Dizzy was a regular at the Spam Club who shared a little of his ZX Spectrum expertise with us and the world.
Jet Set Willy was the follow-up to the very successful platform game Manic Miner and, like its predecessor, it was written by Matthew Smith, a very young programmer with a wild imagination, of whom great things were expected. That's not exactly the way it turned out, but more on that later.
The very first page of the Cave Noire manual reads: ‘For sale and use in Japan only. Export and sale of this product outside is prohibited’. So if I, as a hypothetical German-Japanese and Game Boy fan, had bought the module there on a holiday trip in 1991, the seller and myself would probably have been guilty of a criminal offence. Nowadays, I also download an – unofficial – language patch from the Internet without any guilty conscience. Konami: have mercy!
LostInSpace
Smoking is more and more considered indecent and is increasingly tabooed by society. Films in which the superhero takes a pleasurable puff of a cigar to emphasise his alpha status, as in the A-Team or Predator, are no longer being made. Small retro games such as Ewe Woz 'Ere DX show courage by once again pushing this pose into the field of vision for the young-at-heart retro audience. The cigar has simply been disguised as an iron pipe to match the robot sheep.
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Aliens. To be quite honest, and at the danger of being yelled at, the last time I watched this movie, I found it difficult to get through. This rampant 1980s body cinema, the obsession with big guns, the stupid one-liners – I felt it hasn't aged well. Today's game recreates the tense action, aka "the good part".
Mr Creosote
Trial of Champions – the much-awaited (?) return to Deathtrap Dungeon! It's the right book for you if you like failing. In a way, most of these books are really about failing and trying again, of course. Though this one puts this whole idea to new levels.
Mr Creosote
Forty years ago, things looked like computer games would get out of their kids toys niche and into the accepted mainstream. Established authors lent their names and talents to game development. Of course, this glimmer of hope all crashed and burned when the broad consumer public decided the simplistic skill games featuring a "plumber" who never does any plumbing were the best. Yet, the artefacts of this brief moment in history remain. The one cited with some regularity in highbrow elitist circles is Mindwheel.
Mr Creosote
My Fighting Fantasy output has been slowing down significantly. The reason being that I feel I've reached a stage where the line collapsed under the weight of its own success. Sword of the Samurai came from the same authors as a previous book I actually liked, showing their talent. Though this one has several significant defects, it's hard to imagine it went through any serious quality control. Pressure to release more and quickly must have been considerable.
Mr Creosote
The summer holidays motivate Eddie to go on a boat trip across the lake behind the house. This scene almost fully reveals the climax of innocent pubescent dreams, which some of us might have had on those occasions. In this ambiguous sense, however, Lake Adventure brings far deeper insights to the surface via much longer ladders.
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Tom Clancy's espionage-thriller The Hunt for Red October was released in 1984, whereupon the popular war game theme was immediately transferred to the home computer market. When the film was released in 1990, a large Japanese company starting with N was already enjoying great success with its consoles. The game was also to appear on the smallest of these devices – the Game Boy – in a completely revised form, but under the same name.
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A public service announcement that as every year, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition will take place in October. There is still time to install or update your interpreters. Be ready, because when it starts, you will not have enough time to play all those games until the voting deadline! In the meantime, just to get acquired to the taste again, here is a game which ran last year: Barcarolle in Yellow.
Mr Creosote
Anyone who associates platform games with fast action might think of Sonic the Hedgehog. However, the conversion for the C64 lost much of its speed when it was ported from an advanced console to the home computer. If you take another step back, you might end up with The Heart of Salamanderland on the Amstrad CPC and be amazed at how far back the roots of this genre can reach.
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