Someone asked for this at Supanova Gold Coast, SO HERE IT IS. Who says I don’t care about my readers?

Treasure make wonderful games, and this one is no exception, and it’s magic how they make an entire game out of one simple action. Shaking bad guys until they drop gems and explode is one of those neat video game things that you just can’t get anywhere else.

Take that, weird German board games that all the cool kids play!

Yes, I know when you were all voting for me to make a comic about Star Control 2, but I’ll save that one for another day.

Star Control 2 was pretty damn great.

Anyway, I liked how the camera kept zooming in during combat, but I think it could have gone one step further, you know, for extra visceral and immersive realism or whatever other fuff they go on about these days.

This was basically Decathlon with a military theme, and like Decathlon it left a long trail of broken joysticks in its wake. I would also recommend the method of taking the joystick apart and wiring buttons to the left and right inputs so you could hit them a lot easier. Remember when you could take joysticks apart and not have to worry that they cost more than a game? Good times.

The end of this game made no sense. After all the training you get sent into a real combat situation to rescue someone and you have to fight some evil dude. Thankfully you can jump twenty feet in the air and kick him in the head repeatedly for NO GOOD REASON BUT HEY VIDEOGAMES.

Anyway! I didn’t really like this game much, but I adored the title screen music on the C64 version, and recently played the arcade version which was purposely designed to rob you blind. And people say modern video games have no ethics, at least you can play them for more then 30 seconds without being asked for more money.

I never got just what exactly all these people had against this poor kid and his mate. Sure he had stupid ’90s hair and stupid ’90s sunglasses but we ALL did, man. Maybe that’s why it bugs me so, the thought that at any time any of us can be targeted by a giant talking bull and an old dude with a toaster in his head.

Anyway! This was a pleasant enough Amiga platform game that would have been quickly forgotten on console but managed to garner a decent audience on the host machine. The bosses were pretty good from memory, but geez the level layouts were crazy long and winding. I know I complain about the linearity of modern games but there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere?

No? Oh well back to playing Wizball then.

Also found in the museum:

• All the characters in the Indiana Jones Atari 2600 game
• The thing at the end of Pitfall 2
• Everything in the Commdore 64 version of Double Dragon
• Q*bert

Part man, part machine, all cop that has to move his arm in awkward 45 degree increments because that’s how 8-way joysticks worked back then. What made it even worse was that when you aimed up and to the right or left Robocop would keep moving in that direction too so you’d end up walking directly into the line of enemy fire. Just another day in the life for video gaming’s greatest cyborg.

The arcade version of this is my favourite of them all, simply because they stuck to the home console design but didn’t have any of the C64 or Amiga’s technical limitations. Big beefy sprites and an awesome looking ED-209 to contend with plus lots of sampled speed which was a big deal back in the day of course.

The C64 version had horrible bugs which meant one level was a garbled mess, so much for quality assurance back then.

Today’s comic is about the rather brilliant Commodore 64 shoot ‘em up series Cops by Alf Yngve. Never heard of them, well he’s never heard of you, buster. So go play his games!

Cops was created using a (somewhat modified) Commodore 64 utility called the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit by Sensible Software. Yes, that Sensible Software. With it you (YOU!) could make your own computer games! That was a pretty mind blowing concept in 1987 when making your computer do anything besides load up a game was a pretty Herculean task. Thankfully it was a pretty fun little tool that gave thousands of people around the world a chance to make their own game. Some of us (like me) just ended up tooling around with it and never finishing anything (I think the furthest I got was a Smash TV-esque game where you shot Lemmings because that game bugged me a lot at the time…I think only a room or two got completed before I got bored with the idea) but some people like Alf have turned SEUCK creation into an art. The new Cops game is coming soon to the C64 and I can’t wait to see it…but the original game was released on a Zzap! 64 cover tape so it still counts as retro

One thing you couldn’t really do on SEUCK was have intelligent enemies…as shown in the comic. Oh well I’m sure Sensible are working on a new version….right?

I couldn’t decide which comic to do so I did both! Yay who needs sleep?

OK I have to admit not having played Battletoads much, it always seemed to hard for me and I thought it was a weird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rip off. But it seems kind of fun!

And for some reason I own a Battletoads toy. Why did I buy this back in the day? I mean LOOK AT THIS THING:

I had way too much disposable cash when I was a kid.

Did you know there was an Arcade version of Battletoads? And it was published by Electronic Arts? Neither did I! That was weird. Battletoads was a weird franchise. I mean what other game had a cross over with Double Dragon for no apparent reason.

Oh by the way YES I know Battletoads came out in 1991 not 1992 but there were so many versions of the game that came out between 1991 and 1993 that I think I can get away with it in 2012

Update: I’ve since been notified that the toy is not a Battletoads toy and is, in fact, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy. WHOOPS!

Back when I first started doing silly comics about old video games, like, two freaking years ago, my pal Ant asked for a Psi 5 Trading Company comic. Ant’s a good guy, he loves his retro games and he even did the little drawing of me that’s on all my posts! But for the life of me I couldn’t crack this case. I never played it THAT much and would always get distracted by talking about how great Bubble Bobble is. But now it’s done!

And I don’t really have much to say about Psi 5 Trading Company, except that it was by Accolade who is a game developer that seems to have been forgotten by the history books. It’s weird because pretty much every game of theirs was fantastic. They made Test Drive! Yeah you kids love your Test Drive games these days. Well Accolade started that. They also did a fantastic interactive comic book called Accolade’s Comics which has been pretty much forgotten about completely. I really need to make a comic about…uh, that comic. Hmm.

Oh yeah their main programmer is now the guy in charge of all things Xbox. How freakin’ weird is that?

Good morning. Welcome to a nightmare come true.

Of every game I’ve ever played, the opening line to Deja Vu has stuck in my head the most. It’s a really emotive line and I found myself saying it every morning when I woke up before starting another day of living in a one room apartment reviewing Army Men games.

It may sound great, but most Army Men games were terrible.

Anyway! This was probably the first time I played a game with icons and a mouse-like interface in it, not having being exposed to such wild things on the Commodore 64 previously. If I remember right I never got that far through it but loved mucking open with the idea of being able to pick up items from the game play window and drag them into the inventory, open them up, close them, move stuff around etc…it was like a game in itself, except that it wasn’t, but it beat dying three screens into this game because I missed some item somewhere.

And yeah I thought the guy had a question mark stuck to his face for the longest time…I take things way too literally sometimes.