Arcade / Jaleco / 1982

I don’t have many memories of my early family holidays. Let me re-frame that statement. I don’t have many memories of my early family holidays except for the arcade games I may have seen:

• on the ferry.
• in a service station.
• in a campsite. 

Now, I’m not here to tell you that I think this good or healthy, but who’s to say that without those games anchoring me to places at points in time I would have any memories before the age of 10 at all?

…so I must have been 6 or 7. We took our car onto a ferry and sailed across the channel to France. This was wildly exciting in itself, but even better the ferry had a shop and a small arcade, and at some point my brother played one of the games. That game was ‘Naughty Boy’.

In Naughty Boy you control the titular wayward child as they work their way upward through a scrolling maze of walls and trees until they reach a castle replete with flags. The boy must avoid various colorful blobby looking monsters on the way; contact with an enemy will instantly lose you a life and reset all progress on the level, forcing you to start again from the bottom. 

As this IS a bad boy, he’s armed himself with bombs (maybe we could just say they’re water or flour bombs, though they’re super effective at blowing holes in the scenery and setting things on fire!). The bombs stun and then kill any enemies on the level, but in one of the game’s only really interesting mechanics they fly in an arc, the height of which is dependent on how long you hold down the fire button before releasing it again. Once you get to the castle area, the bombs must be hurled at the flags; blow them all up and you progress to the next level of naughty mayhem.

• Cripes! What jolly japes chums! …now pay up or I’ll slit you and burn your fucking house to the ground!

There are a couple of extra features present on all the levels. Safe zones cannot be entered by the monsters, but a timer counts down while you’re inside until you’re ejected (the baddies also seem to go nuts when you go in there!). More usefully, question marks appear randomly in the level which when bombed make all the monsters change color and stand still for a while.

There’s a bonus game for extra points thrown in after every couple of levels; you have to drop objects from the basket of an airship on to the head of a giant blobby enemy that walks back and forth across the bottom of the screen.

Now, this is an obscure game! Nobody talks about it. Nobody cares! It doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry! Maybe this is because it’s also a bad game. Having spent some time with it I feel sorry that my brother wasted his precious 20p on it back in 1982. I want to post him 20p with a conciliatory note to make amends for his bad luck.

Why is it bad? Well, it’s far too difficult for a start. Difficult in a random and unfair way that makes me think it would be impossible to ever get good at it. The first level is OK, but after that you’re swamped with aggressive enemies and lots of wide open spaces where it’s super hard to line up those bombs.

The graphics are basic, but fit for purpose; there were still plenty of graphically simple games back in ‘82, even though that year would see the release of jaw droppers like Pole Position and Zaxxon. What it lacks is well considered and well balanced gameplay. It just feels like an unvarnished cash grab to me.

As an interesting footnote there was a single home console conversion of Naughty Boy for the ultra obscure Japan only Casio PV-1000 console, which sadly makes the arcade version look like a real work of art.

Then : 5/10

It looked colorful and approachable enough to fleece my brother for 20p, and there were plenty of poorly balanced games about back then.

Now : 2/10

Go and play Joust, Q*bert or Burgertime if you want something with an ‘82 vintage.

Philips (Magnavox) / 1982 / G7000 (Odyssey²) / Originally £19.95

Yes, the Christmas spirit has even managed to permeate AfG towers and in the last editorial meeting those memories of games from Christmas past came flooding back. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing. So naturally, the team were asked to find one game each to write about.

First up, Pop…

When we were asked to write a piece about a game which held strong Christmas memories it took me a while to decide on a single title to tackle. There are so many to choose from! As a kid, Christmas was often the best (sometimes only) chance to get something to play on our gaming machines, and even when I was earning a paycheck I still enjoyed the ritual of making my purchase of a newly released games console or computer during the festive season. 

As a terminal man-baby I still enjoy that ritual; when I finally cracked and bought a Nintendo Switch I needlessly made sure I was unwrapping it as a Christmas gift to myself.

There are a few standouts amongst the many. The year I got a SNES with Street Fighter 2, Pilotwings and the distilled awesomeness that was Zelda 3. The Christmas after I started my first job when I was happily unwrapping an N64 with Goldeneye and celebrating the peace on earth and goodwill to all men with festive long distance sniper head-shots on unfortunate guards.

I honestly wasn’t intending to review this, the last significant G7000 game of my childhood on AFG. That’s certainly not because it isn’t worth remembering; I just have a preference for writing about games that I can actually do justice to by playing them in something like their original form …if not always on the original hardware. My G7000 is long gone, but I felt the reviews of system classics Satellite Attack and Pick Axe Pete were justifiable because they are simple enough games to get the measure of when played via emulation. Quest for the Rings is a very different story for reasons that will become apparent.

“ You are about to become a legend in your own time and enter an alternate world where dreams (and nightmares) come true with fire-breathing reality. Special microcomputer circuitry will generate the alternate time frequencies and dimension warps necessary for finite control and monitoring of your alter-presence via television - while you remain physically secure in the relative safety of your home dimension. ”

Billed as a part of the Phillips ‘Master Strategy’ series, Quest for the Rings is a very basic game by today’s standards. You and another player travel across the kingdom to try and gather up the 10 rings of power before time runs out and the evil ringmaster plunges the world into darkness (or some Tolkien inspired guff to that effect!). 

There was obviously no way the primitive G7000 was going to produce a credible role playing experience, so most of the richness of the game is generated with a printed game board, counters and a set of written rules. 

That’s right… this is basically one great big board / video game hybrid. That may sound awesomely crummy to you, the sophisticated gamer of 2019, but back in the early 80’s this was very clever stuff. It allowed the designers to deliver scale, complexity, tension and surprise, all while working within the restrictions of a machine that could draw you a few lines and stick people, and sound out with some tuneless beeps and burps.

• A box of delights!

This was a game that required collaboration (2 to 5 players!), communication (working together to outwit the enemies!) and imagination (shite graphics!) to get you over the line. That, my friends, is why it’s one of my most fond Christmas retrogaming memories.

Ideally played with 3 people, one takes the part of the nefarious Ringmaster, while the other players choose one of the 4 hero classes:

Warrior: a stick man with a sword! The sword is useful, in that it can actually kill some of the enemies! It’s really short range though, and can only be slashed horizontally.

Wizard: a stick man that can fire asterisks! Not just any asterisks, these are magic asterisks! These confuse some of the enemies, making them spin for a while, and they travel horizontally across the screen for as long as the action button is held. The effect is only temporary.

Phantom: a stick man that can walk though most walls! But not walls of fire! When you’re in the wall enemies can’t get you, but they’ll stand around waiting for you to come out, and when you do you’re toast…

Changeling: a stick man that can turn invisible! Invisible stick man cannot be seen by enemies, though he can still be killed by touching enemies. He’s invisible to you too, dear player, which is a pain.

Our bitter experience was that while all the hero classes had their moments you really needed at least 1 warrior on the crew to avoid getting mobbed by the smaller enemies.

• The green warrior has a quick slash against the dungeon wall.

The Ringmaster has the important task of setting up the game board. This is done by hiding monster tokens and the 10 ring tokens under location pieces and placing them around the map.

Once this is complete, the players have a limited number of turns to move around the map, entering the locations to gather the rings. The contents of each location is hidden until turned over; the combination of dungeon type and monster type are entered using the G7000 keyboard (keyboard overlay included!). This is one of the few games on the machine that makes real use of that keyboard. Finally the 2 heroes attempting the dungeon are chosen and the next bit is played out in living colour on your TV screen.

There are 4 types of single screen locations the heroes will be met with;

Dungeons: some black blocks randomly spread around the screen! You can’t go through them unless you’re the Phantom. These places are a breeze compared to the rest.

Infernos: some red blocks randomly spread around the screen! Touch ‘em and you die! The phantom is almost entirely useless here. 

Crystal Caverns: some invisible blocks randomly spread around the screen! Like dungeons, but you can’t see the walls until you touch them. A real pain in the ass.

Shifting halls: some black blocks randomly spread around the screen! They shift to the right at regular intervals. You and the monsters can get trapped inside the walls until they move again. A REAL pain in the ass.

The locations are usually populated by the standard bad guys - orcs and firewraths; basically just white and red stick men that shuffle slowly toward you and will kill on touch. However… the crafty Ringmaster can protect his rings with one of two extra perils!

A location with spydroths and doomwinged bloodthirsts will come with a few spider and winged elephant things scattered about. These cannot be killed, can jump at you when in range and are all in all pretty deadly.

A location with a dragon will have a clear band running right across the middle of the screen where a nicely drawn (for the ‘7000 that is) dragon patrols from left to right. If you enter this band he will rush you, shooting deadly fireballs, and will gobble you up upon reaching your burning corpse. The dragon is a real headache; the further away he is when you start crossing open ground the better, and another player running distraction helps too.

• The dragon will mess you up… again and again…

Your goal in any location is to reach a ring or an exit. Both players have 1 life per dungeon, and failure means you have to try the location again on the next turn.

There’s one extra twist if you’re playing the game with a third person as Ringmaster; they have a small number of possession tokens that can be played on any location. When that happens the Ringmaster takes over one of the players and can annoy the other player by blocking or attacking them. A simple idea, but great fun!

Having fairly slated the crummy graphics, I’ll just take a paragraph or two to wax lyrical about how good the rest of the presentation was for this game. It came in a sturdy cardboard case that opened out like a jewelry box. Inside sat a beautifully illustrated board and manual, and a plastic tray full of nice solid counters and tokens.

• The artwork was top-notch throughout, and really helped our imaginations fill in the massive gaps left behind by the pitiful graphics.

…also, the cartridge had a GOLDEN LABEL! It was beautiful, and I will never forgive myself for selling off my pristine copy a few years back…

Excluding the board-game aspect to Quest for the Rings, I can’t honestly find enough to recommend playing it today. It’s slow paced, and can be in turn frustrating and confusing. What I can’t deny is that it brings back pure waves of nostalgia - much more so than the other games we owned for the G7000. I think this is due to the social nature of the gameplay; though you could mess about in a dungeon by yourself, it really came alive with the full complement of players. Having enough people to play properly was a special occasion in its own right.

So picture the scene: the tree is lit, you’re all stuffed with the first of many turkey dinners. Your cousins are visiting, and you’ve spent the day in a state of hyper-active near meltdown. 007 Moonraker has just finished on the television, and you’re still chuckling about that awesome bit where a pigeon does a double take when Bond takes to the Venetian streets in a hovercraft-gondola. What better way to end an 80’s Christmas evening than to set up a monster 5 player game of Quest for the Rings? 

Score card

Presentation 10/10

The game itself has as much detail as you could ever expect to find in a game for the Philips G7000. Where this really scores is in the packaging, manual and board-game elements, all of which are of the highest quality.  As far as I’m concerned, there are few games of any era that were better presented.

Originality 9/10

The machine was packed with games inspired by arcade hits of the day, but this is a wholly original effort. The bit you actually play on the console is really quite basic, but the way it’s blended with simple board game mechanics made it fairly unique for the time.

Graphics 4/10

It’s a G7000 game, so stick men and blocks abound. The generous 4 is all down to the the dragon, which is pretty spectacular given the general standard on the machine. 

Hookability 5/10

This isn’t a ‘hooky’ game. You have to read the manual and have enough players for a start! Once you had the hang of it the game became a very engrossing challenge, but still some way off a pick-up-and-play title.

Sound 2/10

Very sparse, with some some grating high pitched tones thrown in for things like the Wizards’ spell. No music, unless you count the atonal ear-bleeding loop that plays after you’ve selected your characters that is.

Lastability 8/10

Pretty damn deep for a game from 1982, especially because the unpredictable human factor is built in. If you had at least 3 willing participants this could very well be dusted off regularly for years.

Value for Money 8/10

More expensive than a standard G7000 game, but you could really see where that money went.

Overall 8/10

This score is doubtless tainted by nostalgia, and since I can’t actually play the game any more you should take it with a pinch of salt. One thing I can say for sure is that playing games with other people in the same room as you, either on a board or on a TV screen will never cease to be fun. That remains true no matter how good technology gets at allowing us to physically avoid each other.

Merry Christmas everyone! Stay in school! Try your best not to do drugs!

Firebird / 1984 / Originally £2.50 / Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Yes, the Christmas spirit has even managed to permeate AfG towers and in the last editorial meeting those memories of games from Christmas past came flooding back. The good, the bad, the ugly, the over-priced, the cheap and the ones purchased by Grandma because the nice man in the shop said it was the one that all the kids were playing. So naturally, the team were asked to find one game each to write about.

Next up, Meat…

• Sparkly
  

Picture the scene. Christmas Day is fast disappearing for another year. The family Spectrum has been tidily packed way in its’ box after a morning of abuse at the hands of the Meat household, eagerly having made their way through the pack-in Horizons tape and playing Hungry Horace until our fingers bled. We’ve settled down to watch the late afternoon selection of TV when the usual Christmas interlopers, Grandma and Granddad, arrive coincidentally at just the right time to be fed. 

Crucially, they’re bearing gifts for all the family. Everyone is overjoyed to see them, most of all me, because in my Grandmother’s hands is the unmistakable shape of a cassette box and that can mean only one thing. Yes; there is to be another game to play. More meat for the grinder, so to speak.

In my grubby little hands is placed the treasured item and after a flurry of scrabbling at the wrapping-paper, the contents is revealed. Exodus from Firebird. This is a title I’m not familiar with, but from the screenshot on the package it looks not too dissimilar to Tempest, which I’d seen on holiday. This could be good.

Naturally, I was not allowed to play it until they’d left, their stomachs filled with left-overs and sherry. Come 8pm though and they were away; I was allowed to hook up the Spectrum to the TV once again.

I slid the tape into the cassette deck, and waited for it to load…

Exodus was an early title from Firebird from the prolific John F. Cain. He’s better known these days for Booty, a platformer that proved to be one of the label’s best selling budget games. That you hear a lot about Booty and little about Cain’s other titles might give you a clue as to how good this game actually is.

• It’s a tough game. If you gaze long enough into the pit, the pit will gaze back into you.
  

Sadly, unlike Pop’s immersive experience with The Quest for the Rings, Exodus is quite a throw-away title. There are no bespoke booklets or cartridges with a gold label. Being a budget game, there’s not much to treasure. A nice sparkly title screen gives way to the game’s menu screen that has a nice ditty playing over it. Sadly, it’s not too long and repeats, meaning that it tires quickly.

The game itself borrows heavily in style from Tempest, but swaps the arcade game’s 3D vector graphic splendour for a more conventional and flat 2D experience with a couple of perspective tricks played to try and give depth to the field of play. You have a ship at the edge of a pit and have to shoot whatever comes out; not quite everything mind. In the melee you’ll find your mate Spud (a Dizzy-esque character), who must not be shot. Catch him with a stray shot by mistake and it’ll cost you a life.

Melee is the right word; there are no shortage of things to shoot at with galleons, flying saucers, hover mowers, witches on broomsticks, Cylons from the show Battlestar Galactica, televisions (with a bonus when they are tuned to Channel 4) and cheekily, Commodores.

Enemies fling themselves out of the pit at varying speeds, getting progressively bigger as they reach the edge of the screen. If you fail to stop them it’s no big deal unless, in what appears to be a good humoured dig at Jeff Minter, it’s a Llama. That will cost you a life it it manages to get past the edge of the screen.

• Onto the second screen and the action is really hotting up…
  

What quickly becomes apparent, is that the key to Exodus is focussing only on those things you can’t afford to let escape from the pit. A couple of attempts and you’ll have it sussed. However, after a couple of plays, you’ll probably have given up and started to load something else.

And there we come to the problem with the game and why it got the reputation it did in the Meat household that fateful Christmas evening in 1985.

While colourful and well drawn, the graphics flicker and the collision detection is abysmal. There are times when your ship can be facing your foe head on with you hammering the fire button, but yet your shots sail through the miscreant only to kill the one behind. This is not such a big deal when you have time to get out of the way, but more often than it just ends in a collision that costs you a life.

• I’ve hit Spud. I’m aiming at the Llama. I’m in front of the Llama. Shooting it. Yet I I hit Spud. Behind the Llama. Anyone else see the problem here?
  

Whereas in Tempest, your ship moves quickly and accurately around the playing field unleashing electric death, in Exodus the ship is inaccurate and the firepower of your craft feels feeble. Then there’s the attempt to create a 3D effect by scaling the sprites emerging from the pit; at source they are small and unrecognisable, especially when multiple appear at once and are overlaid. Shooting them at this point is logical as this means that you don’t have to move much, but by the same token you run a very high risk of shooting Spud by mistake. Don’t shoot them early and then there’s a very real chance of two Llamas getting out in opposite directions, meaning that you are more or less guaranteed to lose a life.

So back to Christmas evening, my attempts to play ended in tears. Frustration set in quickly as despite my best efforts, the game just didn’t seem to behave the way it was supposed to; Mum was duly dispatched to see if she could work out what was up. She couldn’t figure out the odd behaviour either and the sad truth was quickly determined. There was nothing wrong with what I was doing per se, it was just the flaws in Exodus meant it wasn’t very a good game.

Coming back to it today, my assessment (and that of my Mum) hasn’t changed. Adding a joystick, not something in my possession when I first had the title, made little to no difference. The faults were all still there. You might say that John F. Cain’s attempt at copying Tempest was not too bad, that it had heart. Sadly, that wasn’t enough.

• CAIN!!!!

Redemption for both my Spectrum and Exodus’s author was soon on its way. With my some of my Christmas money I bought Booty, but that’s for another time.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

Nothing to set the world on fire here - neat packaging, and the game itself is neatly executed. The intro screen, for all it’s faults, is quite nice in reality.

Originality 5/10

A fairly standard shoot-em-up in the mould of Tempest. Minor plus point for gentle in-scene joshing with a poke at the Sinclair/Commodore rivalry and Mutant Llamas, but it’s not going to set the world on fire.

Graphics 4/10

While well drawn, the sprites are basic and flicker. Boy do they flicker.

Hookability 3/10

Infuriating players does not mean that you gain the attention for the right reasons.

Sound 4/10

Sparse, but with it being coded prior to the Spectrum 128 that had a sound chip, it’s acceptable. Forget in-game music.

Lastability 3/10

I’m not sure I played it much after Christmas day. When you have to wait several minutes for a game to load that is so unrewarding, you’re not going to waste your time with it.

Value for Money 4/10

Well, it costs £2.50 and when stacked up against the competition at the time, wasn’t all that bad.

Overall 4/10

Known in the Meat household as the destroyer of Christmas, and with good reason.

Commodore 64 / Firebird / 1985 / Originally £1.99

The young person’s guide to the orchestra. 

“As the pilot of a mine supply ship, your task is to enter the Caverns of Eriban to deliver supplies to the subterranean mining depots. On the planet’s surface are five supply depots with chequered yellow landing strips. If there is a white light flashing on top of the depot building, you can land and collect 5 supplies and refuel your craft. Avoiding the many ancient defence mechanisms you must enter the caverns and deliver the supplies. Any mining installation requiring supplies will be displaying a red flashing light. Local flight control restrictions allow you only to land on the yellow landing strips. Once you have supplied five depots you must return to the surface to restock with supplies.”

What we have here is a basic 2D exploration game, scrolling in 8 directions. You have to maneuver your ship round tight caverns, avoiding contact with the walls, drips from the ceiling, rockets etc. You pick up supplies from bases above ground and deposit them on platforms below ground. There isn’t any gravity at play on your ship, unlike in the infinitely superior ‘Thrust’. Though this proves helpful in such tight spaces, the ship is still affected by momentum, which is implemented in a way that feels slightly unnatural.

Why review this particular C64 budget title? Because despite it’s utter obscurity and forgetability it’s a game that has somehow lodged it’s way into our collective memories.

• The loading screen looks like outsider art.

We remember it for different reasons. Tim? I think he holds it as an archetype of the kind of piss poor quality budget game that unfortunate sods got bought by their Mum because they liked the price and look of the cover art. Me? Whilst I fully understand that point of view, this game also generates a strangely appealing atmosphere with its mixture of simplistic (though very brown!) graphics and music which is both jolly and strangely haunting.

OK, I’m going to lay my cards on the table here. I probably remember this game mostly because of the music. Rather than being an original composition It’s actually a fairly competent, if truncated version of ‘Mercury, The Winged Messenger’ by Gustav Holst from his ‘Planets’ suite. Being a total philistine as a teenager I had no idea what I was hearing, so I just assumed it was a nice little tune to go along with some slightly wobbly cave exploration. Imagine some alternate universe where such a composition would only ever have been heard by the lucky owners of a Firebird budget title that received a lower score than ‘Ninja Master’ in the same issue of ZZAP! Magazine *. That would be like discovering Van Gough’s ‘Starry Night’ in Keighly, painted on the walls of a gents toilet in. In shit.

* Though ZZAP! was something of a bible to me at the time, I think they were unduly harsh here. Ninja Master? Check it out.

As far as gameplay goes, the experience is spartan, and feels quite punitive. But there’s some satisfaction in successfully negotiating the caverns, and the game is, at least, fair. There’s also some strategy in the route you take through the caverns on your repeat trips below ground.

• En route to another base.

While researching this review I discovered that there was also an Atari 8-bit version produced at the same time. That version features much cruder visuals, choppier scrolling and plays out in near silence.

Buying it today

Not particularly rare. A good condition tape copy should set you back a fiver at the time of review.

Commentariat

Pop : This would have been a decent effort as a budget title on C64 back in ‘85. It’s a bit masochistic, but there are plenty of worse games, and there are plenty of signs of technical, if not artistic competence. And if it did nothing more than introduce you to Holst’s ‘The Planets’, it was worth the price of admission.

Tim : Caverns of Eriban is an odd title, sort of Marmite in software form. I shouldn’t like it, but I do and I don’t really know why. The music, while well done is irritating. The graphics while turgid and brown are neatly executed. The gameplay is infuriating, with collision detection that can be so sensitive that if you so much as look at a cavern wall the wrong way from the other side of the screen it’ll cost you a life, but you’ll sail though a bunch of enemies by millimetres and you’ll be just fine.

But it is endearing. More of a guilty pleasure than something you yearn to return to. It does offer a challenge more than you expect, but it’s the getting into and sticking with it that’s the problem. It’s not the easiest game to play but once you’re in, you’re in.

Meat : This game plays like maths homework. It was released at the same time, same price, and on the same label as Warhawk. Rob Hubbard is a better composer of game music than Gustav Holst. Go home, you’re drunk.

Score card

Presentation 3/10

Basic packaging and instructions (though standard for a budget title), nice sci-fi cover artwork, but an intro screen that looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic school kid.

Originality 5/10

Not too many other games play like this one, for better or worse. The scenario isn’t exactly exciting though. Deliver some supplies somewhere dangerous because …something?

Graphics 3/10

Basic, ugly, muddy, brown. Scrolling is smooth, and graphics are clear enough to see what’s going on.

Hookability 5/10

If you do get past how brown everything is, you’ll either be frustrated or spurred on by the challenge of winding your way to each delivery depot. If you hate the idea of having to return to the surface every so often to re-stock then this isn’t the game for you.

Sound 5/10

A decent SID version of a really nice classical piece that is a bit too short and repeats ad-infinitum. Some basic sound effects. If you don’t dig Holst, you might want to knock this down to a 3.

Lastability 4/10

It should take some time to work a successful path around the caverns, assuming you don’t despise the gameplay. You may get bored by the lack of variety in the single cavern before you deliver to every depot.

Value for Money 4/10

A decent challenge for the money. You could certainly do better for £1.99 at the time, but budget games were still very much the poor relations of full price releases at the time.

Overall 4/10

In the context of the time this was a half decent budget title, with a fair challenge and responsive controls. It was never going to excite anyone, and it’s probably not worth digging up today… but it brings me right back to happy times spent talking (or arguing!) about games with friends, and I still like to fire it up from time to time and listen to SID play some Holst.

Sinclair ZX81 / Sinclair Research/Psion/Mikro-Gen / 1982 / Originally £3.95

• Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the golden age of cover art.
  

Good artists borrow, great artists steal. A comment that is often associated with the late Steve Jobs about his appropriating the GUI concept from Xerox PARC in the 1980s. It’s not an unromantic ideal - the young upstart company taking a technology from another, bigger organisation that had gold on its hands but didn’t know it.

Except Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the quote. He said as much in Triumph of the Nerds when interviewed. He didn’t claim to be the father of the modern GUI either; he just happened to see the potential of putting a low(er)-cost computer in the hands of the public that had a GUI.

The early days of the computing revolution were a kleptomaniac’s dream; intellectual property was respected, however it was done very much in a homage sense, rather than a paying-a-licencing-fee-and-doing-an-official-conversion sense.

Bedroom coders everywhere were getting in on the action, developing home versions of popular arcade titles, safe in the knowledge that Atari, Taito or Namco would not send the lawyers after them. After all, this was the early 1980s. Most of the time these companies didn’t know the kids were making these clones in the first place.

So, enter Space Raiders published by Sinclair Research. No prizes for guessing which arcade machine is being ripped-off here. It seems rather pointless to go through the gameplay; it’s so famous after 40 years of public consciousness that going through the mechanics of the game would seem a waste of time.

• Let battle commence!

This version does not deviate too far from the golden formula. Some features are missing, like the bonus saucer craft that you can shoot. That said, alien ships come down the screen, and you with your moving gun must defend. Clear the screen and it continues. Over and over and over until they finally manage to land or you lose all of your lives.

Or get bored and unplug the computer.

Or stand up, knock the desk causing the memory expansion on your ZX81 to wiggle and the machine to promptly crash.

So, with the game being so ubiquitous, it’s difficult to stand out without ‘ruining’ the pure Space Invaders experience. Also, at the time there was little need to; this game would come at a time when recreating the arcade was impossible on home machinery - the Atari 2600 might have been the reference hardware for the home in the US, but even that could not hope to live up to the experience you’d get shoving small change into arcade machines. Though you could get some distance to replicating the feel by turning the lights off, have your younger brother spit out his half-eaten sweets on the floor near the machine to make the carpet nice and sticky and get your Mum to shout at you “This is a cafe, not a change machine. If you want change for those bloody machines you’ll have to buy something you little prick. They should bring back conscription. You’d learn some proper respect!” each time you ventured from the gloom into the kitchen.

• Your shot is the upper case I, the alien bomb is the *. Interestingly neither you nor your foe can fire again until the projectiles hit their mark or whizz off the screen.

While released by Sinclair in 1982, the game is actually the older Space Invaders coded by Mikro-Gen in 1981. That release had the usual (for the time) monochrome packaging and was not available on shop shelves as games would come to be. The Sinclair release sees the title packaged with another, Bomber, a Blitz variant on the B-side of the cassette. Sinclair seemed to have worked with Psion (later of Organiser fame), who developed the ZX Spectrum version of Space Raiders to bring a similar game to the ZX81 at the same time. Shame that Psion did little more than just recycle an old title.

Buying it today

There are two versions - the ZX81 and Spectrum. The covers are more or less identical, so it’d be easy to get the two mixed up if you were not too careful.

The Spectrum version seems to be the more prevalent on auction sites. The ZX81 version reviewed here was not produced in as great numbers and so commands a higher price. Prices do vary from £10 to £50 depending on condition and how gullible the seller thinks people are. Expect to be able to get it for the lower end of these two figures at the present time.

Note that there is a cartridge version for the Spectrum. These are quite rare and can cost around the £60 mark. If you end up with that, well done. Now you just need to find a ZX Interface 2 so you can play it.

Commentariat

Tim : I’m going to be straight with you. This was the first game that I ever played, so my opinion of the game is really tinted. Back when I first got my ZX81, I absolutely loved it and played it for hours and hours. One particularly epic game was played at the end of the day with the prospect of bed-time looming. I made it count, going further than ever before; my parents, failing to understand the seismic nature of what they had just seen, sent me to bed instead of cracking open the champagne.

Playing it again, I can’t pretend it’s not a disappointment; it certainly isn’t how I remember it, but in these situations, it never is…

Graphically it’s not impressive, even for the ZX81; the coders could really have got more out of the hardware especially as game requires a 16k expansion in order to play the game. That said, it certainly plays well enough. It is harder than other Space Invaders clones out there, but it kind of has to be to ensure you get your money’s worth, which probably says more about the higher quality of the opposition than anything else.

The hardness kept me coming back for more when I first had it, but given that it was this, Bomber or the ICL “Fun to Learn” educational series tape that my folks had bought me in the vain hope I’d learn geography from the computer, it was an easy market to please. Now, it can grip me enough to play it, but the longevity isn’t there.

So is there much to recommend it today? Sadly no. A trip down memory lane, but not a particularly good one.

Pop : Ah, gaming on the ZX81… a tricky proposition on the painful and unresponsive keyboard. If you’ve never experienced it, try to imagine using the buttons on your microwave to play your PS4. Luckily this game of space invaders can be enjoyed at a slow pace! I can’t honestly remember if it was this or another invaders clone I played back in the day, but it’s barely passable fodder for the ‘81. Space Invaders is already a simple game, so leaving out stuff like the saucer is and the invaders speeding up as they get fewer is criminal. At least the bunkers are all present and correct. Still, I’d have happily played this back in may games-starved youth. If you’re going to (re)visit the machine today, check out something like 3D Defender or even better 3D Monster Maze…

Meat : Really, have we reached the bottom of the barrel this quickly? In some ways I jest, but really you’d only want to play this for nostalgia’s sake. Given that it needs a 16k expansion to run, I’d want to have something far better than this. Even for the time. It’s not that the aliens don’t traverse the screen properly sometimes. It’s not the missing saucer bonus alien. It’s not the absence of sound (which I can forgive - you can’t magic up sound from a machine with no ability to generate it). It’s not the lack of bitmap graphics. It’s just that in 16k you’d expect them to do something half decent. Like redefine a character set. For heaven’s sake, they could squeeze a game of chess into 1k at the same time, so I expect better here.

There is so little recommend this today. A couple of goes and the fun is exhausted. Unless you are a collector, save your money and head for better titles on the machine. If you really must have a Space Invaders clone from the era, try Avenger for the Vic 20. Hell, even the dull Atari 2600 Space Invaders cart is better than this.

Score card

Presentation 6/10

At a time when a photocopied inlay with a dour pencil drawing was the norm, the cover was incredibly stylish and smart. Seriously, look at it!

Originality 2/10

Sadly it can’t score highly here. Even in 1982 Space Invaders clones were ‘me too’ products.

Graphics 2/10

Uses the inbuilt graphics character set - plenty of scope (and memory) to do something else, even without a bitmap display.

Hookability 7/10

Plays well and draws you in quickly and effectively.

Sound N/A

The ZX81 has no sound output so unsurprisingly, neither does the game.

Lastability 3/10

While it hooks you in, at the end of the day it’s still ‘just’ Space Invaders. While tough, the missing features means there isn’t the depth to bring you back too often.

Value for Money 5/10

Will give you a fair amount of fun, even with its’ drawbacks. Plus there is a second game - Bomber - on side B.

Overall 4/10

You will get some fun out of it on your ZX81 but if you’re emulating, it’s not really worth the effort, sadly. Nostalgia will only get you so far. If you must play Space Invaders on a ZX81, try QS Invaders.

Electric Dreams /  1987 / C64 

Also released on Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX and C16

With one eye firmly on Halloween, we’re going to review some games that used to make us breathe heavily, grasping our joysticks tightly in our sweaty palms…

Based on James Cameron’s sequel to the archetypal sci-fi body-horror Alien, Aliens is possibly one of the most panic-inducing games of the 8-bit era. It goes without saying that it’s hard to actually scare anyone on an 8-bit computer, unless blocky, jerky and flickery graphics bring you out in a cold sweat. What you can do, however, is force the player into having to make a series of quickfire decisions under stressful conditions, juggling resources and trying to keep order in the face of the impossible, like an air traffic controller in a power cut.

Aliens is played from a first-person perspective, and at first glance seems like a fairly simple game. You start in the middle of the operations room in LV-426, in control of Ellen Ripley and a team of 5 space marines who’ve been sent to find the alien queen and rid the base of her menace. You get a cross-hair, which is where your bullets will go. You can look around to the left or right, and you can step through a door to another room with a press of the space bar.

Nothing much is happening right at the start of the game, but don’t worry, it won’t stay that way for long!

The queen sits in a room right in the depths of the base. You use the keyboard to select individual team-members, but you can only directly control one at a time. Each member is represented by a nice little image and a stat bar showing how tired they are. There are no practical differences between each team member, which is a bit of a wasted opportunity, but the images are still a nice touch if you’ve seen the film, and help the player identify with their soldiers. Your team grows weary if they move too far without a rest; they’ll be unable to move and will aim more slowly until given time to recuperate. 

You can issue orders for any team member to move a number of rooms in any compass direction, and they’ll carry out your instructions to the best of their ability once you switch out. On the way you’ll encounter alien warriors, eggs and face huggers… or they’ll encounter you as they’ll actively try and hunt down your group. 

When one of your characters is in the same room as an alien you’ll hear a warning noise. This is a sinister beeping when you’re not controlling the character directly, and a panic inducing klaxon when you are. What ensues next is a desperate fumble to find the correct key to select the character who is in trouble, followed by an anguished pan around the room in search of the invader. Obviously you’ve only got a limited time to do all this, and the warning tone gets quicker and increasingly agitated to make sure you’re well aware of this fact. 

• I see you!

Once you spot the alien, you’ve got to line him up and blast him before he gets to you. One head-shot should do it, but you won’t get a clean shot, because by now your heart rate is sure to be through the roof. He’ll run right at you too, making you waste a bunch of (limited!) ammo on him.

If you’re super lucky, several team members will be attacked at the same time, which is probably more tense than doing a driving test naked with a wasp in the car.

If the alien gets you the warning tone will change to a forlorn peep. That signifies your character being bundled up for immediate xenomorph oral impregnation. You’ve got a short time to get someone else to the room to take the alien out, but if you don’t get there in time you’ve lost them for good. Their little picture will disappear and you’ll get nothing but static if you switch to their screen.

Another nasty twist: if you blast an alien in front of a door it’ll leave a pool of acid blood which will kill your character outright should they try to exit that way.

There are a few things you can do to keep yourself alive. You can shoot out the control panels next to any door, which will prevent aliens coming through for a time. This is a one-time only deal, because you’ll have to blow the door open if you want to use it again. You can also re-stock a team member’s ammo at a specific room in the complex. This is useful, because running out of ammo is as good as a death sentence. You’ll also need a map. There’s no in game map provided, though the room number each character occupies is shown next to their image. The full price release provided a fold out map in the box, and you’ll need this. Make sure you have a copy handy, because the game is almost unplayably hard unless you have one!

One last thing. The aliens spread a sort of fungal growth around the rooms, which can cover doors and must be blasted away. There’s a generator room somewhere in the complex, and if the walls there get covered by alien fungus the LIGHTS WILL TURN OUT!

I can’t emphasise enough what bad news this is, because hunting for aliens by shadows alone is probably about as much fun as falling into the sharps bin in an STD clinic.

Film licenses had a pretty bad reputation for the discerning 8-bit gamer, tending to be shoddy and quickly thrown together efforts. Aliens is both an excellent game in its own right and perfect at evoking the tension and atmosphere of the film. There’s also quite a bit of tactical depth here too. Do you keep your group of soldiers together? Move as quickly as possible to the queen chamber? Maybe try to fan out and secure the generator room and armoury?

• Ripley is looking a bit off colour today.

It’s also worth mentioning that there was also another Aliens game released for 8-bit micros, developed by Activision in the U.S. This takes a different approach to the license, presenting the film as a series of mini-game levels such as landing the drop-ship, fighting your way through the base to save Newt, the last surviving colonist, and the climactic one-on-one mechanical loader duel with the alien queen. This is also a good game, and well worth seeking out if you’re a fan of the franchise, though for my money not quite as well conceived and executed as the U.K. version.

Playing it today

If you don’t want to follow the obvious route of emulation and you’ve got a real C64, Amstrad CPC or Spectrum to hand, this should be easy to pick up for a few quid online. If you fancy something slightly more polished, there’s a fine looking windows PC remake ‘LV-426’ by Derbian Games that can be downloaded for free.

Commentariat

Tim: Ah, Aliens. Back when the franchise was actually scary and not a pastiche of itself.

As I suspect many others, I bought this on budget when it appeared on the Ricochet label from Mastertronic. This release really lacked the one thing that helped gameplay. A map.

The full price release had pull-out one included with the game; Mastertronic however, probably decided that including a separate sheet for just one title would have cost too much. And been yet another inlay for the staff at Menzies in the Clydebank Shopping Centre to lose. Zzap 64 published one for those of us without, but as I didn’t have that issue, I was in the dark. Quite literally, as it was more fun to play with the lights off.

Life is too short to make maps, so instead I ended up creeping about the complex, not really knowing where I was. Sounds dull, right? Well, no. The game oozes atmosphere; the graphics are tight and well executed, and though the C64’s SID chip is hardly taxed, the sounds that are there do the trick. The throbbing noise when an alien approaches, your exhausted marine out of ammo but still you frantically pull the trigger of their Pulse Rifle in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe there will be one last shell in there to give you a fighting chance. What I particularly like though is the freedom of gameplay, choosing to use your team as individuals or cooperatively as squads, investigating the different parts of the base separately. Pretty cool, when you consider it’s all done in just 64k.

Do I have fond memories of it? Yes. Would I play it again? Absolutely.

Meat: This game is an intense experience, likely to elicit some strong swear words if you’re not in the right mood for it. It’s certainly engrossing stuff though, and tough to beat. One thing though. Which genius decided that the ‘m’ key should restart the game? You know, the one next to the ‘n‘ key you use to tell your soldiers to move north? Nice one.

Pop: I played this a few years before seeing the film, but in retrospect it’s a very clever use of the license. It was also a really tense experience for an 8-bit game, particularly later on when your soldiers are assaulted by wave after wave of aliens and face huggers. Like many games of the era, it’s perhaps a little arcane for today’s audience, what with having to use the keyboard to select the different team members, but still playable and still enjoyable today. It’s the kind of game I can imagine working perfectly on a VR helmet, though that might be a little too much immersion for comfort!

Strangely enough, one of my strongest memories of this game was actually waiting for it to load off cassette tape. The Mastertronic re-release copy I played (borrowed off Tim, of course!) had a neat game of space-invaders that you got to play while waiting for the loading process to complete, accompanied by some very atmospheric music. This ‘invade-a-load’ appeared on a few C64 tape games, but in my head it’s always tied to playing Aliens.

Score card

Presentation 4/10

Very basic indeed. No intro screen, title crawl or music. The box contained a map, which is essential and should have been a part of the game itself.

Originality 8/10

An extremely novel use of a film license. The mix of first person perspective, team management and light strategy elements put this in a class of its own. Sadly, most licensed games of the 8-bit era tended to use cookie-cutter gameplay which was usually executed better elsewhere.

Graphics 7/10

Very clear and atmospheric, you’ll have no problem working out what everything is. The images for the team members are well drawn and clear for an 8-bit system. On the down side, rooms are drawn predominantly in a single colour and a little more variety in the room designs would be nice. The aliens walk like they’re going for a relaxing afternoon stroll, but the animation when they rush your position is very effective.

Hookability 7/10

Immediately intriguing, but the use of the keyboard and advanced controls for commanding team members require the investment of time to enjoy.

Sound 3/10

Played in near silence, except for gunfire and the alien warning siren. This actually makes the game more atmospheric. A title tune would have been nice.

Lastability 7/10

A decent challenge, it seems impossible until you form a good plan on how to tackle the assault on the base. Like many other games of the era, how much you get out of this game depends on how much you’re willing to put into working out how to play it effectively.

Overall 8/10

A fine example of how to compress the tension and drama of an action film into 64K.

Cosmi / 1985 / C64

‘An archer took a stroll through the deep dark wood…’

With one eye firmly on Halloween, we’re going to review some games that used to make us breathe heavily, grasping our joysticks tightly in our sweaty palms…

Beyond the Forbidden Forest starts dramatically with flashes of lightning against a starlit sky. With every flash comes a crack of thunder from the C64’s SID sound chip, before the title of the game is revealed against the darkness. It’s obvious even at this point that the game’s author, Paul Norman, was aiming for something much more cinematic than the average computer game of the era.

You start, alone, in an overgrown forest. You are an archer, sent to slay the dreaded Demogorgon, who legend says can only be killed by a golden arrow to the heart.

Your character occupies the middle of the screen. You can walk through the forest to the left and to the right. You can also walk into and out of the scene. Sometimes trees or bushes can obscure your view. There’s a primitive parallax scrolling effect so that the trees in the foreground move more quickly than those in the background, which could charitably be described as decent for the time.

There’s nowhere to actually ‘go’ in this game, and the forest isn’t there to be explored. You’re not really alone, you see. This forest is actually the scene of a desperate fight for survival.

The first creature you encounter is the scorpion. The scorpion will enter from the side of the screen and will rush straight at you. Like all this game’s enemies, he gets his own special musical theme that plays during the encounter. This is where you run away! If he reaches your archer he’ll messily jab your organs out with his stinger, to the accompaniment of a kind of musical shrieking noise generated by the SID. Imagine something like a primitive version of the score that plays in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ when Janet Leigh gets stabbed in the shower. This game doesn’t pull any punches for its death scenes, that’s for sure.

• It’s behind you!

Luckily your archer can defend himself with his bow. Hold down the fire button and you’ll stand in place, aiming around the scene. A grey indicator bar moves up and down showing the elevation of your shot. Simply let the fire button go again to let loose an arrow. As you might imagine, it’s hard to keep away from a scorpion who is intent on perforating your innards while also stopping to pepper it with arrows, but this retreat, aim and fire mechanic is all a part of the game’s charm.

Plug the scorpion a few times and you get presented with a golden arrow, which appears from a spinning orb after an overly long fanfare plays. These golden arrows are important; you need to collect at least 4 to progress to the next stage of the adventure, and they also act as your ‘lives’. Every time the archer is killed you lose half of the stash of golden arrows, until the game is over. You will get very tired of hearing the victory fanfare, I assure you.

The next foe you meet is a massive worm, who rises out of the ground at various places in the foreground and background. Let him rise too many times without hitting him and he’ll swallow you whole, reappearing to regurgitate the bow, along with a healthy fountain of archer blood.

After that is a giant mosquito, who darts around the sky. He only takes one hit, but is tricky to get a bead on. He’ll drink your juices like a milkshake if he gets a chance, leaving only a crumpled heap on the forest floor.

Last up is… some kind of demonic frog / crocodile thing… who’ll jump about unpredictably and will mash your body like a pub piano at closing time.

• He’s hungry for your offal.

One nice touch is the way that the game shows the passage of time in the forest. The sun sets, and eventually night comes, with the colours of the trees and sky changing appropriately. The day to night cycle welded to the ability to move in and out of the scenery prompted Cosmi to market this game as having ‘OmniDimension 4D`. This was sadly typical of the shameless bullshit marketing departments would churn out in the 80’s.

Once these 4 different foes are defeated, it’s back to the scorpion again, in an effort to gather enough golden arrows for an assault on the caverns, which lie… beyond the forbidden forest. See? Although 4 arrows are technically enough to progress, you’ll want more than that to have a realistic shot at what comes next. To progress to the caverns, you have to to pause the game with F1 and then press F3. If you don’t do this the forest encounters repeat until you die or your patience runs out.

Once within the caverns you face off against 3 final foes.

The Bats: A group of bats flutter around the cave. One of them is a golden colour, and that’s the one you need to shoot. You only need one hit, but it’s flight is fast and unpredictable.

The Hydra: This four headed monstrosity fills the entire screen! Each head can shoot fire, and you’ve got to dodge about to land a hit on each one. Succeed and he’ll stop moving and turn to stone.

The Demogorgon: Squatting over a pit, this massive beast follows your movements with his head, shooting deadly bolts from his eyes that will disintegrate you instantly. Shoot him in his glowing heart to win the game and free the land from his evil!

• I appear to have misplaced my skin.

Beyond the Forbidden Forest surely must be the most ‘‘Commodore 64ish’ game of all time.

Chunky blocky graphics? Very. Lots of muddy browns and muted greens? None muddier. Bone rattling soundtrack courtesy of the SID chip. All present here.

It was also creepy, atmospheric, and with all the sudden and violent deaths, really quite nasty… for a computer game of the 80’s at least.

Trivia

This is the sequel to ‘Forbidden Forest’, which is probably a bit better known and generally held in slightly higher regard (even by the game’s author). There was a third game in the series released in 2003 for Windows PC. It’s a third person 3D effort, which sadly looks pretty generic and uninteresting. There aren’t even any gory death scenes!

Playing it today

Only released on the C64, and copies are getting rarer. Easily emulated, but bear in mind that the function keys are important on this one.

Commentariat

Meat: This game could be the poster child for anyone who considers C64 graphics to be dull and unappealing, but behind the ugly front there’s a lot to admire here. The ‘gore’ is also hilarious! With the notable exception of the head chopping in Palace Software’s ‘Barbarian’, games of the era were very timid in their depictions of graphic violence. I guess this is about as close as we were going to get to a survival horror game in the 80’s…

Pop: I got this one on a magazine cover tape, and was immediately hooked on its strange atmosphere, shocks and gory death scenes. I was a latecomer to the C64, and by that point these graphics really looked like a dog’s dinner. Despite that I still found myself playing this game quite a bit. Aiming the bow at enemies in the foreground and background feels a little tricky initially, but it can be mastered. My main issue now is how long the player resurrection and golden arrow presentation scenes take. Skipping repetitive cutscenes was a luxury you were so rarely afforded in those days.

Sadly I never went ‘beyond’ the forest, because I didn’t have a clue that the keyboard was required to progress to the next stage of the game.

Score card

Presentation 8/10

Starting with the fantastic cinematic introduction screen, this is a game that goes the extra mile to involve the player in its world. There’s even a proper ending sequence with its own musical theme. The various versions of box artwork are all, however, distinctly amateurish.

Originality 8/10

Made before all games started to look and feel the same, this is obviously the work of a single individual. It doesn’t look, sound or play like any other game of the time… except perhaps for its own prequel.

Graphics 6/10

Undeniably ugly, blocky, untidy and muddy. Also somehow atmospheric and appealing. The screen filling hydra is a pretty impressive piece of work for the time. Gets an extra point for splashing the pixelated claret about.

Hookability 7/10

From the first moment the scorpion scuttles over and messes you up with its stabber you’ll either want to see what other horrible fates await you in the forest… or switch the computer off in disgust.

Sound 9/10

A series of memorable tunes, played by the C64’s SID chip in the style of a demented horror film organ. Though it’s somewhat crude, few soundtracks at the time were better suited to the on-screen action.

Lastability 7/10

It takes some time to get used to hitting the different foes with your arrows, but there are ultimately only 7 different types of enemy to face in this game. Despite that, it puts up a decent challenge, and you’ll want to make it to the caverns to see what horrors are lurking in the darkness.

Overall 7/10

A game with plenty of quirks and flaws, which it overcomes by sheer force of personality.

Philips (Magnavox) / 1982 / G7000 (Odyssey²)

“I’ve been lost in this damned mine for what seems like days. I pried off the rotting boards nailing the hillside entrance shut… hoping to fill my pack with enough shiny metal to feed me, my wife and our 7 kids for the rest of our lives… but those boards and warning signs were there for a reason. This place is a death trap! Maybe if I keep going deeper I’ll find my treasure and a way out…”

As miner Pete, you wander a single screen of platforms, connected by ladders and holes. You can only climb up the ladders, and only drop down the holes. You can safely drop any distance, but have no control over the character as you fall, leaving you vulnerable. As in all G7000 games, you only have 1 life. On every other level is a door. These doors can be different colours, and periodically spew out boulders which bounce around the levels. They’ll flatten you given half a chance, so you’ll have to jump, duck or otherwise avoid them. Under normal circumstances if you try and enter a door it will send you flying straight back the way you came.

Pete starts the level with (guess what!) a pickaxe, which is a clear duplicate of Mario’s barrel smashing hammer, and similarly runs out after a short time. You’re completely safe from all harm while toting the ‘axe and rack up points for every boulder smashed. Sometimes 2 boulders meet and smash together, and when this happens they form a single golden boulder that drops straight to the bottom of the screen. When it hits bottom it might drop a new pickaxe, or a key might fly up to the top of the screen. These items  will remain on the level for a short time to be picked up.

• In COLOUR!

The pickaxe makes Pete invulnerable again, but the key gives him the ability to leave the current screen via any one of the coloured doors. A word to the wise - the doors are very dangerous, so jumping rather than walking into them is usually a good idea. Even if Pete gets thumped by a boulder mid jump as long as his flailing body hits the door you get to see the next level.

Once you’re through the door a brief close up animation plays of Pete … what is that, dancing? Yes, dancing and slamming the door like a nutter. Then its on to the next level, where a chunk is randomly removed from one of the platforms to make getting about trickier.

• Little fish, big fish, cardboard box!

That’s almost all there is to it - the only other element is the colour of the doors. If you travel through a red door you get a screen with red platforms, a blue door has blue platforms etc. But a black door? That’ll send you to a screen where the platforms are the same colour as the background, and you have a real nightmare to deal with.

The G7000 (or Odyssey² for our american friends) is a little celebrated machine these days, and had way less support than its much more famous peer the Atari 2600. Almost no third party software was released in its lifetime. Most games use the same set of predefined characters to save memory, and all of them look impossibly primitive today. Despite these facts it is home to a handful of excellent titles, some of which retain their raw playability today.

Pickaxe Pete is one of the best games for the machine. On first inspection it seems to be a totally stripped down Donkey Kong clone, but it’s actually a really interesting twist on the same formula, where you can develop your own strategy to score points and stay alive. Do you hang around at the top of the level waiting for a key? Or at the bottom for new pickaxes? Do you take the points gained for moving on to the next level, knowing that there will be slightly less platform to stand on every time you do? Amazingly, most of the games on the machine were the work of one man, Ed Averett, and he certainly had a flair for making the most of basic hardware. This is one that deserves to be played and remembered.

Score card

Presentation 8/10

G7000 games came in a nice sturdy clam shell box. The manual sits inside the clear plastic box lid, and the artwork is usually well drawn and enticing, unlike the game graphics!

Originality 7/10

It’s clearly inspired by Donkey Kong, but plays nothing like it. The meat of the gameplay remains fairly unique to this title.

Graphics 3/10

I predict no G7000 game will ever score more than a 5 here! Second generation consoles were originally designed to handle very simple graphics, so what we get here is a stick man character running around on coloured lines avoiding asterisks. There are a few nice touches like the way the pickaxes and keys sparkle before they disappear. The door slamming intermission could potentially cause a seizure…

Hookability 7/10

Has a pretty simple premise, but can be tough and unforgiving.

Sound 2/10

I predict no G7000 game will ever score more than a 3 here! The sounds are etched into my brain from extended childhood play sessions, but they consist mostly of bleeps, bloops and explosion noises. Some of them, for example when you get stuck in a door without a key are actively annoying.

Lastability 8/10

Taken in the context of what was available at the time, this is a very replayable score attack game. 

Value for Money 8/10

I played this one endlessly, which is just as well because the cost of cartridges was such that we only ever got one a year max.

Overall 8/10

Something of a forgotten classic.

PC / Gremlin Interactive / 1995 / Originally £29.99

Ah, the future.

Everything is shiny and new. All the time. The womenfolk are all improbably thin and dressed in tight fitting spandex or bikinis. Because that’s that happens in the future, we just go nuts for the man-made fibres. Just look at Buck Rodgers. Or Star Crash.

• “Girls of 25th Century”, as envisaged by a boy aged 15 and a quarter with his bedroom door locked…

And in the future are sports; not sports as we know them, sports that are just a little bit different and played out to a pumping electro soundtrack that might just sound like Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten or Nitzer Ebb but played on a cheap Casio organ to avoid royalty payments.

Yes. The future. And it’s here in the shape of a racing game.

Set at a nebulous point in the near future, Slipstream 5000 brings us pilots racing their aeroplanes around courses around the world. There is no dystopian backstory, no settling our differences through sport rather than war - this is an out and out racing between between ten characters and their flying machines.

This is something of a relief. It gets a bit tedious to constantly be told that society has collapsed and to settle our differences we now play Bridge or Whist, all as an excuse for a developer to hide their slightly naff obsession with Gin Rummy behind a smokescreen rather than run the risk of them being discovered in a latex old-man bodysuit down the WI of a Thursday night.

• Each race begins with a fly-through, showcasing the game’s graphics engine. It whips along at a good pace on Pentium level machinery without a 3D graphics accelerator.
  

Slipstream 5000 belongs to that first flush of 3D games where texture maps were planted on large polygons rather than using smaller and smaller polygons to create the landscape the developers wanted to convey. Sure, even at the time it never was the prettiest but is a fair compromise given the power of the machines it was designed to run on.

Controlling your plane takes full advantage of the 3D environment, allowing you to fly in all directions and creating a feeling of freedom. Playing with a decent joystick really adds to the game, although keyboard control works well enough. Oddly, no provision has been made for a mouse in-game, which combined with the keyboard à la Quake would have been as good a choice at the time as a joystick.

• Some circuits verge on the spectacular; not just underground but underwater too. Don’t worry about hitting the glass sides, they won’t break.
  

The circuits that make up the championship are split between the metropolitan and the natural - one minute you’re flying through the Grand Canyon or Icelandic Fjords, the next it’s London and under (or over, you can choose) Tower Bridge. There are ten tracks in total; before you race each track, you’re treated to a fly-through to help you plan your approach to the race. Presented in a TV style, it can be quite like marmite. You’re going to either love or hate the way it’s done, which comes down to the in-game commentator. More on that later.

Slipstream 5000 makes the most of the axes you can fly in. Each course has its own challenges; enclosed circuits where you are racing through caverns or tunnels require skill and dexterity as the elevation of the circuit changes. Clattering around the courses, scraping the sides of your vehicle will work, but at the cost of performance. Each time you connect with the circuit, another player, or are hit being an opponent’s weapons incurs damage, either to the engine or the controls. As more damage is inflicted, your craft becomes less and less performant, making it easier to compound the damage to meaning that too much damage and it’s game over. Fortunately, each circuit has a pit tunnel where damage is remedied in blaze of lightning. Race wisely and taking the pits each lap can also make you quicker, even when you are not damaged.

• Cash bonus? That’ll do nicely.
  

Each track is lined with bonuses and forfeits, either positioned randomly or dropped by shooting the drones that fly along as you do. Cash is the most valuable thing, but you can also pick up engine and control repair which fix your maladies on the spot, turbo recharge or a short boost of turbo. If you’re unlucky though you get a disrupter that’ll reverse your steering and is more or less guaranteed to chuck you into the walls.

You start the game by choosing your plane and unlike some games, they’re all equal. It’s not how they start, it’s how they are upgraded that is key. For a single race, it’s not that important, in a championship it can be the difference between first and midfield. Some upgrades and weapons just aren’t worth the money and it really becomes a matter of making sure that you chose wisely.

And, you’re going to need weapons. The AI pilots give as good as they get.

The point where you chose your plane is, erm, very much of it’s time. Cheesier than a pack of Wotsits and presented in a very stereotyped way. Clearly the developers were going for a Wacky Races vibe. This extends to the virtual characters in the game: Lyall Mint, the deliberately unlikable, ex-racer and his prim and proper career presenter, Crystal Eyes, as well as the game’s AI pilots.

• This is one half of your commentary team, Lyall Mint. He’s about to crack a funny, the zany ex-Slipstreamer that he is. Pity all of his comedy material is made up of Dad jokes and insipid sexual innuendo.
  

Each of your adversaries has their own traits and this is emphasised by their on-screen presence. You get transmissions periodically during each race - sometimes taunting, sometimes bemoaning that they’ve been hit or crashed. It’s a nice idea, if the implementation is rather cliched and adds to the feeling of rivalry in the game. This was something that was not common at the time and unique to the CD version of the game.

Flying against the AI players is good and fortunately Gremlin’s developers added the ability to go head to head with real players; old school two player splits the screen, but there is an option to connect two machines together. It’s not really network play as it’s known today, rather it’s via serial cable (yes, physically linking two machines together) a modem connection or being on the same physical network. Slipstream 5000 fell at that awkward time where the internet was a thing, but standards weren’t.

Yes, multiplayer is not for the casual gamer of today. Those of us playing games in the 1990s were made of sterner stuff. Man-up if you don’t want to be billy no-mates.

• Dog fights are fun but can be time consuming. Sometimes it’s better to fly low, turn on the turbo and leave the other pilots to it
  

So Slipstream 5000, offers you a slice of the future like no other. Or, truth be told, like any other. This so easily could have been a franchise like WipeOut; maybe this would have really taken off (excuse the pun) with the console versions that had been planned. The game would have been really good on a Playstation or Saturn. It’s just a shame that this never happened.

Like so much of Gremlin’s catalogue around that time, this rather smacks of an opportunity missed.

Buying it today

You have lots of options for this today. You lucky, lucky, people. If you are looking to buy it on an auction site, you can pick up a copy pretty cheaply. The original big-box release will set you back in the region of £15, but be later re-releases in their paper sleeves, jewel or DVD cases can be anything from £2.50 to £5. If you’re going this way, make sure that you don’t end up overpaying for a budget version…

Finally, you can skip all this retro media nonsense if you have a PC and get it on Steam or GoG; you won’t have to faff about with DosBox or worry about converting those 3.5” floppies to disk images. Unfortunately, if you’re using anything other than Windows, you’ll have to make your own arrangements.

Commentariat

Tim : Slipstream 5000 was a firm favourite of mine; I first played it as a demo that came on a CD with PC Format in 1995 and excelled on the Pentium that I got to play it on. Although nothing to do with Magnetic Fields, the game had a ring of Super Cars about it in terms of tone and presentation. A sort of Super Cars ++ as it were.

Having played the demo to death, I bought it when it came out on budget - I was not, and am still not, made of money - I bought the title. The demo pretty much summed up the playing experience of the game and although there were extra circuits and a championship mode, it didn’t really add a huge amount to the fun in single player mode…

With only three levels of difficulty, it’s not that hard to finish quite high up the pecking order in every race. This may be ok in a single race, but in Championship mode it reduces the sense of jeopardy. Where the game does come alive is just right - when you’re racing. The action can be fast and frenetic; one minute you can be first, the next 8th after a misjudged corner or a missile strike from another pilot.

That the computer pilots can also mess up on their own adds to the excitement. Nothing more satisfying than seeing the computer pilot hit a drone and be faced with a disrupter. Even more so when it’s your mate in multi-player mode.

The other thing that disappoints - for me anyway - is the music, both in-game and between races does not do the game justice and feels more like an afterthought. That’s not to say it’s not well done; it is, it’s just doesn’t suit the game in my opinion. Add in the flight-computer voice that tells you you’re being shot at when you can hear the shots bouncing off the hull of your plane and it becomes an irritation rather than asset. We’re not talking Cybermorph levels of irritation, but let’s say it’s getting there. Good job you can turn it off.

Overall though, these are minor objections. I love the game and was one of the first titles I got working on DosBox once got that working properly. If only Gremlin had chosen to have taken it further…

Score Lord : I told you lot last time. I’m not reviewing games for you. Even this, which I quite liked when it came out and think it’s a crime it’s been forgotten. No. Go away and stop bothering me.

Meat : The explosion of 3D games at this time wasn’t a blessing; looking back today, there are some really, really ropey titles. Slipstream 5000 might have avoided this fate, but has trodden a fine line to do so. The cross between flight sim and racing game is novel and explored at around the same time by Bullfrog’s Hi-Octane, but there really is only so much you can do and a fair few tricks have been missed here. I’d have liked it to have been a little harder, with differentiation between craft being, well, present. A career mode rather than just a flat championship, where you could have more control over the different elements of your ship and crew would have made all the difference.

This doesn’t mean that the game is bad. Not at all. There are neat little extras, like the rear-view camera which although useless is pretty cool. It plays well, so much so that there is depth in the gameplay to last more than one run-through. For all my gripes about 90s 3D games down the pub, I like the way it looks too. It’s begging for a modern version with proper network play and slightly less patronising tone in the cut-scenes. I’d pay to have that on my phone, provided it came with a branded spandex flight-suit to wear while you are playing, natch. We are in the future after all, right?

Score card

Presentation 7/10

Stakes had been upped in the mid 1990s by the arrival of the fifth generation consoles, Slipstream 5000 holds its own against the kind of stuff coming out on those machines. The whole thing feels rather slick, with quite an authentic TV feel, even if its tone and jokes have dated quickly since the 1990s. PC games had yet to fall to the DVD-box format that is ubiquitous with today packaging, so you’ll still treated to the big-box experience if that’s your thing.

Originality 8/10

The idea of a racing game working on four axes that you can explore, rather than the traditional horizontal is still a pretty neat idea. The elements of rivalries that are generated by the computer characters comments feels a little synthetic, but the game is the better for it.

Graphics 8/10

From beginning to end, the games looks really good; sure it has aged, but more endearingly than some that feel like they have a certain something missing.

Hookability 6/10

The first course is well designed and eases you into the game nicely. From there on in, it’s a challenge, but not always enough of one. 

Sound 7/10

Sounds fine, as long as you have the right sound card, but having different background music would have made all of the difference. The floppy disk version loses out on some of the speech, but that’s not the end of the world.

Lastability 7/10

Easy to learn, difficult to master. It can be a difficult but not impossible to play using the keyboard, but there is a lot there for you to explore and those jibes and taunts from your fellow competitors press just the right buttons to make you want to come back for more. Unless you’ve got the floppy disk version…

Value for Money 7/10

Was good value back in 1995 and it’s worth the price of admission today.

Overall 7/10

Gremlin did themselves proud with the game itself and the TV styling, the cliched and stereotypical characterisations of the pilots and presenting team less so. Slipstream 5000 really had the feel of a series in the making. The shame is that it never made it there; with today’s VR tech the game would really have been something else.

Games of Christmas Past : Winter Games

US Gold/Epyx / 1985 / Originally £9.99 (£14.99 disk) / Commodore 64

Ding-dong-merrily-on-high, it’s another round of Christmas games on Antiques for Geeks! It’s been a while! Hope you’re well! Pull up a seat and let us tell you all about the games you couldn’t avoid owning, even if you wanted to!

Over to Tim…

Oddly, Christmas was not a rich vein of games for me. Whilst each year, festive editions of Zzap! 64, Commodore User or Commodore Computing International would tantalise with reviews for me to read, the games featured in them were not as readily forthcoming in the form of presents. No, as gifts, anything computing related would favour hardware purchases and whenever there was software bought, invariably it would be productivity titles. I think I was the only kid in my class that Santa decided needed Kindwords 2 for the Amiga in 1989.

Yes, while I was given the gift of word processing, everyone else was getting into Batman.

This time of year wasn’t a complete dearth of fun however. 1987 stood out as a vintage year; on Christmas Day morning that year, as it resolutely refused to snow outside, I unwrapped a compilation from US Gold. Solid Gold contained five of the publisher’s best-selling titles from the previous two years and offered them for the same price as a new game. As we know, especially with US Gold, best selling doesn’t always mean good, but there wasn’t a dud in the selection. I could wax lyrical about the different titles [And he did. For months. -Meat] but there were two that stood out from the others. Gauntlet and Winter Games.

Winter Games had been released for the C64 by Epyx in America during 1985 and had sold very well. Putting this on a compilation for Christmas in 1987 meant another bite at the sales cherry, but the timing was also well observed. After all, 1988 was an Olympic year…

Unlike later titles published by US Gold, Winter Games had no official licencing in place. Instead of playing out the Olympics, you are officially playing out a fictional event that by pure coincidence, pretty much mirrors the real Winter Olympics sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee. Complete with opening and medal ceremonies. Coincidentally, it’s also set in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1988, which just happened to be the location chosen for that year’s actual Winter Olympics. What are the odds?

Yes, there is an opening ceremony; it’s a rehash of the one used in Summer Games, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Once the Olympic, erm, Winter Games flame is lit and doves released, it’s off to select your events.

• RELEASE THE DOVES!

Players can attempt all events, playing a combination of the seven events, just the one, or settle for practising. Generally, playing the game meant playing through all of the events. Winter Games is a heavy multi-load on the C64; in the US where a set-up with Commodore’s 1541 disk drive was ubiquitous this was irritating, but by no means, the end of the world. In the UK however, where most people used cassette, this was far more painful. Fortunately for US Gold, us Europeans didn’t know any better.

You can have up to eight players in one game; each can enter their name and select their country. In a nice touch, each player’s national anthem is played when selected; this is notably missing from the versions that were commissioned for the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC by US Gold. Personally, I always chose to compete under Epyx, mostly because it has a cool anthem and flag.

That done, it’s time to begin competing in the seven events…

Hot Dog Aerials

Freestyle skiing at it’s finest, each player has three attempts to combine different moves to try and impress the judges who score your performance much like you see in figure skating. There are ten points available and the aim is, of course, to get as close to the maximum on at least one of your attempts. All to a syncopating rhythm, that I always imagined was blasting out from behind the crowd for the benefit of the TV cameras.

• No, I’d never heard of Hot Dog Aerials before Winter Games, or after it.

This is far harder than it looks. Launching from a slope with some beautifully drawn mountains as your backdrop, it’s very, very easy to perform basic stunts and get a reasonable score in the seven and eight and half points. When you start combining stunts with flips, that’s when it becomes hard. Mix two flips and you’re into the solid nines - two flips in different directions will score you that magical maximum of ten points. However, time this wrong and you’ll end up in a heap of broken skis (and you’d expect, bones) at the bottom of the slope. Better to bank a simple combination guaranteeing you a score over nine points and then use your remaining two attempts to improve your score.

Biathlon

Although there is some competition for this, Biathlon is probably the strongest event all round in the game. The whole thing is incredibly pretty, split over three screens of cross-country skiing and a fourth in the shooting range. While this does involve a fair amount of joystick waggling (or destruction, if your joystick wasn’t microswitched), what is really nice is that this is not a matter of hammering away at the joystick as quickly as you possibly can.

• Doesn’t your biathlete look so snazzy in his grey unitard with yellow go-faster-stripe?

To master this, you need to build a steady rhythm to get the most out of the flats and climbs. Shooting is tricky, with you having to cock and load your gun with a back and forward flick of the joystick, then fire when the automatic crosshair is in location. Miss and there is a five second time penalty for each incomplete target.

The challenge of combining these three disciplines is hard and initially can be very frustrating, but time and patience is rewarded. If you’re really good, you can finish the event in around two minutes. If you were me, then doing it in under three was an accomplishment.

Speed Skating

• Yeah, erm, not much to see here…

We’re now onto an event that is familiar to most; it’s a straight head to head sprint race against either the computer or your friends. There is more joystick waggling here and while it is a lot less subtle than the Biathlon, the key here is still rhythm to build and maintain speed. Go too fast, and the skater on the screen enters a kind of foetal position and does, well, nothing. This is a trap that is very easy to fall into and one that if you’re playing against the computer, is punished as it does not make mistakes.

All said and done, this phase of the game is quite forgettable. That’s not because it’s bad, but because even in 1985 (and certainly in 1987) we’d seen this kind of thing over and over again. Sprinting in Activision’s Decathlon, sprinting in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, sprinting in Summer Games. The looks also betrays its heritage - it could easily be the Rowing game from Summer Games II repurposed with new graphics. Coming after the visual feast of the first two events, it’s a bit of a let-down.

It all feels very transitory, almost like a mini-game to entertain you while another event loads. Even though it isn’t.

Figure Skating

• She’s beautifully animated, but that’s where the excitement ends.

You have a minute to perform a programme of seven figure skating moves and score points. This plays out to a nice rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker suite, with a skater making her way down an infinite rink. The animation of the skater is superb, much in the naturalistic vein of the player in Impossible Mission.

But.

I must confess, I never understood the attraction of this event. It was for me the second most boring event in the game. The jumps and direction changes look great when executed correctly, but for me it seems hard to get anything over a three out of six. But as much as I disliked it, others loved it and I can see that for some, it’s a challenge, rather than something to endure.

Ski Jump

• Life comes down to a few moments…

Although I really like the Biathlon event, this was my absolute favourite. It looks stunning from the get-go, with a beautifully drawn side-on view of the ramp. The aim here is to control the jumper as skillfully as possible so that they can jump as far and as stylishly as possible. Timing is key to this event. You need to successfully launch your competitor off the ramp (if you fail, it ends with a comedic flump from the bottom of the ramp), then once in the air, the action changes to a view of the beautifully drawn landing zone and it becomes a matter of keeping your athlete at an optimal angle at all times. The game will try as it might to knock you off-course by having the jumper cross their skis, lean too far back or too far forward. The quicker you correct these problems, the more style points you score and also, the further you fly. If you don’t, then your skier ends up in a heap on the floor.

• …and this is one of them.

Sounds a bit dull doesn’t it? But no. The whole thing has real atmosphere to it; the opening music is cinematic, inspiring even, with a thudding baseline that is just that little bit foreboding. Yes, it does bring out the nerves, the more invested in the game you become. I love the skill and reaction time required to make this game work and a good jump rewards you with a roar from the crowd. Turn in a really good performance with a roar and a fan-fare. What more could you want?

Free Skating

And from the sublime to the ridiculous. Another two minutes of skating induced tedium. A repeat of the Figure Skating game, albeit with funkier music and two minutes to do your programme of moves three times. Much like the saying about insanity, doing the same thing provides the same results; your skater jumps and pirouettes (or falls over) in the same way and an inevitable score of around three out of six is awarded.

• You again.

This really is the low point of the game; unlike Speed Skating whose criticism is that it’s just a rehash of similar style events from other games, Free Skating manages to take all the frustration of Figure Skating and draw them out with the extra time. Beautifully presented, but painful to play.

Bobsled

The final event is a real white-knuckle ride. You control your bobsled down a run, trying to keep your speed up while ensuring you don’t crash. This is far easier said than done. You have no control over the braking of the sled and just need to make sure that you steer hard enough in the right direction to stop the sled from venturing too high up the sides of the course and wipe out.

• Despite the action really only taking place in the upper left hand corner of the screen, at no point does this compromise the experience. That says a lot about the playability of the event…

The forces acting on the bobsled are modelled quite well here, especially considering the computing power available and there is a really good sense of speed from both the graphics and sound.

Learning the course so you can anticipate the turns is vital to getting a good time. With just three attempts to run the course, knowing it inside out guarantees the best results. You see Bobsled drivers before a run with their eyes closed, visualising the turns they have to complete? Yes, that’ll be you.

If you’re playing on tape, you’re at a massive disadvantage here, as it’s the final event on the tape and locating it is a chore to play as a single event or practice. Although the same for all events, being the it is felt most acutely here.

Still, it was an event that I really looked forward to playing and a fair few times was a winner-takes-all high stakes affair as a gold medial here might just seal overall victory at Winter Games. 

Medalling

In between each event you get a brief medal ceremony and if playing through the current overall standings. Unlike the events, this is a little bland and no doubt so you don’t have to load a bespoke medal ceremony after each sport. However, where something more substantial is missed most is at the end of the competition. It would have been great to have something more special and a closing ceremony (as was the case in Summer Games II), but here you have to make do with a ranking of players, a brief fanfare and the winner’s national anthem.

But in the scheme of things, this is a small gripe; when the games are presented so stylishly with beautifully fluid animation and a great musical score, you really can’t complain much. Epyx were one of the first companies that thought this kind of thing through - the graphics artists and sound designers worked alongside the software developers to produce a polished product rather than have them all work in isolation. Bear in mind also, that when developed in 1985, the do-it-all bedroom coder was still very much a thing. This approach was special.

For me and my friends, the game provided hours of entertainment; while perfectly possible to enjoy on your own, it really came into its own with many players. Given the different skills needed to compete in each game, there are players who could be terrible at one event, yet win the next. Interest doesn’t automatically wane, even with the skating events thrown in.

The game also sparked something else. Come February of 1988, much like the kids who run outside to play football after the FA Cup Final, I’d watch the antics of the athletes in Calgary at the Olympics on the TV, then hurriedly dig out Winter Games to give it another go. Even today I view the Winter Olympics with fondness, the 1988 event firmly imprinted on my psyche.

I may not have ever given ski jumping a go in real life but for a brief moment in the late 1980s, as the sun struggled over the horizon in the depths of a British Winter, Epyx’s game allowed me to soar like an eagle. Just like Eddie.

Eddie. Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards. The British ski-jumper with the thick glasses. Yes, ski-jumper. The one they made that film about. What do you mean you’ve never heard of him?

Score card

Presentation 9/10

Epyx really pushed the boat out, even if they didn’t have an official licence. The whole package feels so consistent - from the player selection screen right the way through to the final medal table.

Originality 9/10

Though there were sports games out there, they were mostly focussed on summer sports. Winter sports, even today, are less well serviced.

Graphics 9/10

Hard to fault. The backgrounds are stunning, the player sprites fluid and well drawn. When it comes to criticism, we’re starting to come down to the way players prefer something to look, rather than thinking it looks bad. I know that I don’t much care for the way the speed skaters look, but that’s not to say they don’t look good to begin with.

Hookability 8/10

Immerses you so far you don’t even care if you have to sit through the figure and free skating events.

Sound 9/10

Great music, superb sound effects. It doesn’t have the work of the mighty Rob Hubbard, but to be honest, it doesn’t need it.

Lastability 9/10

This got played and played and played and played. Even now, it’s a go-to game on the Commodore 64.

Value for Money 10/10

Worth every single penny of the entrance fee.

Overall 9/10

Really hard to come to any other conclusion, even when taking into consideration it’s small faults. Epyx defined this kind of game in the 1980s, earning them their reputation and position as a well-loved developer. Had things worked out differently for the company, they might be on a similar scale to EA today, but hopefully without the loot boxes. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened; would have loved to have seen this series evolve over the years; Epyx Winter Games 2022 on the PlayStation 5 could have been epic (pun not intended).

Screenshots borrowed from Gamebase64 - playing this again for the review, I regressed to the junior me, became engrossed and forgot to take some screenshots. So kudos to them, and for spotting that the ZZap 64 review back in 1985 used screenshots from the Atari version.