Wings Over Scotland

Super-veteran readers may recall the story of Scorpion Software, the amateur games development collective I formed with a pal in the early 1980s to create largely rubbish games mostly written in BASIC for the ZX Spectrum and the Dragon 32.

If you read the 2008 retrospective linked in that paragraph, you’ll note that it offers a bit of constructive self-critique on some of the games we produced, and the other day I accidentally stumbled into following my own advice.

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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.

It’s basically become magic.

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As alert readers will know by now, there’s nothing I like more than preserving weird old videogame stuff that’s in danger of being lost to posterity, unless perhaps it’s seeing games ported to strange formats they were never designed to run on, years or even decades after those formats ceased to be current.

So man, what a stroke of luck!

What’s all this, then?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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*27

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.

Or is it? Or IS it? OR IS IT?

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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.

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It happens at 2m 30s, if you're in a hurry.

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.

I despair, I really do.

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.

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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.

What you should know is what happened next.

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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.

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