Posts Tagged ‘BBC’

4 results.
Jan11
gazunta

Arkanoid

by Gazunta on January 11, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Arkanoid

So what if it was basically an overblown Breakout, Arkanoid was the killer app that sold me on the idea of using a mouse to control a game. Sure, you could play it well enough with a joystick but if you wanted total control you really needed to play it with a mouse.

Thanks to the simplicity of the game (I mean really, it was just a bat and ball game that you could make yourself in an afternoon) there wasn’t a bad home conversion. Even the Spectrum had a great version of Arkanoid! Chances are whatever you’re reading this on has a version of Arkanoid available for it. The DS had a neat one that came with a paddle you plugged into the GBA cartridge port – I thought it was funny we came so far along with technology that we went back to playing games with a paddle.

Anyway, it was the Amiga version that was the business back in the day. It looked just like the Arcade game, as long as you don’t mind a third of the screen being devoted to a bunch of logos and junk. But you got to play it with the mouse, and it felt glorious, and it made me mad I didn’t own an Amiga yet.

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Aug28
meh

Paperboy

by Gazunta on August 28, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Paperboy

Again, a game from an age where any regular daytime activity could be turned into a video game and nobody looked at you weird or nothing.

I can’t say I was ever really in love with this game, but as an artifact of the era it’s quite interesting. And holy cow look at how many machines it was ported to! That’s got to be a record, surely? Maybe Robocod has it beat…

I really feel bad for the artists on that game having to draw everything at that weird forced perspective angle. Ick. This is one of the few classic games where I think a first person perspective would be better.

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Aug27
gazunta

Elite

by Gazunta on August 27, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Elite

I’ve been pushing off doing a comic about Elite since pretty much the day I started making these. It’s the greatest video game of all time and I spent weeks trying to think of a comic that would show it the respect it deserves.

Then I remembered what a complete bitch the docking sequence was and just did this instead.

I can’t understate how much of a big deal Elite was. For the first time here was a game that didn’t have lives and levels and a big boss that you had to beat. You made your own way around the universe, exploring, fighting, trading, learning and seeing what happens based on how you interact with the game. It was the first “sandbox” game and we’ve spent the last thirty years trying to make something as groundbreaking since. It was the game that really made me think that there was more to video games than it first appeared.

The C64 version was the one I spent the most amount of time with, but I have to give special credit to the unofficial GBA homebrew version which pretty much lived permanently inside my handheld for a year or two.

Note to anyone at Frontier who may be reading this: I will do anything, anything, for Elite 4.

And I really mean anything.

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Jun20
knight

Barbarian

by Gazunta on June 20, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Barbarian

American readers might remember this game as Death Sword. But they would also remember Cricket as Baseball so hey.

You modern people with your fancy book learnin’s might be accustomed to having fighting games with multiple characters, but back in the day we just had the same character fight itself with a slightly different colour scheme and we were happy with it, by golly.

At any rate, Barbarian was a cracker of a game, especially when you pull off the move where you swung around and chopped the other bloke’s head off. Could it have been the first fatality in a fighter? Hmm. Gonna stare out the window for a few hours and think about that one.

I really liked this era of fighting games, with a maximum of 16 moves available since you only had one 8-way joystick and one fire button to control the game with. It made the action slower and more tactical since each move had a counter-move.

The C64 version was the one I spent most hours on, but I have to give special credit to the Amiga version for being one of the few games that made the transition from 8 to 16 bit without somehow sucking in the process.  The sound in particular was so cool, using lots of samples to simulate the clanging of swords. Until today I had no idea this game was converted to the Electron…I think it’s safe to say it’ll be the only Electron game on this site.

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