Yeah, it really was amazing to play blind. We especially enjoyed the DLC... when we first realised what it was all about, it nearly blew our minds!
It does seem to have been overshadowed by Shadow of the Colossus somewhat.
I picked it up blind after getting carried away in the magazine hype and excitement. I'd not played any FF games before that... man, that was quite an experience!
Considered Dark Souls... but, honestly, the first time I played it, I hated it. And every successive playthrough, I've loved it more and more. Playing it for the first time would feel like a step back.
It's 20 years old... if Windwaker isn't considered retro now, then Atari 2600 games weren't considered retro in 1997 :)
Pretty much all of them... I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.
Difficult...
I don't have the other devices to compare, but I understands that it should handle those platforms better than the 2+ and slightly worse than the 3+. So some playable games, but not all.
I tried a few GC games (Mario Kart Double Dash and Monkey Ball). They seemed to run okay. Monkey Ball ran worse than Mario Kart.
More powerful chipset and different dpad/left stick placement is the main one. Here's a breakdown:
https://retroabxy.com/retroid-pocket-2-plus-vs-retroid-pocket-2s/
Yeah, it's confusing, and not helped by the fact that they release a new one every couple of months.
Funnily enough, that's one of the reasons I went with the 2S over the 3+. I love the look of the old NGPC!
The first album I ever truly connected to... found when rummaging through my Dad's vinyl collection. I put it on on the strength of the cover alone, then listened to it endlessly for the next few year.
Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road is a 1989 arcade release that plays kind of like a fancy Super Sprint. It's a single screen game where three players race their trucks over a number of courses, picking up nitro and money, and upgrading their vehicles between races. It's fast, goofy, chaotic and a lot of fun. The orginal arcade, notably, featured a three steering wheel cabinet.
On the face of it, this simple game looks ideal for home ports... but can they capture the mayhem of the original?
The Amstrad CPC port is, unsurprisingly, based on the Spectrum version. But in this case, they've at least attempted to include some colour. Sadly, this amounts to changing the track to orange-brown and adding colour to two of the cars, meaning that the other two remain resolutely orange-brown. It's a curious choice, but I guess they ran into some four colour screen mode limit. It's not terrible though, but it does suffer from some horrendous slowdown. Like the Spectrum, it allows for just two players.
Next up is the C64 version, and it's pretty good. It's more colourful than its 8-bit cousins, and it allows for up to three players. It moves and plays okay. But it feels a little bit stiffer, losing some of the chaotic speed of the original. Good attempt!
The Spectrum port is arrestingly yellow. Yellow cars on a yellow track, with your yellow car being distinguished by a yellow square above your vehicle that takes a good few seconds to spot. However, despite its monochrome shortcomings, the conversion itself is top notch. As is often the case with Speccy ports, you can't hang your hat on either the graphics or the sound, but you will frequently find that the feel of the arcade original is captured surprisingly well. And that is totally the case here. Great speed, fluid control, a lot of fun! And some surprisingly good 128K sound!
So, for the 8-bit micros at least (the only comparison that really matters) a Speccy win!
For the posh kids, the Amiga got an effortlessly competent port. Lovely smooth graphics that perfectly capture the arcade original. Not much to say about this one, other than it's very good indeed.
Over on the consoles, the SNES port is the best of the bunch. It looks, plays and sounds superb, retaining much of the original arcade and adding to it. Notably, the soundtrack is brilliant, with lots of catchy and memorable tracks. If you're going to play just one home port of Super Off Road, pick this one. It's rad!
The Megadrive/Genesis port... not so much. It's not terrible, it just tries to add a uniquely Megadrive spin on the game, which doesn't quite work. The end result is a drab looking version with a crunchy/scratchy Megadrive soundtrack which doesn't play quite as well as the SNES version.
On the 8-bit consoles, the Mastersystem is the best of the two. It's bright and crisp with good controls and smooth gameplay. The NES doesn't fare so well, with an incredibly drab palette that somehow swaps red for pink on the main car. However, it supports up to four players, which makes it unique among the home ports and even the arcade!
Sadly, the handhelds don't fare so well. All of them lose the single screen in favour of a scrolling play area, which tends to make the game feel a bit claustrophobic. The best of them is the Game Gear version, which is basically the Mastersystem version on a small screen, and it plays almost as well.
The Gameboy version, on the other hand, is a disaster, with slow scrolling, terrible controls and indistinct graphics. Kind of like a shitty RC Pro Am.
And even worse than the Gameboy port, is the Atari Lynx port. It initially looks promising, with chunky, colourful graphics that capture the arcade well. Then it starts moving... jerky scrolling, bad controls and annoying sound make this the very bottom of the bunch. Avoid!
R-Type is the greatest game ever made, right? Right? No? Then get off my land, you pervert. It just is.
The 8-bit ports of the game were mixed: the Amstrad got a terrible, slow, drab port. The C64 got a fun shooter that felt loosely based on the source, but which loses points for straight up doing it's own thing (as the C64 often did).
But it's the ZX Spectrum port that really shines. More colourful than it had right to be, fast, faithful, fun. It was a weird kind of miracle: so accurate you could even use your arcade learnings to do well at the game.
So, for the 8-bit micros at least, clear Speccy win!
...
But they were, all of them, deceived, for there was another 8-bit computer R-Type made.
On the internet, in the coding forums, homebrew coders forged in secret an Amstrad port to beat all the others. And into this port they poured colour, accuracy, music...
And the result is pretty great. Amazing to see what the Amstrad can really do when it isn't getting stinky Spectrum ports. I would say this one ties with the Spectrum port for playability.
I'd struggle to place the year, probably 1983 or early 1984, but the first game I ever played on our first ZX Spectrum was "Maze Death Race".
It was a blatant Rally-X rip-off, from a time when intellectual property rights felt more like guidelines than actual rules. You move around a maze, collecting flags, avoiding other cars and oil patches. You can select the speed of the other cars, and that's about it.
Most of all, I remember it being janky as anything. The graphics felt like they were falling apart, with UDGs flashing in and out of coherence, jerky movement, blurping sound effects...
But I had no frame of reference, no point of comparison. To my 8 year old self, the mere fact that a recognisable car was moving around on our TV under my control was mind-blowing. I honestly had no idea that the glitchy graphics were anything other than purposeful - that instability seemed to add to the allure somehow. It felt like a window into a weird world I'd only had hints of before then...
And that cassette inlay art... nowadays it looks amateurish; back then it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen!
A shameless bit of self-promotion.
It's 3 years since I got it into my head that I wanted to make a Spectrum game. I'd done BASIC in my salad days, but never machine code... How hard could it be?
I picked the ancient 1982 arcade game The Pit, which had never been ported to the Speccy and looked like a good fit. Here's the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTIjYc-ZH-A
I spent a month drowning in ASM, but finally finished it... and here is what I came up with:
https://youtu.be/YQeyKqAeEaY?t=128
https://dokdave.itch.io/the-pit
My main goal, as well as learning machine code, was to get it as close as possible to the arcade - not easy given the Spectrum's limitations.
Luckily, The Pit helped me out - its colour scheme is basically the Speccy palette. It is based on 8x8 blocks, like the Speccy. It's horizontal res was similar as well. Only the vertical res was challenging.
In the end, I settled on having the screen flip between top and bottom, rather than be single screen. But it seems to work fine.
The most rewarding part of the project was focusing on the fine details - the weird title screen, the font, the high-score and instruction text.
And the biggest challenge was actually making the gameplay feel like the arcade. Not easy when you're terrible at the game and can barely finish the first cavern.
Oh, and, of course, machine code...
Honestly, it feels a bit like a fever dream. It's so different from the modern programming languages I'm used to. Needing to think of memory as something you actually need to care about and consider is so alien to me. No variables, as such; self-modifying code; considering how quickly you can get a new screen generated and copied to the "TV"... By the end of it, I was thinking in t-states and frames and little else.
It's all gone now, of course, lost in a whirlwind of pandemic and other distractions. I doubt I could remember a tenth of the things I learned in that month...
But maybe I'll get the urge one day and dust off the old assembler again. Maybe I'll wonder anew at how the hell bedroom coders did it back in the 80s, without the convenience of modern IDEs, debugging and such.
As a nice bookend to this project, later that year I opened my copy of the Crash 2020 Annual and found this...
My fanboy scream probably registered on seismographs!
Buggy Boy (Speed Buggy in the US) feels like a game that deserves to be remembered more fondly. Sadly, it always seems to fall through the cracks between the likes of Outrun, Power Drift and Chase HQ.
This is a shame, because it is a fun little racer that received some mostly decent 8-bit ports on the #Amstrad, #C64 and #Spectrum.
But which one was the Buggy-est Boy of all? Step this way...
In the arcade, Buggy Boy is probably best remembered for its cockpit version with a panoramic three-screen display. There's also an upright, single-screen version, called Buggy Boy Jr, which is basically the same game.
In Buggy Boy, you race five tracks, collecting flags for points and time, and avoiding boulders and water traps. There are jumps and objects that flip you up onto two wheels. You'll see other buggies, but the game is mostly a race against the clock. It's a lot of colourful fun!
First port we'll look at is the Spectrum port. It's very different from the other two, and makes a plucky attempt at recreating the arcade faithfully. It has a valiant attempt at a huge buggy sprite, with colour no less, which moves about okay-ish. And the road has hills, just like the arcade.
Unfortunately, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. The huge sprite makes the road feel very cramped, and the gameplay feels slow and indistinct.
Good effort though!
Next up is the Amstrad. Like the C64 port, this feels more like it was inspired by Buggy Boy, rather than faithfully ported. Unlike the Spectrum, the buggy sprite is tiny. This actually works in the game's favour, keeping it snappy and responsive. The road moves nicely, albeit with no hills, and overall it's an enjoyable, if slightly slow, experience.
Best of all is the C64 version. This does everything the Amstrad does, only better. The same presentation (making me wonder if the Amstrad was ported from this), same small sprite, same nimble gameplay. But this version moves better and is a lot more fun to play. Getting to the next checkpoint is hugely compelling and it plays like a great, simple racer.
If you had to nitpick (Spectrum guys always have to nitpick the C64, right?) you might say that it is a little drab... but never enough to detract from the game.
A very clear C64 win!
The first RPG I ever played! This book has so much nostalgia for me... first watching the cool kids over the road playing it and picking up a White Dwarf to see what it was about, then finally getting in on a game and getting my own copy of the rules.
Green Beret is a difficult game to love, because Green Beret is a difficult game to play. Honestly, it's brutal. Utterly unforgiving, unfair in places, and generally infuriating. Especially since every life lost is greeted by a shrill siren sound that will have even the most understanding spouse reaching for her earbuds (trust me).
It's also a simple game, if a little rooted in the concerns of the 80s... move to the right, murder fools with your knife and your deep fear of communist expansion, pick up the occasional flame thrower or rocket launch to murder more efficiently... win!!!
But how did the home computer conversions handle the absurd difficulty of the coin-op? They'd have toned it down, right? Right??
Amstrad: This port is the worst of the three main ones. There's just something off about it. Maybe it's the loose controls or the insane difficulty, or maybe it's the fact that your green beret looks more like Robin Hood and the communist aggressors look more like merry men. Still, everything from the arcade is represented here. Just not brilliantly. And it is so so difficult...
Spectrum: Next up is the Spectrum. It's a port by the late great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith and it is a really neat conversion. The graphics are bright and crisp, it controls and moves around well, and it feels like the original arcade. But goddamn it's hard. I had to figure out how to use a Multiface, just so that I could poke in a cheat and get to my screenshot spot for this one!
C64: The C64 port is probably the best of the bunch, but not by a long way. It looks and sounds great, definitely the closest to the arcade. It's main problem - believe it or not - is difficulty. Again, it is insanely hard. And it suffers from some unfair hit box issues - if you jump and collide with an enemy on a level above, you lose a life, which feels wrong.
Atari: Finally, a dishonourable discharge for the Atari 8-bit version which is, frankly, a bit of a war crime.
It's beyond hard and enters an entirely different realm of frustration, with your hero wielding the smallest knife imaginable and enemies requiring the intimate closeness of a secret lover before they'll shuffle off this mortal coil
Combine this with invisible bullets (pesky Russian tech) and that awful siren that plays at the start of EVERY life and it's a recipe for an 800XL out the window.
My first love was the ZX Spectrum, but my first salacious affair was with the Sega Master System, many years later.
It was a time in the UK when consoles were hardly even a thing. We'd somehow missed the NES wave that was gripping the US, and we were still clinging to our 8-bit micros or the new 16-bit STs and Amigas. No-one seemed particularly keen to swap £1.99 budget cassettes for £29.99 cartridges.
So, getting the Sega Master System was both extremely exciting and also a tacit acceptance that new games would arrive a couple of times a year, rather than every few weeks.
And it was totally worth it. To my naive 14 year old mind, the games were basically arcade perfect... Of course, this was a measure of my own lack of exposure to actual arcades, rather than the port quality itself. But the games were definitely more polished than the Speccy games I was used to. As such, I have extremely rosy memories of virtually every game I found a way to play. Sometimes unjustly.
Like, for example, Psycho Fox by Vic Tokai.
Psycho Fox is a side scrolling platformer where you play the eponymous fox, but also a range of other animals with different abilities. You run to the left, jump on enemies to kill them, fight a boss every three levels... so it's just like Super Mario Bros, right?
Well, that's how I remember it. It was Sega's Mario, and in my mind it was just as good. Of course, I hadn't played Super Mario Bros at the time, and it would be years before I played Sonic. As such, I had no real frame of reference to judge Psycho Fox's strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses...
Because Psycho Fox has a fatal flaw which means we live in a world dominated by Sonic and Mario, rather than a crow-throwing fox...
Movement.
There's just something off about the movement in this game. The acceleration curve is too shallow, it takes forever to get moving. As such, jumps always require a run up, and escaping from enemies can feel like wading through treacle. 90% of the deaths you'll suffer are because you can't get up enough speed fast enough. And it is extremely frustrating.
It's a shame, because it's otherwise a great game. It has a Sonic-esque blue-sky feel to it, the character work is awesome, and the extra animals add an interesting dimension to how you play the game (Tiger can move fast, Monkey can jump high etc). The range of levels is interesting and includes the usual tropes (desert world, ice world with slippery momentum) and the boss fights have some novel quirks.
Overall, it's definitely worth a look. But to truly enjoy it, you will need to unlearn all of the instincts you've build up from more fluid Sonic and Mario games. You need to think about every jump, and really take your time.
What about you? Did you play Psycho Fox back then? Have you played it since? Did it hold up for you?
I love and hate the feeling in Animal Crossing that the world has just continued existing without you for the last 18 months that you haven't booted it up. Feels like visiting old friends... but old friends that thought you were dead or something.