21st June 2012
It's time for your weekly dose of retro
Retro: Old School
There are two new releases for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum this week. One dates back to 1984, while the other started out life in 1992.
The oldest project is a text adventure called The School, which was intended to be a commercial release, but it unfortunately did not find a publisher.
This production drops subtle hints of malevolent witchcraft and sorcery throughout a typical mid-1980s educational environment. Although it has some polish to it, this interactive fiction title seems to be difficult to map at first, and the keyboard input system makes typos hard to deal with as the delete key doesn't work, so if you make a mistake, you have to continue with gibberish until the internal buffer is near full before pressing the Enter key so you can type again. I'm sure if the original source code would have been to hand, then such issues would have been resolved quickly.
Its creators, David Smith and David O'Neill, decided to release it as it is after some 28 years, and this freeware texty gets interesting when you find the kitchen and office. This is one for avid fans of the often forgotten typing genre. Check out worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027706.
Meanwhile, Nestling, by Dmitriy Zhiviloy, is a platform game, which started out life in 1992 and was finished this year. It's monochrome and 2D, with some sparse sound effects and rather cruel collision detection - so much so that it took me a while to get past the first screen. I'm quite surprised that this particular feature of the game wasn't tweaked to make it more inviting to the player, because it requires a bit of persistence to get started. It's available from the World of Spectrum (WoS) archives at worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027707.
While you're on the WoS database, you could search it for Freddie Laker's Airline Capers, by Rutlemore Games, which is another recently unearthed game dating back to the mid-1980s, and one that I have missed through these pages. This is technically really polished and has quite a number of mini-games throughout, starting with some sampled speech for good measure after loading.
With a total of 36 levels to play through, which puts you in daily charge of running an airport, with tasks including keeping the runways clear and dealing with contraband at customs, you should be busy during the summer months - especially useful for those rainy days.
Two new Commodore Vic-20 games have been released, neither of which requires a RAM expansion pack to run.
The first is by Jeffrey Daniels, called The Explorer, which is loosely based on Snake and is pretty abstract. In a similar fashion to Jeffrey's previous work, Dream, it seems to be made to provoke an emotional response from the player. However, it is possible to beat this game by reaching the red flashing square after an interesting introduction sequence.
The second, by Ghislain, is called Breakfast II. This is a reaction game, with the task being to fill the play area with coloured blocks, which appear at the bottom of the screen travelling horizontally. These are moved to the top, where each will remain static, with a simple keypress, but you must arrange them in such an order that no two colours touch on the horizontal or vertical plane.
Both titles are available to download from tinyurl.com/VIC-20-2012, where you'll find the other releases of 2012 so far for the mighty VIC.
