Wings Over Scotland

In the modern world, presentation and packaging is absolutely central to how we experience (and sell) everything. When videogame arcades tried to break that rule, it almost led them to disaster.

If you went to a shop to buy the latest blockbuster videogame, handed over your £50 and were given in return a blank unboxed disc with the name scrawled on it in marker pen, you’d be really unhappy about it – even though the disc would contain the exact same game code and play exactly the way it does when it comes in a pretty case.

It’d be like ordering a cup of tea in a cafe and have them bring you a cup of cold water, a teabag and a kettle – you’ve technically got everything that you need, but it’s not the experience you were hoping for.

And yet, for many years – and to some extent even today – that’s exactly the way we treated arcade games.

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For a number of years now, Twitter has been an unmitigated force for evil – a barely-disguised attempt at mass social engineering on a scale unprecedented since the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels, undertaken by an unelected, unaccountable global corporation (it doesn’t even have a published address in the UK, either physical or digital, something I can’t believe is legal).

Attempts have been made at creating an alternative, including Parler and various branches of a protocol called Mastodon, but they’ve all been terrible. The latest effort, Gettr, looks a lot more promising. Available on the web or as free iOS and Android apps, it works exactly like Twitter, except that you get 777 characters instead of 280 – the interfaces are so similar you could easily forget which you were using.

It has roots in the American right, so has immediately been attacked in apocalyptic terms by woke activists, but is open to anyone and many on the left who’ve been silenced by Twitter – mostly for defending women’s rights – have signed up. I made an account yesterday, and despite not mentioning it to anyone anywhere I had over 200 followers by this morning, most of them UK feminist and LGB campaigners.

(Because communications platforms are neutral by default, even if people you don’t agree with are allowed to use them too. Hitler loved trains, that doesn’t make you a Nazi if you get on one. We don’t boycott the seaside just because Stalin had a beach house and you don’t have to follow or listen to any of the right-wing people on Gettr just because they’re there.)

It plainly doesn’t yet have the breadth of Twitter – because most of those signing up so far have specific political agendas of various sorts, rather than being people who just like posting cute pictures of their cats and whatnot – but it’s hit 1.5m users in 11 days, something that took Twitter more than two years, so that could change quickly.

There’s also no guarantee that it won’t become just as evil as Twitter, of course, but for now it seems worth giving it the benefit of the doubt if you like the idea of social media but don’t want to get instantly banned and/or witch-hunted to death if any of your views diverge in the tiniest possible way from those of the hyper-intolerant Twitler Youth who have somehow captured most of Scottish and UK politics. Maybe see you there.

Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (below, 20-1)

20. GAUNTLET
Arcade: 1985, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

Gauntlet was probably the first ever Spectrum coin-op conversion that I saw and thought “That is to all intents and purposes arcade-perfect”.

Because US Gold’s big Christmas blockbuster title for 1986 – oddly coded by Gremlin Graphics – looked like this:

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Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (below, 40-21), Part 5 (20-1)

40. PING PONG
Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1986, Imagine

This one was quite hard to place. It’s almost certainly the slimmest game in this entire chart, offering just five stages of perhaps the simplest sport in existence without even the superficial novelty of different opponents.

On the other hand, if you’re going to execute something as exquisitely as this, how much does that matter?

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Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (below, 60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (20-1)

60. PANG
Arcade: 1989, Mitchell Corporation
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Look, nobody’s more surprised than me.

I was expecting this to be challenging for the top 10. The triumphant Arkanoid-style updated return to the Speccy of the arcade game that started out years earlier as Bubble Buster/Cannon Ball has it all – the graphics, the music, all the levels, even a decent splash of colour.

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Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (below, 80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (20-1)

80. CRYSTAL CASTLES
Arcade: 1983, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

On first glance, Crystal Castles looks like an awfully big ask for the Spectrum.

A fast-moving, colourful, trackball-controlled game in a diagonal 3D perspective looks like an obviously impossible feat, so when you see what a mostly-fine job Andromeda Software made of it, it just makes it more annoying that the ship was substantially spoiled for a ha’porth of tar, in the shape of the almost total absence of sound.

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Recently, just for fun and to pass the time now that I’ve retired from political journalism, I thought I’d compile a totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100, also compiled and written by me, was published in 1991.

(Phew, made it with eight hours of 2021 to spare.)

There’s a whole torrid story attached to the undertaking, but meh, some other time. Here’s the entirety of the chart in one place. It takes about a thousand years to load as a single page because YouTube is such a big whiny baby, so I’ve split it into five.

Part 1 (below, 100-81)
Part 2 (80-61)
Part 3 (60-41)
Part 4 (40-21)
Part 5 (20-1)

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We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.

The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.

So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.

I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.

My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.

Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.

Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.

This is the last piece of data from our recent Panelbase poll.

Click image to enlarge. Full data tables here.

I’ve just remembered that I meant to leave this pinned to the front page when I shut Wings down as a blog, so here it is. It’s just a short one.

I am willing to bet anyone in the UK any amount of money of their choosing that there will NOT be a second independence referendum in Scotland while Nicola Sturgeon is First Minister.

If you still believe she’ll deliver one, now’s your chance to demonstrate your faith in public AND get yourself some free cash. (It’s a matter of public record that I’ve never failed to pay up on a losing wager.)

So come on, SNP loyalists and true believers, let’s see you. Put your name and the amount you want to bet in the comments below* and let’s find out how much you really trust her. This is an entirely genuine, serious offer and remains open to anyone** until such times as Nicola Sturgeon stands down as First Minister, even if that’s 20 years from now. Any amount you like. I’m waiting keenly for your responses.

.

*PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT EXCEPT TO TAKE THE BET.

**WAGERS FROM GERRY “THE WELCHER” HASSAN NOT ACCEPTED.

Craig Murray is due to be released from HMP Edinburgh a week tomorrow, having served half of an eight-month sentence for contempt of court via “jigsaw identification”. Our latest poll data from Panelbase, surveying 2000 Scottish voters last week, reveals that just a quarter of Scots think that such an offence merits imprisonment.

Readers may find the figures for male and female respondents of note. The full data tables can be downloaded here.