Busy busy bee

Just to let you all know that I’ve not gone anywhere but that I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year and so much of my writing time is being taken up with that (it’s a great story, honest, well worth it. I hope). Anyway, as a result there are probably only going to be a couple of “proper” posts going up here this month which, I hope, you can all manage with. Until then, why not take a look at this which might just be a brand new Spectrum game. Oh Yes.

Manic Miner the Lost Levels

It’s here! Manic Miner the Lost Levels is a collaborative project by coders Headsoft and journalist and videogame historian Stuart Campbell which came about after the latter wrote an article in Retro Gamer magazine about the “missing” Manic Miner levels: platform-specific extra stages which appeared when Matthew Smith’s 1983 ZX Spectrum classic was ported to various other home computers. The short of it is, these various levels (50 in total – more that double the number of screens in the original game) were hunted-down, documented and then used to create a whole “new” Manic Miner game for the DS with tarted-up modern (well, more-modern) graphics and sound.

Whilst it can be played on emulator, it really wants to be played on a proper DS. Download it from its website here.

I’ve not played it yet, but when I do expect a review to appear on this ‘ere blog o’ mine.

EDIT: I made an error (how unlike me, ahem)! Apparently, the number of “lost” Manic Miner levels actually comes to 20, the same as the number of stages in the original game. The 50 levels in the DS game includes new levels by the programmers. So there.

Machinarium demo

2D FTW!

Just a quick post to let you know that a demo version of Machinarium is available to play online. It’s a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game for Windows, Linux and Mac by Czech indie company Amanita Design and, according to Wonkypedia, the money to finance the project came out of the developers’ own pockets.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a mixture of the Monkey Island games and the old Gobliiins series on the 16-bit machines but the really striking thing about the game is the visuals which look absolutely gorgeous even though they’re mostly of robots and things that look like they’ve been made out of scrap metal. Music and sound are also well above-average and, as is common in games of this type these days, there’s an enormous amount of character in the protagonist and the various other machines he meets.

Play the demo version on its website and, if you like it and you’ve got the readies to spare, buy a copy so that Amanita can refill their pockets and we, hopefully, can see more of this kind of thing.

Micro Men – a quickie review

"I don't know what it is, Chris, I just keep thinking of rubber keys..."

Last night (8th October at the time of writing) BBC4 broadcast a drama based on the early years of the British home computer industry. Originally given the geeky and puntastic title of Syntax Era, the name was changed later on to the far more general public-friendly (and nowhere near as good) Micro Men. Described by the BBC as a “an affectionately comic look at the race to dominate the home-computer market in the ’80s”. The narrative focused on two key figures of the early ’80s PC industry – Clive Sinclair of Sinclair Research (played by Alexander Armstrong) and Chris Curry of Acorn (played by Martin Freeman).

I was unsure about Micro Men from the trailers the BBC put up on their website in advance of the broadcast last night. Martin Freeman looked fine as Chris Curry but Armstrong’s performance as Sinclair came-across from the short clips shown as being a bit too comic and caricaturish, like something from a sitcom rather than a lighthearted drama. Fortunately, within the first ten minutes of Micro Men this feeling subsided and Armstrong’s portrayal of Sinclair as a tempremental, aggressive and somewhat-buffoonish business bofffin – an angry ying to the more chilled-out yang of Freeman’s Curry – started to feel quite natural and most of my reservations were left at the wayside.

The story focussed on several different episodes in the rivalry between these two men, taking place over a period of years. The first was Sinclair and Curry setting-up rival computer-manufacturing businesses after working together in the late ’70s (the breaking-up of the state-supported Sinclair Radionics is shown near the start and precipitates the two men parting ways); the next was the race to gain the coveted BBC seal of approval and become the Beeb’s official “BBC Micro” (Acorn famously winning-out in the end, although there was a nice moment when Sinclair presumptuously placed a BBC logo on his mockup of the ZX Spectrum’s casing); the third was the scramble for the Christmas home computer market in 1982-83 and the fourth was both companies crashing spectacularly after failing to build on early success and releasing new products that failed to catch-on in the way their early models had.

And, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. Knowing a bit about the background and presonalities involved helps but even without that, this was still a funny, engaging and sometimes moving piece of drama. There were some marvellous “face-off” scenes between Sinclair and Curry; notably a cafe confronation in which Sinclair attempts to emphasise his self-styled position in the pecking order by ordering Curry’s food before he arrives (“their oxtail soup is warming. And nutritious!”), and a fight in Cambridge Pub “The Baron of Beef” over an Acorn advert attacking Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum which a little research informs me actually took place. There were also plenty of in-jokes and period details: the infamous Sinclair “RAM-pack wobble” gets a mention, Acorn staff are shown desperately cobbling together their BBC Micro prototype mere days before men from the Beeb come to inspect it, the notorious C5 is practically a running-joke throughout the whole thing and Sinclair at one point, exasperated by his “hobbyist” home computer becoming a games’ machine complains “there’s even a game about me trying to get a knighthood!”. And speaking of games, that reminds me: there are also lots of namechecks and brief clips from classic 8-bit games from the period which should keep a lot of you lot happy. In spite of its faults (Armstrong’s makeup never looks quite convincing enough and some scenes – such as Sinclair taunting Curry from his C5 on the late-night streets of Cambridge – were a bit too silly) this was a superior piece of comic drama and a nostalgic look at a period when it must have felt that, as far as computers went, anything was possible.

Now, all we need is someone to commission a drama about the rise and fall of the British videogames industry in the same period…

(For those in the UK, Micro Men is doubtless still available on the BBC’s iPlayer service. I also hear that it’s likely to be repeated on BBC4 if watching things a bit fuzzily in a monitor doesn’t appeal)

Gameswipe – just my opinion

Gameswipe, then. For those of you who don’t know (which, probably, means you live somewhere other than the UK) clever and opinionated but slightly-overrated (ooh!) journalist and TV presenter Charlie Brooker put-together a one-off TV show called Gameswipe for BBC4 which went out last night. The idea behind the show was to give an overview of videogames, where they came from, what flavours they come in and what they’re all about. Brooker is an ex-games journalist and famously good fun when he spouts off about stuff as well as shamelessly knowlegable so this looked good…

I’m not really in the mood for a big ol’ essay so I’ll divide this review into appropriate sections:

What Gameswipe Got Right

Probably the most impressive thing about the programme was that it covered a lot of bases. A major bugbear for me when the media deal with videgames is the “Pacman-Sonic” syndrome whereby Ian Journalist has only heard of the games the mass-media has meaning that he thinks it all started with Pacman then there was probably some other stuff which wasn’t important and then that fucking blue hedgehog appeared and that’s when games were important again. This is infuriating because, of course, there was a very successful gaming industry in between these two periods and, most importantly, Europe had its own almost self-contained industry at the time with the British side of things basically being an overblown cottage business largely staffed by people under 25. Gameswipe mentioned this era plenty of times and we saw more than enough snippets from games of the period from Manic Miner to Elite to Knight Lore. Jolly good stuff. I also thought it was clear that Brooker was a proper gamesplayer who Knew What He Was Talking About rather than the sort of mouth-breathing idiots who too-often become games journalists these days and are impressed by fancy graphics and a “good” (ie sub-Hollywood-B-Movie) storyline. Brooker’s dismissal of the new Wolfenstein in favour of the 1992 original because the latter is a bit more, well, fun was a perfect case in point. Who cares about the protagonist? Who cares about what blokey has to say about the super nazi-gun? Just get on with it! This is a game!

I also liked the talking heads. I don’t quite agree with Dara Ó Briain’s argument against unlockable content since I think such arguments are a demonstration of how consumerist and WANT IT NOW we’ve become – well-done unlockables increase the lifetime of a game and give us more to work for – but I enjoyed his rant against difficult bosses. Graham Linehan was really good value, though. I’ve said before that I don’t like the emphasis on storyline in modern games because too often I think it detracts from the gameplay, but I thought he made excellent points about why game storylines suck – because game developers simply try and ape some film(s) they saw once giving us tiresome cliché and hackneyed characters (although using GTA: Vice City – a deliberate parody – as an example probably wasn’t the best idea). Linehan argued that game developers should do proper research (as, for example, writers do) into the scenarios they develop adding more realism and atmosphere and gave some very good examples of how this can pay-off.

What Gamewipe Got Wrong

This wasn’t so much a fault of the show as a fault of having to cover so much in so little time (50 minutes) but too much of the show felt incredibly rushed. Brooker referred to the terrific Manic Miner as “pythonesque” but didn’t actually explain why this was the case because there simply wasn’t the time. And that wasn’t the only thing that was given short shrift, the coverage of the different genres was also too brief. Beat ‘em Ups, for example, were condensed down so that only one-on-one fighters were included and genre classics like Target Renegade and Streets of Rage 2 (which represent a whole subset of the BeU genre) were ignored; Role-playing Games were even more poorly represented with about ten seconds of Final Fantasy VII having to stand-in for a genre that consists of everything from Heavy on the Magick to Dungeon Master to Oblivion.

The show’s desire to squeeze things in also lead to a certain unevenness. The new Wolfenstein and a Fifty Cent game were given what essentially amounted to full reviews for no other reason than, apparently, that Brooker thought there was entertainment value in doing so; but in a show where most of the items discussed were lucky to get more than twenty seconds it felt weirdly jarring and, given that neither game is especially important, a little inappropriate. I suppose it was an example of how games reviews will look on Screenwipe, all well and good but maybe it would have been better to stick to Gameswipe as an overview of the videogaming phenomenon and not the same but with a couple of full reviews thrown-in. It was also hard to work out who the show was aimed at: much of the show seemed to be about explaining gaming culture and history to newcomers and yet I doubt newcomers were those watching.

Overall

As you might expect, overall I thought it was a pretty good show if rather flawed. What’s really needed is for the BBC to commission a full series so that each genre (or era) of videogaming can be investigated properly with interviews with designers, proper explanation of gameplay mechanics and gaming quirks. Gameswipe showed that you can do TV about videogames without it being boring or just a succession of five-minute clips of games being played whilst a voiceover states the obvious (far too many youtube bedroom reviewers take note). All we need now is for someone to make that series; and put Dr Ashen as Noseybonk in it, of course.

UK residents can catch Gameswipe on iPlayer. Non-UK residents can, ahem, probably find it elsewhere…

Retroaction Issue 3

I’m late with this, for which I can only apologise; issue three of the fantabulous retrogaming fanzine Retroaction has been published online.

As well as lots of reviews of new Spectrum stuff by yours truly there’s also a feature on the 1990s videogame version of Blade Runner, an article about the different home computer and console takes on the Ghostbusters franchise and all sorts of other lovely things.

Go here, look impressed, download PDF file, read…

Spelunky 1.0

Newer, shinier, V1.0-ier

I mentioned in a post a while back how much I love Spelunky the excellent procedurally-generated platform game where you whip snakes, avoid piranhas and steal gold. Well, the game’s programmer Derek Yu has finally got around to releasing the first non-beta build of the game, V1.0, and it can now be downloaded from its very own website.

Data used in previous versions seems to carry-over into the new version without any problems, just copy-across the relevant files from the game’s root directory.

Even better news for XBox360 owners – apparently a special version is being written (presumably for download from XBox Live Arcade) and pencilled-in for a 2010 release!

Now, if only a Nintendo DS release were forthcoming…

Why aren’t you all playing ‘Homebrew’?

Alcohol brewed from fruits dropped by shot bees? That's sure to be good!

No, I’m serious. Apparently, not many people have downloaded Jonathan Cauldwell’s new ZX Spectrum game Homebrew which is scandalous.

So, using my amazing powers of persuastion which are almost nearly arguably not quite as good as Derren Brown’s I’m going to (hopefully) convince you all to download it.

For starters, like much of Cauldwell’s work Homebrew is free and not only is there no real excuse for not downloading a freeware game but to not download this one is to thumb your nose at all the hard work Mr C has done (no, not the one out of the Shamen).

Secondly, it’s a great game because it invokes the spirit of the early Ultimate Play the Game titles like Jetpac and Cookie – single screen, baddies all over the place to be shot and a collect-and-drop gaming mechanic. Although, rather than fuelling a spaceship or making  a cake the player is trying to homebrew booze which doubtless wouldn’t have been allowed in commercial gaming in the ’80s lest the kids try it at home and be sick all over the walls.

Thirdly, you play a barrel. I think this is the only game in the history of gaming where you play a barrel. You want to own the only game in the history of gaming where you play a barrel don’t you?

So, go here and download a copy to play on your Spectrum emulator (or real Spectrum if you have the know-how); if you need a Spectrum emulator go here.

Well…. off you trot!

Poly-Play – Wasserrohrbruch

Notice how he seems to be wearing skinny jeans, the trendy sod.

So, finally, we’ve reached the end of this East German trek through generally awful games and my own personal Berlin Wall can come crashing down on Poly-Play and gaming from behind the iron curtain in general. For now anyway…

So, what’s the last game from the list of shame on Poly Play’s spartan and functional selection screen, a sight that’s greeted me far more than I’d care for over the last week or so? Which is this final explosion of badly-drawn graphics, beepy sound and ill-thought-through gameplay? What is it I have to play through and write something about before I can go back to playing proper videogames again? Why, ’tis none other than Wasserrohrbruch (Water Pipe Burst).

In this game, the player controls an inappropriately upbeat-looking man with a gigantic glass in his hand who runs about an enormous and yet empty room (perhaps one designed to hold that wealth of high-grade consumer goods the Communist states were always promising to get around to building one day) trying to catch drops of water (which scores points, natch) which are dripping from the leaky ceiling (at last, social realism). When the glass gets full the man has to run up a set of steps on the left and pitch it out of the door, presumably for someone else to deal with which isn’t really in the spirit of socialism.

And that’s about it, the ceiling keeps leaking, the wee man keeps trying to pitch the water out of the door and eventually the leaky ceiling wins and the whole place floods. I’d like to think that the whole thing is a clever political metaphor for Marxist-Leninist economics that VEB Polytechnik slipped past the Stasi but the truth is it’s probably just a rather shitty game. It certainly plays like one although it is better than Hirschjagd and yesterday’s Stalin Says.

I give Wasserrohrbruch two Karl Marx’s out of five.

So, what have I learned from my week or so of playing these games? Well, for all the bad things it’s given us (adverts, irritating branding, corporate-speak, Rupert Murdoch, the worst recession since the war) capitalism has at least given us lots and lots of really good videogames. Except for Rise of the Robots, of course.

"They've opened the Wall! "Ghosts and Goblins" for all!"

To finish with, here’s a picture of an East German authority figure of some sort in shiny jackboots kicking a Poly-Play machine into a river in Berlin as beautifully rendered in MS Paint. Ta-ra for now.

Poly-Play – Merkspiel

This game's crap, let's slash the controllers!

Today’s game from the jaws of East Germany is Merkspiel which means “Memory Game”. It’s basically “Simon Says” with  colourful bloody shapes and bleepy bloody sounds and it’s about as much fun as you can imagine that sort of thing being. I want my first world games back now, dammit!

So, because there’s pretty-much nothing to say about this stupid game I’m going to go off on one a bit about what annoys me so much about bloody Comrade Poly-Play. Obviously, the Eastern Bloc was never going to match the West for hardware but that’s not the problem; the ZX Spectrum was an incredibly primitive bit of kit – no graphics hardware, beepy sound, tape drive etc etc, but it still had lots of terrific games written for it. What’s so annoying about Poly-Play is that there’s been no attempts to create anything worthwhile, no imagination, no basic understanding of how to make a good videogame. It’s just a succession of feeble knock-offs of Western games that completely fails to appreciate what made those games actually work in the first place. There’s nothing, from what I’ve seen of it, that prevented Poly-Play’s hardware from creating a cut-down version of something like Commando, Jet-Pac or Donkey Kong but the good people at VEB Polytechnik just didn’t seem to have had the slightest interest in what they were doing, just knocking stuff out that they hoped would keep the Young Pioneers happy when they weren’t dressing-up in silly blue uniforms and saluting red flags.

Therein we have the main obstacle that stopped Poly-Play from being some kind of forgotten classic waiting to be dusted-off and turned-on: there’s no sense of passion, no evidence of creativity and no apparent interest in what was being made. I doubt the programmer(s) of Hirschjagd felt a strong sense of pride when they ran it the first time, doubtless more “that’ll do” and then off to the canteen for pink lumps in a thin gravy with potatoes. And it’s not even like people in the Eastern Bloc were incapable of creating something worthwhile with the (admittedly limited) artistic tools and budgets available to them – Andrei Tarkovsky was a Soviet film director after all. It just seems that, one of the very few times the Communist world commissioned people to write video games they didn’t even choose people who had any real interest in the whole thing. A shame, if not a surprise.

And I give Merkspiel one Karl Marx out of five hundred.

One more to go…