Be Excellent To Each Other

The rack of budget games in the newsie.... It was the iPhone app store in an era where uncool bearded men in suits still ruled computing. In later years budget games would become associated with re-releases as pioneered by the Ricochet label from Mastertronic. Games like Dan Dare, Brian Jacks, Exploding Fist, and Tau-Ceti being early examples of games being re-released on budget as early as 1987.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm talking about the original content. Games that were never released at full price, never advertised and were only afforded the briefest of reviews. We spent ages analysing all the cassette boxes in the newsies deciding how to spend our precious money on these games. Sometimes we stumbled across classics, often we actually ignored the classics and bought shite.

In this thread we salute the best that "budget" had to offer. Not the glory seekers like Dizzy that everyone knows about. The unsung heroes of excellence that only members of this forum could appreciate.

I give you my first game:


Colony - Bulldog (Mastertronic)
Studio: Icon Design
CPC. Spectrum, C64, MSX, Atari 8 Bit
Year: 1987
Cost: £1.99





Atari 8 bit version

A resource management game meets a shoot-em-up. Really curious little gem that tied me up for hours. You are a droid who has to maintain a settlement by keeping the giant bugs out and harvesting mushrooms for cash. The bugs will eat anything, fences, solar panels and mushrooms.

When you harvest the mushrooms they are collected by spaceship (which can also resupply you with all sorts of interesting things such as bug traps and fencing if you have the cash).

There are several buildings around the colony, each of which has different purpose. Some are stores for replacement items (which you'll need to replenish when the resupply spaceship comes), others are things such as a recharge station for your droid or even a building where you can call the resupply spaceship, order stuff and activate the landing beacon).

Although the colony is fenced, the fencing is incomplete. You'll need to plug the gaps. You'll also need to keep on top of your mushroom harvest (picking mushrooms and planting seeds) as well as keeping an eye on the solar panels. If the bugs eat too many of the panels the city will start to lose power. If the panels or fencing is only partially damaged, you can return it to its respective store and get it repaired. But this still uses up valuable time.

It's a delicate balancing act and the game gently ramps up the pressure as resupply ships become less frequent and larger numbers of bugs start running around. While you fend off the little buggers from eating your precious mushroom crop (that is your only source of cash), over the other side of the city they have broken through the fence and are eating the solar panels. Worse, the resulting power drain means you are unable to activate the landing beacon required for the incoming spaceship. If this happens the ship will miss its target and dump your valuable supplies in the wilderness outside of the colony, leaving it at the mercy of the giant insects.

It's a game that is enormous fun and was worth well beyond the mere £1.99 it cost.

Rating: 920 Bananas (based on CPC version)

Full Wikipedia entry which explains the gameplay better than I can -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(video_game)

this sounds superb! thank you for taking the time to describe it.

Excellent.

I vaguely remember playing this on the Speccy, but looking on World of Spectrum, I'd forgotten how ropey it looked. I think I was getting it confused with Amaurote, which did look the part.

The yellow background colour on the Speccy version makes it look naff, but there's no reason why it shouldn't play as well as the CPC version. I wouldn't say it is a game where graphics matter that much. It's the balancing of the harvest, battling bugs and keeping the solar farm running.

Well I certainly remember putting some time into it, so the graphics can't have mattered too much.

Did you find the Easter Egg?

IIRC on the Speccy version if you press the right keys on the menu the computer "reboots" and turns into a C64. Hardly Lightfarce but worth a chuckle.

Rebelstar must surely be the greatest budget game of all time.

Ah remember when codemasters had the policy of great games at affordable prices? Amazing. Of course they eventually decided that even Dizzy was no longer budget fodder...

(and even worth many thousands of pounds these days...)

I don't think this was a particularly high profile release. I remember it very clearly and I played it a fuckton, so here's my nomination. (I think it meets Chinny's criteria!)

CHRONOS on the 48K ZX Spectrum. Released by Mastertronic at £1.99

First off, let's deal with the jaw-droppingly insanely good music. This is from the sound chip on a 48K ZX Spectrum, not a 128K Spectrum with the AY sound chip. How the fuck Tim Follin got this out of the humble 48K Speccy I have no idea.

This is with ONE FUCKING SOUND CHANNEL. Incredible. I remember just sitting there listening to it over and over again through a shitty little speaker on a crappy 14 inch portable telly.



You could argue that the game itself was a bit of a let-down after that, but I really liked it. This was the age of horizontal/vertical shooters in the arcades, with newer stuff like Space Harrier and Out Run pushing the envelope, and whilst I knew my humble Speccy could never match them, Chronos did a reasonable job of delivering a pretty good Shoot Em Up experience.

There was a boss fight half way through the game (very easy, you could pretty much stay in one place on the far left of the screen and blast away in safety) and a boss fight at the end (which was exactly the same as the first boss fight!), but other than that one level just segued into the next with a palette change, (I recall one had a yellow on red palette which was a bit hard on the eyes and really upset my cheap portable telly).

There were no power ups and no shop modifications, just your ship and constant stream of bullets. An autofire joystick was a must!

A complete playthrough took around 35 minutes and I could consistently finish the game quite comfortably. (Which I did, many many times.) It also scrolled the odd little funny message past as part of the landscape. When you finished the game it looped right back to the start, which is when I turned my Speccy off, I don't remember ever doing multiple loops of it.

I dunno why I liked it so much, times were simpler and we were all poor! It was my kind of 'go to' game if I had 30 minutes to fill and not much of an inspired idea what to do with it. And if I'd done all the masturbation I could usefully manage for that day.

It reviewed very averagely as you can see below, but I always had a bit of a soft spot for it.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0000951

And here it is - IN ACTION! Seriously, this used to pass for entertainment.

I used to enjoy Chronos too and I loved the music too (along with Agent X). I still remember the cheat for that one too - typing 'jing it baby' to get an autofiring laser or something.

*shakes with fury* Postman. Pat.

Codies were abit of a sausage factory if we're honest. They killed off the truly innovative games in favour of safe rehashes of games and formats that had been successful for them. A game like Colony would have never come out on the Codemasters label.

BMX Sim, Formula 1 Sim, and Jet Ski Sim (+ their sequels) were all the same game with different graphics and physics (as if anyone knew what game physics were in the 80's). The Dizzy games were also accompanied by Seymour which were Dizzy games in all but name. All good games but very formulaic and very dated now.

And then they got into the habit of sticking Dizzy and Seymour into arcade games which rather overshadowed just how good both Kwik Snax (NOT C64 version which is shit) and Bubble Dizzy were. Both are games that could happily port to the iThing today and sell by the bucket load.

Ah, but you say, what about Rock Star Ate My Hamster? Well that wasn't a budget game, it was a re-release. Codemasters tried to launch a new £4.99 pricepoint which was halfway to being a full price game. But the idea flopped and the games released were stuck out on budget at £1.99 soon after.

CJ's Elephant Antics is a good game though. A Nintendo/Sega style platformer on the C64 and Speccy (although the Speccy suffers from some graphical issues). They actually ported it to the NES as well.

Chronos is great. A Nemesis/Gradius rip off for £1.99 that was ten times better than the Speccy or CPC versions of Nemesis.

Yes, once you'd seen Speccy R-Type you'd never touch Chronos again, but for a while it was one of the better 8 bit shooters. Certainly good value.

No Pat! Don't round up the sheep! DON'T!

Codemasters classic: ATV Simulator. One of my favourite games ever.

Can you 'be' Lew Grade?

Good reviews so far, thanks.

I've just entered £1.99 in 1987 into the Bank of England's unnecessarily animated inflation calculator, and it equates to around a fiver in today's prices. Which feels about right for pocket money purchases, I think.

Unfortunately, my earliest memories of buying Speccy budget games include -

Viper III -


Tank Trax - A very early Worms-type game. No AI, so two-player only, involving two tanks. Used to play this a fair bit despite the flaws; the main one being that you could blow holes in the mountain and the ground above it wouldn't drop down, so you could effectively drill through the scenery with enough shots.

However, some years later I got a multipack set of games (a Dixons/Currys type compilation with several plain boxes of bundled budget games and on one of the tapes was Sport of Kings, a MAD Games game from 1986 (£2.99 rather than £1.99) and my brother and I played this loads.



One unusual feature of the game was the Currah speech support, so there was a rudimentary commentary during the race. Unfortunately by this point, my two 48k machines were dead and the speech synthesiser didn't work with the +2A I had so I had to make do without. Although looking back at the video, it looks like I wasn't missing much.

Anyway, you tailored the game before you started to be as complicated as you wanted it to be, from the number of horses in the game to whether weights and jockeys made a difference. Then several of you could place various bets (I think it was limited to Win, Each Way, Straight Forecast and Reverse Forecast) and then spend the next few minutes shouting at the telly as the animated races played out.

Although it was basically just a horse betting sim, it was put together really well, with plenty of nice animated touches here and there.

Just noticed that World of Spectrum have the very compilation listed. Some good stuff in there.

I enjoy pointing out to people that the skeleton key in Magnetic Billiards still costs less in real terms than the £2.99 Zub did on release.

Which is why it must be so much fun when you're someone like Jeff Minter and loads of idiots have a go at you for having the audacity to price your iOS games at the wallet-busting tier two level (£1.49 in the UK).

There were some fab cheapo games though, in the old days. Thrust, Kikstart II and Zolyx (which I recently discovered is a massive rip-off of PC game Antix) spring to mind, although the last of those should be avoided if you're a Spectrum owner.

I loved Zolyx on the Spectrum. I might have low standards though.

"Right then, let's go fuck Pat's life up!"

I bought Nemesis at full price on the Spectrum, £9.99 IIRC.

EDIT - Turns out it was £7.99, so it's not quite that bad.

It was shockingly bad and looked nothing at all like the screenshots Sinclair User had printed. It was an absolute horror to play as well.

Ten quid was an awful lot of money to me at the time. It was an early and brutal introduction to the world of gaming press corruption.

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/pt1.htm

Someone should do a hack to turn it into a version of the first GTA so you could gun down Mrs Hubbard.

Here's the game across most formats (but no Speccy).



Of course, to reflect the modern post office, Pat would steal half the parcels, "deliver" them by placing them under a bush/in your bin and only deliver letters after 2pm. Instead of cups of tea, he'll smoke a crack pipe.

Excellent video, though I wish he'd played on Hard at least once as I bet his reaction to Miss Hubbard throwing herself in front of the van or the crappy controls making him plow into a wall would have been great.

I remember a shareware game on the Amiga, me and my mates put hours and hours in to this taking it in turns, but I can't remember anything about it other than the music, which was a "remixed" version of Old MacDonald. Does anyone know what this was?

Postman Bastarding Pat

Elevation by Lee C. Wilson, Assassins PD Collection, Disk #47?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m1MdypH3Pw

I had a bit of a go at the Spectrum version yesterday, but found the implementation to be a bit pants and consequently rather frustrating. (So the reviewers at Crash did know what they were talking about!)

I really like the concept behind the game, though, so I'll see if I can track down a CPC emulator and a tape image, snapshot, or whatever CPC emulators use...



Me and my mate from down the road used to play that one loads when we were kids - really simple, but amazing fun!

Here's the CPC dsk image - http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=cpcs;i ... m%2Ecom%2F

The placing of items can still be a pain but I always thought that once you got the hang of it it wasn't a huge problem

Here's the CPC dsk image - http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=cpcs;i ... m%2Ecom%2F

The placing of items can still be a pain but I always thought that once you got the hang of it it wasn't a huge problem

You could also try the Atari 8 bit version which I very vaguely remember

online java emulated version here : http://www.xlatari.com/game.php?id=1263

Or you can download a tape image here : http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-40 ... _1123.html

Did you all think (as I did) that Codemasters were the only 8 bit budget publisher still going? Mastertronic doesn't count, it's not the original company. Well.......

http://www.alternativesoft.co.uk/about.html

I was surprised as well! Wonder if they still do all their own duplication in-house?

CJ's Elephant Antics
Publisher: Codemasters
Platform: C64, Spectrum, ST, Amiga and NES (nb ST, Amiga and NES versions not reviewed here)
Developer: Genesis (C64) Big Red Software (Spectrum)
Price:£3.99
Year: 1991



The Great Giana Sisters proved the C64 could carry off a console beating platformer, but CJ's Elephant Antics still seemed fairly revolutionary when I first played it on the Speccy. I picked this up as part of Codemasters full price Cartoon Classics compilation but it was also released as a standalone budget game (by this time inflation and VAT hikes had pushed the standard pricepoint up to £3.99).

The plot of the game is just some cutesy crap and isn't important. What is important is the game has large levels to work through. Gameplay feels fluid and there is much to explore. Proceeding further into the game feels rewarding as a good platformer should.

Baddies are killed by shooting peanuts from your trunk or throwing some of a limited supply of bombs. This is useful for dealing with enemies on lower platforms. Each level also has a large end of level baddie who needs to be killed. It's all standard stuff and has been done a 1000 times. But back then a scrolling action platformer wasn't quite so common on the 8 bits.

The two 8 bit versions have the same layouts but look quite different.



The C64 version is polished with nice graphics and some smooth scrolling and a great SID tune that still sticks in my head all these years later. Commodore users also get to take part in a cutey bonus game between levels in which you have to catch balloons.

Onto the Speccy (which is the version I had)



The Speccy version is a conversion of the C64 version and is missing some stuff. Gone is the between level bonus game. Also gone is any pretence of smooth scrolling. With no hardware scrolling the Speccy resorts to scrolling large chunks of pixels at a time. To be fair you do soon get used to this but it can be jarring when having just played the C64 version. Graphics are better defined than the C64 version and lots of colour is used, but the usual colour clash probems rear their head. 128 owners do get a great set of tunes though.

CPC version? No! They never released one. Given how much screen memory the CPC used, the scrolling problems would have been far greater than the Speccy version. Modern programmers would be able to tackle it but in 1991 they probably thought it would take too long to be worth it. Shame really.

There's another console-esque feature the game has up its sleeve. 2 player co-op! You can have two CJ's on screen at once and can play through the game together. Common on consoles but rare on 8 bits.

CJ is an odd game. With some more polish it would match up to many full price platformers. The C64 version is the better of the two and feels like a console game. No surprise that a NES version was later developed. The Speccy version is fighting the hardware and works despite of the platform not because of it. With no hardware assistance with the sprites and scrolling combined with horrific colour clash issues in places, it does drag the game down.

Seek it out on either platform. It's not the best platformer on either computer by any means, but in the C64's case its a good example of the old girl taking on the consoles and arguably delivering a decent game at a mere fraction of the price of NES games. Mayhem In Monsterland it ain't, but for 4 quid who's arguing?

Rating: 754 Bananas (Spectrum) 789 Bananas (C64)

I played that quite a lot with my brother back in the day (and the sequel). Seems odd that I know the first level so well, but the second level quickly becomes unrecognisable. I guess we weren't too good then.

That is it, well done!

Given away on a ('Michael Jackson' - Ed) cover disk as well.

Wasn't it the other way round? A free copy of ('Michael Jackson' - Ed) was given away with the disks?

I think I had a compilation of 5 games with a CJ game in. The one that stands out was Steg the Slug though.

Burp out bubbles to save your larvae and blow them to safety.

The disks were the reason I bought it. The mag was shite. Same with SU, bought it for the tape and not the mag.

I just wish the ('Michael Jackson' - Ed) disk compiler had worked for AP instead. Then I wouldn't have had to decide between excellent content, or decent disks.

Linda Barker at YS had a lot of love for Steg. I've played it a couple of times it has never grabbed me:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue84/Pages/YourSinclair8400015.jpg

Do also check out the previous page where J.Nash J.Pillar reviews Count Duckula 2 and gives it 9%. SU hilariously gave it 64%.



I say again, 64%.

Don't ask why, but all this talk of budget games led me to download VICE and complete Subsunk. Took about an hour. Memory must be going.

That happened quite a lot around that time. I remember when Lucy Hickman derailed the already flailing Zzap!64 further, and the budget scores were suddenly ramped up to insane levels. You'd have the comments saying something like "this is rubbish—avoid" and a score of 60%. Still, it's not like that kind of thing disappeared from games reviews—if anything, it's very much active. (Bizarrely, I once got booted off a games website, which may or may not rhyme with Gocket Pamer, for generously giving Putt Touch Golf 2/10. The then-editor argued it should have gotten a 4 because he'd tested it and "it worked", got angry with I very much disagreed, and then never commissioned me again. Reading that back now, it's been oddly subbed, too. Horrors!)

Wasn't it Amiga Action that claimed a game should never get below a certain amount as the publishers had gone to a lot of effort and the game loaded, etc?

As for the revived Crash, it amusingly tried to ape YS but never came close. On the first issue back they had a 2 page editorial which moaned that Future tried to buy them to merge them with YS and what bastards they were. 5 issues later it was relegated to a logo on the cover of Sinclair User. This amused me greatly.

When I met Roger Kean seven or so years back, he was still pissed off about that. All the old Newsfield lot knew Crash could survive, but they were overruled by the new people with MONEY and POWER, who forced some half-arses IP-swap for something that never went anywhere. Mind you, Zzap! also disappeared up its own Commodore Force-shaped arse shortly afterwards, which was a great pity. It all went wrong when they stopped using those black-and-white reviewer heads, clearly.

Likewise, Official PS magazine said that anything 4/10 or higher was 'still worth buying'.