Comments on: Gaming Made Me: Mathew Kumarked These Highly

By: Risingson

Risingson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:02:40 +0000

Funny! I spent a lot of time during the weekend playing Head Over Heels in my PSP spectrum emulator. What I realized is that this game, as hard as it is, is better than the other filmation examples just because it is not that unforgiving. It’s just rewarding, something that 8-bit games forgot to be.

It’s a very good game that is still adictive after all those years.

By: Babs

Babs — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:42:28 +0000

I wonder how many PCs Wolfenstein sold? I persuaded my parents I needed one after playing it in a postage-stamp sized window on a 286.

And Fate of Atlantis is another one of my seminal games, it captured the mix of comedy and nazi fighting of the movies absolutely perfectly. That and DOTT are still two of the best games ever made.

By: itsallcrap

itsallcrap — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:38:43 +0000

edit: *A* shiny new penny. Curse my morning cognition.

By: itsallcrap

itsallcrap — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:37:07 +0000

Good lord, so few of you will remember…

That may be true of gamers in general, but it seems the average age of RPS-ites is rather higher – I reckon kind of late 20s.

I too remember Head Over Heels. I always thought it was over-rated. I loved Starquake. And Chaos, obv.

I shiny new penny to anyone who can tell me what J Nash is doing these days. It doesn’t seem so very long ago he was making wibble like this:

http://www.theweekly.co.uk

…with Reader Millington of AP fame. But now he’s just disappeared again. :(

By: Helm

Helm — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:22:07 +0000

Sadly Antiriad devolves into not-very-good-ness 10 minutes after you get the suit :(

By: terry

terry — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:42:39 +0000

I got unbelievably stung on those budget Spectrum games. My first was “Ghost Hunters” by Codies, then “Ball Crazy” by Mastertronic, followed up with the legendary “Don’t Buy This”.

Bafflingly, none of those put me off buying other, even worse, budget games. I still consider visiting John Menzies (or Boots, Woolworths or that grimy basement computing shop with the smell of stale sweat and the balding, grunting, becardiganed middle-aged loners) a gaming rite of passage. Along with possessing a Lenslok, breaking at least one microdrive, replacing a keyboard membrane and buying text adventures advertised by classified ads in the back of computing mags (invariably coded by balding, grunting, becardiganed middle-aged loners).

By: Vagabond

Vagabond — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:28:35 +0000

@pilouuuu
I find the thing that tends to makes old games unplayable today is the UI, and the gameplay tweaks that have come along since that remove some of the more tedious aspects of play. This means that some genres are affected worse than others.
I tried to play Warcraft and Dune II again a few months back and it is just painful. Especially having to build concrete slabs before you can place buildings in Dune II.
I have Jagged Alliance 2 on Steam and I find I just can’t be bothered playing it because the interface is too clunky and it makes the game play so slowly. Funnily enough I played X-Com through to the end recently though.
I’m also left wondering how I’d feel about the lack of mouse look in most early FPSes these days.

@Dominic White
I’d say Silent Storm is probably the latest iteration in the “Top down, turn based, squad based action game” genre. I’m not sure how much it’s added beyond what JA2 had, given my unwillingness to play JA2 for more than an hour, but given the fun I’ve had with panzershreks and the destructible building physics, it’s definately got something going for it.

By: GreatUncleBaal

GreatUncleBaal — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:56:49 +0000

It’s true you can play the original arcade version of Chase HQ on your PC nowadays, but I think that the intro music on the spectrum version is one of the finest bits of game music ever written. It’s just so jolly.

By: Στέλιος

Στέλιος — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:52:12 +0000

P.s. love this series of articles. I’ll echo Psychopomp, Hivemind did well.

By: Στέλιος

Στέλιος — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:48:50 +0000

@MaxNormal: I never finished Antiriad, even though it looked amazingly atmospheric. And it had a loading screen – pretty amazing to me on my green-screen CPC 464!

By: Psychopomp

Psychopomp — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:25:05 +0000

You hivemind guys have something special with this series.

You really do.

By: MaxNormal

MaxNormal — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:23:16 +0000

I loved my Amstrad – I still regret selling it even though I managed to sell it for more than I paid for it after 3 years of use. Gaming doesn’t get much cheaper than that !

Antiriad, Ikari Warriors, gauntlet, thrust, Batman (isometric game like head over heels), elite, endless crappy conversions of speccy games – it kept me entertained for years. I remember spending something like $700 NZD to buy a disc drive for it and spending lots of time shuffling games between discs to fit them all on as they cost so much.