Posted by boyo on Apr 20, 2010 19:51 (Apr 20, 2010 19:51)
after an hour’s tinkering, only to find yourself out of pocket and sporting a severely sprained wrist.
That's perhaps being a little pessimistic. As previously noted, there was a whole lot of love put into many of these games. Companies like Ultimate and Durell became by-words for creativity, and the individual genius of characters like Julian Gollop shone through their games.
Beeeep......BEEP!
It's hard to pin-point precisely how originality was able to flourish so widely during this era. Perhaps it was down to the relatively small size of programming teams (often just a lone bedroom coder) or the crippling technical restrictions of the development systems. Whatever the case, it undoubtedly produced classics of enduring influence.[/link]
The beauty of the BASIC language meant that anyone could try their hand at joining this hallowed pantheon of game-designing legends... in theory. In practise a Spec-chum could spend all afternoon typing in several pages of code from a book or magazine, only to encounter one of two dispiriting results. Either the listings contained one or more typing errors which rendered the program useless and unusable (without the further programming knowledge necessary to locate and fix the problems), or the amazing game you'd created involved a small 'o' character trying to evade capture by several 'x' characters on an otherwise blank screen. It seemed that some kind of mathematical mastermind was actually required to achieve anything more useful. The closest an average Joe could ever really get to being an 8-bit programmer would be to buy some threadbare jumpers and not shave for a week.
ZX Spectrum +
Sir Clive's little black box of fun was a doorway to strange worlds, frustrating quirks and a lifetime of gaming addiction. It wasn't all piracy and social inadequacy, however. A healthy number of titles with two player modes meant there were plenty of opportunities to share experiences with a pal. Spec-chums could even play Target: Renegade in simultaneous multiplayer (take THAT, C64 owners!) and up to eight (count 'em) could crowd around Chaos like dark acolytes, if somebody didn't mind sitting on the power pack. With groundbreaking games, cheap software and a distinctive culture, the Speccy was a home computing triumph; and we loved every bit of it. Even the rubber keys.
Aaaah the speccy plus. The plus was my weapon of choice in the playground 8-bit wars of the mid-1980s - it had "real" keys and a spangly new "reset" button! Hah! I was the envy of my rubber-key-owning mates who were left to unplug and plug-back-in their power leads! Yaaaaah!! ;)
May 24, 2011 12:15:49 (
360 days ago
)
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