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Oh and back on FPS. Unreal Tournament was great fun. A group of us used to go to a LAN gaming bar called Playing Fields for a bit of UT goodness. Good times. Golden Axe was something I used to play in the arcades of Mablethorpe. My parents would give me a stack of 10ps and that would be me happy for an hour. I could stretch 10p out on Double Dragon for quite a while. Then at various points: Willow, Strider, Toobin, Bubble Bobble and many more.
Dragon 32. Not great for me I'm afraid. My mother insisted on getting one instead of a Spectrum, she was a secretary and insisted on having a proper keyboard [much later we got a Spectrum 128]. I remember playing Calixto Island. Brtual. It was basically game of guess the exact string that the programmers expect you to enter to get to the next part.

One that I remember well was called (I'm 99% sure) Terminus (not the 2000 game). You basically had to make your way through this space station/ship through crushers and lasers and stuff, It was just one long (for those days) game with no levels.


What was cool about it especially back then was that you had 4 different robots you could be (and you'd work your way through them til all 4 were dead and it was GAME OVER) they all had different abilities.


Can find absolutely no mention of it anywhere, but I played that a fair bit when I was probably about 8.


It was so cool being able to go to the local newsagent and buy a game on cassette for ?1.99 or ?2.99.

Thrust on the beeb (though ported to speccy) was a particular standout, the first (?) of what we'd term physics games these days?


Finely honed gameplay and skill needed rather than just memory, timing and persistence.


Quite an achievement for the hardware.

and talking of groundbreaking games, Zarch on the archimedes (by Elite's dave brabham).

Obviously my mate was the son of a headteacher, i doubt normal people had an Archimedes.


Can anyone remember a game, on the speccy i think, where you basically had to try and maintain world peace and react to events to try and limit nuclear races and eventually wars which acted out as little pixels pinging around the planet, usually getting through your star wars defences?


My memory of it was that it was awesome, but can't remember a name for the life of me.


of course the dangers of nostalgia. i remeber this strategy game being amazing, its kind of unplayable now

http://www.80stopgames.com/site/node/1993

This thread is a nerd fest but fun.


I'm not sure why but games back 80's then seemed to have more atmosphere than the ultra-real stuff today - anyone know why?


Second thing was how tribal it was. You were either a Spectrum, Commodore 64 or Amstrad guy. If you had a Dragon 32 people were bemused/curious/took pity. If you had a BBC Micro or Acorn Electron you were a geek and your parents had thought about "schooling" way too much...

yeah, that last one sums my parents up nicely.


Still we had elite, and....erm.....and frak?


As for the atmosphere i guess two things, one we were young and our imaginations were wayyyyyy better as kids, and two, games these days do all that for you, they're so pretty and realistic it doesn't leave you anything to do, and they definitely lose something in that.


Elite, or x-wing still fizz my bunghole more than Eve online or Wingcommander.


Though Homeworld was pretty special, and actually a little bit excited about Elite Dangerous

This vid has brought back some great memories, from Turrican 2, to Rainbow Islands, to Dizzy, to Operation Wold (early FPS), Final Fight, Continental Racing, Bombjack, Paperboy, Robocop, Yi Ar Kung Fu...


Amstrad was often dissed as beneath the C64 / Speccy, but I loved it.



Oooo, Chase HQ was another one.


Okay, so after you'd started playing Megadrive / SNES, the 8bit stuff looked shit, but I loved this stuff as a kid and thought the graphics were amazing!


 

El Pibe Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> As for the atmosphere i guess two things, one we

> were young and our imaginations were wayyyyyy

> better as kids, and two, games these days do all

> that for you, they're so pretty and realistic it

> doesn't leave you anything to do, and they

> definitely lose something in that.

>


This is why I still firmly believe that Sensible Soccer or Kick Off 2 are far superior to the current football games which are just too realistic.


Then again nostalgia is a powerful force.

Yeah, loved kick off, i think NHLPA '93 was the sport sim i spent most time on. The moment they became actual sims as opposed to top down arcade games, they became pointless, and agree, the same very much goes for footie, i find them tedious in the extreme.


Speedball, now there's a game they should do in real life.


or rollerball of course, loved that film. Thinking about it video games that became films are universally terrible, but that's a film that is really a live action video game!!

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