Nonsense in BASIC

Accidents will happen. A stray mouse dropping short-circuits the all-powerful Machine and the DNA welder rumbles into life. No going back now, we’re seeing this thing through to the bitter end. But at least you have a modicum of control, although it mostly just amounts to plate spinning for now. Watch the percentage and don’t let anything stop. We might get though this ok.

Killing is wrong, even pretend killing on little screens

The video games mould had barely set before Mel Croucher came along to smash it to pieces. The former architect set up the company in 1977 and produced games that deliberately avoided established tropes like blasting aliens to kingdom come. Automata games were ingenious puzzle boxes full of subversive humour and bad puns. Their anarchic reputation was further cemented by a series of industry-mocking comic-strip ads in the home computer press featuring their mascot the Pi Man.

The label scored its first big commercial success in 1982 with Pimania, a text adventure/treasure hunt where playing the game revealed cryptic clues to a prize hidden somewhere in the real world (the Golden Sundial of Pi was eventually claimed in 1985). This breakthrough was followed by My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar, another adventure where a familiar wisecracking comedian leads the player through a series of puzzles in order to uncover the identity of a Hollywood star. Once again, a prize was on offer to whoever solved all the clues first.

In 1984, Croucher decided the world of home micro entertainment was ready for something else new, and by this he meant an interactive sci-fi rock opera based on Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue. At this point I’ll remind you that the ZX Spectrum had 48K of memory and produced sound from a single-channel beeper.

Deus Ex Machina came packaged in a VHS-sized box with two cassettes: one cassette contained the game, while recorded on the other was an audio track featuring music by Croucher plus the voice talents of Jon Pertwee, Frankie Howerd and Ian Dury, along with singer Donna Bailey and left-wing historian EP Thompson. The clever bit was programming a game that took a fixed amount of time to play through, so the soundtrack could be played simultaneously.

Follow the sequence, touching the light

On loading the game, you are treated to some lovely animated portraits of the cast, then the Silver Fox himself gently talks you through the tape jiggery-pokery required to sync the game with the audio and we’re off. An opening narration hints at a dystopian setting while telling of the fate of the unfortunate mouse, accompanied by a beautifully animated sequence reminiscent of the 1981 TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s funny and creepily atmospheric.

The game proper is a series of minigames themed around the progression of a lifeform – the ‘Defect’ – from creation to death, all played in time to the prog-influenced soundtrack that is by turns spacey and psychedelic, angry and political, or enjoyably daft. Pertwee provides a narration, framing the story with a sci-fied up version of the bit of As You Like It that everyone knows.

The Infant: The Machine (Bailey) malfunctions and rebels, producing, with some help from a ‘fertilizing agent’ (Dury), a life form with unusual powers

The School Child: The Defect Police (Howerd) isolate and interrogate the Defect, but the child finds some unlikely allies and escapes

The Lover: The teenage Defect learns about the birds and the bees while the influence of the Machine wanes and his moral compass starts to wobble

The Soldier: The Defect Police attempt to brainwash and weaponise the Defect, but their creation turns on them. The police are destroyed and Defect is now in charge

The Justice: The Defect, grown fat with power in middle age, must walk a tightrope between nobility and corruption as his empire gradually erodes

The sixth age: His best years behind him, the Defect slowly shuffles towards the edge of the screen as his body starts to fail. The Machine occasionally intervenes at a cellular level to eke out a little more time

Second childishness and mere oblivion: The Defect dies, you see your final score

Imagine if this were nothing but an electronic game

Deus Ex Machina is an extraordinary and sometimes quite affecting piece of early video game art – for an 11 year-old me it was genuinely mind-blowing and the second side of the game tape didn’t even work. It’s also majorly flawed as, for all its ambition and scope, there’s not much actual gameplay. At the outset, your interaction is limited to moving a cursor around the screen to keep elements in motion while your score is a percentage representing the ‘degree of ideal-entity’. DNA strands or cells that stop spinning or pulsating knock points off your score. Each of these early minigames last only a few minutes but it feels interminable.

There’s some welcome variation as the game progresses, and the graphics, while sometimes sparse, involve some terrific sprite design and animation, especially during the ‘soldier’ and ‘justice’ sections. Unfortunately even here the experience is marred by sluggish control and poor sprite interaction that makes it unclear exactly how well you are doing. It’s exceptionally difficult to finish with a score above zero – but in a game intended to reflect the progress of a human life, maybe this is the point (aaah!).

I’ve nothing left to say 

Rainbird, named after its founder Tony Rainbird, was part of British Telecom’s portfolio of video game labels. Unlike budget stablemate Firebird (CEO Ian Firebird presumably), Rainbird had its sights fixed squarely on the full price market, releasing sophisticated simulators and atmospheric text adventures produced by a slate of well-regarded developers including Magnetic Scrolls, Argonaut and Realtime. Rainbird games were marketed as quality products, distinctively packaged in glossy, blue large-format boxes that could accommodate large, detailed manuals and other printed paraphernalia, so you knew you were getting your pocket money’s worth.

What you get in Starglider is a slick and polished combat flight simulator that sticks you in the cockpit of a futuristic aircraft with a mission to single-handedly fend off an alien invasion. Why? Well handily the game came bundled with short novella by author James Follett (Blake’s 7, Crown Court) to set the scene [SPOILERS]:

The good people of the planet Novenia were a bit too complacent about being space invaded thanks to their sophisticated automated planetary defence grid. So the baddies disguised their capital ships as giant migratory spacebirds, which fooled the satellites and allowed them to wipe out Novenia’s unprepared military. Anyway, let’s shoot stuff.

Despite its flight sim trappings, much of the fun of Starglider comes from how easy it is to pick up and play. With simple joystick and throttle controls, the player is immediately and effortlessly gliding around the 3D world zap zap zapping the scenery. Pretty much everything is there for the blasting: ground based turrets and tanks, and airborne fighters blow apart satisfyingly with a few laser hits. Giant walking mechs and the stargliders themselves can only be taken out with guided missiles – let one loose and you get the extra thrill of a high-tech HUD snapping down over the screen as you ride the weapon all the way to the target.

Konami’s 1985 coin-op wasn’t massively successful in the UK, but Imagine had bought the license anyway and were damn well going to have a crack at it. The result is one of the most spot-on arcade conversions of the 8-bit era, opening with a splendid bit of chiptunery that ranks among the best ever achieved on the 48K machine.

Everything that Imagine did well is present and correct here. Chunky floating bat sprites glide and twirl smoothly around the screen, connecting satisfyingly with the ball that flies back and forth in convincing-enough 3D. A point scored triggers applause as a burst of white noise and a ripple in the crowd of freakishly identical grinning faces. It’s all beautifully well done.

The film tells the story of rulebook-hating police officer Marion Cobretti’s one-man crusade against a heavily-armed, cult-like street gang led by the hilariously-named Night Slasher (stand down everyone, Rachael Smith made that joke in Your Sinclair 30 years ago). It was given an 18 certificate by the UK censors for its uncompromising violence (it narrowly avoided the dreaded ‘X’ in the US) which naturally made seeing it a gore-spattered badge of honour for school-age kids, and therefore an ideal candidate for a video game adaptation.

To their credit, the developers at Ocean ignored the tone of the film along with most of its plot elements. Instead, they took great pleasure in poking fun at Stallone and his film career with a bunch of verbal and visual jokes, from the menu option that says ‘push me’, to the ‘roided-up main sprite with an indestructible head, nutting his way through hordes of bazooka-wielding enemies. Oh, and the boxing gloves. And the Rocky theme stings. 

The game itself is a retread of Green Beret where you run through a side-scrolling landscape, initially taking out enemies at close quarters with those magic headbutts but picking up limited-use weapons along the way. The guns are helpfully hidden inside tasty all-American cheeseburgers. Also in your path are an incredible number of runaway prams that can briefly stun our big, tough hero. Across the three levels, the objective is always the same: find your girlfriend and escort her to safety. If you take a hit during the escort phase she sensibly runs away, forcing you to retrace your steps. The final level ends in a confrontation with the Night Slasher himself, here depicted as a clown who throws knives around like confetti.

You play as Oolong, a would-be wushu grandmaster who has to earn the recognition he craves by kickpunching his way through nine opponents. Each enemy has a signature move or weapon, with a couple capable of ranged attacks. The end of the sequence sees you face your doppelganger for the ultimate showdown… except not really ‘cos the game just cycles back to the first enemy.

This was the first fighting game to feature multiple opponents with distinctive styles and moves; it was also the first to use health bars that deplete with each successful blow (rather than a round being won or lost on a single contact), allowing for a bonus for a flawless round. These ideas became standard in the genre, with later franchises like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat having almost identical gameplay. This early swipe wasn’t without its limitations though: there’s no simultaneous two-player mode, only one character is playable and the poor sod can’t even block punches.

The Spectrum version is another top-notch conversion by Imagine. The graphics capture the original’s cartoonish character designs while the backgrounds (all two of ‘em) are drawn as vividly as the limited colour palette will allow. Control is slick and responsive, and your attacks connect with a satisfying thump of white noise. On the downside, it only takes a few goes before you’ve pummelled your way through every opponent and the only challenge left is to see how many times you can repeat your success.

I liked Leader Board despite being bored rigid by the real thing. Playing it was more chilled experience than most games and there was something appealingly immersive about the setting. The multiplayer mode came in handy as well, as it was also one of the few video games my dad would deign to play – dads being apparently hardwired to enjoy anything related to golf. 

Playing a computerised round of 18 holes removes a lot of what’s rubbish about the IRL game – cost of equipment, longueurs, banal commentary, golfers – and strips it back to the fun mechanics of getting a tiny projectile to a target in as few goes as possible. Doing this is a matter of lining up your shot, accounting for wind speed and direction, then selecting the right club from a comprehensive set ranging from the hefty whack of a 1 wood to the gentle lob of a 9 iron. Hold down the fire key to build power, release it to trigger the swing, fire again to strike. Time it right and your ball sails true through the 3D landscape, landing safely on the green for the putt. Fluff it and you’re more likely to see the ball fly into the drink – cos there’s quite a lot of it.

Leader Board takes place on an otherworldly fantasy course made of island fairways set within a vast lagoon, bounded on all sides by distant mountains and groves of trees. Maybe every golfer dreams of this course: an inaccessible private archipelago of bright greens and deep blues, cut off from real world, where they can spend eternity whacking their balls.

The 3D landscapes are static and render in stages, much like the BASIC hi-res graphics used in the Hobbit. Displaying any kind of filled polygon on the Spectrum was a bit of a feat and Leader Board was an ideal use case for the engine’s leisurely rendering speed, featuring little in the way of fast-paced action. The golfer sprite’s swing is a lovely piece of animation and the pixel of a ball is thrilling to watch as it follows a smooth arc through the air, albeit rarely in the direction you want.

Mikie’s fabulous pompadour quiff and defiant attitude to classroom discipline make him infinitely cooler than you but he has tricky task ahead of him. The letter is in pieces (represented by hearts, aw) all over the school, and our hero is stuck behind a desk in some boring lesson while his beloved waits patiently at the school gates. Luckily, he has sheer chutzpah on his side and blithely disregards his teacher to go a-roaming. 

As Mikie travels the school, each room presents a particular challenge. In the starting classroom he must retrieve the hearts from under desks by aggressively doing the Bump with his classmates (consisting entirely of cheerleaders and football-helmeted jocks, just like every American high school) until they move elsewhere. Other rooms involve breaking into lockers, hurling canteen chickens or navigating between a gyrating dance class. 

These shenanigans don’t go unnoticed and he is constantly opposed by THE MAN as the school’s faculty of teachers, janitors and cooks relentlessly pursue him. Mikie can defend himself with a well-timed shout – an ability toned down from the arcade original where the lovable hero could headbutt his way out of trouble.

1985 was a big year for lone wolf military types getting stuff done and leaving a startling body count – film releases that year include Mark Lester’s Commando, Joseph Zito’s Invasion USA and George P. Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood Part II. Around the same time, Konami brought pre-Glasnost gunboat diplomacy to the arcades in the form of a run’n’gun murderfest known in some markets as Rush’n Attack. A year later, Imagine released a home micro conversion under the game’s original title of Green Beret.

The player controls an elite special forces unit consisting of one extremely hard dude tasked with an extraction mission. His brilliant plan involves running headlong through a bunch of enemy facilities with only a shiny blade between him and hordes of enemies. Ivan understandably wants to put a stop to these shenanigans and comes charging in from both directions using running, jumping, shooting and mortar-firing tactics. You can evade attacks by jumping and ducking, or dispatch foes with a quick stabby-stab. Fallen enemies can be looted for limited-use weapons, such as flamethrowers and rocket launchers, which are best saved for the boss fight at the end of each level.

It’s fun, fast-paced and very tough. Most of the time, you need to be close to an enemy to send them packing, and your moves need to timed with pixel accuracy if you are to survive for more than a few seconds. The violent mayhem is offset by small cartoonish sprites, and animations that render grisly deaths as vanishing skeletons or puffs of smoke. This contrasts with the backgrounds in which Soviet military architecture is appropriately illustrated in clean black outlines with spare and careful use of colour. Although there is also an odd design decision, seemingly unique to Spectrum version, where the player’s three lives – freedom-loving, all-American lives – are represented by the hammer and sickle.

As with many games around the same era, completing the four levels displays a congratulatory message before kicking you back to start to go through it all again. War is endless, and a bit harder every time.

This follow up expands on its athletics-based predecessor with a more eclectic range of events. Kicking off with swimming and continuing with skeet shooting, horse vault, archery, triple jump, and finishing with weight lifting. Progress from one event to the next depends on reaching a qualifying score. Mess up and it’s back to the pool with you.

Imagine’s conversion arrived on the heels of Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (a conversion of Track & Field in all but name) and Daley Thompson’s Supertest. As well as being massively enjoyable to play, they all shared a reputation as scourges of crappily-made home computer joysticks. Slapping a joystick left and right was much faster than keyboard bashing and was many users’ preferred means of play, including mine. Soon enough, the flimsy reed switches in my Quickshot 1 gave up and I was stuck with the keyboard until Christmas, enduring a serious lack of hi-scores. The replacement Quickshot 2 Turbo was a bit sturdier, but still had nowhere near the staying power of devices like the Zipstik or the Competition Pro 5000 which were legendary for their ruggedness and reliability.

Time-Gate has an important story to tell you. It’s a story about how the human race built technological miracles, how civilisation spread throughout the galaxy, how peace and prosperity reigned for millennia, and how the golden age inevitably fell apart. At first it was hubris that caused the mighty empire to crumble, then aliens came along to finish the job. But all is not lost because the surviving humans have found an ancient spacecraft capable of traversing the legendary TIME-GATES. It’s up to one brave pilot (that’s you, player!) to travel back in time, find the aliens’ homeworld, and prevent the threat from ever appearing, through a quick and easy act of genocide. All this info is helpfully dumped on the player over five screens of text every time you load the game.

Sounds like a desperate situation! You’d better get on and vanquish those baddies so humanity can safely resume its slow decline through complacency and decadence. Oh wait, Quicksilva presumably blew the packaging budget on a four-button keyboard overlay, so there’s only room on the inlay card for the loading instructions. You have to click through fifteen more screens to find out how to play before you start…

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Ok, we’re off! The game is a first-person space shooter that uses scaled sprites with an Elite-style moving starfield to create a 3D effect (the 4th D is due to the time travel conceit, of course). You have a long-range scanner showing 18 playable sectors and whether they contain enemy ships or planets. Any sector may contain a time-gate but it must be cleared of enemies before you can access it. Upon finding a time-gate you are immediately whisked thousands of years into the past to repeat the process until you find the homeworld.

On warping to a sector, you will find… nothing. The game requires you to hunt your quarry using a system of gauges to determine its location and distance. Once locked on, you get to anticipate the visceral thrill of a good old-fashioned space dogfight. Eventually, a tiny spaceship comes into view and it’s time to duke it out, hoping your laser zaps are faster and more accurate than theirs. If it goes pear-shaped, damage can be mitigated by warping to a planetary system and setting down for repairs; doing so uses up the resources of the entire planet but it’s all in a good cause I suppose.

HatS is a platform game about killing spiders and is therefore brilliant. In the first of three sections, we join Horace in a mountainous wilderness and must help him jump up hillsides and over the heads of patrolling arachnids to reach the other end of the screen. In the middle portion, a deep canyon bars the way to the lair and the player must use the spiders’ own biology against them, swinging between silken threads to traverse the chasm. In the final confrontation, Horace dashes around a nightmarish web-filled cavern. By jumping on the weak spots in the web, the player can open up holes which the spiders will run to fix – making them vulnerable. Jump on the spider at this point and they’ll fall to their death. Clear the cavern and victory is yours, but the game just starts again with more enemies to deal with.

This was the last Horace title produced by William Tang, whose other projects included the game design software H.U.R.G. and classic beat-em-up The Way of the Exploding Fist. In 1985, he suffered a collapsed lung which prevented the completion of the planned fourth Horace game titled Horace to the Rescue. The project was cancelled, leaving our hero endlessly battling spiders until the release of Horace in the Mystic Woods for the Psion Series 3 in 1995, made without Tang’s involvement. 

The aim is to navigate the cave, find the treasure chest and get out again with any additional loot adding to your score. You have a first person view of the action as you move though the boxy wireframe maze, one square at a time in a manner similar to much later crawlers like Dungeon Master and the recent Grimrock series. The walls are lined with doors behind which you may find the treasure, some other valuable, a clue, or a fearsome enemy – either a ‘trog’ warrior or a giant soldier ant. The only other hazards are rockfalls and bottomless pits that can be overcome with equipment found during your search.

Combat is dead simple: you have a few precious seconds to type a letter based on the one displayed on the ant’s head or trog’s shield. On the lowest level you just have to hit the same key, on the highest you must find the letter four places after in the alphabet. Get it wrong and it’s death on the end of a trog’s sword, or the ants escape and seek their queen – who then starts seeking you. From this point, the game takes on an atmosphere of dread familiar to anyone who played 3D monster maze.

The overall presentation is terrific. A cartoon avatar performs the dice roll by throwing a dart at a chunky rendering of the game board (recoloured to overcome the Spectrum’s graphical limitations but still looking well classy). Once the player has picked their square, the action moves to an elegant wood-panelled drawing room where the same avatar asks the question, then paces back-and-forth, patiently awaiting your answer. The game is not designed for a single player so rather than type your answer, you’re required to say it out loud before the correct one is revealed and the game asks you whether you got it right. This works pretty well, since there are no problems with fat-fingered typing resulting in an incorrect answer and the other players can police cheating.

Rather than being focused on plundering foreign lands, the turn-based strategy game Viking Raiders looks at the horror that ensues in the absence of a decent legislative system. All out war has broken out between two-to-four chieftains, with the only remaining course of action being to see the conflict out to its bitter, bloody end – and Winter is Coming.

What is actually a pretty light-hearted wargame begins with picking your favourite jarl from a choice of four delightful smiling cartoon faces. The game procedurally generates a network of fjords, a scattering of resources, and the player castles which must be captured to win. On each turn the player can buy as many armies, longboats and catapults as space and funds will allow. Units can move up to eight spaces in one direction on a given turn – meeting an enemy army or castle will trigger a battle. 

The only resources on the sparse map are treasure and booze. Gathering loot is essential if you are to afford new units. An army encountering a horn o’ delicious mead will immediately take the opportunity to forget the endless grind of war and drink themselves to a blissful stupor, at which point they can be recruited by a rival faction. As the game progresses, the onset of winter gradually erases the fjords from the top of the screen down, trapping boats and leaving areas vulnerable to land assaults.

1985 - The Day After is a poorly implemented clone of the Atari game Gravitar, in which the player navigates a series of screens by turning and applying thrust to a craft that is yoked by gravity. It’s nice to look at – the screenshots of colourful pseudo 3D caverns were what prompted me to buy it at the time – but the gameplay is rotten. 8-bit era gaming was frequently challenging but here, a combination of an unresponsive thrust key, over-sensitive turning control, unforgiving inertia and one-touch death creates an experience more akin to Flappy Bird, as the ship meets its firey doom again and again and again before you even leave the first screen.

Revisiting it now, it proves to be a well-presented arcade adventure with a heroic fantasy plot that has little bearing on the actual gameplay. The player guides the robotic protagonist through a vast isometric maze, collecting items and depositing them in a central computer. Parts of the maze are blocked by forcefields which need to be disabled by collecting and depositing silicon chips. Time is limited by your fuel supply which depletes alarmingly quickly, requiring regular top-ups from canisters that are, more often than not, frustratingly out of reach.

It’s one of dozens of titles released by Mastertronic, a budget producer with an expansive distribution model that meant their tapes could often be found in garages and newsagents as well as the normal video game outlets. Quality control was generally better than other publishers in the £1.99-£2.99 price range, and Rockman is a decent example, being a fast-paced and addictive slice of arcade action.