Oxfam Music Love

I don’t know about anyone else but I love my local Oxfam Music, not just for the cheap CDs but also for their often-excellent choice of old videogames for a wide range of platforms. In recent months I’ve managed to pick-up secondhand copies of Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle, the brilliant Total Annihilation, Commandos, SimCity 3000 UK Edition (I’ve actually got SC4 but it hates this PC due to lack of memory) and Ascendancy all boxed (huge, old-skool boxes too – back when they actually had manuals in them) for the princely sum of £1.99 each. I got around to playing the last one today (via the excellent DOSBox) since it’s a space exploration/conquest game and suitably similar to Colonial Conquest 2 that I thought it would be worth doing a small comparison which I might put up in the next couple of days.

The Next Big(ish) thing…

Ooh, is that a preview of things to come? I think it just might be.

I’m busy this weekend so no posts will be going up. However, I’m finished with JSW clones for now and I’ve decided that the next batch of lookbacks should be strategy games from the 1980s onwards. In keeping with the theme of this blog I won’t be looking at Command and Conquer or even Chaos and instead I’ll be concentrating on less-known and less-celebrated titles to see if they deserve more exposure (in the case of a few of them I already know the answer but I’m not going to tell you yet. You’ll have to keep reading the blog).

See you all soon.

A brand new blog

Hello,

I suppose I’d better explain what this blog is going to be for. Well, there are an awful lot of gaming blogs out there where people can gas on about World of Warcraft and GTA4 but this isn’t going to cover those sorts of games. This blog is about highlighting largely-unknown or forgotten games and genres, with an emphasis on “indie games” and 8-bit and 16-bit gaming (ie pre-Playstation era). Hopefully, I’m going to update it around once a week once I find something worth highlighting.

I’ll try not to yak on about myself too much like some self-absorbed broadsheet journalist bore with a picture of themselves looking quizzical in trendy glasses in the middle of the text (what is it with that? What’s wrong with at the top?) and confusing “London” and “Britain”. This is going to be about the games first and foremost. Besides, I’ve got another blog to gas on about myself (occasionally).

So, what are we going to start with? Well, we’re not going to start right now; this is just an introduction. But I’ve decided to kick this thing off with a look at 8-bit platforming, specifically games inspired by Matthew Smith’s highly-influential Jet Set Willy. Whilst Smith’s game remains well-know and well-loved there were dozens of games inspired by it and released in its wake (including indie titles released this decade) which have fallen by the wayside and which probably deserve another look.

Until then…