Graphics HQ, trying to get to the program listing for the cover tape game. Then on the second screen you’re taking it to the mastering plant – successfully reach the other end of the screen and it becomes the master tape! Screen three is where it’s getting duplicated and turned into cassettes. The instructions said that although they were putting over 100,000 copies of the game on the magazine out, the Gremlin programmers made their own estimate of the Your Sinclair circulation, so you only had to pick up eight cassettes to bring to London. And that was a major clue because if you didn’t have eight in mind there was no way you were ever progressing past that screen, which gave you absolutely no indication of what you were doing before you even got to the point where you were counting tapes!
Anyway, the fourth screen was another head-scratcher, this time making your way into an M1 service station (I think), with the puzzle being how you got past the final parked car that kept eating you with no apparent rhyme nor reason! Work out that you just needed a bit of single pixel prodding and retreating there, and on the fifth screen you’re in the Your Sinclair offices for a very tricky timed jumping section that must have taken me a hundred attempts to get past the first time even though I knew exactly what I should be doing! And then you’re finally on screen six, a kind of loosely Frogger-style experience where you’re dropping off piles of magazines from one side of a lunatic road to the other, several times. Do that and it’s a lovely message of Christmas cheer / advertising and a nice Christmas tree. Then you’re strangely compelled to start again…
Despite the usual gaming perfection that a Monty Mole game demanded of you, this one seemed to be about getting lucky sometimes too. And I think that’s why even after the head-scratching is done, I like going back to it, then trying to get through it again and again a bit quicker. Combining that slight unpredictability (possibly caused by some odd timing that I can’t really put my finger on) with its shortness actually makes it more akin to playing something like Super Sprint than the traditional platformer it makes out to be. You definitely can go a bit faster, because you definitely can do it without running into something, but will you? And all this going faster is actively encouraged throughout the game because your energy meter is going down regardless of what you run into, and in the penultimate screen you’re also racing magazines getting finished (where I still don’t really know what means death and what means success)!
There’s some great use of clash-free colour, everything moves smoothly, and the level of detail you expected of a Monty Mole game by 1987 was all present and correct. Sound was alright for the Spectrum too, with a nice background tune (on my +2 at least) and some inoffensive white-noisy effects when called for elsewhere.
It’s hard to say where this would fit if you were to rank all of the Monty Mole games, but there’s more to it than meets the eye in comparison to the others, even if there’s significantly less to it, which as we’ve seen, brings its own rewards. But remember, it was free on a magazine! And if you’re anything like me, the only one of these you’re going to finish too!
