Category Archives: Games

Old-school gaming

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I’ve been an afficionado of old-school games since, well – since they were new-school games really. I just personally think that games peaked at about the point when the number of controls were less than (or equal to) the number of digits in my posession (currently ten).

Playing on the consoles of today, I find myself fumbling with controllers which have a D-pad, one or two analogue pads, and “fire” buttons on the front, sides and back. FIFA Street on the XBox is a great game, but I’d need at least three extra arms if I ever wanted to play it properly.

So emulators are the name of the game – I give the old Spectrum emulator an airing every now and again to have a bash at the still fiendishly difficult Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy 2, but my usual time-sink is SNES9X, and either Street Fighter 2 Turbo or Super Mario Kart – the greatest fighting game ever and the greatest driving game ever, respectively.

It’s just not the same using the keyboard to control the game though, so when a (now former) work colleague pointed out that RetroZone sell original SNES controllers with USB cables retrofitted, I had to have one.

It works perfectly on my Mac Mini, with no drivers or setup required at all. And this is why I haven’t achieved much for days.

PS. Game websites are horrible. Thank heavens for Wikipedia.

The Impossible Achieved

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In 1982, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum found its way into our family home. I knew immediately that I wanted to be a computer programmer, whatever they were.

But when I wasn’t hacking in BASIC, I was playing some of the first home computer games.

Manic Miner, and later Jet Set Willy 2 (I missed the original Jet Set Willy completely, for some reason) introduced me to the platform game.

The Hobbit introduced me to the text adventure, and it was no coincidence that the first game I ever wrote was a text adventure (although this was also because it was easier, and because I can’t draw sprites to save my life). The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy wasn’t released on the Spectrum, but I remember playing this, the cruellest of text adventures at around the same time. The Babel Fish Puzzle still makes me shudder to this day.

Anyway, it has been possible for a few years now to play all of these games on your Windows PC through an emulator – SPIN for the Spectrum, and WinFrotz for the Infocom series of games.

Solutions for most games have also found their way online. Here’s a walkthrough guide to completing The Hobbit, and here’s one for finishing Hitch Hiker’s. But a little-known feature of SPIN is the ability to record and play RZX files. These files record input events, to play them back at a later date. So start recording, play the game, stop recording, and save the RZX file. Now you can watch yourself play the game whenever you like. And because it’s just a recording of input events, rather than a video recording of the game, it’s only a tiny file.

The RZX archive hosts countless of these recordings of people completing the games that infuriated me as a child. Now I can finally see what happens at the end of The Hobbit without having to actually sit down and play through it myself. And I can even watch someone complete Jet Set Willy 2 – a feat I had previously assumed was impossible.

Ah, nostalgia…

Give sandwich to dog

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Ahead of the movie release of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy in a few weeks time, I’ve been playing the classic (ie. very very old) game of the same name.

The BBC have put a spruced-up (and subsequently BAFTA award-nominated) version online – with graphics (egad!). Play the game.

So it was with great interest that I came across Hanna Wallach’s writeup of a recent London event featuring Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater – both of whom worked with Douglas Adams on his IF games.

Douglas first visited Infocom to discuss possibilities for the game in 1983, whilst at MIT giving a guest lecture. The meeting was successful and it was decided that the game would go ahead, but the lecture less so. Douglas read selected excerpts from HHGTTG, including some Vogon poetry. One member of the audience stood up, ran screaming across the auditorium, crashed through the fire exit and was gone.

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.