Hitler has only got one ball, the other is only very small...
Posted by boyo on Dec 15, 2010 21:10 (Dec 15, 2010 21:10)
There's one or two British necessities when it comes to a complete Christmas experience: hearing Noddy Holder's winter war cry floating on the thrice conditioned air of an overfull shopping centre, selection boxes that are twice the price of the individual choccie bars contained inside them, your grandmother making you drink Advocat "snowballs", socks and aftershave, the cat pulling over the Christmas tree and The Great Escape on the telly.
Well, since those trendy, ex-yuppie dorks who now run the BBC have decided that good viewing is filling the Chrimbo schedule with morbid soap operas and poncy dancing programs, we purists must turn to the good old Speccy to ensure our Yuletide celebrations involve the cheesy embarrassment of stiff collared Gestapo.
Fortunately, The Great Escape is perhaps the finest RPG ever seen on the Spectrum, with game mechanics so subtle and advanced we're only recently seeing their like again today. Players take on the role of All 'Mercan Steve and attempt to bust themselves (not the entire prison population including the mole faced forger played by Donald Pleasance) out of the POW camp. But stay your itchy trigger finger, Mr McQueen, because The Great Escape is more a cerebral challenge than the "boots first 'n' brawn" we might expect. This intriguing title is a brilliant meld of many multi-coloured genres, and could perhaps best be described as a Skool Daze-Tenchu-Dizzy-Zelda-Head Over Heels crossbreed (even though it came out before most of those other games, but you get what I'm saying).
Surely the first game to ever take the central character's morale into active consideration, much of the sticky sweetness of the movie inspiration is gone, replaced instead by a more cursive approach to war crime imprisonment. The guards fear the patrolling Commandant every bit as much as the player, while the hide and seek gameplay establishes a very personal link between the prison leader and the player. A brilliant cross and change betwixt protagonist and antagonist that even Steve failed to portray so expressively.
Running through the Great Escape on your Speccy is a terrific way to spend Christmas, and for all the traditionalists out there, I'd like to suggest there's no finer homage to classic holiday entertainment than spending Boxing Day in solitude, bouncing a ball against a wall.
Dec 16, 2010 20:31:05 (
Dec 16, 2010 20:31
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