| Beyond The C5 |
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| The glorious days of the ZX Spectrum couldn't last forever, as super-boffins began work designing computers that could display more than two colours at a time, with keys that weren't made out of rubber and with sound that didn't resemble a choking hamster struggling to be heard from under the floorboards. Clive Sinclair disappeared from the limelight after selling the Sinclair company to a slimey man with a beard and blowing his vast fortune on designing the doomed C5. He was last seen struggling to win some of it back on Late Night Poker on Channel 4. Some of the new computers were crap. The MSX is clearly not even worthy of discussion in a prestigious website such as this, and the Amstrad was famously designed for Gays. The natural successor to the ZX Spectrum was of course the wonderful Commodore 64 with it's sexy,slick casing, it's bright and colourful graphics and it's deliciously bubbly soundchip. The success of this fantastic machine would go on for years and years, outclassing even the mighty ZX Spectrum for it's sheer longevity and refusal to die. Commodore would then go on to design the last great computer, the Amiga, in all it's various different formats, most of which had confusing names which I can barely remember.(The A500, the, erm, A600? The nice crunchy one with the hard drive? Was that the 1200? Who cares, they were all Amigas, weren't they? Why didn't they just call them Mark 1 and Mark 2 etc, was that so hard to do?) By the time the Amiga came along, imagination and creativity in games was beginning to dry up a little bit and the glory days of the 8-bit machines were well and truly gone - but there was still the odd classic that cried out to be played on this likeable little computer, and not all of them were based on Jetset Willy. So, lets now go Beyond The C5 and see what else the Computer World had to offer us before the rot set in and everybody started buying shitty consoles........ |
| The Dizzy Series Bit of a cheat this one, because the original Dizzy game was actually designed for the ZX Spectrum, thus making a mockery of it's appearance in this section. But the Dizzy series did go on to be a major success on every format it appeared on, and that's the lame excuse I'm going on for including it's here. The original Dizzy game was released by Code Masters in 1987 for just Ł1.99 and was largely ignored by the gaming world, except for me and my mates. Dizzy was actually an egg who somersaulted his way around the landscape in what was a delightful little arcade adventure in which he had to find all the ingredients for a magic spell to get rid of the nasty Wizard Zaks. Trying to control a somersaulting egg was certainly very original, and the whole game had a wonderful atmosphere as you explored the spooky forests and the abandoned mineshafts. All this and it only cost two measly quid! As I say though, it hardly set the world alight and so it was more than surprising when two years later in 1989, Code Masters, competely out of the blue, released a sequel Treasure Island Dizzy. This was bigger, bouncier and better and the gaming world finally began to cotton on to the fact that the Dizzy games were a shining example of quality entertainment at a nice budget price. Things reached their peak in 1990 when Code Masters released the third and best game in the series, Fantasy World Dizzy which turned out to be one of the best-selling budget games ever released. Dizzy could now interact with his eggy friends in order to gain clues to solve the fiendish puzzles - in fact Fantasy World Dizzy had more sophistication and imagination than the vast majority of full-price games and deservedly won heaps of accolades from the Computer Press. If this had been the final Dizzy game, then the series would have been lovingly remembered as a constantly improving trilogy of excellent arcade adventures. Sadly, this wasn't to be as Code Masters took the abominable decision to start releasing any old crap under the Dizzy banner. It's late in the day and somebody has accidentally written a crappy and tired-looking Pacman clone. Let's stick Dizzy in it and the kids will love it! Oh dear, I appear to have written a completely useless puzzle game with no redeeming features whatsoever. Stick a little picture of Dizzy at the bottom, that'll do the trick! The final nail in the coffin was when they dragged a reluctant Dizzy into the full-price market with Crystal Kingdom Dizzy but forgot to put in any elements that had made the original games so great. It was a woeful end for the egg-shaped hero and he quickly disappeared into oblivion. But for a while at least, Dizzy ruled the roost and extra credit must be given to me for not including a single egg pun in this piece. Or should that be eggstra credit? (Shit......) |
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| Braybrook, Minter and The Llama Motherfuckers From Outer Space The arrival of the Commodore 64 ushered in a new army of weird and wacky programmers, all keen to explore what this sexy new computer could do, and creating new and exciting new worlds for us to go and visit whilst we left the poor Spectrum owners behind, waiting for a bus. In the rain. With nothing but their broken joystick interfaces. Take a look at this wild and crazy guy. He looks great, doesn't he? This is none other than the legendary Andrew Braybrook who created some of the most important games ever in the history of home computing. That's when he wasn't out pulling birds anyway. One of his early releases was the now classic Paradroid, still hailed by many as the definitive C64 game. It was a brilliantly designed mix of shoot em up action and strategy which went unrivalled for years.As well as having to use lightning reflexes to shoot all the other Droids,you could also enter 'mind battles' with superior Droids in order to try and 'swap bodies' with it, something which becomes vital if you want to progress to the later levels and defeat the really nasty Droids. Braybrook also wrote the tremendously important Uridium which completely shook up the world of shoot em ups and had players frenetically wiggling their joysticks for years and years. It was incredibly fast-paced, it featured dazzling animation for it's time with enormous attention to detail on each and every sprite, and it boasted some dead cool innovations - your spaceship could even do rolls,loops and spins to avoid the onslaught of the enemy! But for me, Braybrook's finest hour was the beautifully designed Gribbly's Day Out. You play Gribbly Grobbly from the planet Blabgor, and you have to navigate sixteen dead hard caverns in order to rescue all the helpless little Gribblets who are in danger of being carried away by constantly evolving nasties. It sounds simple but even controlling the hovering Gribbly Grobbly takes a while to master and that's before you can even think about saving the bastard Gribblets. But again Braybrook has come up with an absolute masterpiece which had me hooked for years. One really nice original feature that works well within this game is that, apart from the first level, the caverns don't come in any particular order and so even after I had owned the game for months, I could sometimes be surprised by a brand new cavern that I hadn't seen before. I can remember back in 1986, as a discerning 12-year old C64 owner, walking into Micro Fun and choosing to buy this game. The bloke behind the counter gave me an approving nod and said "Well done Sonny, you've just bought the best game ever made." I told him to fuck off and keep his patronising opinions to himself or I would take my business elsewhere in future. But you know, he was almost right, Gribbly's Day Out is right up there with the best. There's just room for one final anecdote about Andrew Braybrook which proves that even he is not infallible. Back in the days when computer magazines were any good, ZZAP! 64 used to publish a long-running feature called 'Diary Of A Game' in which they would enlist a top programmer to write a monthly feature covering the development of their latest game. By this time, Braybrook was a God in the C64 world and so ZZAP!64 were over the moon when he agreed to chart the progress of his latest epic Morpheus within the hallowed pages of their magazine. This flagship feature ran for over a year, from his initial ideas and designs right through to the game hitting the shelves. But poor old ZZAP!64 had egg on their faces when, after having spent over a year proudly giving extensive coverage to the development of Morpheus, it turned out to be the stinkiest dog turd of a game you can possibly imagine, and they had just wasted entire rain forests on charting it's development! That though, was just one blip in a long line of classic games from Braybrook, and nobody else in the world has designed half as many groundbreaking games as he has. He works for an Insurance Company now. Shame. Whilst we're on the subject of weird and wacky C64 programmers, they don't come any weirder or wackier than this guy, Mr Jeff Minter. If you're looking for shoot em ups that seem to take place inside the head of a complete lunatic who has just taken forty tabs of acid and finds himself constantly hallucinating about fighting hordes of Llamas and Camels in the far reaches of outer space (and let's face it, who isn't?) then you could do worse than check out the entire back catalogue of Jeff Minter. Minter is more famously known as The 'Yak', a name he settled on whilst playing the old arcade machines where of course you only had a maximum of 3 letters to type in your name on the Hi-Scores chart. He formed his own software label Llamasoft from his home in 1982 and went on to release some of the most mind-bendingly ridiculous but joystick-bustingly playable games the world had ever seen from Sheep In Space to Mama Llama, via Attack Of The Mutant Camels. Yes, just about every Llamasoft title featured some kind of hairy animal blasting some other kind of hairy animal in a galaxy a million miles away from our own. But these were by no means silly novelty games. Well, yes, OK, they were silly, they were all as nutty as a fruitcake, but beneath all the hallucinogenic imagery and the implied beastiality, they were all utterly fantastic games, and Minter did wonders in presenting us with original new twists and innovative new control methods for the tired old shoot em up. Revenge Of The Mutant Camels is my personal favourite, I just love controlling the fucking huge Camel sprite and blasting telephone boxes out of the sky - I'm not sure but I don't think there's another game on the planet where you can do that. The really great thing about Jeff Minter is that he never sold out. A programmer of his talents would normally end up accepting a whopping pay packet from a major Software Company, but Minter insisted on doing it all his own way on his small home-grown label, despite the huge demand for his games.In the early days, he even had to rope in his mother to help put the inlay sleeves in the cases before they got sent out to the shops! Minter was also instrumental in helping set up the Shareware scene, a system where upcoming programmers could get their games distributed to the world, and folks could buy new games dead cheap and spread the word, and all without any profits being sliced off by the nasty bigwigs. Much respect to the Yak. Not sure what he's doing right now but I'm guessing it involves a live hairy animal. Lots of classic C64 games can now be played again using the wonderful VICE Emulator. The Pigeon Loft's recommended list of games and links can be found on the last page of the Guide. |
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| The Secret Of Monkey Island As we venture onwards to the wondrous super-duper machine that was the Commodore Amiga, I have to sit back and reflect just how much shit was released for this great computer. Don't get me wrong, there were also plenty of truly groundbreaking corkers which would change the face of computer games forever, but by golly you had to wade through a river of stale afterbirth in order to find the sparkling gems. About 90% of all Amiga games ever released fell under one of three categories. 1) A bouncy run and jump platform game with colourful graphics but bugger all else. 2) A 'deep' strategy game with a 400-page instruction booklet which would take you weeks to realise that underneath all the over-complicated gameplay was a deceptively simple game which would probably have worked on a 16k Spectrum. 3) A bloody Dungeon game in which you had to guide a noble warrior through a thousand corridors that all looked exactly the same to defeat the Mighty Zarjok of The Seventh Moon. Bit disappointing really considering the wonderful things you could do with such a mega computer as the Amiga. But never mind, in amongst every lorryload of mindless repetetive shite, you would be lucky enought to come across something as innovative as Cannon Fodder or Civilisation or if you were really lucky, maybe even Worms. But for me, one of the greatest gaming experiences you can possibly have is the wonderful Secret Of Monkey Island released by Lucasfilm in 1990. A wise man once told me whilst we were sat on top of a mountain (not naked) that you haven't lived unless you've experienced Monkey Island and even though I was unwittingly conversing with a crazed murderer on the run from the police, I knew exactly what he meant. The game works so brilliantly on so many levels, it's difficult to know where to begin. It was the very first fully interactive adventure game in which there is no need for the keyboard at all, it's all controlled by the mouse using a system which is instantly accessible and yet you can perform quite complicated tasks with complete ease. You control Guybrush Threepwood, a bit of a prat, who decides to travel to Mellee Island and become a Pirate. That's where you start off, but things soon start to develop around you and Guybrush is soon up to his neck in it as you have to help him buy a ship, get a crew together and sail off to the mysterious Monkey Island to rescue the Governer from the Ghost Pirate LeChuck. The way that the story unfolds as you get deeper into the game is spellbinding and very cleverly done. You can interact fully with absolutely everyone you come across, and everybody has something to say (even the pub dog for God's sake!) and you can't help but get completely involved in the whole scenario, every place and every character is so vividly brought to life. Even the sound is amazing with every location having it's own distinctive theme from the merry Piratey tunes of the Scumm Bar to the genuinely spooky theme of the Ghost Pirate ship. What really makes this game though is that it's just so funny. There are just so many moments which had me laughing out loud at the screen when I was probably supposed to be actually rescuing someone. I once spent about half an hour wasting my time trying to steal a spade from a shopkeeper and deliberately getting caught purely because he was slowly getting increasingly pissed off and his reactions were just getting funnier and funnier and funnier. It's a pretty difficult game to complete, I think I'd been playing it on and off for about a year until I'd even begun to get my crew together, never mind reach Monkey Island itself! But the game is just so utterly engaging on every level, you can't help but be drawn back into it and just try and get that little bit further. As if all that wasn't enough, Lucasfilm even managed to surpass themselves with a sequel Monkey Island 2 - Lechuck's Revenge, released in 1991. The graphics are awesome in this one and the game is about four times bigger! I've only recently managed to discover the delights of this sequel for the first time on my lovely Amiga Emulator but after weeks and weeks of play, I know I've barely scratched the surface which is top banana 'cos it means I've still got loads more left to explore! Hooray! Truly exceptional pieces of software and a good excuse to invent the Amiga. |
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| Pinball Fantasies It's bizarre really that some game ideas ever made it onto the shelves. I mean, which wanker decided that a fruit machine simulation might be a really good idea? There were bloody hundreds of 'em as well. WHY??? You couldn't win any money! Didn't anybody stop to think about that for a second? Idiots! Realistically, you could say the same about whichever drunken tramp decided that a pinball simulation might be a bold step forward for computer programming. How on Earth were they going to translate the physical fun of a pinball table into a computer game? Mind you, suppose you could say the same thing about Geoff Capes Strongman Challenge. But I fear we're straying from the point... Most pinball games were shit. Up until the early nineties, there was only one half-decent pinball game ever to grace a computer and that was Sagittarian Pinball on the ZX Spectrum released in 1983. (Sometimes referred to as Pinball Wizard if you're ever trying to find it to use on an emulator). Even this wasn't great, a very simple one-screen affair with a very slow and sluggish ball moving lazily around a light blue screen with a couple of hazards and ramps on it. But it did have a certain charm I suppose and having just played it five minutes ago, I actually quite enjoyed it. Anyway, my dad liked it a lot so that's why I'd thought I'd give it a mention here. 'Twas many a time in the days of yore when my dad could be found at half-past three in the morning, sat beside four long-empty cans of lager, trying to beat the high-score on Sagittarian Pinball. I think that's the only time I came close to witnessing a grown man trying to throw a ZX Spectrum out of the window too, after he lost his last ball in an arguable manner. However, in 1992, 21st Century Entertainment began releasing their legendary Pinball series for the Amiga. It all gets a bit confusing 'cos there was Pinball Dreams and Pinball Illusions and Pinball Fannyache but the only Pinball game you'll ever really need is Pinball Fantasies. This seminal release featured not one, not two, not five but FOUR utterly fantastic tables to play on, each one being completely unique and difficult to master - and the end result is one of the most pant-wettingly addictive games EVER. Each table is actually pretty big and the screen scrolls smoothly and rapidly. The Partyland table was the first one I got into with all it's carnival atmosphere and general liveliness, but the true gem here is the Stones 'N' Bones table. Each hazard and feature is amazingly well thought out and genuinely exciting and it's very difficult to drag yourself away once you get going. In fact, if Pinball Fantasies had consisted of just the Stones 'N' Bones table alone, then it would still be an awesome classic. But no! There's the others too! Billion Dollar Gameshow is another incredibly inventive table which kept me hooked for weeks and weeks. Speed Devils is the weakest of the four but even that proudly pisses over just about any other Pinball game released on any format ever. To be honest, Pinball Fantasies actually manages to surpass the excitement of a real Pinball table and that is just an incredible achievement. Legend tells of a hideous Rotherhamite known only as 'Growler' who found an infinite lives cheat for this game and proceeded to play it for days and days, even though technically the game would never ever end and he wouldn't even be able to save a high-score on it because of this fact. After a solid week of playing it, his mind fell out of his head and his dad had to very quickly and cheaply replace it with the mind of a monkey before the relevant authorities took some sort of action. Yes, Pinball Fantasies is that good and was one of the last truly great pieces of software. So now we've reached the end of the line for quality home computing, let's nip back to the seaside for a last look at what the arcades had been doing all this time..... |
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| Rough Guide To Home Computing & The Arcades Click here to go back to the Title page and view the whole Guide |