Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello viewers! As you'll be aware, being a gamer of many years I have played most games. Well some games anyway, mostly on 80's and 90's machines. But keen viewers will be aware that I'm always seeking a new gaming thrill. To this end I spent time this very evening playing 3 classic, and often highly rated, games that are new to me (or at least I might have seen them in action years ago but have never played with them for any length of time).

First up Xenon from the Bitmap Brothers (Amiga). A game with alot of hype behind it, I was left wondering where the gamplay was. Looking and playing like a SEUCK game put together by a 12 year old, I was left totally cold. Sampled sounds and cheesy graphics straight from a PD game, I just couldn't see the appeal. Time has evidently not been kind.

Rating: 411 Bananas


Then I turned my attention to James Pond on the Amiga. Cutesy? Possibly, but it all just left me cold. Annoying music, average graphics and terrible gameplay that just left me feeling annoyed. I'd rather smell rotting fish than play this again. Still better than Xenon though.


Rating: 483 Bananas


Skweek (CPC) originated on the ST in France but was quickly ported to the CPC (what with it being the leading format in France for years). To call it a puzzler is an injustice as it mixes in a decent level of arcade action. Nice graphics, decent puzzles and some nice tunes mean this an all round good game that is just crying out for an iPhone conversion.


Rating: 895 Bananas

Skweek is good fun. Had it on the amiga.

Video:



Reminded me of the game Pippo from Mastertronic:



There was also a similar Hewson game that was set in a maze. But the name escapes me. That also predates Skweek.

I just got Lotus Turbo Challenge 3 working on WinUAE.

Wow.... Just fuck me.......

What a lazy shoehorned piece of crap that was. Lotus 2 was a fine game with its limitations. The game looked good and was genuinely challenging. It also had some great tunes and a fantastic intro.

3 does away with all that. Crap music. shit intro, crap courses and stupid "turbo zones" where you press the fire button for a speed boost. The sampled "checkpoint" speech has gone as has much of the games charm. In fact 3 is so shit that even though it uses much of the code from 2, it manages to highlight all the problems with the second game that had been glossed over by decent course design and alot of polish. I felt insulted having downloaded it, let alone what the poor sods who paid 25 quid for it back in the day must have felt.

Utter horse shit. I really hope the magazines back in the day gave it a right slating for being so lazy. It's just Lotus 2, but shit!

Score: 377 Bananas. Just plain lazy. This is the kind of shit EA pull off every year with FIFA.

For the record I'd give Lotus 2 a score of 781 Bananas. It's a decent enough game but the lack of crashing, slightly odd handling and the fact that your car sounds like a Dyson are all minus points on what is actually a very polished game with courses I really enjoy.

James Pond isn't great. James Pond 2: Robocod is fantastic, though.

Lotus 1 was the best, closely followed by Lotus 2. Lotus 3 is dogshit.

I've only played Lotus 1 on the Speccy. Felt it was hampered by not using the full screen when in single player mode, which is something I believe the 16 bits also suffered from. It was like playing your computer through someones letterbox.

The 2 player split screen was impressive on the 8 bits mind because it was far more detailed then the previous attempts at it such as in Pitstop 2 on the 64. Yes there was slight slowdown, but impressive.

Hmm, the CPC game wins. I for one am somewhat suspicious...

I could be remembering wrongly, but I think Lotus was full screen in single-player on the Amiga. The spectrum version wasn't a bad conversion but it was too easy.

Lotus 2, possibly, Lotus 1, I think the lower half of teh screen was a car in a garage.

The 3 games were chosen at random. I never expected Xenon to be as bad as it is.

Lotus Espirit Turbo Challenge

The sequel?

Yeah, it was me getting it mixed up with other games... probably Road Rash, oddly. On the plus side though, it prompted me to give WINUAE a try again as I've finally got a computer that can cope with it and it runs Lotus rather nicely, so I might have to have a nose at other Amiga games to go back to. Nice to see the Gremlin games are available to download freely too

Chinny top tip: Create config files for different types of Amiga eg A500, A1200 etc. Ensure each one is setup properly and has the correct Kickstart. It is fiddly but once its done its done and life becomes much easier.

Somwhow, Xenon 2 manages to be worse. Although I think it got good reviews solely for its soundtrack if memory serves.

I was always suspicious of any developer that only did 16 bit games in that era. It mostly meant that their games were all style over gameplay and as such would be exposed on a platform without flash graphics and fancy sound.

When you consider Lemmings made it onto the Speccy, although the graphics were limited the gameplay lost nothing.

Xenon of course did come out on the 8 bits and was quickly forgotten about as there were many better shooters. Which kind of proves my point about style over substance.

I have to (mildly) disagree about Lemmings on the Speccy. They did a decent job, but it was slow.

Youse all want to play Supercars and Supercars 2.

I really liked Supercars on the Speccy. The music was awful though, and part of the tune would cut out every time you went round a corner because they just played the sound effects on the same channel.

The CPC version did this as well. Which was odd, because the ST version (with identical music as it also shared the same sound chip) omitted the fx and just had a choice of either music or fx.

Since the 8 bit versions were developed after the ST and Amiga versions you can only think that someone thought it a good idea to have 1 channel of the music cut every time your car made a skidding noise.

I loved Supercars on the CPC. A great game really well converted from the 16 bits. My mate who had it on his ST had no objections to playing the CPC version at all.

Evening chums. I have been playing more games this evening that I haven't played before, or if I have I have given them scant attention.

Creatures 2 - C64

Much hyped and with good presentation. However the difficulty level starts at impossible and jacks it up from there. Nice cartoony graphics but far from an improvement on the first game. Worth a go if you think you are hard enough but for the rest of us stick with the original.

Rating: 669 Bananas


Auf Wiedersehen Monty - Spectrum

You know Jet Set Willy? Well take that game, give it abit of polish and then try and pass it off as something new. It's dated 1987 and feels so dated for that era. It's Jet Set Willy with better graphics and sound, but none of that "just one more go" appeal.

Rating: 585 Bananas


Sensible Golf - Amiga

OK so I have played this before but I thought I would revisit it as it always gets such bad press. You know, it isn't bad really. I once spent a holiday playing Mario Golf on a Gameboy Colour I had got on Ebay, and this game has exactly the same kind of appeal. Perhaps Sensible fans expected more arcade gameplay, but I think this is one of the better takes on golf of the era. My only complaint is the loading times involved between courses.

Rating: 863 Bananas.

xenon was only liked because the cool bitmap bros image after speedball, wasn't it? horrible stuff...
Swiv is the only vertical amiga shmup still worth playing imo

and supercars 2 rules!

Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine were pretty much the only Bitmap Bros games I liked. They were both utterly spectacular games though and I genuinely still play both every now and then to this day.

Lotus 2 was easily the best of the Lotus games... in fact I'd go as far as to say it was my favourite racing game of it's type on the Amiga. Certainly the closest thing there to an Outrun and I obviously include the actual Amiga port of Outrun in that. Some of my fond memories of that game also come from the fact I had a dodgy copy of Lotus 2 for the Acorn Archimedes, so I could have a sneaky play on the school computers in my breaks!

I loved the Super Cars games. Myself and one of my best mates at school would play the original endlessly on his Amiga 500.

I also sympathise with Chinny's thoughts on 8-bit conversions exposing the shit games. Lemmings was another I had for the Archimedes, so when I wasn't playing it at school, I was playing it on my mate's Amiga. But personally, I still think (and I know I'm going to get the piss taken for this) that the best version was the Game Gear one. Obviously it was portable, so that helped, but the conversion was stunning. Brilliantly transferred to an 8-bit, with all the graphical and musical charm completely intact.

If you'd said "Atari Lynx" I might have agreed with you. It's the Gamegear version but on an infinitely better screen.

To be fair, I haven't played the Atari Lynx version. The Lynx was a 16-bit console though.

Barely. In the same way the Jaguar was "64 bit". It had a 6502 modified to use 16 bit address space. A real 16 bit CPU would slaughter it.