My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of about £300 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).
But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.
Ashby Computers & Graphics Ltd, better known under their trading name of Ultimate Play The Game, were the most reclusive and secretive videogame developers of the 8-bit era. Almost never doing interviews and giving very little away when they did, they preferred to let their stream of smash-hit games do most of the talking for them. The anti-Bitmap Brothers, if you will.
The games themselves were just as enigmatic, never really explaining your goal or even how to play. You'd be told the control keys, given a bit of cryptically florid plot waffle and left to get on with it.
But even now, 37 years after the last new Ultimate release, remarkably little is known about how they managed to arrive full-fledged on the scene, already making games that most other releases of the time paled and quailed beside.
And as I'd given myself the week off writing about politics and there wasn't a poker game on, I decided to spend last night having a bit of a dig.
Galaxy Wars, released by Universal in 1979, is one of the first wave of "proper" arcade videogames (defined here as coded on ROM chips rather than being semi-mechanical or solid-state like Pong).
Running on a hacked Space Invaders board (as most of the first wave did), it actually bears a lot of similarities to Taito's 1978 blockbuster. It's got UFOs running across the top of the screen, above a field of asteroids which move one way across the screen, then drop down a level when they reach the edge and start moving back across in the opposite direction.
The screen was a monochrome reflector – sometimes supplemented by sheets of coloured cellophane to mimic a colour display – and all the sound effects are ripped straight from Invaders.
It was a pretty dull game, and other than an inexplicable Japan-only SNES port in 1995 (which seems to have been the only ever licenced home version on any format) it made very little impact on posterity.
Until this week, when it suddenly threatened to become mildly interesting.
I came by a little snippet of games-magazine history this week – via an unlikely route that needn't concern us here – and I just thought I'd share it for the historical record.
Atari ST Review was a magazine published by EMAP in 1992 and 1993, when after just 12 issues it was suddenly sold to Europress, leading to this editorial column in a suspiciously large typeface:
But alert readers might have noticed (from the slightly off alignment of the red border) that the column actually took the form of a hastily-applied sticker. Because that wasn't the editor's original leader.
So, yeah. It was on this day in 1991 that the first ever proper issue of Amiga Power (A Magazine With Tatty Shoes, or something) hit Britons’ newsagents’ shelves.
>>SUB: PLEASE CHECK IMAGE
And while vast numbers of old games magazines are now available to read as lovely friendly PDFs or similar that you can load up onto your computer or electro-tablet and flick through page by page in a gratifying manner, AP inexplicably isn’t.
I was as pleased as a big fat walrus with a free bucket of haddock today to be able to contribute to the week-long one-off revival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the start of the majestic Digitiser.
Especially when I got a lovely new Panel 4 picture from Mr Biffo (instead of money). But I got a bit distracted in the column, and forgot to talk about the thing I meant to talk about, so I'm going to talk about it now.
Seriously, all those millions in development, all the hundreds of pounds people have spent buying the PS4 and the VR headset and the game and the upgrade – how hard could it be to have it detect when you'd gone seriously off track and have the navigator go "ARGH! SHIT! OW! BLOODY HELL, GET BACK ON THE ROAD YOU MORON!", so as to not completely ruin the whole thing?
How dull-witted do you have to be, how far have you missed the point by, to obsess over every last wheelnut in the name of "realism" and then sit the player beside a virtually-real companion who keeps calmly reading out directions even as the car he's in plummets down a mountainside on its roof? For God's sake.
There's nothing about Ramboat (Genera, free, iOS and Android) that isn't interesting. The game itself is a short, punchy and fun pure arcade shooter that most obviously channels Metal Slug and Irem's much-underrated In The Hunt. Indeed, it's basically a very clever adaptation of the latter game for one-thumb control, but presented with all the beautifully-detailed character of the former.
But this isn't the article I've been meaning to write for years about the fascinating and often incredibly elegant and even revolutionary ways that developers have rejigged every traditional game genre for touchscreen devices in order to avoid going down the horribly unsatisfactory route of the "virtual d-pad".
Because the other most intriguing aspect of modern gaming*, particularly on mobile formats, is the monetisation of it. And in the case of Ramboat, the opportunity for an experiment presented itself.
The process of simply buying the Xbox One took me either three days or eight weeks, depending on how you look at it, due to a combination of how retail works these days and the gibbering random madness that is GAME's pricing and corporate structure. But I'm not even going to get into that here.
Since the demise of the Nintendo DS, I've done almost all of my videogaming on smartphones and tablets. A confluence of circumstances made traditional console formats less attractive for a variety of reasons, but also saw me spend more money on gaming than I had done in years. iOS and Android games offer a huge range of incredibly good titles at mindbogglingly tiny prices, almost all of them capable of fitting into whatever free time you have available.
(And not just because they're short, snappy arcade twitch games like Super Hexagon or Impossible Road. Classics like Civilisation and Shadowrun have been revived brilliantly to suit the format, and traditional genres such as scrolling shooters have actually been improved by touchscreen controls, with the likes of Dodonpachi and Raiden rendered far more player-friendly without reducing their fearsome difficulty one iota. Pinball games and others can finally get the aspect ratio they've always wanted.)
More to the point, it almost never takes 47 days to download one.
Robert Hughes on The Long Unravelling: “Yes , indeed , B . I’ve never known such levels of mendacious propaganda being spewed 24/7 by MSM &…” Nov 22, 06:03
Oneliner on The Long Unravelling: “Yep – better to stick to an ad hominem like ‘microbe’ Do you have any mirrors in your butt an’…” Nov 22, 05:21
Mark Beggan on The Long Unravelling: “He should have grown a moustache like Neil Gray.” Nov 22, 04:59
Breeks on The Long Unravelling: “I haven’t either, indeed it’s something of a fallacy calling them newspapers. A cursory glance in the direction of the…” Nov 22, 04:56
The Flying Iron of Doom on The Long Unravelling: “Don’t you mean “You fall out with the Tsar, you fall out of a window”? 🙂” Nov 22, 03:00
Robert Matthews on The Long Unravelling: “https://www.progressscotland.org/uploads/Progress-Scotland-Nov-Release.pdf” Nov 22, 02:51
Robert Matthews on The Long Unravelling: “https://www.progressscotland.org/uploads/Progress-Scotland-Nov-Release.pdf” Nov 22, 02:49
Robert Matthews on The Long Unravelling: “Julius Evola – The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti and the Secret Way, should steer you in the Right direction.” Nov 22, 02:43
Campbell Clansman on The Long Unravelling: “I see that I’m living rent-free in your head. … Perhaps you’d explain how childish name-calling advances your cause?” Nov 22, 02:23
Michael Laing on The Long Unravelling: “Perhaps you could explain to us, Camp Bellend, how Scotland benefits from being in the UK? How does having governments…” Nov 21, 23:37
Michael Laing on The Long Unravelling: “It’s deliberate. He’s an unelected UK state plant. He’s just continuing the sabotage and destruction that’s been ongoing since 2014.” Nov 21, 23:11
Zander Tait on The Long Unravelling: “You do like your facts embedded in your fantasy future Dumpster CamelMan. Unfortunately for you Cancer FannyBaws the last two…” Nov 21, 22:58
Shug on The Long Unravelling: “I do hope Swinney and co turn up at Salmond’s memorial so we can tell them what we think of…” Nov 21, 22:52
wull on The Long Unravelling: “Flynn should also have known that Alex Salmond also donated one of the two salaries he had at one point…” Nov 21, 22:39
Campbell Clansman on The Long Unravelling: “Glasgow is an Indy stronghold. If these areas vote 2-1 Unionist parties, all the Alba/Salvo fantasies and all the lies…” Nov 21, 22:37
Zander Tait on The Long Unravelling: “There ain’t no medals for his kind of bravery.” Nov 21, 21:38
Mac on The Long Unravelling: “I have not bought a newspaper in 20 years but I have an X subscription which I bought just a…” Nov 21, 21:30
Mac on The Long Unravelling: “What Craig Murray is doing is beyond brave. I really thought he had a death wish this last couple of…” Nov 21, 20:56
Ian Brotherhood on The Long Unravelling: “Watching that right now. It’s remarkable, listening to these people, (regardless of whether you agree with them or not) and…” Nov 21, 20:50
znovak on The Long Unravelling: “Craig Murray’s argument about purity is fallacious. When organic chemists say that that the product of synthesis was 95% pure,…” Nov 21, 20:46
Zander Tait on The Long Unravelling: “And you are a thing of wonder, Camel Humpster TransMan. Let’s see, the last 2 polls on Scottish Independence clearly…” Nov 21, 20:31
Campbell Clansman on The Long Unravelling: “There are four council elections today. Three are in Glasgow, an SNP stronghold. I wonder if the “Indy” parties (assuming…” Nov 21, 20:12
George Ferguson on The Long Unravelling: “I was surprised Flynn didn’t know that Ross donated one of his salaries to charity when questioned on the Sunday…” Nov 21, 19:41
Zander Tait on The Long Unravelling: “And, of course, let’s not forget the double salary, double staff and double expenses. There are few more impressive sights…” Nov 21, 19:17
George Ferguson on The Long Unravelling: “Stephen Flynn finding out that double jobbing motivated by naked ambition is not a good look especially when sitting politicians…” Nov 21, 19:09
Stevie on The Long Unravelling: “Actually, people have been asking for decades what happened to huge donations left to the SNP in deceased wills” Nov 21, 18:45
Al Dossary on The Long Unravelling: “Cant watch that and Danny Haiphong / Mark Sleboda at the same time unfortunately……..” Nov 21, 18:33
twathater on The Long Unravelling: “NO he”s just a fucking corrupt moron elected by imbeciles” Nov 21, 18:25
Mia on The Long Unravelling: ““Close Holrood” No. I have a much better solution: get a political party to stand on a manifesto to: gain…” Nov 21, 18:23
twathater on The Long Unravelling: “I vote Alan that we get rid of the BIGGER more incompetent and more corrupt WM parliament and while we…” Nov 21, 18:23
