#microsphere

The Regeneration Game

It may only be a quarter of a millimetre wide, but this specially engineered biodegradable microsphere could be the key to repairing the damage caused by loss of blood flow to heart muscle during a heart attack. Because the heart only has a limited ability to repair itself, this damage leads to an increased risk of heart failure. Researchers are now testing whether microspheres packed with lab-grown heart muscle cells can be delivered directly into the heart to repair any damage. Nearly a million people in the UK are affected by heart failure – a figure that’s rising as more people than ever are surviving a heart attack. More research is needed to ensure that these tiny microspheres are a safe and effective treatment for people who have had a heart attack, but they offer hope that we may be able to help heal their broken hearts in the future.

Written by Kat Arney

Image by Annalisa Bettini, UCL

University College London, London, UK

Image copyright held by Annalisa Bettini

Research from the British Heart Foundation presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference, June 2021

Top 47K - Skool Daze (feat. Kim Justice)

Kim recommends...Skool Daze (ZX Spectrum)

If you live in Britain and you’re a kid (you can tell if you’re a kid or not through various checks such as: Do you own a slingshot, how much “tuck” do you consume in a day, do you have friends named Tucker and Gonch, etc.) then chances are good that right now you’re enjoying your half-term holidays — a full week away from the daily rigours of the classroom and bundles of the playground. However,…

Skool Daze (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: David Reidy, Helen Reidy / Microsphere Released: 12/1984 Completed: 18/07/2022 Completion: Went up a year! Trophies / Achievements: n/a

What I said a couple of weeks ago about Soccer on the NES being worse than a Spectrum game had me suddenly thinking if there was anything particularly important I’d missed as I work my way forward through the years, and while there are some things here and there I might go back to, one release caught my eye: Skool Daze, released at the tail end of 1984 and 15th on the Insert Credit Best British Games Spectacular.

Skool Daze is a game that–if I’m being completely honest–I’ve played more in its first retro remake, Klass of ‘99 (which is now older than Skool Daze was at the time of the remake, but let’s not think about that) because it’s one of the rare(-ish) games that was released on ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 but that never actually made it to Amstrad CPC. That means for me it was a game that (although it was well in the class of “crusty old budget games” even when I got my Amstrad) I simply pined after having read about it in multi-format magazines. In fact, I can literally remember looking at an advert for Alternative Software’s budget range of I think £1.99 games with each game with a wee checkbox for Spectrum, C64, CPC, and genuinely being disappointed about how unfair it was there was no checkbox for CPC next to Skool Daze. It’s funny the mundane things you remember.

Skool Daze is also one of those games that, in whatever format I’ve played it, I’ve simply messed around with, with no actual attempt to efficiently finish it, until now. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an early school… simulator? Sandbox? It’s the kind of game that I think of as quite exclusively British, honestly–messy, over-ambitious, and not simply interested in using systems to create emergent play, but to do so in a way recognisable to its audience. I’d love to be able to pinpoint when this kind of game design went truly fallow in the face of more strictly narrative or linear experiences, or if it was truly always just the domain of the iconoclast, where it remains to this day.

(If you were to push me on it, part of me thinks the phenomenon of Doom was the end of any future where games could concentrate on being simulation sandboxes; for me, Doom was a step back from Ultima Underworld. Yes, I still want to talk to the monsters.)

Anyway, in Skool Daze, you play Eric (who can be named whatever you like, as with all of the other characters–a spark of genius allowing its schoolboy audience “recreate” their own experiences) who, aware his report card is a complete disaster, must steal it from the school safe in order to (I assume) doctor it. To do so, Eric has to first, uh, make all the shields that hang around the school start flashing by hitting them, which, uh, makes all the teachers reveal their secret code letter for the safe, apart from Mr Creak, who can’t be trusted with it (so was… um… hypnotised) and will only reveal it if he sees his birthdate drawn on a blackboard. Then you write the code on a blackboard, nick the report from the safe, and hit all the shields again!

What I sort of love about that completely deranged task list is how clearly it comes from the limitations of making a game on a Spectrum and also (honestly) the fact that the developers (David and Helen Reidy and Keith Warrington) were clearly more interested in making a school sandbox than a strict video game experience. Surprisingly (after playing things like the willfully obtuse Tower of Druaga) here they actually explain exactly what you’ve got to do in the cassette inlay–not so helpful if you’ve pirated it like everyone probably did at the time, admittedly, so I wonder how many players really did just play it as a sandbox survival!

What makes it actually interesting, of course, is that whether or not you’re actually interested in finishing the game is the simulation of a school day. You’ve got classes to get to, teachers and other students follow their own routines, and you can’t just do whatever–if a teacher sees you hit another student, or use a catapult, you’ll get lines, and if you try to skip a class they’ll pursue you doling out hundreds of lines what feels like every second. And in class, there’s often not enough seats, leading to yet more lines as students turf you out of your seat onto the floor.

It’s a fascinating experience, if a challengingly dated one. It’s honestly not any worse to control than Soccer on NES, but it does have its quirks–I remember playing games with QAOP movement, but it’s amusing to see how unintuitive the “intuitive” decision to place actions like jump on “J” and firing your catapult on “F” is. It’s just a bit… fussy. Going up and down stairs is a challenge, and your catapult is extremely temperamental–you can’t fire too close, or too far, and you miss sometimes anyway in a way that feels like a bug, but I suspect is some calculation being made that you missed instead of hit (though that’s pure speculation as there’s no feedback.) But the game is a clever take on a stealth genre that didn’t really exist yet–you can get away with stuff if a teacher’s back is turned, you’re far enough away, and especially if another (named) child is closer to the teacher as they’ll get the lines instead. Important, because you get expelled as soon as you hit 10,000 lines, which is honestly very easy as teachers randomly assign you between 100 and about 800 lines, making some mistakes very costly.

The game even has events, which is surprising–sometimes the swotty kid goes to tell on you and you have to stop him (by punching him a lot out of the view of teachers) to stop yourself getting lines; other times you’re stuck trying to avoid the bully who has mumps (annoyingly this causes an instant game over). Along with all the lessons having the teachers actually talk about stuff, there’s a surprising amount of stuff in a game intended for a stock 48k Speccy!

Actually completing it though… hmm. I’ll say here that you’re going to have the most fun with this just messing around with it or even treating it as a survival score attack; hit as many teachers and kids as you can, survive as long as possible. Completing it is simply a bit too exacting and I’m not going to lie that after a bunch of runs I gave up and started using save-states. You see, the game might allow you to really complete it in any fashion you want, but unless you want to poke the game’s memory to limit the number of lines you get (beyond me) you really have to complete the game quickly to not die from lines, making any completion feel like a very exactly speed-run. The school design doesn’t especially help–the top floor all shields can be hit by leaping but the bottom floor requires you hit teachers to bounce your catapult ammo off their heads to hit shields, and if you don’t time it exactly right you’ll get lines and no benefit.

Worst is the middle floor; you can hit teachers or punch students and jump on them to hit the shields, but the majority of them are in a dead-end exam room that is almost always empty. As a result you’re probably going to have to skive a class to get in while another class is in there, and because the school isn’t loopable, avoiding a teacher for long enough to get to the next period (at which point they lose interest) is next to impossible.

(My caveat here is it might be possible to play the game slowly, very carefully, but there’s so much simulation randomness that you can suddenly find yourself stuck getting knocked down by the bully in front of a teacher, getting thousands of lines…)

So the game does sort of devolve into a puzzle if you try to complete it, but I think in 1984 playing the game a lot, learning the timetable, seeing how teachers would move around, would have made this a perfectly enjoyable puzzle, and it’s simply that in 2022 I don’t want to have to restart the game again just because my stupid catapult missed or I was one nanosecond too early with my hit to actually get the shield meant I turned to the easy way out.

I won’t lie; this is a hard game to play now, but I also won’t lie that I played it for hours. Occasionally frustrated, but always entertained by the little school dramas being played out in front of me.

Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll be checking out Back To Skool for sure and might even look at Klass of 99 again, which pretty heavily changes things in a way I didn’t even remember at the time (it might use the Back To Skool school layout? I’m not sure.)

Final Thought: Skool Daze has a modern remake as well that I didn’t know about until writing this up, Skool Daze: Reskooled, but it is absolutely horrendous looking, with horrible art and animation. Which probably sounds a bit rich considering I just spent hours playing something with four frames of animation and heavy color clash, but seriously, just look at it. Bleurgh.