THE HISTORY |: OF B HOW JUDGE DREDD, ROGUE TROOPER m £ AND CO MADE THE LEAP TO GAMING FULLY | DECLASSIFIED E — 30 YEARS OF... SONIC THE HEDGEHOG J Play some of SEGA’s best Retro titles on Nintendo Switch™ Available on Nintendo eShop now! © T SEGAAGES.SEGA.COM SEGA kukaa UY © SEGA. All rights reserved. © 2019 Nintendo LOADING... THE RETROBATES sem DARRAN JONES Revenge Of The Gator is a charming pinball game that | still play on my Super Game Boy. Expertise: Planning expensive birding trips to Scotland Currently playing: Dragon Force Favourite game of all time: Strider W.6 WOZ BROWN R-Type was one of my first games; | was gobsmacked that it ran on a handheld. Expertise: Hooking up every Nintendo home system to one à single HDMI input Currently playing: Super Smash Bros Wii U Favourite game of all time: The Legend Of Zelda Ocarina Of Time pD PAUL DRURY Pokémon Red without a doubt. | spent 102 hours totally filling up my Pokédex and have fond memories of every minute. Expertise: Train games Currently playing: Donkey Kong 2: Jumpman Returns Favourite game of all time: Sheep in Space DREW SLEEP My parents took me along to see Jools Holland once, but | didn't actually see anything because | was too busy hunched over on the ground playing Super Mario Land 2. Expertise: Leaving the team high and dry on deadline day Currently playing: Final Fantasy IX Favourite game of all time: Final Fantasy VIII IAN LEE Here's something pretty awful, | honestly don't think I've ever played the original Game Boy. | am so sorry and hang my head in shame. Expertise: Buying overpriced stuff on eBay then never touching it Currently playing: Antstream Favourite game of all time: Elite (BBC Model B) NICK THORPE You would expect me to say is, but it's actually Pokémon je, which | received for my 13th birthday, Expertise: Owning five Master Systems (I sold two) Currently playing: Donkey Kong Favourite game of all time: Sonic The Hedgehog DAVID CROOKES I'm going to have to say Tetris. | played it to the point of developing ‘Tetris Syndrome’, which meant | really could enjoy the game everywhere | went! Expertise: Amstrad, Lynx, adventures, Dizzy, and PlayStation (but is it retro? Debate!) Currently playing: Football Glory Favourite game of all time: Broken Sword 4 ANDREW FISHER Link's Awakening, a huge quest packed into a tiny cartridge. Over 85 years of gaming, from Commodore 64 to Wii U Currently playing: Splatoon Favourite game of all time: Paradroid RORY MILNE l'Il go for Monster Max. It's not as colourful as Batman or Head Over Heels, but its gameplay is less linear and it's full of fresh mechanics. Expertise: The game that I'm writing about at the time of writing Currently playing: Super Robin Hood Favourite game of all time: Tempest “ve never been very good at predicting things. | backed HD DVD over Blu-ray, could never tell when a song | heard on the radio would become a breakout hit and purchased an Atari Lynx over the Game Boy. To me, Atari's console seemed like the clear winner because it had a colour screen and a large number of great arcade conversions. Nintendo's system seemed silly to me on release, and for the first six months of its release | was blissfully ignorant of it. Looking back, it's easy to see how an excellent battery life, a reliance on existing 8-bit architecture and some truly phenomenal software allowed the Game Boy to become the success it became. | couldn't see that at all when it first arrived on the scene, though. Fortunately, it only took a handful of visits to a friend's house and multiple games on Contra, Tetris, Double Dragon and Link's Awakening to realise that | had indeed backed the wrong horse and | eventually picked up a Game Boy of my own, and | have owned one ever since. It's a real pleasure, then, to feature Such a cultural phenomenon on the front cover and to talk to the many people then did a far better job of realising the Game Boy's early success than | did. Enjoy the magazine! Micro Music, Maestro! Andrew Fisher reports on Chris Abbott's impressive 8-bit concert News Wall Konami wins E3 with its big announcement The Vault Cool retro stuff to waste your money on Love Letter — To The Eighties Tobias Bjarneby explains how his love of arcades inspired a brand-new game lain Lee You've been asking for his return for years, and now he's back. Enjoy his new column Back To The Noughties Will Nick ever find his way home? This month he's landed in August 2002 S REVIVALS Pitfall! Darran discusses his love for Pitfall Harry, one of gaming's earliest heroes Metroid Nick learns someone didn't read the manual Police Trainer Nick remembers this forgettable game Alien Trilogy Darran recently completed this, so of course he has to write an article about it >> Load 196 Breathing new life into classic games RETRO RADAR Pios 64 FEATURED The Making Of: Firelord Steve Crow takes time out from Blizzard to tell us about his classic 8-bit hit Ultimate Guide: Ninja Spirit This fast-paced arcade game never gets much love, so Mike Bevan is rectifying that Peripheral Vision: Gear Master Converter We discover all sorts of oddities in Nick's desk drawers. Here's the latest find The Making Of: Loco Antony Crowther explains how a ten-minute play on an arcade game led to this classic The Making Of: Columns Find out how Jay Geertson's humble work project turned into a huge Sega series From The Archives: PF Magic Learn how a company on the brink of destruction turned it all around Classic Moments: Point Blank Allthe best bits from Namco's brilliant arcade game, including leaf shooting The Unconverted Nick finds more obscure games for you The Making Of: LMA Manager We go behind the scenes of this impressive PlayStation simulator L 30 Years Of The Game Bo We look at the cultural impact of Nintendo's handheld and go behind the scenes of some of its coolest ports, including R-Type Super Adventure Island Darran explains why Master Higgins first adventure on the Super Nintendo is still worth playing today 4 | RETROGAMER Don't forget to follow us online for all your latest retro updates RetroGamerUK @RetroGamer_Mag Retro Gamer Magazine @RetroGamerMag retrogamer@futurenet.com FAN | zw The History Of 2000 AD Videogames Jason Kingsley, Jas Austin and many other developers look back at the digital adventures of Judge Dredd and co "mme Boy Miro —SCENTIALS Subscriptions More enjoyable than clearing four lines in Tetris or completing Super Mario Land Homebrew Jason Kelk is back once again and has an impressive range of games to talk about How To... Nick is on hand to tell you all you need to know about running PC Engine games Collector's Corner This month's collector has a truly exotic collection of games Mailbag Tells us a heart-warming or funny story and you'll earn yourself an amazing free book Next Month Everyone wants to know their future and this page will tell 100 Contra Anniversary you yours Collection 98 Samurai Shodown Of X-COM =~ Julian Gollop looks back at his popular strategy series : Endgame 100 Timespinner Nick is our resident Star Wars expert and he just completed 100 Cadance Of Hyrule Rebel Assault for you 100 Sega Ages: Wonder Boy In Monster Land RETRO GRITIER. | 5 VFA Hull 4 áá pence HG Hull Mis College Có4Audio.com * CONTENTS 6 MICRO MUSIC, MAESTRO! Andrew Fisher reports on therecent 8-BitSymphony 8 NEWS WALL Allthe latest news from this year's E3, including the PC Engine Mini 10 THE VAULT More cool items and books for you to ‘spend your cash on 12 LOVE LETTER TO THE EIGHTIES Tobias Bjarneby tells us about fusing classic genres andpixels in 198X 14 IAIN LEE He's been away, but now he's back. Find out what lain's been up to 16 MR BIFFO Our resident columnist discusses the sheer appeal of the Game Boy 6 | RETRO GAMER ver 800 retro gaming music fans made their way to the very grand City Hall in Hull on Saturday 15 June, and even a heavy summer shower as they queued did not dampen their enthusiasm. A VIP reception was held earlier in the afternoon at Hull College — which helped stage the event, thanks to the efforts of CEO Michelle Swithenbank — as drinks and canapes were enjoyed by gaming legends and invited followers alike. A selection of classical SID tunes helped set the tone before the 75-strong Hull Philharmonic Orchestra took the stage, under the direction of conductor Robin Tait. C64 Audio's Chris Abbott Abbatt’s impressive 8-bit tribute. MICRO MUSIC, MAESTRO! The 8-Bit Symphony raised the roof of Hull’s City Hall and Graham Raddings acted as hosts, introducing each tune with background notes and jokes, plus a pirate flag. 8-Bit Symphony has long been Chris’ vision, and it finally came to fruition in unforgettable style Adding to the atmosphere were the videos projected on a screen above the orchestra. More than just raw game footage, these themed videos (from creators including Toni Galvez, Mat Ricardo, Andrew Wright and lan Flory) showed humour and respect for the subject matter that was being celebrated at the event. A special mention must go to Steph Abbott for her illustrations of each piece, shown on the projector and in the glossy concert programme. This was available as a signed edition (by Rob Hubbard and Paul Norman), with the profits being donated to Special Effect — the UK charity that help makes gaming accessible to all. A Blu-ray giving the ‘home concert’ experience (with the videos playing alongside sequenced versions of the music) was also on sale, and was streamed online as the concert was happening. The concert loaded up with a medley of Ocean Loader tunes and Comic Bakery from Martin Galway, accompanied by famous loading screens. Allister Brimble's Green Beret arrangement and Rob Hubbard's Kentilla (originally intended for orchestra) stood out, plus the bouncy William Wobbler and Mark Cooksey's Ghosts 'N Goblins. The first half ended with Rob's Flash Gordon, while the interval had its own assortment of SID ragtime pieces. The second half started with International Karate, and included a tribute to Ben Daglish, Glyn R Brown's epic interpretation of Firelord and Paul Norman's Aztec Challenge (which was arranged by Peter Connelly). As the concert drew to a close, Jon Hare spoke in memory of his late colleague Richard Joseph, followed by Richard's comic title tune from Stifflip & Co. With the credits scrolling to the sound of Barbillax (Richard's Barbarian II merged with Martin Galway's Parallax high-score tune), fans queued up at the signing table to meet Rob Hubbard and Paul Norman in person. "|t was a very special event for me and everyone who attended," reflects Rob Hubbard. "I don't think we could ever top it, but another concert somewhere would be very VISIT TO HAVE YOUR SAY cool!" As musical producer, Rob was heavily involved. "Composing and orchestrating are what | love doing — more than actually playing an instrument, or playing live." As for highlights, Rob says, "There were quite a few. Meeting Ben's wife and family again, and the tribute video with The Last Ninja was very moving. WAR, Monty's Journey (Rob's 19th-Century romantic arrangement of the Monty On The Run and Commando high score tunes), and Aztec Challenge were very well played." Chris Abbott was very happy with the evening. "Obviously it's live so there will be the occasional glitch, but the orchestra played beautifully and with passion, the audience were wonderful and everyone was at the top of their game," he says. "Having Rob Hubbard and Paul Norman in attendance to hear their stuff was amazing. | think most people would think that the segment paying tribute to Ben Daglish and ending with Jedi Ben' illustrated by my daughter Steph, and the one paying tribute to Richard Joseph (Stifflip and Co, with a funny Queen Victoria intro by my good friend Anna Black) were particular highlights. Otherwise, people's favourite tracks varied wildly: which is always a good sign." There was a tinge of sadness for Chris with the absence of Ben Daglish "| miss Ben: he would have rocked the joint and conducted the heck out of Trap. As it was, me and Graham (Raddings) were kind of hosting it as almost ‘part of the audience’. We're the target audience for these things. | will say that | was really pleased that all age ranges were present, it was enjoyed by children and elderly fans of Hull Philharmonic alike." The orchestra p beautifully and with passion, the audience were wonderful The planned CD box-set of orchestral music and the printed scores — now also called 8-Bit Symphony, and previewed at www.c64audio.com — are progressing well. Chris says, “The concert really allowed us to attract the extra talent (Rob Hubbard, arranger Ally Pickering, conductor Robin Tait) to get that project finished before the end of the year, so that we are putting out unquestionably world-class orchestral arrangements.” As for more concerts, Chris adds “If people buy the box- set they can certainly get an idea of what's likely to make it onto the bill for 8-Bit Symphony 2: more Follin, more Hubbard, a tad more Daglish, and some more iconic tracks. We have got to build up momentum for the next one.” Everyone who experienced the amazing atmosphere will certainly look forward to another concert. Thanks to Jason Moon and Chris Abbott for the official photos. MICRO MUSIC, MAESTRO! RETRO GAMER | ? remeradar DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTLINE OF RETRO GAMING TEN-WOAH! intendo's Direct was easily the highlight of E3 2019. The stream itself is worth checking out as it featured a hoard of retro- flavoured news, including a glimpse at a Panzer Dragoon remake. Square used the show to highlight a remake of Trials Of Mana and that the Mana Collection was finally heading to the west. Other highlights included more news on Luigi's Mansion 3, Fire Emblem: Three Hous and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and it was all capped off with a sneak peek of Breath Of The Wild 2. Phew! Ne. NE n, % aq um > BATTLETOADS RETURN Ithough it was first announced at last year's E3, we've finally had our first look of Dlala Studios' Battletoads game. It seems very much in the style of earlier games in the series, so there's, of course, a focus on brawling. The new 2.5D visuals look extremely impressive, and breathe fresh personality into the three toads, while Microsoft is doubling down on the multiplayer aspect of the game, touting couch co-op as one of its key appeals. Needless to say, you can expect a review when the game debuts later this year. 8 | RETRO GAMER his year's E3 has been rather wonderful from a retro perspective, but the most exciting thing for us was easily Konami's surprise reveal of the PC Engine Mini. Admittedly, very little about the device has been announced so far, but even the few nuggets of information that have dropped have left us drooling for more. Three versions of the device are going to be available. The PC Engine variant (the best looking one) will be dropping in Japan, US gamers will be treated to the TurboGrafx-16 version, while European audiences will receive the PC Engine CoreGrafx, which is based on the later Japanese system which featured AV over RF. Interestingly, all three consoles appear to be the same size as the originals (hardly surprising when you consider how small the original PC Engine was), meaning they're not strictly ‘mini’ in the same way other similar consoles are. Still, we're not going to get strung up on size, we're largely interested in the emulation and the games and that's where things are a little unclear at this moment in time. Konami so far hasn't announced which developer is on emulator duties, something that can make or break these systems. The hope is that M2 (which has recently been working on Konami's Contra —P TYT --— Aii m] —— and Castlevania compilations) is in the driving seat, but the studio is also hard at work on the Mega Drive Mini, which might make it unlikely. We know there are various display modes and quick save support, but that's about it. While only a handful of games have been announced so far, it's a Konami so far hasn't announced which developer is on emulator duties solid roster of games that consists of R-Type, Ninja Spirit, Ys | & Il, Dungeon Explorer, Alien Crush and New Adventure Island. Rondo Of Blood has also been announced as a Japanese exclusive, but we expect this to change as the machine gets nearer to release. The available games are a mixture of third-party classics and also CD-ROM releases, suggesting that Konami is putting a lot of thought into the game selection. While no Bomberman game has been revealed, the multitap device that will be available suggests it's only a matter of time before it will be. We're expecting hits like Bonk to make the cut as well. NEC's PC Engine was an incredibly exotic delight that still retains an air of mystery about it today, so it's pleasing to see Konami ensuring the classic system reaches as many gamers as possible. More news as we get it. KONAMI OQ yE Cour (ustieomnn COLLECTION OUT NOW Dive back into the ACTION! EXCLUSIVE EBOOK INCLUDED BE PFA LBE Qsteam SMTK www.pegi.info ; and e x gos sana ae gr 2 pa xe A remeradar THE COOL RETRO STUFF THAT WE'VE HAD OUR EYE ON THIS MONTH The first book to chronicle Nintendo games this month is courtesy of Brett Weiss and concludes his whistle stop tour of the SNES, which began with Volume 1. Unlike similar books we've seen in the past, it only focuses on games released in the US, meaning a few of our personal favourites don't make the cut and you're only getting half the story here (it covers N-Z). It does feel a little minimalist in its layout, but many of the entries do include various insights from games journalists and developers, which adds value. It tendo nt a me does feel a little expensive next to the other books we've featured this month, though. Price: £47.99 From: amazon.co.uk The NES Encyclopedia: Every Game Released For The Nintendo Entertainment System While Chris Scullion's first book lacks the production values of Sam Dyer's compendiums, it is still an enjoyable read about one of the best-loved consoles of the Eighties. It's lacking in interviews, but that's somewhat understandable when you consider that all 714 officially licensed games have been included. Price: £20.54 From: amazon.co.uk = E — U. u N Š “N N S N S m ` e v ZX-VGA-JOY Running classic systems on new TVs is difficult, which is where devices like the ZX-VGA-JOY come in. This device plugs straight in to your Spectrum's expansion port and connects to the VGA port of your monitor. It outputs 640x480 at 60Hz, 75Hz and 85Hz and 800x600 at 60Hz. You will need to supply your own monitor cable, but as an added bonus it also features a Kempston joystick port. Price: 49.99 Euros From: sintech-shop.de If you're still enjoying the recently released Mortal Kombat 11, why not enhance your gaming experience with Numskull's selection of official gear? We suggest taking a victory sip from your official heat changing mug whenever you pull off a fatality. Then you can sit back and enjoy the immersive aroma of blood, sweat and tears from your 40-hour There are two rabid Master System fans in the office, and neither of them were disappointed when Sam Dyer's latest book turned up. As you'd expect from a Bitmap Books production, this is a ridiculously lavish tome, with gorgeous looking photography, beautiful pixel art and a surprising amount of insight into many of the games (even if some of the entries do leave you wanting more info) One particular cool touch that helps make Sam's sixth book in his series stand out from the burning candle. Price: £12.99 (candle), others is that 22 pages require the use of stereoscopic glasses, mimicking the effect of the £7.99 (mug) console's 3D Glasses. It's typical of what you'd expect from Sam and the end result is another From: numskull.com essential addition to your library. Price: £24.99 (softcover) £29.99 (hardback) From: bitmapbooks.co.uk 10 | RETRO GAMER LONDON'S BEST GAMING WEEKEND, BACK FOR 2019! 28-29" SEPTEMBER 2019 THE PLACE TO PLAY! THE PLACE TO JOIN IN! Be among the first in the UK to see, try and Take part in one of our miniatures painting buy the hottest releases from the makers of: workshops or learn how to make your own ° Catan game in our design workshops. * XWing Miniatures Game Get involved with roleplaying and * Pandemic Legacy miniatures participation games: * Ticket to Ride * Pathfinder ° Deep Sea Adventure * Call of Cthulhu * King of Tokyo * Mortal Gods * Hive * Wings of Glory * Wild West Exodus 2M arhaified SEE IT | PLAY IT | BUY IT sx tablet“ — AMING 28-29" September 2019 Alexandra Palace, London THE PLACE TO BUY! Buy directly from your favourites including: Leisure Games | Chaos Cards | Warlord Games | Big Potato | Zatu Games KEYA | PLUS | Huge open gaming area | Talks and workshops | Catan national qualifier Pandemic Survival regional qualifier | 4OO+ game library sponsored by The Ludoquist VISIT ttgami.ng/retrogamer_aug19 š E je-fuscHghuyEs : — es : vi AND HECE GIVE VOO THE RETRO HORE LOVE LETTER TO THE EIGHTIES Tobias Bjarneby on blending genres and pixel art in 198X f you've been following its Kickstarter campaign since its reveal in May 2018, you'll already be well aware of Hi-Bit Studios’ brand-new game. Designed as a love letter to the Eighties and the pleasure of visiting your local arcade, 198X is an interesting-looking project which features a variety of different genres (including shoot-'em-up, racing and scrolling fighter) some truly beautiful pixel art and a rather stylish soundtrack from legendary games composer Yuzo Koshiro. With a release imminent, we felt it was the perfect time to sit down with Hi-Bit Studios’ Tobias Bjarneby to find out a little more about his ambitious nod to classic gaming. Where did the overall concept for 198X originate? Before all this, I'd been working as a videogame journalist and editor for 25 years, producing hundreds of magazines and several books. The core of our development team also founded Stockholm Museum Of Video Games in 2016, so you could say that 198X is an extension of our previous work with regards to preserving and celebrating videogame history. le | RETRO GAMER What challenges are presented through creating five distinctly different games? The big challenge was defining the essence of these games and their distinct era. Why do | love Out Run so dearly when | couldn't care less about modern racing games? How come the opening stage in Final Fight, the first deadly slash in Strider and the initial boss encounter in R-Type had such a huge impact on me? We found the answers not merely in graphics, sounds and core mechanics, F es Mr but in the context, presentation and gameplay variation. Visiting an arcade in the Eighties was all about finding new experiences, swiftly moving from one world to another. Driving your Ferrari under the blue sky, then cleaning up the streets of Metro City, or suddenly Soaring over the rooftops of 2048 Moscow and flying further out to space to face Dobkeratops. This is what 198X is all about. We are not making just another ninja game or beat-'em-up game - we are using these games to tell a bigger story. » Can you guess which classic Eighties racer this section of 198X is based on? » Tobias Bjarneby was a successful Swedish games journalist in the Nineties So how big are these games? In part one, releasing now, there are five full-blown stages, one for each arcade game. These stages are bigger and more varied compared to any single stage in the Eighties games we draw inspiration from. I'd say the game we're releasing now is the same size as any Final Fight or R-Type or Strider — the typical late Eighties arcade game, with more storytelling and less frustration! Have you drawn inspiration from any other games? There are so many! Each game in 198X is full of references to the history of that specific genre. Take Shadowplay - our ninja game — as an example: you can find Shinobi, Strider, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Spirit in there, but we are also mixing these influences with the bigger, overarching story we're trying to tell. icult creating 198 distinctive pixel art? It's been extremely time-consuming. Most modern 'neo-retro' games use a much more zoomed-out camera with smaller sprites and more open level design. And while | understand and respect that choice, we really wanted to have spectacular visuals with huge sprites in our games. The late Eighties were all about who could project the biggest sprites on the most detailed backdrops — while the catchiest chiptunes were playing — and we just love that! Has it been So how did the collaboration with Yuzo Koshiro for 198X's soundtrack come about? His music was performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra a few years back, and | know the producer of that concert. So when we were looking for composers for our arcade games, | just thought we should TRORRDRR: LOVE LETTER TO THE EIGHTIES give it a shot. So we asked [him], and he said yes! | believe that Yuzo Koshiro really shaped the sound of this era of gaming, so it's been a huge honour to have him on board for 198X. We were also fortunate enough to guide him through our hometown of Stockholm late last year, cementing our deep HI-2500000 appreciation and love for this humble musical legend. Is it hard to manage backers’ expectations on Kickstarter? Our amazing backers have been very supportive. When we told them we needed to split the game in two ££ The late Eighties were all about who could project the biggest sprites on the most detai backdrops 77 jarneby parts, to be able to deliver on the promise we made to them and to ourselves, they were very encouraging. They really understand what we want to achieve and how much it takes to get there. We might be a pretty small studio in terms of people, but our ambitions are indeed huge! And we are so excited to finally be able to invite all of you to experience 198X. Why do you think that is there much nostalgia out there for arcade games? Arcades used to be these magical places. There you'd find the coolest and most impressive videogames, with futuristic qualities far beyond what you could play at home. These towering machines were more than just games — they were portals to other worlds. To me, this is the perfect setting for a Eighties coming-of-age story. Of course, 198X is hardly the first game to be heavily influenced by Eighties arcade games - but what we're doing is to put those games into context, capturing the atmosphere surrounding them. We tell a story about discovering an arcade and finding new worlds in its games. 198X is a videogame about falling in love with videogames. 3k en years ago, | was getting ready to have my first kid. The games room, where | kept my mighty retro collection, was B going to be the nursery. | had kind n retro stuff, | hardly went in there, so | thought I'd do a grown up thing. | decided to get rid of everything. The PlayStation 2 test unit, the Dreamcast, the modded BBC Micro, the Neo-Geo handheld, everything | couldn't face going through everything and putting them individually on eBay, so | did something altruistic. | listed them on Freecycle and offered them to whomsoever wanted them and could take them all in one bundle. A few days later, a nice chap came and took the lot. | felt a twinge, a tingle, as though maybe that wasn't the right thing to do, but | shook it off and focused on being a dad. Ten years later, I'm divorced, and spending all my money buying back everything | handed over to a stranger that day. What a stupid, dumb, ridiculous idea it had been. Give it all away? What the hell was | thinking? That was insane! Box it up, put it in storage, hide it under the bed, lend it to mates. But give it all away? No! H | RETRO GAMER lain Lee is a freelance broadcaster who loves gaming, particularly retro gaming. He currently hosts The Late Night Alternative show at weekends from 10pm on www.talkradio.co.uk and runs daily retro streams on www.twitch.tv/iainlee., What got me back into a retro gaming jag was taking my boys (two of them now, seven and nine) to a retro gaming market in London. | thought they needed to see something more than just Fortnite and bloody Lego Star Wars. | wasn't really sure how they'd take it. | was worried they would find the whole thing painfully dull and hate me for making them sit for an hour and a half in the car to get there. But | needn't have worried. They absolutely loved it! They wandered around wide-eyed asking what each machine was and for a couple of hours we were closer than we'd been in a while. | shared stories of my first PlayStation, about spending ages loading up Spectrum games, and why you Should always treat your joystick with respect as you don't want to snap it. | gave them a few quid each and they chose, completely independently, a GBA and a PS2 They played them for a few weeks and then drifted back to Fortnite. But | was hooked. | had that river of electricity run down the back of my neck, that little frisson of excitement. I'd fallen back down the rabbit hole, and it was delicious. | didn't buy anything myself that day, but as soon as | got home, | started looking up Dreamcasts online. I'm back in the retro groove. And thrilled to be sharing my thoughts with you every month in the magnificent Retro Gamer magazine. | kept hold of one. A boxed, mint condition Nomad that had been gifted to me after | finished filming Thumb Bandits, a video games documentary from about 2001. I'm so glad | kept that as | just looked at how much they go for now. My word! I'm rich! Find collectibles Engage in challenging activate platforms hidden in the forest music battles Q pave © 2018 JoySteak Studios. All rights reserved. Published by PQube Ltd. "reradar re FEATURING DIGITISER 2000'S MR BIFFO o pick up a Game Boy in 2019, it feels like a bulky antique. Far more even than certain games systems which came before it, the Game Boy feels like a relic. That monochrome screen, the heft of it, the lack of any concession to ergonomics... yet somehow, the Game Boy conquered the world, its deceptive accessibility proving to be as appealing to First Ladies as they were to my mother. That for me is the real achievement of the Game Boy; it was the first — and to date only — games console that my mother ever owned. l'm not even sure whether she had any games other than Tetris. She even got quite good at it, as | remember. Prior to this, videogames were something my mum saw as for her son. She didn't try to understand them (though | remember her having a Ib | RETRO GAMER Paul is probably better known as Mr Biffo — the creator of legendary teletext games magazine Digitiser. These days, he mostly writes his videogame ramblings over at Digitiser2000.com. If you want more Biffo in your eyes, you can catch him as the host of Digitizer The Show at www.bit.ly/biffo2000. go at Space Invaders on the Atari 2600, and doing that thing where she weaved from side-to-side along with the on-screen movement). Even after the Game Boy she showed no interest in games, beyond Candy Crush on Facebook. She and my dad had a go at Wii Sports one Christmas — which inevitably led to a festive row when she accused him of cheating at bowling — but beyond that... nothing. No interest whatsoever in playing games. She, like many of her generation, finds technology confusing. She can just about deal with her iPad, but if it does anything unpredictable, I'll get a call to go down and ‘fix it’ for her. Usually, it's something as simple as she's closed one of her browser tabs, or accidentally signed up for a new Facebook account, and she can't work out where all her friends have gone — no, | don't know how she did that one, either. My dad is even worse. Most of his technical issues — such as the time his Kindle stopped working, and he bought a new one - can be J J J ^ ! 1 , I| Ü solved with the classic, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?’ My dad, though, never got into games. He was interested in my ZX Spectrum - albeit from a programming perspective. | bought him some military strategy game for his PC one year, but | don't think he even tried to play it (he's got a weird paranoia about installing anything on his computers, in case it gets ‘full up'...). My mum, however, was - for a couple of years — a gamer, of sorts. Something specific and difficult to identify drew her to the Game Boy. It could be the simplicity of it. There was nothing to download. No difficult controls; just two buttons and a d-pad, plus start and select. It ran on batteries, so there was none of that mysterious, and seemingly supernatural, recharging. Batteries she understood. Even the green-and-black graphics would've been familiar from a life which had seen more black- and-white TV screens than colour ones. The Game Boy was simple, it was accessible, it was a machine for everyone. ne of the best things about last Christmas was the release of the Zzap!64 Annual 2019, which featured a whole host of classic writers and was overseen by Roger Kean and Oliver Frey. It proved such a success that Chris and the team at Fusion Books are back again with a follow-up that should be ready to arrive under your tree in time for the big day. More of the same with a little tweak here and there. The response we had from the first annual was that it totally captured the feel of the Zzap's of old —the only niggle was the reviewers’ portraits where the likes of Jaz [Rignall] and Robin [Hogg] gave a ‘thumbs up’ even if the game was average or poor. This has now been fixed for this year's annual. We have called upon the same reviewers from last year's annual for consistency and their expertise — so Mat Allan, Paul Robinson, Jaz Rignall and Robin Hogg. We also have Andrew Fisher joining the review team this time also, Other writers include Martyn Carroll, Simon Butler from Ocean Software, and Stuart Williams will once look after the adventure section. remeradar SHOWING OFF COOL RETRO-THEMED STUFF THAT’S GOING Yes - Oli Frey will be producing a brand-new cover for the annual, so he'll be dusting off his airbrush once again and creating the cover old school. He will also be adding his unique graphical touches throughout the annual, as he is very famously known for. Roger Kean is taking the helm once again as the editor and will also be laying out the whole annual, thus making sure for the reader it is Zzap!64 through and through. We are aiming for around the 30 mark which is consistent with the number of reviews in each issue during ZZap!64's heyday of the Eighties. It's amazing to think that so many great games are still appearing on the Commodore 64 allowing us to produce another review jam-packed issue for this year. The main challenge is time. Those contributing to the books have day jobs, or are retired. We take a two-to-four- month duration to produce each annual — Newsfield were creating issues of Crash, Zzap! and Amtix on a monthly basis and Oli, for example, had to produce covers for each month. Roger tells me it was a crazy time. After the Kickstarter finishes we use CrowdOx to collect backer details. It allows us to create a 'shop' offering many of the perks that were on the "=E Kickstarter, as well as the annual itself. This year we linked zzap64annual.com to the CrowdOx page - so readers can enter that URL to get to the shop. Amtix is a slow burner — we have every intention to do an Amtix Annual to complete the set. It's just finding the time to produce it, though | can say there are writers putting together features for us. So let's see how it goes. Roger would very much like to do a Fear annual next with John Gilbert — so that may take priority! ON AUGUST 2002 - The GameCube has barely been out five minutes, and people are already predicting that it'll be the last ever Nintendo console. What in the world is going on? Nick Thorpe takes - the long journey back in , time to find out... NT , NEWS AUGUST 2002 Throughout the month, UK headlines were dominated by the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, a pair of ten-year-old schoolmates from Soham. They were first reported missing on 4 August, and a search lasting almost two weeks began. On 17 August, the bodies of the two girls were discovered by police, just hours after they had arrested lan Huntley and Maxine Carr on suspicion of murder. The. couple worked at the girls’ school — Huntley as the caretaker and Carr as a teaching assistant. Carr had provided a false alibi for Huntley early in the investigation. She was found guilty of perverting the course of justice, but not guilty of assisting an offender as she had acted in the belief that he was innocent. Carr received a prison sentence of three and a half years. Huntley initially feigned madness but was judged to be mentally sound. His defence pushed for the lesser charge of manslaughter. The jury rejected this and convicted Huntley of murder in December 2003, for which he received a life sentence that he is still serving. On 25 August, ITV broadcast the first episode of l'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, a jungle- based reality show starring the likes of Darren Day, Tara Palmer- Tomkinson and Tony Blackbum. The show became enormously popular and is still running today. 1 | RETRO GAMER THE LATE N NEWS FROM AUGUST 2002 atoru Iwata didn't take long to start making waves as the president of Nintendo. Taking the post after Hiroshi Yamauchi finally retired from the role, lwata chose to say some very interesting things in his first speech. In outlining the differences between the company and its competitors, he claimed that Sony and Microsoft "seek to control the distribution of all types of entertainment". Explaining Nintendo's position, Iwata claimed, "We want to make gares that are interesting. We'd be happy to work with any company that has new ideas for gaming." But the comments that set tongues wagging were related to hardware development. "No matter how many consoles Sony sells and whatever Microsoft does, it is important for us to make our software attractive enough to drive consumers to buy our hardware," said lwata. "The effort to produce machines with better technology has reached its limit. If things continue, they may lead to the decline of the entire industry." Magazines put two and two together, and got an answer of 27. In a report titled, ‘Is GameCube Nintendo's last console?’ NGC shied away from making any definitive claims regarding the company's exit from the console business, but did assert that these the headlines. statements meant "GameCube will definitely be around a lot longer than the traditional five-year life-cycle of past generations". GamesMaster was characteristically less restrained, claiming "Ninty intend to do a Sega!" and that "top bods are quickly falling out of love with competing in the cutthroat console market". It reasoned that the company would "more than likely concentrate on making games and let Sony and Microsoft fight amongst themselves for console sales". We're sure that with your current knowledge, you can adequately judge their powers of prognostication. The saga of Rare also continued, with NGC reporting that a UK source had told them that Activision would soon be acquiring the company, and that the deal was essentially done but had just been delayed a little. But with the Stampers and Nintendo being typically quiet, nobody knew for sure. The release schedules this month weren't too hot, but things weren't quite as dreary as they could have been. PC owners had a perfect excuse to avoid the sun, as Neverwinter Nights offered RPG fans plenty to do, and [Xbox] Hands up -who was expecting Buffy to be a bit of a belter? Not us, it we're being honest. plenty of people to do it with. Although Edge complained of “slightly suspect performance and a few minor design issues”, the game still earned an impressive 9/10 score. BioWare's tightly designed campaign was praised for a plot that “begins to twist and turn most impressively,” but it was in online and LAN play with friends that the game truly shined, which Edge felt made the game “a flagship for the platform”. The big surprise on the Xbox was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which defied general expectations of licensed games and proved to be decent. GamesMaster scored it 80%, as reviewer Tom East felt that it was a “fun and faithful adventure” that suffered from “spending too much time in Tomb Raider mode.” XBM praised the game for featuring “expansive levels and creatively devised puzzles” in a 9/10 review. The best GameCube release of the month was the rather unusual Lost Kingdoms, an action RPG with card collection and deckbuilding elements. Edge gave the game 8/10, as it felt that although the main character's movement was somewhat slow and that slow monster summoning speeds led to silly scenes, “Lost Kingdoms has the freshness, charm and vitality to overcome such imperfections.” NGC's Mark Walbank was similarly impressed, awarding the game 8696 and expressing the hope that card battling was "hopefully going to be a burgeoning subgenre of games". Players with access to American GameCube releases got the better end of things this month though, as Eternal Darkness scored a whopping 9.5/10 in Cube. The Lovecraftian survival horror BACH TO THE NOUGHTIES: AUGUST 2002 [PlayStation] The conversion of Capcom Vs SNK Pro was a welcome sight for PlayStation owners. distinguished itself through creative effects that conveyed the deteriorating sanity of the game's various protagonists, who engaged in a battle spanning centuries and every region of the planet. Reviewer Chandra Nair felt that it “takes adventuring and horror to levels that Tomb Raider and Resident Evil will never reach” Even PlayStation owners got a bit more love this month, as Capcom Vs SNK Pro finally made its way to Sony's venerable console. While the presentation fell a little way behind the arcade game's standard, the game design held up extremely well. Official PlayStation 2 Magazine awarded the game 8/10, praising the game for possessing "balanced gameplay, furious action, the coolest fighters". That made it one of the top three games of the issue — on the PS2, the only games to achieve the same score were extreme sports outing Aggressive Inline and the cover star Stuntman, which was an exclusive review. The game, which required players to complete difficult stunts with extreme precision, was judged by reviewer Mark Wyatt to be “refreshingly challenging and rewarding” but “not a game for anyone who has a low tolerance for maddening frustration” Join us again next time, when we might have slightly less hyperbolic responses to speeches by industry executives. Then again, maybe not. * Medal Of Honor: Frontline (EA) Spider-Man (Activision) Britney's Dance Beat (THQ) Final Fantasy X (Sony) Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar) Spider-Man (Activision) 2 Halo: Combat Evolved (Microsoft) Project Gotham Racing (Microsoft) 2002 FIFA World Cup (EA) Max Payne (Rockstar) IKMIN Ala Pikmin (Nintendo) Spider-Man (Activision) Super Smash Bros Melee (Nintendo) Star Wars: Rogue Leader (Activision) Luigi's Mansion (Nintendo) 1 Crossroads (Blazin' Squad) 2 Round Round (Sugababes) 3 Addictive (Truth Hurts feat. Rakim) 4 What You Got (Abs) 5 Colourblind (Darius) Play Atari's clothing. It's been a while since we've seen what Play's readership has to say for itself, so let's take a look. "I personally am delighted at the return of Atari to game publishing," says reader Colin Waller. "Atari were masters at making games with immense playability.” Maybe so Colin, but this is just Infogrames in This month's issue features an Ideas Factory segment devoted exclusively to readers' ideas to improve the Mario Kart series. "There should bea fair few courses set in the Mushroom Kingdom, but there should also be some set elsewhere — maybe one could be inside Luigi's Mansion," suggests Peter Hignett. Patience, Peter... Edge "It's often forgotten that the games industry sells licences too — Lara Croftto a film studio or Pokémon to a lunchbox manufacturer," says Edge, in a feature asking whether licences and sequels are killing videogames. "Doubtless there are purist lunchbox-making craftsmen who bemoan such crass commercialism too.” Erm, what? RETRO GAMER | B » ATARI 2600 » 1982 » ACTIVISION Poor old Pitfall Harry, he’s the gaming mascot no one seems to care about anymore. Aside from an iOS game in 2012 the explorer has been all but forgotten by Activision, which is a shame. While | never owned an Atari 2600 growing up, | had a numk of friends who did, so | frequently had the opportunity to play on one after school or at the weekends. Thanks to friends like Paul Staddon | was introduced to the likes of Combat, Frostbite and countless other classics, but the one that | always pestered Paul to play was Pitfall!. | loved Pitfall! and not just because it felt so advanced compared to many of the other 2600 games that Paul owned at the time. Pitfall Harry was every bit a draw to me as the game, mainly because | loved Indiana Jones (| used to make all my friends call me Indi-Darran Jones at school when both Raiders Of The Lost Arc and Temple Of Doom came out). Like Indiana Jones, Pitfall Harry explored jungles, loved treasure and was extremely athletic. For me, he was a hero to latch on to and latch on to him | did. Pitfall! would always be the game | asked to play whenever | visited a friend's house and it upset me greatly that the Amstrad never received a port, but the Commodore 64 did. | would continue to follow the adventures of Pitfall Harry during the intervening years, and while he never rose to the same status as Mario or Sonic, | always used to be able to wring some enjoyment from his adventures. Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure was a solid 16-bit offering that featured the sort of splendiferous animation that was typically associated with the likes of Shiny Entertainment, while Pitfall 3D: Beyond The Jungle would reveal that Pitfall Harry sounded remarkably like Bruce Campbell The love affair for me, though, will always be with the original game, and while Pitfall Harry seems to now have been forgotten by Activision, he isn't lost to me. * 30 Years T por MATRIX hen the modern handheld console market developed in the late Eighties and early Nineties, it quickly became clear that one of the manufacturers was significantly more attuned to the challenges of creating a portable platform than the others. The designers of the Atari Lynx focused on pairing the familiar 6502 CPU with relatively high-end custom graphics technology, with Epyx giving the system arcade-style graphical features like sprite scaling. Sega and NEC focused on how they might leverage their existing hardware in a new environment, ultimately basing the Game Gear and PC Engine GT on the Master System and PC Engine respectively. All of these consoles seemed to be born of similar thinking: they were consoles designed in service of the games. They allowed players experiences close to what they’d get elsewhere, and allowed developers to continue using the techniques they had elsewhere. With the Game Boy, Nintendo approached the problem from the other end - the company designed the hardware in service of the gamer. Nintendo reasoned that the ability to actually play the machine was more important than what it could play, and that less impressive GAZ THOMAS. JEREMY PARISH, Developer of Author of Game Boy Owyn's Adventure Game Boy Works collector software was a worthy sacrifice. As a result, more than most pieces of videogame hardware, the Game Boy is a product of compromise. Where other handhelds had colour screens, the Game Boy had four greyscale shades (or green, if you're staring at that original screen). The other machines were backlit, and Nintendo's hardware relied on getting just the right level of light. Nintendo even opted for a custom processor based on the Z80, rather than the 6502 used in the NES, meaning that its developers couldn't simply reuse code. But it didn’t matter if it couldn't play Super Mario Bros — Nintendo could just make a new Mario game tailored to what the machine could do. Not everybody was impressed - it has been said that there was even some deal of BOT WÜOUHDERS MATHEW BOYLE, 30 YEARS OF THE G scepticism at Nintendo prior to launch. Even those who would later come to be associated with the platform didn’t always get a great first impression. "I do remember when a neighbour classmate showed off his Game Boy to me. I'd guess this was summer 1991, since he was playing Blades Of Steel," says Johan Kotlinski, author of the Game Boy music tool Little Sound DJ. "Being outdoors in the sun, it was rather difficult to see what was [happening] on the screen, and it did not come off as a particularly compelling entertainment option. As you might remember, there were a lot of competition at the time — most of us kids had a Commodore 64, NES or even an Amiga, and for mobile gaming the Atari Lynx seemed more desirable, even if too expensive. | already had my Tetris needs served by an original C64 tape, and the Game Boy did not seem like an improvement at the time. Certainly the load times were much faster on the Game Boy, but we kids had lots of time to waste anyway." But Nintendo had made a judgement call, and it paid off. "Even though it was underpowered and its screen had issues with ghosting and no lighting, all those things that kind of worked against it also worked in its favour — it made a very economical system," says P RETRO GAMER | 23 FRIHTE OF PERSIA ED MAGNIN CONVERTED JORDAN MECHNER’S CLASSIC TO THE GAME BOY How did you end up working on the Game and coding My boss woke up one day and decided to swap me from the NES to the Game Boy, It was the best thing he ever did, The Game Boy represented freedom for me. When I'd go to GDC or E3 | could carry my work in my pocket and walk up to a booth and show it to someone, no appointment necessary. | did Caesars Palace first, then Prince Of Persia. Were you a fan of Jordan Mechner’s original game? | quickly became one. | played the PC version but knowing he did the original on the Apple lÍ was even more impressive. | played the PC version constantly to make sure ours worked as well or better on the Game Boy. Did you have any say in the cart size selected for the game, and was it a struggle to make it fit? Publishers were cheap. They didn’t want to pay for a larger cartridge or a battery to back-up RAM in the cartridge. It would have cost a dollar or two, but then multiplied by their mark-up that would have added five or six dollars to the price of the game. If you look back, only Nintendo and maybe one or two publishers ever released games on larger cartridges or with memory backup - the rest of us had to make convoluted password save systems. And yes, it was a struggle to make it fit. You later did a second version of the game for the Game Boy Color. Did the updated hardware make for an easier conversion? Not really. In addition to adding colour, Nintendo required developers to add additional levels or features, so we added a training level. At the very end of the project the Nintendo colour police (Club Wario) asked us to make every level a different. colour. We had worked hard to make the palace and dungeon levels look really good, so we resisted changing colours. On. a conference call | asked Nintendo, ‘Do you want it to look good or do you want obvious use of colour? They answered, ‘Obvious use of colour: That was it. We had to give them what they wanted or they wouldn't let us publish it. "It was the handhelds and it First time I had ever seen a console, Let alone a Was werd exotic" Gaz Thomas > Jeremy Parish, a veteran videogames journalist and creator of the Game Boy Works video and book series. The Game Boy was half the price of the more impressive Atari Lynx, and would run three times as long on fewer batteries. This made it attractive to parents, and the built-in display meant that it didn't tie up the TV. It was a viable purchase, even for families that already owned a console. "I first received a Game Boy for Christmas when | was a kid. I'd been trying to play my brother's NES and so | got my own portable system to keep peace in the house," says Mathew Boyle, a Game Boy fanatic whose game collection consists of approximately 800 games. "Of course, | was a bit too young | think to really appreciate it, but | would play Kirby's Dream Land until the batteries ran dry!" As good as games like Kirby's Dream Land were, one game overshadowed the rest when it came to selling the system to players — including those with no previous gaming experience. "The first time | laid my eyes on a Game Boy was at my cousin's house, he had gotten one for Christmas. It had Tetris on it and he was e ——à P X. 1 44444 Ga |+++44 Ga 44444 E ott © 44444 8 HRS “arar ar E an ar Fn m Pan mf Ë showing my dad and |,” says Gaz Thomas, an indie developer whose work includes Owyn's Adventure as well as contributions to Hydroventure and Stealth, Inc. "It was the first time | had ever seen a console, let alone a handheld, and it was very exotic. | was only five at the time but | could understand the game and the music was entrancing!" Indeed, Tetris could be universally understood and its new handheld home proved to be conducive to spreading the game's appeal. Plenty of young players would frequently find their systems being borrowed by parents and grandparents. Indeed, while Sega and Sony get much of the credit for bringing older audiences into the videogaming market during the Nineties, Nintendo's machine had a killer app that appealed to players across all demographics. "It definitely did reach a broader spectrum of gamers than the NES did, and Nintendo recognised that from the very beginning," notes Jeremy. "Some of their early ads were targeted at working professionals and adults, promoting games like Tetris and saying, 'Hey, you can enjoy yourself when you're waiting at the airport — it's not just LLLI w 30 YEARS OF THE GAME BOY » [Game Boy] Puzzle games like Pipe Dream worked well with the Game Boy's blur-prone display. TENTE TH Wes ico o / for kids, even though it's called the Game Boy.” That campaign had the tag line ^Have you had your fun today?" and deliberately targeted non-gaming media, appearing in magazines such as GQ as well as on TV. Even then-First Lady Hillary Clinton admitted to buying a Game Boy for herself in a 1993 interview with Time magazine, after having become a fan through playing her daughter's machine. The Game Boy had a long tail, too. While the first couple of years played host to more major hits than later years, the hardware saw at least a few games hit the 1 million sales mark every single year. That's pretty remarkable, as Game Boy owners didn't buy a lot of games. Nintendo's figures show that just 4.22 pieces of software were sold for every piece of Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware - a low number compared to the 8.07 games sold for each NES, or the 7.72 games for each SNES console. It didn't hurt that the system had a late hit in the form of Pokémon Red & Blue - the games gave the format a shot in the arm in Japan when introduced in 1996, and plenty of hand-me- down systems were dusted off when they made their way west in 1998 and 1999. In the financial year ending March 1998, the Game Boy was old hardware (the Game Boy Color still having yet to be introduced) and the world was fixated on home consoles with 3D graphics. But even at what should have been its loweest ebb, the low cost and timeless library of the Game Boy, combined with the absence of any serious competition in the handheld console space, meant that Nintendo managed to sell through 10.37 million hardware units. The Game Boy Color was introduced just months later and revitalised hardware sales — and even though that model saw plenty of exclusive software, major releases including Pokémon Gold & Silver and Dragon Warrior Monsters still supported the old model. Only when the Game Boy Advance was released in 2001 did the classic system truly ride off into the glorious greyscale sunset. That level of reach alone gives Game Boy nostalgia a much wider resonance than most other machines can claim. But there's something p+ > [Game Boy] Bespoke Game Boy projects like F-I Race sold in their millions, despite generic branding. » [Game Boy] Games produced by Shigeru Miyamoto don't tend to fly under the radar, but Mole Mania has. RETRO GAMER | 25 » [Game Boy] Pokémon kept the system from flagging when most machines would run out of steam. SQUTR BE > more to it — the hardware choices Nintendo made gave the Game Boy a very distinctive identity, a look and feel that its competitors can't match. Show most people a screenshot of Lemmings on the Atari Lynx or the Game Gear, and they'd be hard-pressed to identify the platform. But when you show people a screenshot of the same game running on the Game Boy, there's no hesitation — the four shades (green if you're original, grey otherwise) are a defining characteristic of the platform. And the Game Boy sounds unique amongst Nintendo systems too, not inheriting its sound hardware from the NES or having anything in common with the SNES. Combined with its overwhelming commercial success, these unique distinguishing factors have turned the Game Boy into a true cultural icon, recognisable even to those who weren't around to experience the system's birth 30 years ago. Take the form factor of the system, for example. When Nintendo chose to reintroduce its Game & Watch classics in mini keychain size in the Nineties, it did so in Game Boy- style casing. The machine has also been the basis for all sorts of novelty products, from shampoo bottles to drinking flasks and alarm clocks. Though Nintendo would abandon the vertical orientation beginning with the Game Boy Advance, it was widely imitated by manufacturers of lower-level handhelds in the 26 | RETRO GAMER » [Game Boy] Game Boy games often offer unique takes on existing properties, like Super Mario Land's shooting sections. i Nineties, from cheap 'block game' handhelds to the likes of the Mega Duck and the Supervision. Even today, contemporary machines such as the Playdate draw clear inspiration from the Game Boy's classic design. The limited display of the system has also been a visual inspiration for many, including Gaz, whose game Owyn's Adventure uses the Game Boy visual style. What inspired this choice? "I started Owyn's Adventure as an entry to the Unofficial Game Boy Jam run by my friend Jamie, who convinced me to take part away from another personal project that l'd gotten a creative block on," explains the developer. If you're a regular reader of our Homebrew section, you'll likely be familiar with such development drives. "|t was two weeks to make as much as you could so long as the game featured just four shades of the Game Boy green. After two weeks | had some systems in and a rushed level, so | thought I'd spend a couple of weeks working on the level design but kept going as | was enjoying working on it so much.” “Both the Game Boy and the Spectrum are Zee, had a head start" Jas Austin 2o I already The existence of an unofficial jam suggests that there's no shortage of people interested in making Game Boy-style games, and a look around the indie scene bears that out. Browse the online store for the Nintendo Switch and you'll find games like Save Me, Mr Tako and Awesome Pea that lift their limited colour palettes and green hues directly from the original model of the Game Boy. It's not just on the handheld platform that you'll find this reverence for Nintendo's original machine, either — PC games like Madcap Castle and Squidlit also pay homage to the system's distinctive display, while others like Evoland 2 and PlataGO! include the Game Boy as one of many retro gaming styles. The look even goes beyond games, as mobile apps like Retrospecs, Bitstagram and Retroboy offer camera filters designed to produce images like the Game Boy Camera add-on. So what makes the look of the machine so popular with indie developers? "A couple reasons as to why the Game Boy aesthetic is popular come to mind,” says Gaz. “Firstly the > 30 YEARS OF THE GAME DOS HINI MAKING OF... ALIEH zr JAS AUSTIN REVEALS THE STORY BEHIND HIS UNIQUE INTERPRETATION OF ALIEN 3 You worked on the Spectrum before moving over to the Game Boy. Was it a smooth transition? Yes, it was pretty smooth. Both the Game Boy and the Spectrum are Z80, so | already had a head start. What was new to me was hardware support — scrolling and sprites for example. Were you able to watch the Alien 3 movie prior to starting development? Sadly no, but the team did get to attend a private screening in asmall cinema in Leicester Square shortly before the film was released, which was pretty exciting for me. For the design we only had a copy of the script. There must have been a temptation to do a typical 2D run-and-gun, like the other versions of the game? A side-view game was the obvious choice but we purposely avoided doing that. My last few games had all been side- scrollers and | was a bit sick of doing them, so | pushed for the idea of doing something top-down with a little less straight action, Plus at the time | had a feeling the other versions of Alien 3 would be side-scrolling actions games and thought this would help our game stand out. Did you receive any feedback — or interference — from the movie studio? Fox had no feedback or input into the game design, l'm not sure back then that the film companies saw the games industry as anything important, However any larger graphics of the actors had to be signed off by Fox and the stars. How long did the development last, and was it a smooth development? It wasn't the smoothest development. | started on the game and made a very quick prototype to demonstrate the top-down scrolling view. But then | got pulled off the project to work on another game, Spider-Man 2 if | recall. Sadly my replacement on Alien 3 had to stop due to health reasons, so after finishing the Spider-Man game | jumped back on board. The previous coder's work wasn't something | could use so | went back to my original code, Because the development was now running late the pressure was on to get it finished. It was tough but | managed to finish the coding in about five weeks, which even back then was pretty quick. HOHSTER HAX JON RITMAN ON CREATING HIS MINI ISOMETRIC OPUS FOR THE GAME BOY Did you find it easy moving on to Game Boy development, due to the Z80-like CPU? Z80-like? Yeah, if they had castrated a 780. No exchange registers, no index registers, no 16-bit additions or subtraction instructions. It was doable but also horrible. Were you asked to create an isometric game in the style of Head Over Heels, or was it something you wanted to do? | had just finished my own development program that Rare used for many games, and at that point | just wanted to use it for something myself. There were no isometric games for the Game Boy during that time, so | thought it would be an interesting challenge. The monochrome screen was probably the Game Boy's biggest shortcoming. Did you have to mitigate for it during the design? To be honest, as far as an isometric game was concerned the Spectrum was also monochrome, so no change there. The biggest problem with the screen on the Game Boy was that there wasn't a proper hi-res mode, so | had to mess about a lot to create one using interrupts to change modes as the raster passed over the screen. The issues you had with the publisher are well known. Do you think the game would have had more impact if its release had been handled better? If reviews made no difference at the time why would anyone bother to submit a game? Monster Max got great reviews when we finished it, but how many would remember it when it was eventually released nearly a year later? Is it correct that Nintendo was interesting in publishing the game at one point? Don't remind me that | made the biggest mistake of my career. Yes, Nintendo was interested but we would have had to remodel the main character to be one from the Nintendo stable. | can only plead tiredness for my failure to do so. Finally, was a Game Boy version of Match Day ever considered? | did think it would be possible to make afoolball game that — | would be happy with on the Game Boy. | did bout it only for a very short time. > instant nostalgia back to when we were younger - fun, easy-to-learn games. Secondly, for me especially, it lets you worry less when drawing the artwork. It takes a bit to get into the mindset of four colours but once you draw with them for a bit you learn to know when you've done enough.” There are limitations, of course. “You can't go overly detailed or things just appear noisy and unreadable, less becomes more as players fill in the gaps.” s well as the four shades, many developers choose to employ the green screen - this is in spite of the fact that many players will have experienced Game Boy games on other systems that represent the system's graphics differently, such as the Game Boy Pocket, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Indeed, even this magazine uses the green look for its Game Boy screenshots. Why is this such a crucial part of the look? For Gaz, it comes down to simple nostalgia. "The green is what people who have played on the original console think of when they hear ‘Game Boy’. I've seen some great games with four shades but green represents the original console for me." Of course, one of the things that comes with imitating the style is that you can cherry pick the best bits of it, and one thing that tends to be left out is the motion blur that was characteristic of the early Game Boy systems. "| think developers don't chase the motion blur effect as it's not an aesthetic that lends itself to all gameplay types," explains Gaz. "A player who never used the console might even think it was a bug or glitch!” As you'll likely remember if you were around atthe time, the sound of the console was popular too. In 1992, two of the Game Boy's flagship titles inspired singles that reached the top ten in the UK singles charts — SuperMarioLand ft MC Mario “The green » [Game Boy] Mario often tumed up to boost the appeal of early games with generic branding, ike Tennis by Ambassadors Of Funk, and Tetris by Doctor Spin (in actuality, musical theatre composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and record producer Nigel Wright). British readers will also likely remember an Ariston advert which featured the title music from the Game Boy conversion of RoboCop. Those achievements are pretty astonishing, considering that the console’s sound capabilities were very limited even by gaming standards at the time, and speak more to the system’s massive popularity than its musical merits. But the Game Boy’s sound remains iconic way past the system’s commercial heyday. With the rise of flashcarts, anyone can use homebrew programs like Nanoloop and LSDJ (Little Sound DJ) to turn their childhood handheld into a powerful instrument. But why create LSDJ in the first place? "The stars were aligned," says Johan. "| had put my heart into making music on the Amiga for a couple of years and was looking for something new. For a long time | had imagined a portable music-making tool, that would allow me to try out and annotate music ideas on the go." The choice of platform was more coincidental than deliberate. "Some of my friends were starting with Game Boy Color programming, | thought it seemed fun and assembly programming might even be a useful skill when looking for jobs. The Game Boy music programs at the time seemed rather limited and | thought making the best Game Boy music program could be my humble claim to fame - not that | imagined many would ever use it." Johan's software did become rather popular, as chiptune artists have adopted the Game Boy as a favourite platform. What is it about the system that makes it so attractive? "The Game Boy sound is technically not that extraordinary and is maybe best characterized by its limited 4-bit dynamics. Time has shown though, that it is a rather good music system," he says. im What people who have Played on the original console think f When they hear Gaz Thomas ‘Game Boe » [Game Boy] The music of Tetris has inspired a number of musical tributes, including a top ten single. “The capabilities are well balanced between two square wave channels, a programmable wave table and a noise generator, so it lends itself equally well to many music genres. It is easy to program and the Game Boy has ample RAM, ROM and decent processing power, so it's possible to splurge on things like nice UI, samples, soft synthesis, even going overboard with effects so that one can sculpt the sounds to ones desire. The serial port is a nice bonus, and crucially those square wave basses just happen to sound great in a big sound system.” LSDJ has gone on to become a key tool in the repertoire of many chiptune musicians — those who use it include popular acts such as Anamanaguchi, Toriena, Chipzel, DJ Scotch Egg and Trash80. "I'll mention Covox, Lo-bat and Goto80 since | did a lot of shows with them back in the day," adds Johan when asked about his favourite acts. Like the Game Boy graphical style, the Game Boy sound has even found its way back to games - Anamanaguchi did the Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack, Chipzel provided music for Super Hexagon and Toriena contributed to the recent Team Sonic Racing. But while the hardware itself has had a considerable impact on our gaming culture, the Game Boy is like every other console in that the primary draw remains the games themselves. And the library manages to attract both old hands and new faces. Jeremy's Game Boy Works covers RS OF THE GAME BC BEST: 61:33 ` the Game Boy library in chronological order, and cultural significance is a big reason for the choice of platform. “Ever since Game Boy Color and Neo-Geo Pocket Color I’ve been a big fan of handheld gaming, and during the DS and the PSP's lifespan, | was a big advocate of those in the press. n f So | felt that maybe | should go back P and look at the roots of portable gaming, the first major portable system to come out - and it still has so much heritage in gaming at this point,” says Jeremy. But there's another factor that makes the library attractive too, and that's the fact that despite all the nostalgia, it still represents relatively fresh ground to cover. “There's not really that much coverage of Game Boy - even now, outside of the major titles » TENTENRIST ARKANUM RETRO GAMER | 29 HINI MAKING OF... LAHO HHI IAN MANDERS CODED THE THIRD AND FINEST DONKEY KONG LAND How did you land the job of coding Donkey | Kong Land 3 for Rare? I started at Rare in 1994 and my first project was the SNES game Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run. After that finished in early 1996, | was assigned to work on Donkey Kong Land 3 It used the same engine that Rob Harrison wrote from the ground up for Donkey Kong Land 2, but with lots of new gameplay features, as well as new map screens and bonus games. What were the main challenges you faced from a coding perspective? It was a new platform, to me, so I had to get up to speed with a different CPU, and the tighter constraints of the Game Boy - slower speed, less memory and the small pages of the Game Boy cartridges. It was an interesting challenge, though, and the immediacy of working with portable platforms resonated with me. For most of my career since that point I've developed software for portable games consoles and mobile phones. The first two Donkey Kong Land james are quite close to their big Brother SNES versions, whereas Donkey Kong Land 3 does deviate from Donkey Kong Country 3. Was this a conscious decision? We weren't given any significant directives one way or another and we were generally left to get on with it. Most attention at that time was paid to the Nintendo 64 games in development. We had the benefit of having a good starting point in the existing engine, so that gave us some breathing room to add some original elements. The original Game Boy’s monochrome screen wasn’t amazing. Was there much you could do as a coder to improve clarity? | think that was mostly in the hands of the artist. I dont remember having much influence over that. The artist, Keri Gunn, had lots of experience with creating great Game Boy graphics so it was in capable hands. The first Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy reportedly sold in huge numbers. Were you privy to how well your sequel sold? | remember hearing that Donkey Kong Land 3sold more than a million, which was great to hear for only the second game I'd worked on. 30 | RETRO GRITER. P — so it seemed like something interesting to do," he points out. “It's been a journey of discovery, which is what l really wanted to do because | missed out on Game Boy for most of its life. This is the chance for me to go back and experience the things that | didn't get to experience when they were new." Going back and taking every release in turn has allowed Jeremy to gain insights on the system that he wouldn't necessarily have reached otherwise. "It had a lot of puzzle games, which | didn't really realise at the time," he tells us. “When | would play puzzle action games like Adventures Of Lolo or Toki Tori, | was like, ‘Wow, this is really novel’ and now that l've spent a lot of time with the Game Boy library | realise that these were really common and this was a huge genre, especially in Japan on early computers." Indeed, looking at the Japanese library is a gateway into a world of games that iginated on the likes of the PC-88 and FM7, and plenty of other games made similar transitions. Since consumers expected simple, easy-to-grasp games on the Game Boy, developers used the console as a means of bringing classic games back to market. Arcade games like Mr Do!, Heiankyo Alien and Donkey Kong were revived on Game Boy, as were computer classics such as Lode Runner. The project has also allowed Jeremy to discover plenty of new favourites. "Mercenary Force was a great one, it's kind of like a horizontal shooter but you're controlling a team of mercenaries in feudal Japan. The Sword Of Hope was developed by Kemco, and Kemco made its mark on the NES by taking the ICOM MacVenture games and converting them, and The Sword Of Hope takes that framework and combines it with a Dragon Quest-style RPG. It's really interesting and distinct. | also like Balloon Fight and it didn't really occur to me until | started this project that Balloon Kid was a sequel and follow up to Balloon Fight, so | really enjoyed that one." It's fascinating that even for a long-time games journalist with a notable interest in retro games, there's so much unexplored territory. "There have been quite a few games since l've started this project that have been pleasant surprises or genuinely great. | don't think the Game Boy gets its fair due, honestly," he tells us. One of the long-term devotees of the system is Mathew, who graduated from Kirby to Super Mario Land, and later to RPGs like Pokémon and Dragon Warrior Monster. "l've been collecting Cw WR EUN » [SNES] The Game Boy's display is part of its character, but players always desired colour solutions like the Super Game Boy. n3-z-owa Nvave NI 30V » The Game Boy saw a lot of support from Nintendo, with big franchises making waves on the handheld console. Wena 9 Ë Ar MES! i i i] E l » Mathew Boyle's collection is enough to make any retro gamer Game Boy gre ith envy. there's a puritH cauLdn't rely Mathew diss for the Game Boy since | was about 11," says the collector. "| used to go to car boot sales and local retro stores with friends at the weekends. To be honest, it pretty much happened by accident - as | grew up with the system and its successors, | ended up with a pretty solid base of games and discovered new ones via emulation. | started filling in the gaps because honestly it'd stretch the money I'd get from my paper round a little more than buying a SNES game. Unboxed carts were usually only a couple of pounds, so it was worth gambling on games with interesting labels!” Eventually, this casual collecting turned into a more focused effort. "It wasn't until | moved to Denmark that | decided to go for a full set,” he explains. “| managed to get the full European set a few years back (467 carts) and then | mopped up the hundred or so US exclusives last year. | think l'm somewhere around 200 of the Japanese exclusives, so l've probably nearing the 800 carts mark if | haven't already!" So what is it that keeps players coming back to the Game Boy library? "I honestly think it's because the system's limitations made for great gameplay. The games are very simplistic and there's a purity in that — developers couldn't rely on visuals (or even colour), so it makes the experience all about play," Mathew replies. "I guess it also helps that the Game Boy came around at a time when games were in their infancy. Much like the indie games of today, a small team could make an experimental game with relatively little risk involved. | think it's a real testament to those studios, that you can hand an al: gs HHI: “The games are verY simplistic and in that - devs on "visualzs" Boyle [original Game Boy] and some games to a six- year-old and they'll still have fun playing them!" The Game Boy was never Nintendo's flagship product, yet there's a case to be made that it had the biggest impact of any of the company's hardware ventures. After all, what became of the adults who got hooked on their kids" copies of Tetris? They're the bedrock of today's casual gaming market, and they're probably still playing Tetris on their mobile phones. What became of Pokémon? It's still one of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world. What became of handheld consoles? They were established as viable alternatives to home devices, and Nintendo has been the driving force in their continued evolution. The company enjoys a similarly commanding position in that market now - even though the Game Boy line has been inactive for over a decade, the Nintendo DS line went on to even greater sales and the Switch is more or less unopposed today. Because of that impact, we're still in love with the system today. You can see that in the people who still cherish the collections they amassed when growing up, as well as those who are discovering the library today. You see it in the Game Boy kids that have grown up and are now bringing the console's distinct style into their own projects — a style that exists purely because of the choices Nintendo made in service of creating a viable handheld console. If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that the best hardware will turn heads in the moment, but the best hardware for the job will create a lasting legacy. %* GAME DOY n [Game Boy] The Game Boy editions of R-Type are impressive, and well worth picking up. K-TYFE Dx RECALLS THE BUMPER R-TYPE PACKAGE THAT DELIGHTED ALL GAME BOY OWNERS *» Did having the ZX ! Spectrum version of R-Type on your CV help you get the Game Boy R-Type Il gig? Well the original R-Type for the Game Boy was converted by Jas Austin but he was busy on another game, while | was free and had the experience of coding the Spectrum version. | don't know if it had been offered to anyone else but for my self-confidence I'd like to think my name was somewhere near the top of the list! The pair of you later updated your R-Type games for R-Type DX on the Game Boy Color. What was the impetus there? It was a quick money-spinner. The DX versions replaced the mono sprites and backgrounds with colour versions and | also added a brand-new backdrop to the third stage of R-Type Il. We found out that it was very easy to convert an existing four-colour Game Boy game to a full(ish) colour one, so much so that perhaps the console should have been called the Game Boy Color-ised. Besides the colour versions, R-Type DX also included the original mono games that could be enjoyed on both Game Boy and Game Boy Color. How did that work? | had to add a piece of code to the mono Game Boy versions that checked if it was running on a Game Boy Color. If it was then it set the first four colours of the Game Boy Color palette to an approximation of the Game Boy, with a slight yellow tinge. Disregarding the differences in colour the Game Boy Color versions are pretty much identical to the originals. Nintendo did ask for some minor tweaks such as asking for the level one boss to be made harder to kill. R-Type DX includes a cryptic messages on the end credits: *For Arch Stanton, The World Is Yours?' Was this down to you? Yes, that's another of my little messages at the end. Arch Stanton plays a key part in the finale of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, while ‘The World Is Yours'is the motif that drives the protagonists of both versions of Scarface. Subscribe from just £25 and grab your FREE 8BITDO M30 CONTROLLER abitdo controller ever made, reimagined for modern gaming The M30 controller is the PHÁT — là e greatest six-button ; Nisi € j "AT Compatible with Windows, Android, \ à macOS, Steam, 9p Rasberry Pi and Nintendo Switch Wireless Bluetooth and USB-C connectivity SUBSCRIBE www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/ret/8bitdoM30 US. ai 9, 1993 Sheet 1 of ` N f Y $ r H N | pa Stunning exclusive subscriber-only covers You'll never miss an issue! It's delivered direct to your door Brilliant value — save money on the cover price Li hc 7 (77 ~ PGRADE TO INCLUDE DIGITAL SEE THE FORONLY | FULL RANGE AND £2.50 Al Increase your www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/ret/8bitdoM30 » PUBLISHER: HEWSON CONSULTANTS m » DEVELOPER: STEVE CROW » RELEASED: 1986 » PLATFORM: ZXSPECTRUM, VARIOUS » " ADVENTURE Thanks to the popularity of his Wizard's Lair and ve E tarquake, Steve Crow became a hot property. He tells F Retro Gamer how this led to him switching publishers Z and developing the magical Firelord Words by Rory Milne i3 coed. Ba Bet kawea El _ SË og Ha ee pa a RE aE aay S » [ZX Spectrum] Firelord's hero begins his quest unarmed, although the game's early screens are relatively safe. t's fair to say that Steve Crow was living the dream of many teenagers during the Eighties. A family friend’s business published his first two games in 1983 and 1984, and then he started work on his third, Wizard's Lair, just as his business partners decided that his games weren't profitable. Following a change of publisher, Steve proved ; the same as they would have looked i 300 years prior. So the whole game was based around the idea of what it would have been like 300 years ago in that area, and what kind of people i you would expect to find." i Interms of the kind of person that Firelord's medieval hero would be, Steve opted to give him a low rank, and this fed into his title's gameplay. DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS them wrong, firstly with Wizard's Lair : "Since you started off as a serf in WIZARD'S LAIR and then its follow-up Starquake, and : Firelord, or you were just a pageboy, SYSTEM: ZX SPECTRUM, soon companies were falling over my thinking was that you started at VARIOUS each other trying to sign his next that level and that you had to build YEAR: 1985 game - Firelord, but things almost your way up from the bottom," Steve — STARQUAKE cicturep) didn’t go to plan, as Steve explains. reasons. “So that included things like SYSTEM: ZX SPECTRUM, “Bubble Bus published Wizard's Lair you wouldn't have a weapon to start VARIOUS when | couldn't get anyone else to i with, and you had to get one.” YEAR: 1985 publish it,” Steve admits candidly. Further gameplay elements FIRELORD “But it did really well with it, and followed, as Steve set limits on SYSTEM: ZX SPECTRUM, then Hewson Consultants contacted : Firelord's protagonist, which he VARIOUS me when | was doing Starquake. In — : depicted with energy bars b YEAR: 1986 the end, | decided | should go with Bubble Bus, because it treated me well, But once Starquake started getting reviews | realised it was going to be a big hit, and | got frustrated that Bubble Bus was only putting out half-page black-and-white adverts in magazines. So then with Firelord, | had already decided that | was going with Hewson.” Having settled on a publisher for Firelord, Steve next looked to the medieval architecture of his home county to inform his game's visual design and gameplay. "My whole inspiration for Firelord was where | grew up in Sussex,” Steve notes. "I'd H go cycling around all of these villages : Je wWilirtimber'tramedihioUses and $ » [ZX Spectrum] Magic defensive spells are rare in Firelord, but thatched roofs; all the buildings were : there's always one near the start of the game. S ear THE MAHING OF: FIRELORD CONVERSION CAPERS How Firelord compares on different systems zX SPECTRUM m Like many other di 8 (A Spectrum originals MS ". : E published by Hewson, anaes | Firelordpacks alot of colour into each of its flick-screen stages. This matters beyond being aesthetically pleasing, as the game has hundreds of levels, and so having different coloured buildings to use as landmarks is really helpful. The Spectrum Firelord also has great sound effects throughout, and even a little speech when you get caught stealing in the game's trading sections. AMSTRAD CPC 464 B Generally speaking, the . Amstrad Firelord is avery accurate conversion, but it falls down ona couple of points. Firstly, it's rendered in the system's high-res four-colour mode, which is fine, except for the fact that this leaves a lot of the buildings in the game the same colour, which makes navigation tricky. Secondly, the CPC 464 iteration doesn't sound as good as the Spectrum original, despite having a far superior sound chip. Otherwise, it's a solid adaptation. C64 W First off, credit to the late C64 chiptune legend Ben Dalglish for the superlative medieval synthpop that greets * players on loading up the C64 Firelord. That said, the game's sound effects aren't quite as good in places. In terms of visuals, the C64 Firelordis almost identical to the Spectrum original, although everything is depicted is slightly less vibrant tones. For some reason, its hero's face isn't cast in shadows, and there are dogs in its village streets, but in all other respects the C44 conversion perfectly replicates the game that it's based on. tM TIU RES GLIIDE TO me. NECI ze CHART YOUR COURSE KNOW YOUR LIMITS HONOURABLE THIEF Fr È = EE ED p CAST THIS SPELL 30 ROACH HERE ACAIN + = z = MAGIC PLACES E Firelordis 512 screens in size, so making a map is a must if you plan to navigate its world without getting lost. No two village buildings are exactly the same size, shape and colour, so use those as landmarks when exploring the game's sprawling woodlands and rocky areas. E The ghostly villagers that haunt Firelord's hero drain his limited energy. The magic he has to defend himself with, and his trading ability, are also finite. There are power-ups for these vital Stats scattered around the game's world, but there are also hazards that deplete them. W The aim of Firelordis to lift a curse from an ancient land, but the game's inhabitants insist on charging the game's penniless hero for their services. This being the case, stealing from them is for the greater good, but as it's punishable by death it's best not to end up in the dock. W Trading objects for transportation spells only gets you so far, you also need to specify your destination by providing the symbols uniquely associated with it. Since these are only revealed by visiting it on-foot, transportation isn't viable until you've done a bit of walking around. the same kind of visuals where you had the same running around." But rather than limiting the trading in Firelord to bartering, Steve added the option of stealing objects and services. “| just thought it was a fun the chance of stealing something, and doing it quickly," Steve reflects. "It was to add an element of excitement to the trading — it was risk/reward. It introduced arcade gameplay into the trading part of the game, and it made the player use : some skill in those sections." » Firelord was Steve Crow's final solo project. He's a senior artist for Blizzard Entertainment these days. P representing health, defensive magic and trading ability. "I guess the energy bars were like mana, and things like you get in modern games," Steve says. "| did the same in Starquake; there were three $ energy bars. It just meant that there: that worked within the restraints were more things for you to pickup, : of Firelord's host hardware. “| was because you could boost each one of : thinking that if you got caught you f course, it followed that unskilled pilferers would have to face justice, and so Steve devised a trial : different people do different things. | probably just based that on real life, you know, you don’t buy bananas : when you go to the butchers! Back : then, every shop did its own thing. | ; think that's just how life was 30 years sort of element where you could take : ago; you would go to certain people for certain things, and so | just incorporated that into the game.” One notable service that could š be traded for in Firelord was i teleportation, which worked by casting spells consisting of symbols revealed when entering one of the game's ‘magic places.’ "It was just taking the mechanic from Starquake but doing it with symbols ; as opposed to letters," Steve i concedes, "because the maps just i got so huge. So you would have to go somewhere else to learn those : symbols, and then you could just teleport yourself. It was exactly the same as Starquake but implemented in a slightly different way." But other areas of Firelord diverged more substantially from Starquake, such as its inventory system, which allowed four objects i to be held and a further four stored i with Ward Keepers. “I thought four i objects was enough, and the Ward Keepers were like a bank," Steve i points out. "Also, maybe some of i my thinking there was that it made you travel around the map to go back to where you had left a thing with a Ward Keeper. | added that complexity because in Starquake į you just picked up pieces of core, i and then you went to the core and i putthem in." the bars. | think they added depth.” But Firelord gained far greater depth when Steve decided to incorporate trading with non-player characters into his latest project, which he hoped would differentiate it from its arcade-inspired predecessor. "I was focusing on trading mechanics, rather than with Starquake, which was more gameplay mechanics - like laying bridges, going up elevators and flying little platforms," Steve explains. “I was trying to do more of a role-playing game or an adventure game, to get more of that kind of feel where there was more interaction and you met people, but on a very basic level obviously. It was to get a different type of game based around fe F P = EJ im RETRO GAMER would go to see a magistrate or t you would have a court case," Steve H ponders, "but that would have been i too complicated to do in a game È up with an arrow going backwards ; and forwards between innocent and i guilty getting faster and faster. | did i play Uridium a lot; | loved that game, Í trading became more complex, i different characters with trading : disparate objects and services, : traders. “There was definitely H trading," Steve observes, "it was : about building things up and having mh tes back then. So it just sort of ended STAMD TRIAL THIET so maybe | got the idea from that.” Another aspect of Firelord's however, when Steve tasked TMMOCENT Sl instead of giving his game generic an idea of progression with the $ n [ZX Spectrum] Stealing services is essential in Firelord, but getting caught lands you in a courtroom minigame. ia d EP Elba cs aci: Besides collecting essential objects, such as defensive spells and items to trade, Steve set Firelord's core challenge around obtaining four charms, which would have to be traded for, unlike his previous game, where objects were found lying around. "That was something I'd done with Starquake," Steve acknowledges, “but with Firelord you were interacting, and you would have to trade and you would have to build up to it. You couldn't just go to a location and get a thing. It was to create more gameplay, but also it was to create more interesting characters and an extra level to the game." Unique hazards further distinguished Firelord from Starquake in the form of steady, intermittent and frozen flames, which : may have also given Steve's latest project its name. "I was looking for an obstacle that was timed," Steve remembers. "| don't know why | chose flames particularly, but | think it was connected to the game being called Firelord. Maybe | was thinking that since there was fire across the land, the game’s hero was the guy who could go through the fire, control it and unfreeze the flames. Or maybe | just started putting those fire mechanics in because it was convenient, and then the name Firelord came from that.” A second set of obstacles followed, but rather than relieving Firelord's hero of lives, like the flames, the magic spells that Steve introduced to his game drained his hero's defensive magic. “I just ri 160185 6 TREE » [ZX Spectrum] Firelord's hero can defend himself with magic when attacked by the ghosts of former villagers. wanted different hazards, where one drained your health and another drained your weapons," Steve says : ofthe spells and the flames. “You i could pick objects up that would Í boost those stats, but then you had to watch out for hazards that could take away from them. | thought that i your trading ability was something ; that you built up, and so | didn't even ; think of taking that away.” ut the time that Steve had poured into Firelord's gameplay unfortunately led to the teenage developer i missing his deadline, which in turn caused a falling out with his publisher. “Andrew Hewson i called me up one day, and he was i furious,” Steve recollects. "This was i in September, he needed to get the i marketing done, and he was worried i Firelord wasn't going to come out for Christmas. You know, | was a little bit behind, but ten days late is had been pretty reasonable. Finally | put the phone down and said to my parents: 'He's going to sue us because I'm late on this game!’ My i parents were concerned, but they ; said: ‘Oh, he can't do that." Just as Steve's parents had : predicted, Firelord was completed : quite as good reviews as Starquake, ; Steve recalls. “It sold well because i Hewson Consultants was much t better at marketing than Bubble : Bus; it sold probably the same as THE MAHING OF: FIRELORD u know, | was a little bit behind, but ten days late is nothing, right? But, man! He shouted at me Steve Crow i without matters having to be i resolved in court, and the reward for its designer and his publishing firm on its release was overwhelmingly positive reviews and stellar sales. It got fair reviews, but it didn't get Starquake, so | can't complain there. : Hewson also converted it onto other i platforms, and | worked with its i programmers to help convert it onto i the Amstrad and the C64." i nothing, right? But, man! He shouted : i at me [...], and up until that point he When reviewing Firelord now, Steve offers a single tweak before approving of his classic title's vibrant visuals, but reflects on how he could have made more of its gameplay. “I i would definitely give you a weapon i to start with — that's fundamental!” i he laughs. "It's hard to play, but | i think that games back in the Eighties i were hard. | like the graphics for E r 003500 05 "$ > 2 =, > [ZX Spectrum] You can teleportto magic places situated around Firelord's levels providing you know their spells. i what you could do back then on the Spectrum, and just the enormity of the map. But looking back at Firelord, ; | don't think | realised that | was ; starting to get into what we would now call an RPG. | didn't really value that aspect of the game; you know, | saw it as an end in itself. | thought about how to make Firelord more i sophisticated than Starquake, but | i never thought beyond that. So | think į | was probably onto something, and ; didn't quite realise it." * One of the most stylish ninja-themed arcade games of the Eighties, Irem's Ninja Spirit mixed side-scrolling beat-'em-up action with innovative shoot-em-up mechanics to create something totally unique Words by Mike Bevan 38 | RETRO GAMER ention the word ‘Irem’ to any seasoned gamer and chances are that the first thing they'll think of will be the company’s flagship shooter series, R-Type. But perhaps one of the Japanese coin-op developer's lesser known claims to fame is the fact that in 1984 it created the first side-scrolling beat-'em-up, Spartan X, better known to western audiences as Kung Fu Master. The game was also one of the first to feature an exclusively eastern setting, a sprawling pagoda inspired by the Bruce Lee martial arts movie, Game Of Death. In 1988, a year after the release of R-Type, Irem returned to the side-scrolling brawler with two coin-op titles — the New York-based Vigilante, and a rather more intriguing return to a world influenced by eastern mysticism, Ninja Spirit. Released in Japan as Tsukikage: The Legend Of The White Wolf, the title screen announces “the last way of the ninja” in Japanese script, and the gameplay owes more to arcade games like Z A ¿ ^ » [Arcade] The visual design of Ninja Spirit really is exceptional in places thanks to some truly exquisite sprite work, » [Arcade] Ninja Spirithas some cool abilities, including this one which gives you multiple ninja clones. Shinobi and Black Tiger than Kung Fu Master, while very much being its own katana-wielding, shuriken-flinging beast. Ninja Spirit's admittedly superficial plot concerns lone hero Tsukikage (translated as 'Moonlight' in English) on a quest through Japan to avenge his father, who has been murdered by a mysterious sorcerer demon. In gaming terms, this equates to running a gauntlet of seven increasingly challenging stages in which scores of constantly spawning enemies try to kill you with lightning accuracy, which this being an Irem title isn't overly surprising. From Moonlight's first appearance in a ruined shrine he's beset by ninja baddies lunging through the air at him with daggers, throwing knives in multiple directions, and even trying to spear him from under the floorboards. Luckily our protagonist is equipped with a set of four useful weapons, a katana (Righteous Cloud), throwing stars (Swirling Leaf), bombs (Bamboo Thunder), and a nifty sickle and chain (Rising Dragon). The default weapon, the katana, is probably the most useful for the majority of the game, as it slices in a wide arc above Moonlight's head, and effectively blocks most projectiles. Throwing stars are useful at range and can be powered up to be flung rapidly three at a time. Bombs are extremely powerful and best used against bosses, while the sickle and chain also blocks enemy bullets, and . can be swirled around the screen in tx » nok the game's coolest looking attack move, the downside being that it's a little slower than the other weapons. All weapons can be upgraded 3b. once by picking up power-ups left x after killing orange ninjas, with the katana being top priority as "n cual ` MONE. š - =. ULTIMATE GUIDE: NINJA SPIRIT Boss RUSU How to vanquish this horde of devilish bad guys W After running a gauntlet of ninjas through the first stage this statuesque demigod rises from the ground, Thankfully he's fairly weak and his attacks are easy to avoid. A handful of attacks will easily finish him off. W This bizarre tree-dwelling demon starts in the centre of the screen and will track your movements. His attacks aren't quick but they will fell you in one swoop so keep moving in between using your bombs. rhe I This towering ninja has a huge sabre, so get ready to high-jump over it if he gets close. The main problem, though, are his riflemen henchmen. You might want to switch between your sword and bombs. c STONES W This boss’ method of attack is to try and make ninja squash out of you, The two stones take turns at targeting you and it's easy to make a bad move and end up being flattened. Avoid the corners of the screen! E This giant kite packed with ninjas is definitely one of the tougher bosses. The sickle weapon is useful for blocking | projectiles, and if you see an opening, | chuck a few bombs and pray. | | | LORE IH W These powerful zombie warriors make IH for a hectic fight because they seem to IH warp in randomly. Your only hope is your bombs, if you still have them powered up. If not you're going to be in a bit of trouble. JARRA Ii Congratulations, you've made it to the final boss. The lightning bolts he fires track you, so some deft manoeuvring and ll jumping will be required to beat him, Good | luck, and may the ninja spirit be with you. POWER-UP RETRO GAMER | 39 BROWN NINJA ATARE GT FT Sta CoHPFODORBRE (Ga 2x SRPECTARUH m The 16-bit home computer versions of Ninja W The Amiga conversion appears to be based IW The C64 port was by Chris Butler, the genius E In some ways the Speccy port is the most Spirit are credited to Mediagenic, the short-lived ^ directly on the Atari ST port and suffers thesame behind popular conversions of Commando, authentic of the 8-bit computer version in terms successor to Activision. The Atari ST version control issues, reduced colour palette and lack Ghosts 'N Goblins and Space Harrier. It's a of the scale of the backgrounds and size of the isn’t bad, but suffers from a sluggish feel to the of background planes. Like the ST port, there are reasonably impressive effort, though it suffers in-game characters. However, it does suffer controls, plus the awkward need to press a no in-game sound effects, but this version has a from scaled-back sprites, but with a great remix from screen flicker and the busy backgrounds direction on the joystick to attack. much better soundtrack. of the original arcade music by Martin Walker. sometimes make it hard to spot enemies, DIT >J Z er [Ss] 4:28 be » [Arcade] In this stage Moonlight can flip between the floor and the ceiling, but » [Arcade] The aggravating pit section sees you falling down a vertical unfortunately so can his enemies. with very little control over your character. it will add a trail of hollow „ tw v * It's this powering up aspect of the game that circular blasts along the arc "e LH gives Ninja Spirit a feel much more of its swing that'll hold off gl in sync with stablemate R-Type than smaller bad guys for a while. AR a, Vigilante or Kung Fu Master, with a y yA i, 3 fully tooled-up Moonlight filling the ce screen with sword swipes, multiple shuriken, bombs and swirling chains. and cutting through lesser baddies with ease. The pace of the game is Ninja Spirit isn't a game to hang around in, though, the main impetus apart from 4} the throngs of enemies being a timer that ticks down as you push forwards towards the boss. Moonlight’s ability certainly more akin to a shoot-em-up to leap across the screen like an p [ than most arcade action games, escapee from Crouching Tiger, =. A ` - d but the downside of this approach Hidden Dragon is definitely an is that, similarly to R-Type, things advantage in this respect. can rapidly go downhill if you die and The most innovative power-up in the lose all your upgrades. Ninja Spirit can be game though is arguably the ability to gain up to stubbornly difficult at times, but like Dark Souls the two of the ninja ‘spirits’ of the game's title, an idea satisfaction of taking on a stage or boss without so good it was later pinched by Tecmo for Ninja dying rewards persistence, observing attacks and Gaiden II. These take the form of clones of your the mastery of your various weapons. character that shadow your every move and attack, Visually, Ninja Spirit sports the pastel-toned, as you do, much like the Option power-ups from j finely detailed look of Irem games of this period, Gradius. In later stages one of the game’s and although there's nothing quite as pickups even gives you a Gradius-style impressive as R-Type's famous shield that looks like a fiery skipping- mothership, the backgrounds rope rotating around your character and characters neatly and your — a exude the atmosphere spirit clones. F =Ë of an otherworldly ` ULTIMATE GUIDE: NINJA SPIRIT rele £i zm E m Unfortunately the Amstrad port is the worstof W Produced by British studio Bits, which gave us P GEHN W The PC Engine port is by far the closest to the the game's conversions, with a decent enough the excellent Game Boy iteration of R-Type, thisis arcade game in terms of gameplay and graphics, colour palette, and blocky-looking sprites and a great conversion, although possibly the easiest and has the bonus of being less punishing by backgrounds. It's just horribly slow, feeling about to play due to lacking as many enemies on the allowing your ninja to be hit up to five times a quarter of the speed of the arcade version, and screen as the others. The bosses do seem to take ^ before dying. Purists, however, can always the scrolling is a lot jerkier than on the Spectrum. ^ quite a few more hits to compensate, though. switch to the hardcore one-hit coin-op mode. “The pace of the game is certainly more akin to a Shoot-em-up than most arcade action games” » [Game Boy] This truly bizarre crossover from Irem features Moonlight and a host of other classic Irem heroes and villains, medieval Japan. The stages are varied enough to for the majority of players. This version adds a few keep things interesting, encompassing abandoned graphical extras, including a short introductory ruins, forests, moonlit prairies, and a couple sequence showing Moonlight's father being killed of vertically scrolling sections involving a cliff and a brief glimpse of his spirit wolf form, as climb to a surreal kite boss, and a descent into a well as improved animated backgrounds on the cavernous pit. There's even a couple of sections thunder cloud stage. where Moonlight can flip between traversing the In retrospect, Ninja Spirit might be one of Irem's floor and the ceiling, Strider style. most overlooked and underappreciated arcade games, never receiving even a sniff of a sequel, utside of the arcades, Ninja Spirit was which is a shame, as it's certainly one of the probably best known from its home stand-outs of the company's late Eighties output. conversions by Activision, which, due Being able to play as three identical ninjas at the to the technically ambitious same time is a pretty unique experience in nature of the original, couldn't really fully 2D gaming of its era, and although its home capture the look, speed and playability of conversions didn't quite do it justice, it's the arcade original. The closest port is worth picking up the re-release of the PC definitely the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 Engine version on the Wii Virtual Console, version, which has the added advantage or DotEmu's Irem Arcade Hits for of allowing players to take a number of Windows, which includes Ninja hits before dying, making finishing the Spirit plus seventeen other classic Want more Moonlight? game a rather more achievable prospect emulated Irem coin-op titles. * Check this out Although Ninja Spirit never had a dedicated sequel, its hero, Moonlight, does appear in this crossover released only in Japan for the Game Boy. Sporting a surreal cover which appears to show Hammerin' Harry riding an R-9 fighter like a bucking bronco, Irem Fighter isn't so much a fighting game as a card battling hybrid. Sporting a host of characters and vehicles from Irem's history, if you've ever wondered who'd win in a fight between Kid Niki, Mr Heli and Dobkeratops this could be up your alley. RETRO GAMER | 13474 T4* Peripher. Visio Gear Master Converter » PLATFORM: GAME GEAR » RELEASED: 1991 » COST: £34.99 (LAUNCH), £5+ (NOW, UNBOXED), £20+ (NOW, BOXED) ather than building a brand-new piece of hardware for the handheld market, as Atari and Nintendo had with the Lynx and Game Boy respectively, Sega chose to base the Game Gear on the existing specification of its Master System console. This approach came with a selection of advantages and disadvantages — while Game Gear games would never impress like Lynx games due to the dated could migrate its Master System ver easily, and new games could be developed for both home and portabl stems simultaneously. In fact, the two machines were compatible that some Game Gear games 42 | RETRO GAMER run natively in Master System Out Run Europa. Since the tv a Hong Kong devised a simple Game Gear to run Master System cartridges Some games didn’t work — particularly those that required certain peripherals, as well as the likes of Out Run and Phantasy Star. H the majority of Master System games will run via the Gear Ma: Converter with no problems, although some certainly fare better than others le's low resolution LC text-heavy gai small objects and you should be fine. * PERIPHERAL VISION: GEAR MASTER CONVERTER : ESSENTIAL GAME PSYCHO FOX To be fair, the Game Gear is hardly short of good platform games to begin with, so adding this one might seem like an odd choice. However, this one never made it to the portable platform and it's actually a little more convenient to play on the handheld, as you don't need to go over to the console and hit the pause button every time you want to transform into a different animal. The bright, chunky graphics also ensure that you won't have any problems playing the game on the Game Gear's smaller screen, as there are no small details to miss. RETRO GAMER | 8 rp amr e ar FE |S ES 078€ 03 O raw k E E EE E M OM E d Score. eee =" =." =." ee WIRE EH EH EE EH M THE Time flies bu when you're the driver of a train. == especially if it’s a fast-paced arcade shooter turned = dodge—-'em-up coded by C64 wizard Tony Crowther — Words by Paul Drury =i = IN THE HNOW » PUBLISHER: ALLIGATA » DEVELOPER: TONY CROWTHER: » RELEASED: 1984 » PLATFORM: COMMODORE 64 » GENRE: CHUFF-EM-UP 44 | RETRO GAMER t's the summer of 1984 and Tony Crowther and his family are promenading along Blackpool seafront, when the 19-year-old Tony decides to turn it into something of a busman's holiday. Having coded Bug Blaster and Bat Attack the previous year, clones of Centipede and Galaxian respectively, he slips into an arcade to see if there are any coin-op titles which might inspire him. He stumbles upon a train-themed game he's not seen before and begins to watch it intently. Not play it, you understand. Just watch. ovont tapers ELI niont 000000 » [C64] We off or flipping you th waving you "| wasn't keen on spending money on them,” laughs Tony, "plus | wasn't very good, so I'd watch other people play. | watched for about ten minutes or so before my mum said, 'Come on, we're going,' and then went home to Sheffield and did my version! | thought | knew everything about the game - even the music, which | was sure was Jean-Michel Jarre." Tony is reminiscing about that fortuitous summer holiday sat in the canteen of Sumo Digital, the Sheffield-based developer where he has worked since 2011. The game that caught his eye that day was Super Locomotive, a rare 1982 release from Sega, and what captured his imagination was the amount of scrolling the game utilised. “I was really into scrolling games, kind of addicted to them, and this had two speed scrolling," he recalls. “l thought it was a way | could push myself to somewhere new." Once home, he drew a few ideas out on paper, planned what percentage of the screen would be scrolling for each 'section' and at what speed and soon got the technical side of things moving smoothly. We ask what his thinking was in moving the track layout to the bottom of the screen and the view of the train to the top, which is the opposite setup to the arcade game? He looks at us ao with bemusement. “What, did | swap them round? | could have sworn that was how it was supposed to be. | was only watching for ten minutes...” hat's right, Tony took no notes during his brief spell with the coin-op and so it is particularly impressive just how many elements of the original game made it into his home version. Your steam train puffs past a pastoral backdrop, while planes and airships, the latter emblazoned with Tony’s initials, fly overhead, dropping bombs on your little engine. Well-timed bursts of smoke from your chimney will see off enemies above while releasing steam from the front of your cab will dispose of dynamite-laden handcarts let loose on the interweaving network of track you must traverse between stations. Switching train lines is vital, not only to avoid deadly collisions but to collect fuel and keep your engine running. There is a lot happening on the screen, which meant some trickery to overcome the hardware limitations of the C64, with interrupts used to split the screen into ‘segments’ and then the eight sprites used on the upper screen could be ‘recycled’ to display different objects in the bottom section. And all this took Tony just a fortnight to finish. HI-SCoRE “I'd set myself a challenge for each day and I wouldn't go to bed until it was done, which could take me two days sometimes,” he grins. "I was working in the Alligata offices in the day, in the back room just next to these big tape duplicating machines, and then l'd carry on at home in the evenings. | worked solidly for those two weeks but it never bothered me. | was young and loved it.” Tony's work rate was impressive. He produced six C64 titles during 1984 alone, including hits like Monty Mole and Son Of Blagger, by setting himself the target of coding a game in two or three weeks and then having the following month off to visit various videogaming publications to promote his latest work and generally enjoy himself in the Big Smoke. In fact, the many journeys south actually helped him create the background landscapes for Loco. "| used to travel on the train a lot, going down to visit the gaming magazines in London," he recalls, wistfully. “I'd visit Stuart Cooke at Your Commodore quite regularly and | did all the graphics for Loco from my head so maybe those trips had an influence... and | did watch Thomas The Tank Engine as a child so there may be a connection there." If you look carefully as you speed through one of Loco's station, you'll indeed see a slightly suu u="... THE MAHING OF: LOCO he size of planes you'll need to slimmed down incarnation of the Fat Controller, waving you onward. He awards you a flag each time you pass him and if you collect five, you move on to the next level. A crash robs you of any flags accrued though, meaning you have to clear five stations without losing a life to progress, a big ask even for the most skilled of drivers. Tony, surely that was overly harsh? “Erm, | was just saving the player from the even harder challenge of later levels," he offers, rather unconvincingly. “That was what games P RETRO GAMER | 45 1332 SUPER LOCOMOTIVE W The original inspiration for Loco, this may well be new to you as it's thought only 20 machines made it into UK arcades. It adds traffic lights to the track-switching gameplay and is worth tracking down, or looking up on YouTube, if only to compare and contrast with Tony's work. 13932 LOCO-HOTIOH W Konami reimagined one of those old slide puzzles as aseries of train tracks and tasked you with keeping you engine on the right lines to pick up passengers and avoid crashes. An intriguing puzzler that was converted to many home micros of the day. 005880 086280 IOS S28 O0] Y Y sy STOP THE EXPRESS 13382 Wi Infamous for its mangled 'Congraturation! You Sucsessl" end of level message, this has our hero dashing along the top of a moving train, dodging enemy fire, in classic action movie style, It's fun for five minutes or so, and then you'll want to take the title literally. (Awww, | really like it - Ed] SON OF BLAGGER SYSTEM: C64 YEAR: 1983 N20 SYSTEM: PLAYSTATION YEAR: 1998 TEAM SONIC RACING SYSTEM: VARIOUS YEAR: 2019 were like back then. You die, you go back to the start. There was no playtesting — it was all just me. The thing was, it was only on my machine so if someone wanted to play it, | had to stop working on it." Yes, Loco was developed on an actual Commodore 64. There was no fancy development system at Alligata so Tony would just save the game to tape each day, stick his trusty C64 in his duffle bag and take it back and forth between home and the office. One aspect of the game which was done wholly in his bedroom was the music, a collaboration with his old friend and SID chip maestro Ben Daglish, who sadly passed away last year. "I was 100 per cent sure the music in the arcade game was Equinox 5 by Jean-Michel Jarre," says Tony. "| can read sheet music but what | can't do is hear something and know what notes they are... but Ben could! | played the LP, he hummed it, worked it out in his head and then coded it up. It only took him a couple of hours. Later, much later, when | saw the arcade machine again | realised, ‘Oh God, that's Rydeen by Yellow Magic Orchestra!’ | actually think the music was a big reason for the game's success. | only have happy memories of Ben. | never had a bad day with him. We were always good friends." The stirring soundtrack, polished visuals and frantic gameplay all combined to create a fine game which was well received by the gaming press. Commodore Horizons gave it 9/10 in their review and Personal Computer Games awarded it the same score and made it its ‘Game Of The Month’ in July 1984, producing a pull-out poster which adorned your correspondent's bedroom wall for many years. Loco also attracted much attention at that year’s Personal Computer World show in London, and Tony clearly recalls a certain long-haired, lairy visitor to the Alligata stand. “We were getting loads of interest, partly because of the music for Loco and also we had a Formula One car on our stand that Mike [Mahoney, Alligata boss] had sponsored, and over comes Fish, the lead singer of Marillion. | didn’t know who he was at the time. He started talking to us and we started drinking. A lot. | had to be carried to my room. As far as | know, he was fine.” A cautionary reminder that one should never drink like a Fish. Tony’s game did well commercially, too, and for the first time earned the developer a tidy royalty payment of £1,000 on top of his annual salary of £3,500. After Loco was done, lan Stewart, owner of Sheffield’s Just Micro computer shop, tempted Tony away from Alligata to set up Gremlin Graphics as a director of the company. “Loco was the best scrolling game I'd done so far and did cause a buzz,” remembers Tony, “but as soon as | left Alligata, they stopped paying me royalties for it! They said it was in my contract. | said | couldn't remember that, but it turned out they had asked me to sign it at the office Christmas party and | must have been drunk." FRESS “TART AHING OF: SFACE Te THE TRAIN GARE 1333 W This ZX Spectrum game caters to your inner Fat Controller as you aim to keep up to three trains running safely and collecting passengers by judicious switching of points, It begins simply enough but stress levels soon reach Southern Rail franchise proportions. "I ACTUALLY THIHE THE HUSIC WAS A BIC RERZOH FOR THE GAHE’S SUCCESS" Such was the underhanded world of those early days of the British software industry but Tony remained fond of his steam-powered shooter and decided to revisit the train theme later that year. For Gremlin, he produced Suicide Express, a super-fast, futuristic take on Loco, and then for Quicksilva, he coded Black Thunder, a super-fast, futuristic take on Loco, Hang on, Tony, what happened there? “I was leaving Gremlin and found out | wasn't going to get a penny for all my work on Suicide Express,” he explains. “We were trying to work out how we could make some money out of it and our solicitor said maybe we could change the graphics and the name.” It's an intriguing story and one we will share in a future issue of Retro Gamer but for now, we boot up Loco on the C64 Mini we've brought into Sumo HQ and soon Tony is clutching the joystick and trying to get to grips with his old game. It's fascinating to watch his eyes flick between the track overview at the bottom of the screen, planning his route and watching for approaching enemies, then up to the ever-decreasing fuel gauge at the top before focussing on the immediate threats to his engine in the middle of the screen from the bombs raining down from the flotilla of antagonistic aircraft. He dies frequently, mainly due to his inability to perfect the ‘three smoke puffs’ defensive shield manoeuvre necessary to survive an airborne onslaught. “Look, I've not played this since, well, since | finished writing it," he says. "I would have played it a few times at the magazines the following SOUTHERN BELLE 1335 W Usually cited as the first 3D steam train simulator, a sadly neglected genre in the modern era, this casts you as the driver and fireman of an engine on route from London aver to Brighton. HS2 this certainly isn't, but we do enjoy the strangely hypnotic demo mode. month and then that would've been it. | was on to the next game. Hang on, what killed me there?” We point out the explosive handcart that came from nowhere and Tony grumbles but presses restart instantly. After five minutes, he is definitely getting into the zone, dispatching foes with well-timed smoke bursts and switching lines at junctions with confidence, and we are reminded what an engrossing if brutally difficult game Loco is. “I need to concentrate 100 per cent. There are three different things to keep an eye on. I'll need some time to master this.” His engine is blown apart by an airship and he pauses before adding, "| don't think I've got that much time." COHWERZIOH CHRPERS Loco changes station By 1984, Tony was becoming a ‘face’ on the C44 scene, his prolific output and the quality of his games meaning he was often featured in the game magazines of the day. “I'd buy all the mags every month and cut out any pages with my stuff on and throw the rest away,” he admits. “I was always dead chuffed [to be in them] and | kept all the cuttings all in a scrapbook which I've still got." Though Tony's name was synonymous with the C64, Loco was also released on the Spectrum and Atari 8-bit computers in 1986. Did he have any involvement? “I didn't even know they existed!” he laughs. “I've never seen them running. They couldn't have had my code because it was written on a one line assembly so they must have just seen my game and done their own version.” Which is apt, given how the game came about in the first place. SCORE: 00540 TRAINS RETRO GRITER | 4? £ Ji ii aa | F3 - 2 e: 6s Jkikikikikik : Pt PA CICICICILIL T IT 1T ir ir 1 RETROREVIVAL » NES » 1986 » NINTENDO | love the instruction manuals that come NES games, because they're often a source of real weirdness. You don't industry is a huge, global thing. The > ‘bra ' and guidelines to mak eryon ness ething hin 15 seconds of the game's g isation ( TO! sly ‘ v rent ba something vere due to the Japanese origins of so many NES games, you could just rewrite the story and your audience ne th More often than not, | get the feeling that th: ting the manuals had pretty limited familiarity with the games they were writing about, too. If you need an ple, Metroid is on: my favourites. Quite a lot of the story ually related fely when com} to the original story, but w! we get to the sub is, the manual gets things somewhat wrong. “ >t revealed at th ou could argue that the manual's author v / save the uld it really surprise yo if that person H ead the Japanese and jus > assumption that the hero was a dude? Nintendo Of America wasn't the massive entity that it is today, so there's every chance that had cleared the game in under five hours to know the truth. 3e » [PC] You might not want to get attached to your soldiers... they're likely going to meet an untimely end. » [PC] The X-COM series pits your team of soldiers against an extraterrestrial menace. | 50 | RETRO GAMER [ °C} You can -— E THE HISTORY OF H-COM Sectoid autopsy better understand The autopsy reveals vestigial digestive organs und o simple structure. The brain ond eves ore very well developed, The structure suggests genetic citerabion or mubabion. The small mouth ond nose anpeor bo hove likble function. The webbing between the Fingers, ond bhe Flab Feet suggest mquobir origins. There ure no reproductive organs, ond no cues os bo how bhis species con reproduce, They ore mask probably o genebicolly engineered species your enemy. » [PCI The original alien designs were made by Microprose's John Reitze. Hs Julian (Gollop gears up to release a spiritual successor to the series he created, he shares his memories of the origin of X—COM. as well as the many ups and downs the franchise has been through along the way Words by Lewis Packwood UFO Defense as it was known in the United States, started off as a sequel to Laser Squad, Julian Gollop's 1988 ZX Spectrum game. “| had a story set where corporations rule the world, and you acted almost like a mercenary force for these different corporations," says Julian. It was primarily focused on MarsSec, the Mars Security Corporation, and Julian and his team at Mythos Games took an Atari ST demo of Laser Squad II to MicroProse UK in 1991. But the publisher felt it wasn't quite right. “What they wanted was a game that could compete with Civilization," recalls Julian. He surmises that MicroProse UK, a subsidiary of the | FO: Enemy Unknown, or X-COM: US company, suffered from “a bit of an inferiority š » [PC] Inspired complex because they were regarded as the ‘toy by Abed Lites, division’. They were doing a lot of conversions, X-COM turned the A EP, er chido and they want to do something more serious". " againstthem. MicroProse US had released Civilization in 1991 to LI RETRO GAMER | 51 | 1996 W "They copied the isometric perspective of dimensions from X-COM when they were making the original Diablo,” says Julian. “Actually the first version of Diablo was turn-based. It was Blizzard that persuaded [Condor Games] to change it.” INCUBATION: TIME IS RUNNING OUT 1997 W The creators of The Settlers and Battle Isle also made this X-COM-alike in 1997, one of the first strategy games to use 3D graphics. It fared well critically, but didn't perform well sales-wise. if ! pi IH a UFO: AFTERMATH XENONRUTS 2003 W ALTAR bought the unfinished game The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge from Julian's Mythos Games and turned it into this homage. It was followed by two sequels, UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight. 2014 W This is a love letter to the original X-COM created by fans of the series. PC Gamer called it a “deeply engaging, indie version of an alien invasion that stands toe-to-toe with X-COM” Goldhawk is currently working on a sequel. huge acclaim, and the UK office wanted its own slice of the pie. And it pushed Mythos to focus their game on an alien invasion. “Both [assistant publisher] Pete Moreland and [game designer] Steven Hand at MicroProse were big fans of Gerry Anderson's UFO series,” says Julian. “They said ‘let’s make it like Gerry Anderson's UFO’, so | went back and started to do some research. | bought a few video cassettes from the series, and the thing about it that struck me was they had this idea of the aliens infiltrating planet Earth, and you had these three levels of defence. So the first level of defence was these Moon-based interceptors, and then the second- level defence was these airborne interceptors in Earth’s atmosphere, and the third-level defence was these ground-based interceptors. So they try to intercept these flying saucers, but inevitably of course they always failed. 52 | RETRO GAMER "| then went on to research contemporary UFO folklore, for want of a better word, and one particular book which was very influential for me was this book by Timothy Good, Alien Liaison. It had the idea that the government, the USA and potentially other governments, have somehow acquired or possibly captured some alien technology, including their flying saucers, and were trying to reverse engineer it. They'd also somehow captured some live alien 'greys' and were trying to interrogate them. “All this stuff went into the game," continues Julian, apart from one particular aspect of Gerry Anderson's series. "We stripped out the Moon- based interception, because that's just stupid. You'd think the aliens would be intelligent enough to attack when the Moon is actually on the other side of the Earth." But the first and second levels of defence remained in the form of Interceptors and the Skyranger troop transports, and Gerry Anderson's idea of a secret agency dedicated to fighting the invaders - Shadow - became X-COM in the game. nce the idea of X-COM was settled on, Julian was left with the task of dreaming up a backstory for it. "I had to think, ^Why does this organisation exist? Who's funding it and why?' The logical step was it was funded by the largest countries in the world and it's almost like a United Nations-style organisation but it's completely secret. And if you don't perform according to the way these countries expect you to do, then they get upset and stop funding you." Which leads us to the game's curious duel names. So is it UFO or X-COM? "The game was always originally just called UFO,” notes Julian. “MicroProse UK decided to add the tagline Enemy Unknown because UFO by itself is a bit nondescript and could be confused with Gerry Anderson's UFO. It was American MicroProse that decided to rename it X-COM: UFO Defense. | don't know why, but that's what they decided." MUTANT YEAR ZERO: ROAD TO EDEN THE BEARDED LADIES, 2018 W This is one of a clutch of games inspired by the XCOM reboots. Mutant Year Zero blends turn- based tactics with real-time exploration, all set onan Earth overrun with mutants. Whatever the reason, the name stuck, and UFO was dropped in favour of X-COM for the subsequent sequels. But in some ways it’s a miracle that even the first game made it out, considering the puzzled reception it got when Julian went back to MicroProse to pitch it. ^| had to explain to them how the game works, and you have to appreciate how difficult it was because | couldn't really reference any other game - because there was no other game like it.” Julian's idea was a real-time ‘Geoscape’ section of the game where the player shot down attacking UFOs and built a base, coupled with a turn-based .. 'Battlescape' mode where the player fought the . A aliens on the ground. It was quite unlike anything » [PC] You base soon grows to accommodate all sorts of alien-fighting facilities. Evelyn Nash RIGHT HAND 661 was really interested in making turn-based games feel more interactive 7 7 Julian Gollop RIGHT SHOULDER LEFT SHOULDER else at the time — and quite a distance from MicroProse UK's request for a Civilization-alike. "They wanted something like Civilization, so we had some things from Civilization for sure," remembers Julian. "We had this idea of research, and that this research sort of drove your progression. And there was the idea of the UFOpedia, like a repository of knowledge that you've researched. But that was about it, there wasn't really any other connection." Still, even though they took some convincing, MicroProse gave UFO: Enemy Unknown the greenlight. ulian reckons that board games were a massive influence on the development of UFO/X-COM. "| came from tabletop gaming, and particularly games from SPI and Avalon Hill like Squad Leader and Sniper. Squad Leader was just a fantastic game; Sniper from SPI was not such a good game, but was probably more influential in the development of X-COM than anything else. I'd probably say that particular board game is the most influential of my career. It had this concept of overwatch - or opportunity fire as BACK PACK » [PC] Keep your soldiers equipped with good gear, or they'll be soon be outgunned by their alien foes. THE HISTORY OF H-COM they called it and | call it up to the present day.” The idea of snapshots, meanwhile, came from a 1979 Game Designers’ Workshop game called, appropriately enough, Snapshot. Julian wanted to capture the tactical fidelity of Sniper but without all the fiddly setting up and rule checking. “Sniper was a pain in the butt to play,” he admits, “and my motivation was that the computer can actually manage all the painful stuff that players had to do on pen and paper and make for a smoother experience.” And computers also allowed for more back and forth between opponents, he notes: “l guess | was really interested in making turn-based games feel more interactive, in the sense of the interaction between the characters during the enemy’s and your turn - so it’s not like chess, basically.” Still, when it came to actually developing the game, coding was an uphill battle. The unique combination of creating not only real-time but also turn-based sections meant Mythos had a big challenge ahead. “It was a real pain in the butt,” Julian admits. “We started with the tactical combat system, because we thought that would be the most difficult one technically to implement.” The Laser Squad ll demo gave them a bit of a headstart on this, since they'd already created things like the isometric graphics and overwatch. "The things we added were the lighting system, which we wanted to use to represent battles that took place F during day and night, and the procedurally generated battle environment system. We created these little map parcels of 10x10 . L| RETRO GAMER | 53 GOLLOP’S GENIUS A few highlights from Julian Gollop’s illustrious portfolio ROUNDS LErT=19 MOVEMENT POINTS LerT=4 REBELSTAR RAIDERS 1984 I This two-player sci-fi turn-based tactics game was developed by Julian for the Spectrum in 1984, while its sequels, Rebelstar and Rebelstar Il, introduced a single- player mode and opportunity fire. Gollop returned to the series in 2005, making the Game Boy Advance exclusive Rebelstar: Tactical Command, published by Namco. + Julian Gollop has had a very long and successful career surrounding strategy games. IN 2 o GR ST Go HO Bu oB HE! rz E (9) $5 (£) 9» (£) LASER SQUAD MAGIC AND MAYHEM 1988 1998 W Laser Squad debuted on the ZX Spectrum in 1988, and W This title, published in 1998 by Virgin Interactive, was was later converted to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, intended as a sort of continuation of Julian's 1985 ZX PC, Amiga and Atari ST in the years that followed. It built on ‘Spectrum game Chaos: The Battle Of Wizards. Although this the turn-based tactics of the Rebelstar series with several time around Magic And Mayhem adopted real-time strategy different scenarios and was rapturously received, earning design rather than turn-based. Interestingly, its cutscenes 93% from Amiga Format and 97% from CVG. uses claymation models and Harryhausen-style stop motion. GHOST RECON: " CHAOS REBORN SHADOW WARS zi 2011 W Julian took to Kickstarter in 2014 to raise funds for W This launch title for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 was the aremake of Chaos. The campaign managed to raise a highlight of the system's initial line-up — and if you ask certain commendable $210,854 before being released the following members of the RG team, the best game on the 3DS full stop. year. Chaos Reborn stays true to the turn-based wizard The squad combat was slightly simplified from the X-COM battles of the original, but with added equipment, spells and games of old, but perfectly suited to the handheld. other enhancements. 54 | RETRO GAMER tiles, and they'd be randomly put together based on the environment type. “We knew this would be the trickiest thing to do,” recalls Julian, “and it was difficult. The contract we had with MicroProse was for 18 months, and the idea was that we sort of split the divide between the tactical and Geoscape side on a two-to-one basis.” ulian and his team were concerned that their plans for the Geoscape mode could take considerable time because it involved a detailed 3D representation of Earth that was programmed by Julian's brother, Nick. “As far as we know, it's the first representation of the Earth in 3D with a day/night cycle that’s ever been done,” says Julian. “We didn’t have 3D engines or 3D cards then, it was all software-based rendering techniques.” Thankfully, the nifty spinning globe that X-COM became famous for wasn’t quite the time sink that Julian anticipated. “It didn’t actually take us too long to do that, even though it was really innovative for the time. Then we focused on how to build all the other systems, the UFO interceptors, the base building, the base construction, the research.” Julian notes that they spent so long working on the game’s complicated systems that the weapons and aliens were only added in right at the end of development — and with some help from MicroProse. MicroProse was able to help with the alien designs. “They asked the artist John Reitze to come up with a bunch of concepts,” says Julian. “He actually came up with quite a lot of stuff. | visited the MicroProse offices in Chipping Sodbury and we looked at these screens of sprites that he designed, which all looked really fantastic. “| was trying to think of what these creatures do in the game — you know, what makes them interesting. One of them was the floater type thing, a cyborg that flies. Another was the Chrysalid, this sort of crab-like, insect-looking thing — that kind of reminded of the alien from the Alien film, so ! got the idea that it would impregnate your soldiers." After being inspired by John's drawings, Julian came up with the concept of terror units — bigger, scarier companions to the more regular aliens — and asked John to sketch out what became things like the terrifying Cyberdisk and Sectopod. “We actually got more aliens in the game than | originally hoped for," he says. UFO: Enemy Unknown launched in 1994 for Amiga and PC, and was later ported to the Amiga » [PC] Terror From The Deep took the action underwater, and X-COM's new technology and gear reflected that Threats in Terror From The Deep conjure up images of a certain Lovecraftian terror. CD32 and PlayStation. It received almost universal acclaim, garnering a 9/10 score in Amiga Format and selling more than 600,000 units on PC alone - with around half of those sales in the US. The success of X-COM convinced MicroProse to greenlight a sequel, X-COM: Terror From The Deep, although this time Mythos Games wasn't on developing duties. "We licenced the code to MicroProse," says Julian. "They rebuilt the game using new assets and new story stuff very much based on the original code base. We had nothing to do with it basically." Instead, Julian and his team set to on what would become the third game in the X-COM series, X-COM: Apocalypse. Terror From The Deep was set 40 years after the first game, when a strange signal awakens aliens that have lain dormant in the oceans for millennia. X-COM is reformed to take on the threat, and the game involves building underwater bases and When you save the game, it H-COm UR a OD (0K Julian Gollop says that one of the hardest challenges in coding X-COM: Apocalypse was getting the traffic to behave correctly. forgot to actually save the difficulty level you selected fighting the soggy aliens on their home turf. It climaxes in a catastrophic ending that sets up the events of the third game. Players had complained that the first game was too easy, so MicroProse ramped up the difficulty for the sequel. But then players complained that Terror From The Deep was far too hard. What was going on? It turns out it was all down to a bug in the original X-COM that set the difficulty to beginner no matter what difficulty level you selected, says Julian. “When you save the game, it forgot to actually save the difficulty level you selected, so that when you reloaded the game, it always reset to the default, which | think was the easiest level.” Neither Mythos nor MicroProse's QA team had spotted the bug before release, mostly because the game was designed to get harder if players were doing well. "We had a sort of a dynamic difficulty adjustment system in the game,” says Julian, “and the way it worked was that if you gave the aliens a È thrashing, it would provoke them = to progress a bit faster along their progression track. We put that in because we realised that there's no way that we can balance such a systemic game with all these interactions going on perfectly.” He says that this dynamic difficulty system ended up masking the save-game bug, meaning that the testers didn’t notice until it was too late. “So we just didn’t catch the bug. Looking back on it, we probably accidentally did the best thing — the game did kind of adjust to however good you actually were, regardless of the actual difficulty level you selected." hile MicroProse was busy re-skinning the first X-COM game to make Terror From The Deep, Julian and Mythos Games were working on something altogether more ambitious. Set 50 years after the apocalyptic ending to Terror From The Deep, in the third game humanity lives in giant self-contained cities. “| guess the underlying influence comes from Judge Dredd,” says Julian. “Judge Dredd had Mega-City One: basically, most of the Earth was a wasteland apart from a few mega cities.” X-COM: Apocalypse tasked the player with defending just one city - Mega-Primus - rather RETRO GAMER | 55 How Julian is returning to the X-COM FROM THE ASHES F formula with Phoenix Point Julian Gollop has been beavering away on Phoenix Point for the past few years, which is billed as a spiritual successor to the X-COM games of old. And it's been a chance for Gollop to revive an array of dormant concepts. “It involves quite a lot of ideas and influences from X-COM: Apocalypse, the original X-COM and also Dreamland Chronicles, which was a cancelled project I was working on,” he says. “I view it very much as a continuation of what | was doing back in the Nineties.” Similar to Dreamland, humanity is on the back foot as Lovecraftian horrors have taken over the planet, and it’s up to the player to stage a resistance. Superficially it bears a resemblance to 2K's XCOM reboots, but there are some significant differences, such as the first-person aiming that allows. body parts to be targeted. And rather than. shots being calculated with a percentage — Which can sometimes result in misses frorn + [PC] In Phoenix Pointyou can target specific body parts and sometimes even guarantee a hit. point blank range — you instead have a disc in your sights that you aim over the enemy. All shots will land within that disc, so if it's completely covering an enemy, you're guaranteed a hit. But the real innovation comes with the enemies themselves, which evolve in response to your actions. They feature modular body parts with different mutations — so, for example, a crab-like creature might have a claw that's mutated into a shield. And if that mutation proves effective for the enemy, they will send more enemies with the same mutation into battle. Balancing all of these mutations has been a headache for the team at Snapshot Games, says Julian. “I think for the most complex creature, we've got something like 600 possible unique combinations.” But after a couple of delays, the game is almost ready for release - it's currently slated for September 2019. » [PC] The creature design in Julian's new X-COM successor is impressive. N real-time space battles. than the whole Earth, but it was far more complicated because of the various organisations within the city you had to keep on side. "It was the idea that these mega cities were a horrendous parody of existing big cities," says Julian, ^where you've got multiple factions, gangs, corporations, all vying for influence and control, and stuff is fairly corrupt." This time around, the aliens are interdimensional beings that warp directly into your city. "But at the same time," says Julian, "you've got to be aware that there are all these other organisations in the city that you need to keep happy." The corporations will react to things like collateral damage to the city, and they might even be infiltrated by the aliens themselves. 66 They had this ambition to do some brilliant stuff, which ended up looking like Mr Blobby JJ Julian Gollop 56 | RETRO GAMER fthat wasn't complicated enough, the game was now all played in real time (although there was still an option to switch to turn-based fights). Julian recalls that developing such a sophisticated real- time game was a headache: "We had to do a real-time-based Al, and we had to deal with all the animation and timing issues that real-time games have to deal with. It was very tricky." Development ended up taking around two and a half years, and it was marked by disagreements with MicroProse about the look of the game. “MicroProse didn't quite get the hang of the graphics," says Julian. "They took all the graphics in-house: they had a much bigger art team, and they did some really good designs with these sorts of retrofuturistic vehicles and stuff." But the team wanted to use 3D graphics tools to create the assets, and Julian was less than impressed with the results. "They had »[PC] X-COM: Interceptor ditched the turn-based combat in favour of this overambitious idea. This famous sci-fi artist who did lots of book covers was going to , build these really sophisticated aliens in plasticine and they were going to 3D scan them and then render them. And - fees. they ended up looking like these blobby EN characters. | looked at the plasticine models they used, and they've got some amazing detail on them, which they just couldn't replicate in the game." And although Julian was unhappy with the « graphics, there was nothing he could do. "I had absolutely no control over their art department. They had this amazing ambition to do some amazingly brilliant stuff, which ended up looking like Mr Blobby." X-COM: Apocalypse marked the end of Julian's involvement in the X-COM franchise, although Mythos Games would go on to ) 9) start development of a spiritual successor to the series in the form of The Dreamland -— Chronicles: Freedom Ridge. This game saw Earth being conquered by dinosaur-like aliens, but Mythos struggled to find a publisher, and development was wound up, along with Mythos Games itself, in 2001. However, Dreamland lives on in a fashion in Phoenix Point, the latest game from Gollop's new studio, Snapshot Games. "Some ideas from that are actually in Phoenix Point," he says, "including body part targeting and the first-person aiming system. That was actually in Dreamland back in 2000. And also the Geoscape side of the original Dreamland is somewhat similar in some ways to Phoenix Point: the idea that the aliens are already building these big structures, and that you have to scavenge for really basic stuff." While Mythos Games worked on the ill-fated Dreamland Chronicles, MicroProse carried on making games in the X-COM series, although they began to stray farther and farther from the turn-based original. X-COM: Interceptor from 1998, which is actually set before Apocalypse in the timeline, saw the fight being taken into space, as Earth's corporations seek to find new resources in distant star systems to rebuild the shattered Earth. It was a mix of base management and real-time flight simulation — the player would repel alien attacks by hopping into a spaceship and shooting down the marauding forces. Although it was mostly well received, scoring an 8/10 in Edge, the game sold poorly and shared little DNA with the previous X-COM games. “X-COM Interceptor was a tangent really, rather than the continuation of the series,” notes Julian. At about the same time, the struggling MicroProse was bought out by Hasbro Interactive, and two of its development studios were closed shortly afterwards. MicroProse itself would cease to exist as a company in 2001, when Hasbro sold its remaining intellectual property to Infogrames. Hasbro released two further titles in the X-COM series. X-COM: First Alien Invasion from 1999 was a budget title that formed part of Hasbro's ‘Email Games’ range - this simplified version of X-COM could only be played over email, and ceased to be playable once Hasbro shut down the servers. X-COM: Enforcer from 2001, meanwhile, dropped the strategy element of X-COM, instead offering up a third-person shooter where the player controls a robot ‘enforcer’ taking out invading aliens. It was critically mauled by PC Gamer on release, whose review called it “one of the worst spin-offs ever squirted out on the PC". Enforcer was built from the ashes of two cancelled games, X-COM: Genesis and X-COM: Alliance. Genesis was an attempt to do a "back to the roots style X-COM game" but with a 3D engine, notes Julian. It was helmed by Dave Ellis" team at MicroProse Chapel Hill, which had worked on Interceptor, and was scheduled for launch in 2001. But Hasbro cancelled the game at the end of 1999 and closed the studio shortly afterwards. X-COM: Alliance, on the other hand, started development at MicroProse UK's studio all the way back in 1996 and used gameplay similar to Hired Guns on the Amiga, with play split between four windows reflecting the viewpoints of each of THE HISTORY OF H-COM » [PC] X-COM: Enforcer ditched all tactical elements and was instead a straight-up third-person shooter. your troops. But Hasbro closed the British office in 1999 and switched development to the US. Shortly afterwards, the project was put on hold and the assets were used to make X-COM: Enforcer, a much simpler game. X-COM: Alliance flickered back into life briefly at Infogrames in 2001, but ultimately was permanently cancelled in 2002. Julian remembers seeing Alliance on display at a huge booth during E3 1999. “l went up to try it, and there was a MicroProse guy there who jumped on me because there wasn't anybody else playing. And he said, 'Are you familiar with X-COM?’ and | said, ‘Yeah, just a little bit." "It was interesting, in the sense that it was a squad-based first-person shooter type thing where you control four soldiers, and each of the soldiers had their own view in a separate camera. But it wasn't working well — | remember | played it for two minutes and my guy started standing ata really weird angle of about 60 degrees from vertical. You couldn't really play it." Julian laments the sad fate of the original X-COM series: "It went out with a whimper, basically." But now, with 2K's XCOM reboots and a spiritual successor in the form of Phoenix Point, finally the series has a legacy to be proud of. * How Firaxis and 2K revitalised the series RNING X-COM INTO XCOM THE BUREAU: =COM DECLASSIFIED 2013 I This third-person shooter languished in development hell before limping out in 2013. Chiefly made by the 2K Marin studio, the game was intended to chart the formation of XCOM in the Sixties, at the height of the Cold War. =COM: ENEMY UNKNOWN 2012 W Firaxis revived the beleaguered X-COMbrand in 2012 with this well- received reboot - which dropped the hyphen and combined the names X-COM: UFO Defense and UFO: Enemy Unknown. It stayed true to the turn-based original, but refined and updated many of its systems. XCOM: WITHIN 2013 W This update of Enemy Unknown was launched in 2013, and features several additions and improvements to the original game, including cyborg soldiers, base defence missions and an enemy faction called EXALT - a human organisation that has sided xcoM 2a 2016 W Firaxis released this sequel in 2016, with the twist that XCOM lost the alien war in the first game. In a similar way to Julian Gollop's cancelled Dreamland Chronicles, aliens now control the Earth and players lead a resistance in an attempt to topple their dominion. More bespoke level design and mission variety made this a winner. WAR OF THE CHOSEN 2017 m This expansion overhauls the game's campaign, introducing new rebel factions as well as three powerful, recurring enemies known as The Chosen. It also adds a neutral faction called The Lost, zombies which will attack humans and aliens alike. RETRO GAMER | 57 58 | RETRO GAMER Ame 2| | =| oll N= S= LK SONS ANSWER TO TETRIS PROVED TO BK À GOOD ALTERNATIVE ON THE PLATFORMS iT LANPXP ON, BUT iT ALMOST DIDNT MAKK iT TO MARIKT. WE TALK TO iT$ ORIGINAL CREATOR, JAY GEERTSEN, TO LEARN MORE veryone has a retro title that meant the world to them. For some it may be the game they played the most throughout a machine's life, for others it may be the one they could only play over the weekend after renting it from the video rental place down the road. When it comes to Sega’s Mega Drive, those games could be anything from Sonic and Streets Of Rage through to Earthworm Jim or Road Rash. Few games, however, have the complete, unanimous recognition of Columns, a game that every Mega Drive owner must've whiled away the hours on at one point or another. This is thanks in large part to the Mega Games 1 bundle —- which came packed with Super Hang-On and World Cup Italia ‘90 — and is arguably the reason that the Tetris clone became such a staple of the console. nverted his other created the IN THE HNOUJ » PUBLISHER: Sega » DEVELOPER: Sega, Jay Geertsen » RELEASEI 1989 » PLATFORM: Various » GENRI Puzzle But while the obvious comparison with Nintendo's puzzler is there, the story of Columns is rather surprising, forgoing the typical tales of developer endurance or a determination to do something new with videogaming. In fact, Columns wasn't even going to be released at all. “Around 1989, my family and | were living in Colorado Springs where | was working for Hewlett-Packard as a software engineer," says Jay Geertsen, the brain behind the jewel-matching game. "The team | was on was developing a graphical application and | was given the assignment to port the application to the X11 Window System. | had found an X11 tutorial online and was plodding through it, but before long | became a bit bored with the exercises in the tutorial. | thought that programming a simple real-time game would be more interesting and fun." Believe it or not, but that's where the story of Columns begins, not with a desire to release an interesting product onto the games market, but rather as a way of practicing programming for a software engineer. "| don't recall going through a long thought process about the initial concept." says Jay, who admits that he just wanted to "transition from the X11 tutorial to a game". From this came the concept of manipulating falling tiles into three or more rows. "Soon after that, | decided to use colours for the tiles and that aligning colours would be the objective." It'd be easy to make the Tetris comparison, of course. But while the landmark puzzler released in 1984 on various platforms, it wasn't actually until "AT TH< TiM< MY iNT& Adventure Island is crawling with enemies and Master Higgins typically starts off with no weapons, meaning he has to rely on his legs in order to propel him past the game’s many b.m H hazards. Fortunately, Higgins is pretty handy "mm ^ud Tos SS % when it comes to jumping and he can easily leap a tees T MIC over most foes in the game. Crucially he can 4 `y t leap higher and further by pressing up on the d-pad while jumping, which becomes far more important in later stages where moving platforms and more deviously placed enemies start coming into play. Higgins can also now crouch, which not only enables him to avoid incoming enemies and projectiles, but also allows him to perform an even more impressive “Super Jump' that again helps with avoiding enemies and has the added bonus of letting him reach out of the way fruit. Jumping will only get Higgins so far, however, so each course often features a number of power-ups in the form of axes and boomerangs for him to use. The axe is a throwback to both Wonder Boy and the earlier Adventure Island games, allowing Higgins to lob projectiles in a lazy arc that destroy any wayward enemies they come across. Even more useful is the boomerang, which can be thrown in various directions (including up and down) and has the additional benefit gê $ of potentially taking out any missed enemies as it returns to Higgins’ eager hand. Both items can be powered up a total of four times and their final incarnations become fused with fire, which allows Higgins to break open the troublesome rocks that can be found on most stages. s well as its mechanics, another similarity Adventure Island shares with Wonder Boy is its bright cartoon- A like aesthetic. While Master Higgins himself isn't the most endearing-looking of characters, the world he inhabits is a lush and verdant paradise Levels take place across slippery snowfields, gloomy-looking caves, vibrant palm E tree-filled beaches, misty forests and hazy deserts. Every environment you've ever raced through in a platformer is present and correct, but Produce!'s game still manages to make them feel distinctive » [SNES] Although there are no animal companions in Super Adventure Island, you do get dropped off by this friendly eagle. thanks to Super Adventure Island's bright and punchy visuals. This larger-than-life style extends to the game's bosses, which are often huge abominations that are as cute as they are deadly. A giant octopus, lava-protected snake and a huge guardian statue are just a few of the deadly creations that Higgins has to face and each and every one of them is hugely satisfying to fight. Super Adventure Island also finds time to throw in some neat Mode 7 effects. Granted they're not as spectacular as those seen in the likes of Pilotwings, Super Castlevania IV or Contra Ill, but they do manage to complement the cartoon style of Produce!'s release, whether its seeing Higgins fall towards the ground at the start of the game or when he gets swallowed by a whale. The flourishes found throughout Super Adventure Island are further enhanced by Yuzo Koshiro's excellent soundtrack. It's a delightful fusion of . SUPER ADVENTURE ISLAND SUPER SEQUEL The further SNES adventures of Master Higgins Two years after rescui Jeanie Jungle, our plucky hero Master Higgins returned in a brand-new adventure. Super Adventure Island Il is a far more ambitious game than the original, as it features a more in-depth story, a large overworld map, as well as plenty of additional items that Master ig I also the same kind of ia e nma | PETETETTATMI tropical tunes and big bouncy beats that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced his earlier work. It particularly comes to life during boss fights, delivering a dance-fuelled groove-like tune that you can't help but hum along to. Super Adventure Island isn't the easiest game in the series, thanks to some annoying difficulty spikes, but it still remains a lot of fun to play, even if it does feel like something of a step back compared to Adventure Island 2 on the NES. Fortunately, it's one of the few Super Nintendo games that won't cost you a small fortune to own nowadays, meaning that there's never been a more ideal time to head to paradise and experience Master Higgins" 16-bit SNES adventure. * Following the disappointment of a canned console attachment, PF Magic barked up the right tree with the first game involving a virtual pet, laying the ground for a successful series and a hugely popular genre Words by David Crookes »[3D0] Rob Fulop says the laying the ball inside a pinball machine in PaTaank may have been too innovative for the time. 66 | RETRO GAMER FROM THE ARCHIVES: Pf MAGIC a WHERE ARE i » [CD-i] Max Magic was a light title intended to have a broad appeal, helping players impress friends with a few tricks n 1994, Rob Fulop felt his world crashing down around him, three years after setting up PF Magic with John Scull, a former marketing executive of Apple. The company had been set up to work on an innovative communications device for the Sega Mega Drive called the Edge 16 - a 4800-baud modem which sat on top of the console to allow multiplayer gaming over telephone landlines. But the company funding AT&T, decided to pull the plug and PF Magic ended up sitting on the edge of oblivion. “It wasn't a good time and we were abandoned,” says Rob, still smarting at th ‘AT&T had put $3 million into the Edge 16 and we'd developed the hardware and worked hard on th: , and yet AT&T was fini t happening to us. We had to turn a corner and do something different but it was hard because our w X single product.” to be innovative. Sega had released a mc but it never made it outside of Edge 16 w ping up well for the US market and attracting attention from Microprose, Tengen, GameTek and EA. Sega was also on board, with each company eager to allow PF Magic to make the necessary tweaks to their games. When it was showcased at the CES in Chicago in the Summer of 1993, CVG magazine said it was “a nice glimpse of the futu Those who saw it, feted the device for its ability to dial Edge 16-owning friends and not only allow gamers to play together but chat at the same time. There was a socket for a Mega Drive keyb d it boosted the console's 64K memory by another 128K. Portable cards could also be inserted to store c data that could be m in 1990 at Street Fighter II wi leaving the hou: AT&T made the d Edge 16 prior to its inten 1994, by which stage, it had also E nent for the 3DO. "Li ys Rob. Having 1a multiplayer party / on television, raightforward vide involved in professional programming s ited from the University Of California in Berkley jan as an intern at Atari. After working ion, he was d to write games 600 and these included Night Driver and Missile Command. Rob also cofounde »[CDi] Unfortunately for PF Magic, its early games like Max Magic failed to make the desired impact with gamers. uu a ELE 000001 332 De DE 00060. THEY NOW? Rob Fulop in 2000, Fulop joined Playfirst as a for Videobrain and Zynga. His main Hands On Media overseeing the World Poker Tour online games, He currently consults for various videogame companies and he joined the indie rock band Bourbon Therapy in California in 2015 as the pianist/keyboardist WHAT DOES PF MAGIC ACTUALLY MEAN? Many have tried to guess what ‘PF’ stands for in the company's name and ideas have included Partially Funded, Perpetually Fighting and Positive Future. But, according to Rob Fulop, it is none of those. “When | was at Atari and made many games, a lot of times we didn't really comment our codes very well,” he says. “So if something would work and | wasn't really sure how it worked, | would just write ‘PF Magic’ which meant ‘pure fucking magic. “We were only bothered that the code was delivering the goods and all that really matters is people have a great experience. The technology behind games is invisible to the customer and they really dont care. It's just fun. It just works. So that's where it came from.” RETRO GAMER | 67 m After selling PF Magic to Mindscape senior game designer before working interest lay in creative interactive poker games and he was the design director for PF A their body of balls would separate and roll across the PUSHING ground. A version was released for the 3DO, too. BOUNDARIES The studio also developed Max Magic for the CD-i m PF Magic sought to tread which allowed users to learn and customise 14 tricks, new ground, It initially with the player using the controller to fool their friends f focussed on the pioneering » [300] Paten wind a anata Nation: aka anh of EV with potentially jaw-dropping reveals. It worked on Edge 16 accessory for PaTaank for the 3DO, too, putting players in control a the Sega Mega Drive, P in 1981 ting such gems as Demon Magic. of a ball inside a pinball machine. Neither of these did — Y experimented with the He went on to formed Interactive Productions which particularly well, however. 5 world's first electronic magic worked with Axlon on games for a unreleased console “Philips and 3DO put the money up for thes: kit and composed fighters out called Control-Vision that put titles on to VHS tape: titles but they were our concepts and our intellectual of spheres in Ballz, giving an age-old One of those games was Night Trap, shot over property,” says Rob. “We were drawn to the machines genre a fresh spin that would later pave the way for 16 days in 1987 using real-life actors in Culver City, because they would allow you to work with real images an innovative gaming genre. California, at a cost of $1.5 million. Five years later — and and audio and that was a new paradigm which could without Rob's involvement — it was ported to Sega's open us up to new things. Unfortunately, the trouble FAILED CONSOLES Mega-CD with extra footage by Digital Pictures yet it with the CD-i was that the early adopters were a techie m As well as seeing the proved hugely controversial. Senator Joe Lieberman audience and not the mass market Philips was targeting, cancellation of the Edge 16, called it out for its violence and it was pulled from the So it was a technology that never really found itself." PF Magic was unlucky with shelves of Toys 'R' Us and Kay-Bee. Sega took action in the early consoles it chose ^ January 1994 and Rob felt hugely embarrassed ith that in mind, PF Magic turned to to work with: Philips CD-i t "Even though my involvement was five years prior developing games for the PC and Mac and the 3DO. Although and | was now at PF Magic, my name was on the and Rob's decision to concentrate on both systems showed great game and it was very upsetting to have it criticised so the cutest possible games manifested promise, neither lived up to uch,” he says. "The game was being discussed on itself in a title about dogs. "| had wanted to develop their promises and so the games TV and it was quite unfair, but it also was embarrassing a digital pet for years and I'd had it in my notes for a PF Magic made for them failed to make an impact to see it singled out as a very violent game." As a result, long time," he says. "It now felt right to go ahead. The Rob decided his next titles should be cute. "I didn't idea was to create a dog that you could pet and it would CONTROVERSY want to make any more games that had any kind of respond. We took the technology we made for Ballz and AVOIDANCE violence in it," he says. "This made sense to me." created a puppy dog from the spheres." m Rob Fulop was stung by Even so, PF Magic released, Ballz 3D: Fighting At Its Dogz: Your Computer Pet was a sensation, predating criticism of Night Trap, a Ballziest for the Mega Drive and SNES, and it did have the launch of the Tamagotchi by a year. PF Magic had game he had made before a slightly violent edge although it had been developed chosen a dog as its debut animal after visiting the PF Magic but which was with the Edge 16 in mind in 1993, before Rob made his department store Macy's at Christmas and being told by Ü X «dusted down and released decision. Published by olade and released in 1994, Santa that kids constantly ask for a puppy. By creating hynny — [pan P| for the Sega Mega-CD in it had fighters made up of balls and it was quite surree the character out of spheres, they would be able to qu > m re ja 1992. The resulting furore infused with crazy characters including a farting monkey keep track of how they'd connect and produce helped determine the future and a twirling ballerina dancer. Beat an opponent and a dog with smooth, fluid animation. Players direction of the company's later games as Rob sought never to attract such negative press again. VIRTUAL PETS m The Petz series of games would define PF Magic and once it released Dogz and noted its great reception (both by critics and gamers), it based the entire company on the franchise, producing nothing else but new entries until it was sold in 1998. It popularised the virtual pet genre before Tamagotchi was launched in the west FORWARD THINKING m Above all, PF Magic already = looked to the future. It =. š gambled on new technology = à and moved with the times, bct. even hooking into the early internet to cultivate a thriving subculture around Petz. A community hub hosted on PF Magic's website provided downloads and a point of contact for adoring fans. » [SNES] Ballz helped PF Magic hone the animation techniques which would make the Petz series so impressive. 68 | RETRO GAMER Doge 2 > [PC] Pretty much anything you could do with a real dog was available to players of Dogz, including a nice game of fetch. Our ambition was greater than the technology allowed Rob Fulop would determine what their dog needed based on their knowledge of how they behave and use a cursor to interact, feeding, playing and teaching tricks. “When you look at Dogz, it's hardly a new invention,” Rob says. "Dogs exist in the world and we were taking inspiration from that. The innovation was putting it on a computer. Players knew what to do: they could throw a bone and play fetch because they know how a dog is supposed to work. It fit within the paradigm of creating a game that was new and exciting with a track record." Dogz, designed by Adam C Frank and Ben Resner, was given away for free as a demo that came with five days of virtual food. The hope was that players would become attached to having the pet on their desktop and, once it began to get hungry after the supplies ran out, stump up $20 for a lifetime's supply so that they could keep playing. "The dog would be crying for more food and if players didn't pay 20 bucks, it would continue to whine," Rob says. "It was quite manipulative, but we worked on the premise that if you give a puppy away for five days and ask for it back, most will want to keep it. We sold a million Dogz." PF Magic's stock was riding high. Dogz's success and the approach to selling it put the developer on the map and it began to consider follow-ups. It was largely self-publishing, finding working on games for computers to be more cost-effective than for consoles ("its much cheaper to put a game on floppy disk than take a risk on cartridges"). Besides, Rob didn't believe Dogz would work well on console. £ asf Üphon: Help III WA 2 d 1 Ill » [PC] The cats in Catz could become moody and on the verge of tears unless you looked after them well FROM THE ARCHIVES: PF MAGIC Program Manager Options Window Help Dogz Mons Help | To pet Scrappy, hold down the left mouse button and gently stroke. Main Game StartUp » [PC] In Dogz players could choose from a variety of canine pals and spend a š š few minutes each day ensuring they were happy. It wouldn't have been a good match for the PlayStation because it was a game you played for 15 minutes every day," he says. he developer's 50 staff at this time was therefore split. Half worked on the pet-based games of which Catz was next, leaving the other half to work on games that never saw the light of day. "We really wanted to make a 3D adventure game but our ambition was greater than the technology allowed," Rob says. It wasn't long before PF Magic concentrated entirely on their breakthrough formula. Oddballz: Your Wacky Computer Petz was released along with sequels for Dogz and Catz. A Petz CD-ROM combined the original animal games and Oddballz and there were more outings for Catz and Dogz to follow. “We had a team that knew how to do this kind of game so we thought we may as well leverage it," Rob explains. "So we made dogs and cats and birds and pigs and we added two characters on the screen which could interact and make a puppy and that was a big deal. So it turned into a kind of early internet game. Lots of people were creating clubs and swapping pets and all that kind of stuff. Once we started, it wasn't difficult to figure where we should be going with it all." By 1998, however, Rob was ready to sell the company. "We'd staffed up, adding marketing people and sales people and built our development team and we'd gotten over the struggle to make the first products and raised more finance," Rob says. "We had avoided the route of becoming a developer-for-hire because you can never have 50 people on staff relying on other people paying you but | was tired and John was tired and we weren't getting on that great." The pair sold the company to Mindscape which had been bought by The Learning Company. The latter was then sold to Mattel and Ubisoft acquired the Petz series in 2001, continuing to make additional games until 2014. Rob does have some regrets. "I'm sorry | sold PF Magic but you've got to make that tradeoff," he says. Yet having taken a company from the brink of collapse to once that pioneered a genre, we'd say he arguably bowed out at the purr-fect time. Point Blank PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION » RELEASED: 1997 » DEVELOPER: NAMCO hen you picked up a G-Con 45 and Point Blank, you were sold on the promise of madcap blasting fun. You were going to spray bullets around at will, shatter some skeletons and watch those hilarious little characters do their thing. It was going to be great. But you've been trying to get through the game without continues and it's actually very difficult. You're on a good run, but there’s one stage left in the set and you've only got one life. And of all the stages, it had to be the one that makes you sweat - a tense single-bullet shootout that requires impeccable accuracy. The scene is one of tranquillity, with a tree framing a beautiful sunset backdrop. A single leaf drops from the top of the screen That's your target, its erratic movements causing you to doubt your own aim. You estimate the path of the leaf, get your finger on the trigger, then — hesitation. It's half-way down, it’s now or never. You squeeze the trigger. The leaf continues to fall, completely undisturbed. BIO Originally released as Gun Bullet in Japanese arcades in 1994, Namco's Point Blank consisted of a variety of humorous challenges starring Dr Don and Dr Dan. The game came to PlayStation a few years later, complete with additions including an RPG mode, where it joined the ranks of the system's great party games. The success of the game ensured a much more timely home conversion of the arcade sequel Point Blank 2, and Point Blank 3 followed soon after. Though the series isn't revisited often, Namco does still release Point Blank games - the most recent being 2016's Point Blank X. MORE CLASSIC POINT BLANK MOMENTS Car Crusher You know that scumbag that cut you off at the junction earlier? That's his car on the screen, that is. You've got 12 seconds to pump 60 bullets into it, a rate of five shots per second, but that won't be a problem thanks to the sheer rage you're still experiencing after that incident. Let it have it. Covering Fire Who sent Dr Don and Dr Dan to the front line? Well, that doesn't matter now — they're here and they need your help. And although " they're being attacked by d Uu a tank battalion the size of Belgium, those tanks fall to single handgun bullets — so you get some space to admire the terror on the doctors’ faces. Ninja Assault Point Blank does include a number of sections that are more like traditional light gun games than anything else, which normally test your speed and accuracy. But they can't quite be normal, this being Point Blank, so the deadly ninjas you're facing here? They all happen to be cardboard cut-outs. Explosive Finale The final stage of Poin Blank is a fitting send- off — instead of the stressful action of the usual minigames, the only requirement in the last game is to shoot as many fireworks as you can, thus igniting them and giving yourself a Spectacular ending. Good job there, comedy marksman! ress the ` button P Police Trainer [HECK"—ED]THE POLICE PN » ARCADE » 1996 » P&P MARKETING Have you ever ended up hating a game for reasons that had i nothing to do with the game itself? | know | have. š Way back in the mid-Nineties, | used to go to karate classes with my dad. He'd quite often be involved in teaching the kids, and then stay behind afterwards for the adult class — which meant that | had free run of the sports centre. If none of my friends were sticking about, l'd usually go and drop whatever change | had into one of the arcade games in the foyer. There were only ever two games, back to back, but they were usually pretty good Initially, there was Double Dragon (the one-on-one Neo-Geo version) and Taito Power Goal. Neo Turf Masters later went into the Neo-Geo cabinet, and football fun gave way to Sega's excellent DecAthlete. And then, one day, DecAthlete was gone and in its place was Police Trainer. | hated Police Trainer. There's actually nothing wrong with it — it's a pretty competent arcade gun game that consists of a series of shooting gallery challenges against a pseudo-VR backdrop. The idea is that it tests skills you'd need as a police marksman, and the challenges are broken down into categories such as speed, accuracy and visual acuity. But it wasn't the bright, fun game that had been there before, and | hated it for replacing a game that | loved. Deciding that Police Trainer was essentially Point Blank, but without all the charm and variety of Namco's classic game, | even went through a phase were | would refer to it exclusively as ‘Shit Point Blank' instead of using its actual name. | feel bad for the developers, who almost certainly had no say in the placement of their game in my hyper-limited location. Objectively speaking | know the game is fine, and it was pretty popular, too, as it even got a sequel. But | can't fight my feelings, and | feel that I'd much rather see Karl Vain and Rick Blade than the featureless dummies of Police Trainer in my location. * RETROREVIVAL NIDE From the ABC Warriors to Zenith an the galaxy’s greatest comic has been thrilling Earthlets everywhere. Retro Gamer turns nazotimer and takes a look at the videogames inspired by 2000 AD. Borag Thungg! d Judge Dredd, for over 40 years e pm Ë = -— I o xS | hen the first issue of 2000 AD hit the newsstands in February 1977, ] even its galactic editor, Tharg | The Mighty, would have been hard-pressed to admit it would still be thrilling readers four decades later. Yet having eclipsed its then-futuristic name, the weekly comic is still going strong, and about to release Prog 2,132, now available in both paper and downloadable form. As befits this longevity, there have been movies, graphic novels, comic spin-offs, toys and merchandising galore based on 2000 AD characters. And, of course, videogames. By 1983, 2000 AD was a solid success for IPC Magazines and its characters were quickly establishing themselves in youth culture. The iron fist of the fascist Judge Dredd, ruling over an overpopulated city called Mega-City One was the flagship strip, but that's not to demean the other weekly stars of the comic. And with each of those came a strong emotional backdrop and a depth of character rarely seen at the time, in what was (like videogames) mainly considered something just for kids: the blue-skinned Genetic Infantryman Rogue Trooper, betrayed by his own side and conversing with his dead colleagues, their personalities transferred into his equipment via electronic chips. Mutant bounty hunter Strontium Dog (AKA Johnny Alpha), hated and feared in equal measure for a condition which he didn't ask for. Or Halo Jones, the teenager who escapes Earth only to fight in a guerrilla war in outer space. The list goes on, yet it was with the gun-for-hire, Johnny Alpha, who became the first 2000 AD character to move into the world of videogames. Strontium Dog And The Death Gauntlet, released in 1984 by Quicksilva, was not just the first 2000 AD licence, but also one of the first character-licensed games on home computers, and the brainchild of Quicksilva's software manager, Mark Eyles. "I had previously spoken to and met the then-editor Richard Burton," says Mark, "who it turned out was a Quicksilva fan. My initial contact had been to write to him asking for a picture of Tharg to help add thrill power to our game development." When the photo arrived, it accompanied a letter from the editor, declaring his love for the ZX81. "So we sent him some games," continues Mark, "and eventually arranged to meet up. | can't remember where it was exactly, but | think it may have been at a Microfair. Our first choice was Judge Dredd, but he wasn't available as he'd already been licensed for a film." While the movie adaptation of Mega-City One's finest took over ten years to appear, it was just a year later when Strontium Dog made his digital debut. Playing the titular bounty hunter, searching for pals Wulf and Gronk, the aim is to eliminate the Stix Brothers and claim a sizeable bounty in the process. “l worked on the design, and unfortunately it didn't work out as well as we might have liked," admits Mark. Yet despite being a slightly tedious horizontally-scrolling run-and-gunner with little resemblance to the comic strip, The Death Gauntlet did not mark the end of Strontium Dog. Later the same year, the ZX Spectrum got its own tale of the mutie bounty hunter, courtesy of a game submitted to Quicksilva from a third-party coder. "The Spectrum game, Strontium Dog: The Killing, was one of those incredible coincidences," reveals Mark. "The guys who made it sent it in for us to publish for them, not realising we had licensed Strontium Dog. We were understandably keen to publish it!" In the early Eighties, such unsolicited submissions were common and the game's author, Paul Hargreaves, was inspired by his favourite story from 2000 AD. Appearing in Progs 350 to 359, The Killing tells the tale of a deadly contest organised by the Despots Of Zen in which contestants must murder each other until there is one winner, with Johnny Alpha and Wulf using the competition to claim several bounties. The ZX Spectrum's attempt at recreating the story involves a flick-screen maze as Johnny wanders around, killing his rivals. As with Death Gauntlet, it barely resembles the comic, but was considered good enough for Quicksilva to stamp its official licence and commission a beautiful Carlos Ezquerra cover. Despite the popularity of 2000 AD, only moderate success greeted Quicksilva's OUR FIRST CHOICE WAS JUDGE DREDD, BUT HE'D ALREADY BEEN LICENSED FOR A FILM LARGER THAN LIFE KEY HEROES FROM 2000 AD FIRST APPEARANCE: PROG 228 FIRST APPEARANCE: PROG 330 BEST STORY: THE FUTURE OF WAR BEST STORY: THE HORNED GOD seen itted against mut and a huge array of per} NUMBER OF GAMES: 4 NUMBER OF GAMES: 1 Genetically engineered to be able to survive on hostile environments such as the poisoned planet of Nu Earth, Rogue Trooper's fellow infantrymen are slaughtered at the Quartz Zone massacre, betrayed by a traitor from his own side, the Southers. Accompanied by biochipped versions of his former buddies, Rogue finally tracks down the traitor and kills him, and his colleagues are given new bodies. Banished from his own tribe, Slaine is an outsider, barbarian, berzerker and all-round nutcase. Accompanied by repulsive dwarf Ukko, Slaine follows a bloody prophecy in which he is predicted to become king, and to help him in that aim he wields an enormous axe against enemies both human and other. The strip was created by Pat Mills, and heavily indebted to Celtic lore and fellow barbarian Conan, FIRST APPEARANCE: ISSUE 1 (STARLORD), PROG 86 (2000 AD) BEST STORY: PORTRAIT OF A MUTANT NUMBER OF GAMES: 2 With his strange piercing white eyes, Johnny Alpha is able to read minds and see through walls — which are useful abilities in his profession as a bounty hunter, along with his outlandish gadgets and weapons. A thin holocaust parable, Strontium Dog follows Johnny and his comrade in arms Viking Wulf as they take out bad guys for cash, avoiding the scorn of the lucky ‘norms’ unaffected by the | great war of 2150. Alien protagonist esis made its debut in the bizarre Comic Rock and Killer Watt strips before setting of on its own in issue 222. Taking its cue from the Spanish . Inquisition, Nemesis’ main enemy is Torquemada, an evil human determined to rid the galaxy of aliens. A loopy combination of sci-fi and fantasy, there's nothing else quite like Nemesis The Warlock. 76 | RETRO GAMER bin-thips Synths f E £ | f £ |: l f | brace of Strontium Dog games. The 8-bit publisher, bought out by Argus Press Software a year later, tried its hand at adapting an entirely different comic strip character, Rupert The Bear, before fading from view in the late Eighties. Fortunately, others were prepared to make sure that 2000 AD's famous characters continued to appear in pixellated form, starting with Piranha, a newly-formed offshoot of the MacMillan Publishing empire. Unlike Quicksilva, Piranha obtained a number of 2000 AD characters, no doubt thanks to the clout of its parent company. Three games were advertised: Halo Jones, Judge Death and Rogue Trooper, although only the latter would see commercial release. Set on the war-torn and poisoned planet of Nu Earth, the last Genetic Infantryman must stalk the chem clouds accompanied by his biochipped deceased pals. iranha contracted Dark Star developer Design Design to create the shattered Nu Earth, and its programmer, lan Wareing, opted for an isometric flick-screen style. Anticipation was high among press at the time, although cautious given the earlier games. "MacMillan Software has acquired the rights to Rogue Trooper," announced Crash magazine in the summer of 1986. "Details on the release date are not yet available, but any improvement upon Strontium Dog, which had all the hallmarks of a severe Thrillsucker attack, is likely to be welcomed by comic fans." And indeed the game was an improvement, especially visually, as for the first time a 2000 AD character had been recreated recognisably. Trudging around the landscape, Rogue Trooper's chips offer chirpy comments, adding to the atmosphere (if nothing actually useful in practice) and melancholy sense » [ZX Spectrum] Strontium Dog: The Kiling offered depth, but litle variety Í CB EES TTS > [Amstrad CPC] Suitably bloody colours were used in Martech's Nemesis The Warlock game. BBBB*HH of humanity at war with itself. Notably more action-orientated than the majority of isometric games, the tapes are placed randomly every time the player starts again, giving the game an extra degree of variety, and was released in 1986 on the Spectrum and Amstrad, with a C64 version following a year later. Rogue Trooper proved to be a decent seller for London-based Piranha, but it wasn't enough to ensure the other two games that it advertised saw the light of day as both The Ballad Of Halo Jones and Judge Death found themselves caught up in the demise of the MacMillan sub-label. Previews had appeared everywhere, and in the case of Halo Jones, the game was even finished, at least the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad versions. "The Halo Jones game came about because | was a big fan of the comic strip and approached Piranha with an idea for the game," says Mike Lewis, whose previous game, the comic strip/adventure game superhero mash-up Redhawk, informed much of the look and design of Halo Jones. "It was an exploring and fighting game where Halo moves through corridors trying to get to the shopping mall. Along the way she encounters distant drummers and aliens, and could pick up weapons such as grenades." With early previews comparing the aesthetic to a mixture of Gargoyle's Tir Na Nog and Way Of The Exploding Fist, great things were expected of The Ballad Of Halo Jones. Alas it sadly wasn't to be, as Mike explains. “l delivered the master tapes for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad versions on the day that Piranha was wound up by MacMillan Publishing and, although | was paid the rest of the advance, | couldn't find anyone who wanted to publish it due to licensing complications. And I'd even met Alan Moore at a comics convention while writing the game, starting the conversation by apologising for writing a game based on his creation. He was very nice, but confessed that there wasn't a map of Halo Jones’ world, which I'd been hoping to find." WEAPON ACTI WF cum -. v Over on the Commodore 64, Judge Death was taking shape, with the player assuming the role of Judge Dredd's psychic colleague, Psi Judge Anderson, in an ambitious first-person shoot- 'em-up. Despite impressive preview shots, the its development team, and while a semi-playable update called Horror City was revealed years later, the end of Piranha saw any hope of a videogame Judge Death stomping the streets of Mega-City One dashed. But what of Judge Death's main nemesis, the urban pacifier supreme, Judge (Gioco mechanics of the game were proving awkward for E Dredd? Heavily previewed in the winter of 1986 and 1987, Melbourne House's adaptation of the lawgiver had the press and public enthused at the prospect of seeing the sprawl of Mega-City One finally represented on screen. As development stalled, Judge Dredd was finally released in the Spring of 1987, to the disappointment of many, especially on the Commodore 64 where it accrued an embarrassing 13% in Zzap!64 magazine. As unaspiring as Judge Death had been ambitious, developer Beam Software created a dull platform game with a selection of limited comic book stylings (such as speech bubbles) that failed to do Joe Dredd any justice. ortunately for 2000 AD fans, another publisher, Martech Games, had already decided that it wanted to try its hand at licensing characters from the galaxy's greatest comic. "| had three boys and one of them was mad about 2000 AD, [he] collected them and knew all the artists," recalls David Martin, Martech's owner. Having had success with personality-based games such as Eddie Kidd's Jump Challenge and Sam Fox Strip Poker, David rolled the dice on the popularity of another particularly British institution. "We went for a meeting with IPC, and Jas Austin gave us the lead with which characters to go for," says David. Jas worked for Martech's in-house development team, Creative Reality, and was a fervent fan of the CONVERSION CAPERS comic. “Jas said we must go for Slaine and Nemesis The Warlock - | think he basically told me his two favourites!” laughs David. “But we said that sounded great, and the strips had some fantastic artwork, although we created some of our own.” By 1986, Creative Reality had already produced another licensed game, Tarzan, and a shoot-em-up, WAR, for Martech, both coded by Jas, with graphics by Dave Dew. With the team’s other coder, Neil Dodwell, working on an ill-fated multi-event game called Circus Games, Jas and Dave busied on Nemesis The Warlock. “It was a dream game to work on,” says the coder, “and one of my favourites, so we jumped at it. We didn’t even put a game design together for Martech — we had an initial meeting, and | told them we were going to do a side-on platform game, while picking a few things out from the comic.” Beginning in Prog 167 of 2000 AD, Nemesis first appeared in a Comic Rock story entitled The Terror Tube, the freedom fighter escaping his enemy, religious zealot Torquemada. The subsequent series, combining sci-fi with swords and sorcery fantasy quickly gained fans, helped by its unsubtle nods to the Spanish Inquisition and Ku Klux Klan. “We picked a few things such as the acid spit and Nemesis’ sword. We were just plucking these » While 1997's Jud was rather weak, i ideas from the comic and hoping they would all stick together. But the thing that always gets mentioned is the piling up of bodies.” For its readers, one of the most appealing aspects of 2000 AD had been its reluctance to pull punches when it came to violence and gore, and Martech’s Nemesis The Warlock echoed this thanks to the gruesome method of which players could proceed from level to level: piling up the bodies of vanquished enemies in order to reach higher platforms. “It was a brilliant idea,” recalls David Martin, “and they weren't sure if l'd go for it. But | loved it, and when the bodies would occasionally sprout aliens too. It was a really neat little arcade game.” As befitted the era, Martech was not required to run much past IPC - it trusted the publisher P “JAS SAID WE MUST GO FOR SLAINE AND NEMESIS - I THINK HE TOLD ME HIS TWO FAVOURITES!" David Martin While predictably much sparser both in terms of sound and graphics, the Game Boy version still manages to appropriately recreate the world of Judge Dredd, while the gameplay is perhaps better suited to the handheld nature of the console. Only the sometimes muddy controls let it down (get up, Dredd!). Sega's Game Gear pulls out all stops for this conversion, and it looks so impressive that you could almost accuse it of Stookie Glanding. Resembling the Mega Drive game in looks, there is also plenty of action to keep you engaged, and it's one of the better platform games on the system lge Dredd lightgun game ithad some nice box art, THE HISTORY OF: 2000 A QEA: MARK POTENTE We speak to the artist on Krisalis’ stab at bringing Rogue Trooper to the Amiga and Atari ST Yeah, | was a big fan of the early comics, | must have had the first few hundred. Unfortunately, not realising the value of them, my brother and | took the front covers off them, hole punched them and put them in binders. There were later binned in a bedroom clear out | worked on all the environments, comic cutscenes and loading screens. | must admit | loved doing the cutscenes rather than the in-game environments — we didn't have any concept art for the in-game work, mainly relying on roughly-designed pen sketches. I loved it, and the idea of his comrades as biochips was really cool. But the version we had in the game | always thought was too cartoony and the animation didn't look tough enough. He filled a good part of the play area, which made the environments feel claustrophobic. | wasn't a fan of the overly large HUD. The idea was to create a puzzle platformer, in the same style as RoboCop, and a good majority of other games back then. The Space Harrier section was bolted on later, and this was probably created as we had done the Space Harrier game five years earlier and regurgitated the same code. That section was a bit jarring, but helped break up the side-on sections. David Colledge was the only other main artist, he did the character animations and HUD. Peter Harrap and John Scott were responsible for the programming, doing the Space Harrier and side-scrolling sections respectively. | was a bit disappointed that we didn't do the licence more justice, the reviews as | recall reflected that. And with the backdrops, while | tried to make them as distinctive as possible. | was told to cut out some of the gore, especially from the research lab. Initially there were a lot more dismembered bodies and blood-splattered walls. I'm not sure why there were no more, the game received mediocre attention, maybe that had something to do with it. We were all big 2000 AD fans at Krisalis, so it would have been fun to work on other characters. D RETRO GAMER | 79 book, starring its most popular character: Judge Dredd Vs Judge Death. to create a videogame that did justice to the comic strip. “We never met anyone from 2000 AD, not even Tharg,” smiles Jas, “and personally | was quite pleased with the result. It wasn't a Crash Smash, but | still get lots of comments about it today.” With Nemesis completed, Jas and Dave began work on its follow up, planning something much more elaborate for the mad Celtic Barbarian Slaine. “We really wanted to do something different and | remember at the time | was playing a lot of text adventures,” recalls Jas. “So | created this system that was supposed to represent the fevered mind of a berzerker like Slaine.” Dubbed Reflex, the technology was proudly announced in Slaine's adverts as the next big thing in videogames. "Yeah, it was a bit rubbish, though," laughs Jas. "We were hoping to make a big thing out of it, but it was just too frustrating." Within the crowded screens of Slaine, scene-setting text appears at the top-right, above images of the barbarian and his colleague Ukko. To the left, and occupying half the screen, commands drift in and out randomly, leaving the player a split-second to select the required instruction. "The problem was, you couldn't do the simple things easily," explains Jas. “Say you wanted to go west - you had to wait for it to come up, and if you missed it you had to wait again." Gameplay aside, Slaine looks the part, with Dave Dew's artistic talents on » [GameCube] Rebellion purchased the licence to 2000 AD in 2000, and three years later is produced its first game based on the comic display throughout, from the detailed portraits of its characters to the ghostly skeletal hand used to select commands. "Dave's graphics were always top-notch, but sometimes you need someone to say, 'No, that's not working," Jas notes. "Martech would have just looked at the game when we showed them a work in progress, seen that it looked good and trusted we knew what we were doing. It had some unusual ideas, and l'm still kinda proud of it, as it's still talked about today, although maybe for the wrong reasons!" ith Slaine selling poorly, further plans for 2000 AD games, and indeed the Reflex system, were shelved by Martech. With Piranha no more, it was left to Melbourne House, now owned by Virgin Mastertronic to attempt an improvement of its previous 2000 AD game, Judge Dredd. Simon Pick, then working for developer The Sales Curve, takes up the story. "We'd just finished Silkworm for Virgin, which was a great game that sold really well and made them keen to work with us again. | had just finished working on the Commodore 64 version of Shinobi and had the vague idea that we'd just make a game similar to Shinobi but make it Judge Dredd-styled. That seemed to be a good idea until someone pointed out that Judge Dredd never appeared to jump like WE WERE UP AGAINST A TIGHT DEADLINE AND WE DROPPED FEATURES ON A WEEKLY BASIS : that, at which point we should probably have given up the idea of making it a platform game. But for some reason we pressed on." Judge Dredd mark two therefore appeared intrinsically similar to its predecessor. "We had some great mock-ups put together by one of the artists but couldn't get them working in the game," says Simon. The result, with an inexperienced team helped by Simon as project manager, was a visually bland game as Dredd once more patrolled Mega City One, downing perps when not wandering the empty streets. “We were up against a tight deadline," notes Simon, "and we dropped features on a weekly basis as time got shorter. It’s the game that | am most unhappy with from my career, but on the plus side most of the coders went on to become industry veterans, doing great work." With the Amstrad and Spectrum versions stuck in an Iso-Cube, the Commodore 64 and 16-bit games met with more indifference. Would everyone's favourite fascist Cop ever get a decent game? Maybe, but first, a year later, appeared a little-known Amiga and Atari ST interpretation of the hero of Nu Earth, Rogue Trooper. Formed in 1987, Teque Software developed a handful of 8-bit games in the late Eighties, creating its own publishing label, Krisalis. Coded by Peter Harrap, known mainly as the man behind the Monty Mole games, Rogue Trooper is, again, set on Nu Earth as the Genetic Infantryman, captured by those dastardly Norts, must first escape his prison before jetting across the poisoned landscape to the Souther base. Once there he must battle once more (he is wanted for treason, after all) before presenting its command with evidence of the traitor general who betrayed the genetic warriors at the Quartz Zone massacre. Notable for its combination of side-on and Space Harrier- style views, Rogue Trooper failed to build on the moderate success of the previous game, and was the only 2000 AD licence from Krisalis. Four years passed before the release of the maligned Judge Dredd movie starring Sylvester Stallone, prompting the latest 2000 AD-related game. Published by Acclaim, and developed by Probe Software, Judge Dredd The Movie debuted on the Mega Drive, SNES, Game Gear, PC and Game Boy. Following the plot of the movie as closely as a standard platform game can, it's a decent side-scrolling game with some nice elements, such as being able to arrest enemies having wounded them. Despite lacking originality, it fared better than Gremlin Interactive's PlayStation lightgun effort of two years later, which is based directly on the comics rather than the movie. As PSM magazine denounced in May 1998, "Where Judge Dredd really fails is its total lack of being fun," With the comic itself soldiering on, the gaming side of 2000 AD went quiet, with just 1998's Judge Dredd Pinball released. Then, in the prophetic year of 2000, Rebellion Developments, founded by Chris and Jason Kingsley, purchased the comic and brand. Renowned for its movie mash up adaptation Aliens Vs Predator, Rebellion's founders were keen fans of IPC's finest. "I bought issue one from the newsagent by the chip shop on my way back from school,” remembers Jason Kingsley, “although | lost the space spinner that weekend on the top of my gran's garage!” As primarily a videogames developer, the idea was clearly to adapt some of the comic's most famous characters to the small screen. “We had a load of different ideas, and the reason for approaching 2000 AD in the first place was because | wanted to license Johnny Alpha for a computer game, but was rejected and wanted to know why," Jason remembers. "Then, after a long series of twists and turns, we ended up acquiring the whole thing and have never regretted it for a moment, although some would say it was a pretty crazy thing for a games company to do!" Rebellion's first game was not based on Strontium Dog, however, but rather the comic book's premier hero and his most dangerous foe, Judges Dredd and Death in Judge Dredd Vs Judge Death. "All of it was based on comic tropes and themes, but with the twists necessary to make it a compelling experience," continues Jason. Pitching the two diverse lawgivers against each other resulted in an uneven first-person shooter that satisfactorily adapted the look and feel of Mega-City One. s [Switch] More recently for 2000 AD videogames, a redux version of Rogue Trooper appeared in 2017. t was three years before Rebellion released its next 2000 AD game, and it proved to be one of the best. But why choose to adapt Rogue Trooper? "Guns feature in many big computer games, and aiming at something is probably one of the most accessible things a player can do," explains Jason. "Future war gave us loads of possibilities for enemies to fight against, and the setting of Nu Earth is visually different and interesting. Plus the chem clouds meant we could WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE JUDGE DREDD ARCADE GAME? Having had notable success with Mortal Kombat and its sequel, Midway Games was looking to expand its graphical style into more games in the early Nineties. Given the brutality endemic in the famous beat-'em-up series, a brawler featuring Judge Dredd appeared a logical move. The idea caught on, and in a format that heavily resembled another of Midway's earlier hits, the violent Narc, Dredd traverses several Mega-City One locations, beating up and shooting perps. With the game near-complete, it was field tested, and this is where the story takes a downward turn. Whether tired of the format or simply ignorance of the characters involved, the testing proved disastrous and the project was canned. Today, thanks to the internet, we can find out how Judge Dreddfor the arcade was looking, and Midway's designers appeared to have nailed the look and feel of Dredd's dystopian universe. While the star himself looks a little on the portly side, the mass of Day-Glo perps, a busy background and amusing nods to the comic (NO DROWNING' orders the city ordinance in the sewer) show that the people behind the game hadat least a good knowledge of the source material. legitimately have coloured fog in the distance." Rogue Trooper became a solid hit, not just for its evocative location but also the pioneering cover mechanics that the game employed. “It was a big success," notes Jason, "and the first cover-based shooter. Our innovation was not always acknowledged at the time, but | have it on good authority that the mechanics were carefully studied and built upon for many games that came afterwards." Sadly, beyond a redux of Rogue Trooper in 2017, and a 2011 mobile game, there have been no further 2000 AD games from the Rebellion stable, although its CEO and founder is cagey about what future shocks await us. “2000 AD generally has interested, multidimensional characters that have strong personalities and backgrounds," concludes Jason. "And this means you have a good solid base of ideas to build gameplay on top of. 2000 AD is probably more influential than many people realise." With the comic still going strong and a Rogue Trooper movie apparently in the works, we could soon see more 2000 AD videogames. Splundig vur Thrigg! * RETRO GAMER | 8 CONVERTED III III GO! GO! MILE SMILE i "Wi | | / / / Arcade games that never made it home E These switches marked DEVELOPER: FUUKI YEAR: 1995 GENRE: MAZE ‘Push!’ are the key to L SE MES defeating the boss, Later m Sometimes it isn't hard to see why a game never bosses require you to push Y į s made it to home systems. Honestly, when the first the correct switch, or have 1 Li word that comes to mind to describe a game is many active at once. - W The boss itself will ‘anachronism’, it probably isn’t a good thing. Go! Go! Ct EA e. stay in this area, but the " 3153. A ii Pies - * E np. Red arrows show the locations Mile Smile is quite enticing, but we're imagining that á from which it wil launch it would have been a pretty tough sell in the arcade 1 attacks. Go near them market of 1995. Even if maze games hadn't fallen out only when necessary! of fashion long before the mid-Nineties, by that point players had access juggernauts such as Sega Rally, Tekken and other 3D extravaganzas — and we could play some of them at home, too, thanks to a roster of decent console and computer ports. Of course, we're not the type to be concerned about whether or not a game was fashionable when it was released, because we're not tremendously concerned about that now - and it turns out that Fuuki's colourful maze game is quite neat. Go! Go! Mile Smile plays like a cross between Pac-Man and Qix. You play as an egg, operating from within a protected perimeter zone, and must venture out into the maze to collect items in order to move onto the next stage. Of course, it's never an easy task as the maze is populated by evil critters that would quite like to wreck your day. Your journey into the maze leaves behind a chain of chicks, and the further you probe the more danger you're in — not only are you unable to cross your own path, but enemies can hit at any point along the chain. Opportunities to defeat enemies are limited to rare power-up appearances, but you do at least have a quick retreat button to pull yourself out of dangerous situations. Every so often you'll encounter a boss battle, which switches things up a little by giving you target- ` : I : ; Most enemies have a based challenges. : start-up delay to their attacks, fr) 3 x - A pe E o W The key to high scores K k D |, eE | t giving you a chance to retreat In terms of presentation, it's not the most 1 is to pick up lots of items w 1 g —so long as its attacking the sophisticated looking game. The two dimensional without fully retreating = 3 = front of your line. graphics aren't cutting edge — especially considering to the safe zone, as that it was released in 1995 — and the sounds are doing so wil reset your. mostly just passable, although we do have a soft spot for the dodgy English voice work. But it's all pleasant enough, and if you divorce it from the context of its release date it's a pretty compelling example of the maze game genre. CONVERTED ALTERNATIVE VOLFIED 1989. W There's not a lot that directly compares to Go Go Mile Smile, so we've gone for a Qix variant instead. This one's great, with plenty of power-ups and interesting backdrops. It was converted to many systems including the PC Engine, Mega Drive, Commodore 64 and the 16-bit home computers. HH CONVERTED ALTERNATIVE TL AQUA RUSH DEVELOPER: NAMCO YEAR: 1999 GENRE: PUZZLE m We're not entirely sure why Namco chose an aquatic theme for this puzzle game, as it has little bearing on the game design. However, that doesn’t particularly matter as the game itself is rather interesting. Your job is to reach the end of a long column of blocks in Tetris-esque fashion. The primary differences are that you're scrolling the screen upwards, and that instead of tetrominoes, you get » [Arcade] These stage layouts can be tricky - see how itblocks lines trom forming? blocks that are three spaces wide. You can add your own extensions to all three columns using the game's three buttons, and when one line is clear, all the remaining blocks shift upwards, detaching from one another to fill in the gaps and create combos. The game quickly becomes quite challenging as you've only got a short amount of time to decide on the sort of shape you want to create, but thankfully it's broken into stages rather than being endless. We're genuinely quite surprised that this one never came to consoles, as it doesn't seem like it would tax the PlayStation, a format Namco was prolific on. But it's also quite light on content and would probably have required some work to bulk up for a home release — and that's only if you could get past the odd theme in the first place. CONVERTED ALTERNATIVE PUZZLED 1990 W This is alot like Aqua Rush, but you're going down the screen, you're using tetrominoes and you only have to free the trapped balloon. It's available from the comfort of your living room on Neo-Geo AES and CD, on modern consoles digitally via Arcade Archives, and on the Neo-Geo X and Neo-Geo Mini. NFL BLITZ 1997 g Midway's juiced up take on American football includes real teams rather than crazy themed gangs, but provides similar thrills thanks to its lax interpretation of the rules - sadly, the NFL required the outlandish shenanigans to be cut back in later games. You can get it for PlayStation and Saturn. DIRTY PIGSKIN FOOTBALL DEVELOPER: PLAY MECHANIX YEAR: 2004 GENRE: SPORTS m If you've ever longed for an American football game where convicts face off against wrestlers and aliens throw down with Vikings, congratulations — you have a very imaginative mind. And luckily, your ideal game also happens to exist in the form of this Atomiswave sports outing. Dirty Pigskin's brand of gridiron is simplified. Teams have five players each, and many aspects of the game have been removed — there are no penalties, kicking and first downs for making yards, so if you can't score in four attempts then you'll turn possession over to the opposition. The three-button control scheme offers you a couple of passing options on offence, the ability to tackle and change players on defence, and a turbo button on both. Once your special bar is filled, BEST OF BEST DEVELOPER: SUNA YEAR: 1994 GENRE: FIGHTING m Few titles have failed more spectacularly to live up to their name than Best Of Best. Here is a low-rent Street Fighter II tribute act, complete with woeful balance issues, amateurish graphics and some truly bizarre design decisions. We're not sure why the Statue Of Liberty climbs the side of a boat that you're fighting on, but it does. Even the interesting ideas fail What's remarkable is that this game came out in 1994, a time when fighting game innovation and quality was at a zenith in the arcades. Could you imagine playing this over the likes of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Mortal Kombat Il, The King Of Fighters 94, Virtua Fighter 2 and Tekken? Absolutely not. Is it unfair to expect a small Korean » [Arcade] Arenas are themed, as you can see by the this outer space alien stadium. it's possible to perform a special pass or tackle turbo. These changes make for a considerably quicker and more exciting take on the sport. Unfortunately, Play Mechanix's games don't tend to come home and this one was no different. It could have been fun, but it would have needed a lot of work to meet the expectations of a console game in the mid-Noughties. in their execution — fighters can crawl away when recovering, but if you attack as they do, the game displays a message on the screen that criticises you as 'unmanly'! this underwhelming. developer to compete with the top end of the fighting game market? Probably. But frankly, life isn't fair and your life is likely too precious to waste on games THE oo M OF TT Mana or The majority of football management games have traditionally thrived on PC. But Codemasters’ LMA Manager was successful in targeting the PlayStation alone. We talk to its producer about the game's unique features and series-defining legacy Words by Fraser Gilbert x Next a Previous here have been countless attempts to replicate Football Manager's success on consoles over the years, but even Football Manager hasn't always got it right. Arguably the most notable series to leave a lasting impression was Codemasters' LMA Manager. It began in 1999. Back then, Sports Interactive's Championship Manager was well-established and was scene, but competitors weren't in short supply. EA Sports was proving persistent with its new FA Premier League Football Manager franchise, while the likes of Premier Manager continued to retain a loyal fanbase. The subgenre seemed to be going through somewhat of a boom period, and publishers soon latched on to the hype. But few of these games were focusing their efforts solely on console. They were, understandably, targeting the traditionally popular PC market, often producing ports for various systems along the way. LMA Manager was to take a different approach, being "the only football management game designed specifically for the PlayStation". "Codemasters had been working on an idea for a [football management] D ES » [PlayStation] Unlike its sequels, LMA Manager only includes the ability to play with English teams. : game for quite a while," says i Simon Prytherch, the producer on LMA Manager. "And they showed me what they had — they had the initial research and prototypes for a ; management game, and | said | think we should go all-in and design it from the ground up.” His decision was based on the desire for a console-only direction. i "[Codemasters] were in the i process of expanding really rapidly dominating the football management : because a lot of the other games were bringing in money. And we were making all that money on consoles," remembers Simon. "We had gone all-in on the PlayStation with Micro Machines, TOCA Race Driver and Colin McRae Rally, and Colin McRae Rally and TOCA were being developed in parallel with LMA Manager." According to Simon, the initial prototypes had been largely PC-driven, adopting a "Football Manager-esque" design. But the decision to switch development to the PlayStation saw LMA Manager prioritise a more console-accessible focus, with the goal of allowing players to access everything within two or three button clicks. "That was quite a challenge when you've got so much information in a football i game,” he reveals. » [PlayStation] The game uses visual aids instead of stats to identify players’ strengths and weaknesses. THE MAHING OF: LMA MANAGER Return to 6 GWherever possible, everything should be visible at a glance 77 Simon Prytherch The developer achieved this by : developing the series’ now-famed i tab system, utilising all four of the i PlayStation controller's shoulder buttons to transition between different menus. This, combined with the face buttons, ensured : navigation remained a breeze, even £ when engaging in complex transfer i negotiations. And crucially, it never left you pining for the comfort of a keyboard and mouse. "The first thing we did was put together a prototype of the user ; interface," explains Simon. “So : that we could illustrate how quick m erect: «users rivais The first LMA Manager was notable for its inclusion of a stadium editor. This. allowed you to expand your stadium as the seasons wore on. The game's prebuilt stadiums were impressive, too, including lifelike representations of famous arenas such as Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge. “The PlayStation has limited RAM [...], so everything needed to be done in parts,” Simon Prytherch explains. “We built [the stadiums] like Lego... and then in order to get the closest match with a particular club — as the games developed - we grew that list of parts so that you could get bigger and better and more varied stadiums.” Even despite those limitations, the stadium editor included some fairly extensive customisation options. Each potential upgrade was offered in various styles, and there was even the ability to add corners to both ends of the ground, resulting in plenty of bespoke ideas to help develop a unique 1 look for your stadium. ^ » [PlayStation] LMA Manager's player models aren't overly detailed, but there's a varied enough selection on display. : it would be to get to any part of : the screen — we did a couple of key screens like tactics and team selection, and when people saw that and had a feel of that, they felt it would make playing a management game really easy on a console." There were other considerations to take into account as well. The intent wasn't to overload LMA Manager with a stat-heavy interface, given its quick and accessible nature. Then again, it also required enough depth to compete with similar ; management titles on the market. 1 Simon and his team decided upon i aunique approach to differentiate LMA from its peers. "What we wanted to do was set ourselves apart in every screenshot from other management games, so we didn't want to have lots of numbers on the screen," Simon explains. "So wherever possible, everything should be visible at a glance on a pretty low-res TV screen. Which meant the bars that represented 0-100 had graduations in them, and if you wanted to know what position a football player could play, it would shade a part of the football pitch next to them. So you would see at a glance how good a player was by the length of the bars and the positions they would play." LMA Manager still retained the core features of many typical management games. It allowed players to take control of any English league team and compete in one of ten scenario-based challenges, or opt for the more exhaustive choice of embarking on a 50-year career. You could manipulate lineups, tactics, and the transfer market to your advantage, as well as managing aspects such as training and finances i to help curate long-term success. P» RETRO GAMER | && LMA MANAGER I The original game highlighted its 3D match engine, 1999/2000 season stats and “immersive after-match TV show’ as key selling points. It became a hit in the UK, with Codemasters promoting it as the "PlayStation's best-selling football management game”. IN THE HNOW » PUBLISHER: Codemasters » DEVELOPER: Codemasters » RELEASED: 1999 » PLATFORM: PlayStation » GENRE: Sports management DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS MICRO MACHINES SYSTEM: VARIOUS YEAR: 1991 COLIN MCRAE RALLY SYSTEM: PLAYSTATION, PC, GAME BOY COLOR YEAR: 1998 LMA MANAGER SYSTEM: PLAYSTATION YEAR: 1999 F1 2019 SYSTEM: PS4, XBOX ONE, PC YEAR: 2019 » [PlayStation] It's common to find yourself competing in various weather conditions, including rain, fog and snow. 86 | RETRO GAMER LMA MANAGER 2001 I The sequel to LMA Manager was released in March of 2001, improving on its predecessor in almost every way. The big enhancement was that of the match engine, which now boasted more graphical fidelity and the ability to shout instructions at your players mid-game. p Its biggest hook, however, served as the inclusion of an extensive 3D highlights engine. While the games themselves would play out amidst an engaging top-down view, it was the TV-style post-game recap that really captured players’ imaginations. The idea was to develop an immersive feature with alluring graphical prowess. “We realised on the low-powered PlayStation, we wouldn't be able to do [in-game highlights] because we wanted to make it look really polished," says Simon. "So what we developed was a system to generate highlights based on loads and loads of presets which were polished, and then being able to flip it into the four quadrants of the pitch." The new system allowed for highlights to be replicated in various ways depending on the scenario. “We'd only have to develop a move for a quarter of the pitch, and that way we could then multiply that move by four by mirroring it and flipping it into the other quadrant," he explains. "We developed a whole load of tools basically to set up those highlights, and then during the game, the action would be mapped to the closest fitting highlight." These highlights, combined with short full-motion video punditry segments, led to the post-game show emitting a convincing Match Of The Day feel. The addition of Alan Hansen and Ray Stubbs as commentators only enhanced this further, with the use of their voices contributing a sense of authenticity to the broadcast-like presentation. : development — maybe a bit longer, i says Simon. “The plan was that we i were going to go for the previous a j - LMA MANAGER 2002 m This was the first game in the series to migrate to Sony's follow-up console, the PlayStation 2. With it came another momentous jump in visual quality and the ability to manage teams from across Europe. It was also the final entry to be released on the original PlayStation. he highlight system and the rest of the game's in-depth features were a struggle to implement in time for : release, however. LMA had proved i a more exhaustive project than ; originally planned, and it became apparent that more development time would be required, “| think it took 18 months in " season's launch, but once we started development, we realised this was i going to be a bigger game. And so i we went back to the directors at : Codemasters and | secured another year's worth of development." Much of the development team had to be sourced from scratch, too. LMA MANAGER 2003 m LMA debuted on the original Xbox with this version. The game featured an enhanced highlight system and various Al improvements, as well as ‘post-match banter’ from Alan Hansen and Gary Lineker. And for the first time, you could actually name a new stadium! ; In its prototype stages, the game had started out with just three people on board. But as the project began to ake hold, Simon focused his efforts on acquiring fresh new talent. "Because Codemasters were expanding really rapidly, what did was concentrate on hiring enthusiastic — technically able, but really enthusiastic graduates," he says. "All of the ones that we recruited for that project have gone on to do bigger and better things. "Like the main guy doing the football engine, for instance, Gary Paterson LMA 2001-2003) - he went on to head up FIFA on the technical side." The extra development time also led to the team seeking the approval of the League Managers Association. The LMA had served - and still does Sent OFF : Dubhn A wl Í » [PlayStation] Highlights are packed with near misses and often hilariously blatant red cards, as well as goals. LMA MANAGER 2004 W There was another sizeable overhaul in the visuals department for LMA 2004. The bright new menus freshened up the series’ look, while the big new feature was that of a Fantasy Team mode, allowing you to create a club and draft your own players. — as a "collective, representative voice" of English Premier League and Football League teams, making the organisation a suitable fit. "They were interested in raising their profile and nobody else had approached them," says Simon. "And so we found it quite easy to talk to them. They shared quite a lot with us." With that collaboration came a significant degree of responsibility. The team was committed to delivering a statistically accurate game, but with four tiers of playable leagues (and European teams included as well), the task was sizeable. Unlike other established management sims, Codemasters didn't have a pre-existing database to build upon. “What we did was we recruited locally within the Leamington area — football fans, basically — that were really good at computer skills. And we set up a really easy data entry system using Microsoft Access, but building a front-end into that," Simon explains. "And those football fans, | tasked them by saying, look — want you to contact every football club's fan club, because they know their side inside out, and basically build a network through email and other contacts." This only added to the time- consuming work required by the team. It proved a stretch to meet the deadline, even despite the extended schedule. "We worked extremely hard and | think, during that year, there were some long hours," Simon admits. "So yeah, we were working extremely hard and looking to have LMA MANAGER 2005 W The series experimented with the PC in 2005 under the title of LMA Professional Manager. Butit was the console versions that continued to prove most popular, implementing additional updates to the match engine and providing a more realistic transfer system. i a very polished game that would i have a massive impact when it was launched." hen it finally released in late 1999, LMA Manager was met with critical acclaim. Fans and reviewers alike praised its control scheme and authentic gameplay elements, as well as its immersive 3D highlights feature. The hard work had paid off. “We had a lot of press going into it and people had high expectations,” says Simon, noting that the team would regularly receive letters from passionate fans. “We were elated [when it succeeded] because we were all convinced that this was going to be big, and we'd internally convinced directors and marketing, so | think we'd have had a lot of egg on our faces if it had flopped.” Its success led to significant growth. LMA Manager was followed up two years later with a sequel, in which the match engine was significantly enhanced and the menus were freshened up. It then made a successful transition to the Í PS2 and original Xbox, implementing £ ; a visually impressive 3D engine that i negated the need for pregenerated highlights. The franchise eventually drew to a close shortly following LMA 2007's debut on the Xbox 360. By then, times had changed. i Simon had left the company in i 2003 — he suggests the series perhaps suffered from a lack of “real groundbreaking features” in i its final years. But as for his own length profile break LMA MANAGER 2006 Wit was time for another revamp with LMA 2006, with the game sporting a brand-new look. Both the 3D match engine and transfer market were again reworked, and you could also engage in 3D training matches and make your own manager (with PS2 EyeToy support!) 4 Attackers p eT 7| SJageetka 3| LRodgers 4 Injured Heading LMA MANAGER 2007 W Last but not least, the series made the transition to the Xbox 360. The match engine benefited from significantly improved graphics and widescreen support, and the game boasted “far more detail than ever before.” LMA 2007 was also released on the PS2 and PC, Sat 774 Aug Shrewsbury Town | S.Kerrigan Age 26 Played 0 Scored 0 Tackling m Marking = Passing mm Control mmm Shooting mam Hea | Pac T| Aggress. Fitness | Rating | IO (E s [PlayStation] The team training menu features some neat visual animations based on each player's assigned routine, GLI still look back at it now and think, “That's one of the top three peaks in my career, if not the top’ 77 Simon Prytherch experiences, he recalls the franchise — particularly the first game — as a notable career high. “I've worked with many great teams, and even now | have fond į memories of the first LMA Manager. i You don't get many moments in your ; career like that, where everyone gels and is pulling in the same direction,” he says. “I still look back at it now ; and think, “That's one of the top three i peaks in my career, if not the top” It's now been well over a decade since LMA Manager's cancellation, and exactly 20 years since its debut on PlayStation. And yet, people are still talking about it. The series undoubtedly left a significant imprint on both the games industry and many football fans’ hearts, with its original iteration laying the foundations for one of the most enjoyable sports management franchises of all time. 3€ RETRO GAMER | 8? Hardware Heaven Game Boy Micro fact a feature worldwide, it never Game Boy Micro faceplates Game Boy Micro > MANUFACTURER: Nintendo > YEAR: 2005 » COST: £6999 (launch), £50+ (today) Ithough Nintendo had previously framed the DS as the ‘third pillar’ of its hardware strategy, few players believed that there was much of a future for the Game Boy Advance line following the dual-screened 2g device's strong launch. But the company surprised everyone by unveiling a » tiny revision of the older hardware at E3 2005. On stage, Reggie Fils-Aime highlighted the machine's customisable faceplates and claimed that "no matter how tight your jeans, it'll still fit in your pocket" — aiming the hardware at "image-conscious consumers". But he also noted that it wouldn't succeed the existing Game Boy Advance line, and would instead retail alongside it. While it did have a headphone jack, unlike the Game Boy Advance SP, the Game Boy Micro was missing a lot of features from the rest of the Game Boy Advance line. Backwards compatibility was out, and many peripherals wouldn't work with the system due to the radical change in form factor. You even needed an adaptor to use existing link cables. The tiny size of the machine and brilliant display weren't enough to convince consumers to pick the Game Boy Micro over the Game Boy Advance SP or DS, and the console was soon available for deep discounts. Ultimately, it sold just 2.42 million units. EDITOR’S CHOICE If you have an exceptionally portable handheld console that is genuinely pocket-sized, you ideally want to run a game that is enjoyable regardless of how much (or how little) spare time you have. WarioWare is the perfect fit for this job, offering wafer-thin Slices of gaming pleasure that neatly fill any gaps in your schedule, while always leaving room for one more. Have a quick nibble if you have a few minutes between meetings, or gorge yourself when you're on a lengthy train journey. Either way, it's a delicious game with which to enjoy this dinky handheld. Intthe chairgwith= VINCENT BAILL 30 | RETRO GAMER From coder to studio manager, Vincent Baillet's fast- rising career arguably mirrored the growth of the French games industry. But, as he tells Retro Gamer, the "32-bit console earthquake" shook away a lot of freedom Words by David Crookes It's said that France came late to videogaming, but what was the French videogame scene like in the late Seventies/early Eighties and what was the first game you played? | wasn't allowed to have a home version of Pong when it was released in the Seventies because my parents thought that plugging a console into a television could destroy it. But there was a shopping centre near where | lived and it had a few arcade games. Space Invaders became the first game that | played and Galaxian was the second but | probably didn't play either of them alot. They cost one Franc per game and that was a lot of money for children so my first experience with videogames was, in many ways, frustrating. But were you excited about the computers being launched at the time? Among the first computers that | came across were an Apple Il, because my mathematics teacher had one, and a Commodore PET 2001 but | also had a friend who bought a Tandy TRS80 and another one had a Commodore CBM 3000. | recall we spent a lot of time experiencing various things on these computers and that we were a little afraid that our experiments could destroy these precious machines. Which computer did you have and why did you decide that was the one you wanted? The first computer | owned was a ZX81 and | bought it because it was cheap. | bought the ‘kit version’ because it was the only one | could afford. For those who don't know, this was a DIY version of the ZX81 and when you bought it, you received a printed circuit board, and all the components to solder on. Having a computer at home was rather unusual at that time. Most people didn't even know what the purpose of that machine actually was. Looking back, | was probably seen as some sort of alchemist: somebody who would go on to spend days and nights writing texts in a strange language that nobody could understand Did the ZX81 introduce you to coding, then? No. | actually started programming using my TI-57 programmable calculator. | then moved on to another calculator called the HP-41C which was made by Hewlett Packard and which a friend lent me. Leaming how to program on these machines was a good introduction and a great education. To get good results, you had to care a lot about the speed and the memory usage of the devices. The more constraints that you had, the more you had to use your brain — and it's fair to say that these machines were full of constraints! Compared to them, the ZX81 was a much more comfortable machine because it had a lot of MHz and RAM. Are we right in saying that it was the Oric-1 which unleashed your talent, though? Well, for a start, I'm not sure that | have a talent [laughs], but let me explain. Before having an Oric1,|wasa — ^ 44 To get good results, you - Mi had to care a lot about the speed and the memory usage of the devices y y Vincent Baillet ÉÉ Each game that we made was a new strong Othello player — or Reversi SELECTED TIMELINE GAMES PERPE Nome | E REVERSI CHAMPION [1984] ORIC 1, ORIC ATMOS, SEGA SC-3000 E JEU DE DAMES [1984] THOMSON MO E GALAXION [1984] ALICE 32/90 E 3D FIGHT [1985] AMSTRAD CPC E FOOT 3D [1985] AMSTRAD CPC E BACTRON [1986] THOMSON TO, AMSTRAD CPC Wi MAGNETIKTANK [1986] THOMSON TO AMSTRAD CPC, ATARI ST, PC E MACH 3 [1987] THOMSON MO, THOMSON TO, AMSTRAD CPC, MSX, ZX SPECTRUM, PC, AMIGA, ATARI ST E TURBO CUP [1988] THOMSON TO, AMSTRAD CPC, ZX SPECTRUM, PC, AMIGA, ATARI ST E WEST PHASER [1989] AMSTRAD CPC, PC, AMIGA, ATARI ST E TENNIS CUP [1990] AMSTRAD CPC, PC, AMIGA, ATARI ST, TURBOGRAFX TURBOGRAFX CD E BABY JO IN: GOING HOME [1991] AMSTRAD CPC, PC, AMIGA, ATARI ST, TURBOGRAFX CD M BEST OF THE BEST: CHAMPIONSHIP KARATE [1993] AMSTRAD CPC, PC, AMIGA, GAME BOY, MEGA DRIVE, NES, SNES E TOMMY MOE'S WINTER EXTREME: SKIING & SNOWBOARDING [1994] SNES E VAL D'ISÈRE SKIING AND SNOWBOARDING [1994] ATARI JAGUAR E ADIDAS POWER SOCCER [1996] PLAYSTATION, PC B THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN [1997] E ADIDAS POWER SOCCER INTERNATIONAL '97 [1997] PLAYSTATION D.T: ESCAPE... OR DIE TRYING [1998, UNRELEASED] PLAYSTATION, PC, NINTENDO 64 E CORSAIRS: CONQUEST AT SEA [1999] PC m WORMS ARMAGEDDON [2000] GAME BOY COLOR E TINTIN: DESTINATION ADVENTURE [2001] PLAYSTATION, PC E AUTOBAHN RACER: POLICE MADNESS [2007] MOBILE E BOMBING BASTARDS [2014] PS4, PS VITA WII U, NINTENDO SWITCH, PC, MAC, LIN IOS, ANDROID as itis also known. At the time, a French monthly computer magazine called L'ordinateur Individuel organised Othello computer tournaments so | decided that | would program an Othello game on the HP-41C calculator, and later on my ZX81. My software proved to be quite good but that is probably because | must have spent about a trillion hours working to optimise it. The Oric-1 came later. | had bought one of these computers with the first salary | earned in my summer job and so | developed my Othello game for it. It was named Reversi Champion and, once the game was finished, | travelled to Paris to show it to Laurant Weill of Loriciel because | had read in a magazine that he was looking for new games. And | came back with a distribution contract. Were there alternatives to Loriciel at the time? Not really. In France, at that time, there were not many publishers. There were Ere Informatique, Sprite, Ubisoft, Infogrames, Loriciel and Cobra, from memory, but I think that | ended up choosing Loriciel because they had publicly said they were looking for games to publish Laurant Weill and Marc Bayle were nice people, and what they offered me for my game was way beyond my dreams so | didn't call the other publishers and decided to go with them. It was the start of a long relationship. Which games did you start working on at Loriciel? | had started with Loriciel as a freelance programmer because | still had to finish my studies. But since everybody was happy with Reversi Champion, | was asked if | would work on a conversion for the Sega Yeno SC3000 [note: Sega's SC-3000 computer was distributed in France by ITMC under the 'Yeno' brand] | was then tasked with completing another conversion for a machine by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was a kind of strange PC. By that point, | had become =...“ — challenge, and in a lot of ways the challenge was more important Vincent Baillet bored making games of Othello so | switched to working on a French-Checker game on the Thomson MOS. Around 1984, the Amstrad was released and had become bored with games that needed to use the mind so | worked on a shoot-em-up called 3D Fight. It was a big success at the time and it was a bit strange for me to earn more than my parents while still being a student. After the success of 3D Fight, | decided to stop studying, and | called Laurant in order to see if he had a real, full- time job for me. That was the start of eight years of an exciting adventure with Loriciel and | worked on lots and lots of games such as Mach 3, Bactron, West Phaser, Turbo Cup, Val d'Isère Championship, and many, many more. | also worked on a display engine that ended up being used in many Loriciel games and, on top of that, | sometimes had to help other developers with various aspects of their games, whether that was optimisation or debugging or some other technical thing they needed How was the company structured? When I started working for Loriciel, the company was employing fewer than ten people. But working for ») The programmable calculator, the TI-57 by Texas Instruments, allowed Vincent Baillet his first taste of programming 8:00:00 2:00:09 NIVEAU n X) Vincent created one game for the Alice 32, Galaxion, which was released in 1984. MODE D'EMPLOI S LUE eee i g g «€ SU H » itles {Thomson MOI Titles lke Jeu de Dames were based on traditional board games. 9 | RETRO GAMER = E F7 VAL D'ISERE CHAMPIONSHIP W Developed for the Jaguar as Val d'Isère Skiing And Snowboarding, this realistic enough sim boasted freestyle, training and competitive modes and allowed players to use skis or a snowboard as they hurtled down the slopes. MACH 3 Loriciel had been a great pleasure from the start and it meant that | was able to work with some people who are still my friends 20 years later. Were you allowed to be creative and were you able to experiment with coding techniques and different styles of play? Yes! We were mainly working on the games that we wanted to make but most of us were focusing on the profitable ones. We had great pleasure experimenting with all kind of funny, technical things. This was possible because the teams were small and the timescales were short. French developers have often been seen to have trodden a different path to those in the UK and USA: there was a sense that games made in France would better reflect the country of origin and that a lot of attention was paid to graphics and quirky gameplay. Is this a fair assessment and, if so, what motivated developers to do that? | think that point of view is subjective — it's just a view of the mind. Yes, some 'different games' did come from France, but | also remember that you could have said the same for some English games and that the same applied to some Japanese, too. Maybe here in France, we are a little more open to strange things, but you guys in the United Kingdom are not bad at this kind of thing also. Anyway, the videogame industry is a fast-moving » [Amstrad CPC] 3D Fightreminds us a little bit of the Sega arcade game Buck Rogers: Planet Of Zoom. W Players needed to keep a finger close to the trigger when piloting Mach 3's spacecraft. For as well as dodging incoming alien ordinance, it was necessary to keep blasting at an assortment of ground targets. Superb animation and sound adds to the atmosphere. TURBO CUP W This was a rather simple racing game, with players seeking to determine their grid position trying. to beat 21 competitors over four tracks. The game was inspired by driver René Metge and some copies came with a scaled model of his Porsche 944 Turbo. industry and being different is a good way to attract attention. France also had a strong demo scene which would push the boundaries of computers. Were you among those wanting to get the most out of a computer? And which computers do you think you and Loriciel pushed better than developers elsewhere? To be honest, I've not been too interested in the demo scene. l've seen nice things on the Arniga, but lots of the tricks used were not repeatable on a real, commercial videogame. Of all of the Loriciel games that you made, which ones were you most proud of and why? For me, Val d'Isère Championship, Turbo Cup, West Phaser, Bactron and Mach 3 made me most proud but there were a lot of others, too. Each game that we made was a new challenge, and in alot of ways the challenge was more important than the game itself. Did you feel, after developing Val d'Isére Skiing And Snowboarding that you could leave Loriciel on a high? Oh, and are you an avid skier? Hmm... no, I'm not an avid skier, unfortunately. Come to think, I've worked on Turbo Cup but I'm not a Porsche driver, either (even though | would like to be). I'm also not a futuristic aircraft pilot, but l've worked on the development of Mach 3. And, l'm not sure, but | don't think the Assassin's Creed team actually comes from ancient Egypt [laughs] Seriously, though, Val d'Isère Championship was a great project to work on. Olivier Richez and Philippe Tesson are great people and they were motivated and efficient. We had a great pleasure working on the Super Nintendo version and it is unfortunate that Loriciel's bankruptcy came during the Atari Jaguar conversion. | had not completed much of the work on the Jaguar version but all credit had to go to Olivier, Philippe and their new team. IN THE CHAIR: VIN 2 FIVE TO PLAY oup trom vincen’s back catalogue BACTRON W This has a curious premise: you play as an antibiotic within a body which needs to reactivate enzymes that had been affected by a virus, It involves working through a maze of screens, interacting with obstacles and trying not be drained of energy. ENT JRILULET. ODT: ESCAPE... OR DIE TRYING W Vincent Baillet was studio manager of Psygnosis Paris for this quirky adventure. It drew. comparisons with Tomb Raider while drawing on RPG elements. Its puzzle elements and strong characters are decent. » [Amstrad CPC] Foot had bi end ofthe projec, so the reigns were noce Percon ti who left Lorici e reigns were potete nr cont who left Lori before ihe Baillet to finish it off, It was at this point that you left Loriciel, wasn't it? Yes, At the same time, Psygnosis contacted me about a new job and it was related to a secret new machine. It's certainly true to say that some developers struggled with the jump to 32-bit and, indeed, to 64-bit consoles: how did you cope with this seismic move yourself and how excited were you about the PlayStation — the secret machine we are assuming you are alluding to? Well, there are tons of things to say about the 32-bit console earthquake and | could fill many pages with these tales alone. It had been a difficult time for a lot of programmers and artists: suddenly 3D was the new thing and it required a lot of new competencies. It was as if most of our existing skills were obsolete and, at the same time, projects were also becoming much bigger. There were bigger teams and far longer project durations. So we had to learn the basics of management for this leap forward, and we had to learn different method of project management because any problems were multiplied. Before the move to 3D, teams had a sense of freedom, but with bigger projects we RETRO GAMER | 3 ü. TN wv ett 4| needed organisation and financial pragmatism. It definitely had a clear effect on the teams' freedoms. How did you have to adapt, though? As the teams were getting bigger, people were becoming more specialised in some of the tasks. | think the move to 32-bit also played a role in the fact that there was a renewal of talents. But, despite that, the best people — certainly the most motivated of the old-fashioned talents — did succeed in keeping their roles during this earthquake. | switched to a management role and | became the boss of Psygnosis Paris. That was a big step, but Sony Psygnosis did a lot to help all of the new managers. As it turned out, Sony had been a great school; a wonderful education. But then it's a brilliant company that deserves its past and present successes. How did your own approach to gaming change over the next five years with Psygnosis and what games did you enjoy working on and why? First of all, | stopped being involved in the actual game content. As a manager, | had to ensure that the 34 | RETRO GAMER j ej ue | j games were released on time and that they were hitting their budget and were of the required quality. But to do this, | had to give away the creative and technical aspects of developing a game to the teams | was working with. It was important for us to be profitable, and we had to be creative at the same time. So our solution was to develop the Power Soccer series (which was a productive cash cow), and then to take a more risky (but more motivating) approach with ODT — Escape...Or Die Trying, 3X: The Science Of War and other games. ODT - Escape...Or Die Trying was a nice project with a brilliant team. The producer (Jean-Baptiste Bolcato) is a very skilled and efficient developer and he is also a nice guy, so | didn't have a lots of things to really deal with on that project. | think I'm on the ‘credits’ for ODT — Escape...Or Die Trying, but, in truth, the team had done it without much work on my side. | just tried to create the good conditions for them to make a great game. 3X: The Science Of War had been much more complex, though, because of the technical aspects that were involved but also because some people within Psygnosis US and UK didn’t want or understand this game. Making new things is sometimes difficult, and you have to struggle to make it happen. This was the case with 3X: The Science Of War. Why did you choose to leave Sony and Psygnosis and move to Infogrames. How did you feel about the company’s rapid expansion at this time: was it something that opened up fresh gaming opportunities for you? Infogrames’ expansion was a bit strange. Some companies were bought (such as Psygnosis Paris and Gremlin Graphics) but they were considered to be a ‘war takeover’ rather than a new part of the company. We had never been fully integrated within Infogrames and it didn't bring lots of pleasure for the Paris teams. to be profitable, and we had to be creative at the same time Vincent Baillet p): PANTER ey | APA 000 $ = owe 00000 wv [Amiga] Vincent is credited as having lend technical support to the fantastic looking split-screen Tennis Cup. This was a time when the marketing people were deciding everything and the game content was not much of a problem [in their eyes]. That can be good when you work with skilled and nice people, and quite often it was the case. But it can be a nightmare when junior people have too much power and make stupid decisions that impact both the team's motivation and the product quality. » [PlayStation] Vince nt we Lost Children during Carole Faget Producer on The City of 'arole Faure's maternity leave. Even so, during the Noughties, French companies really grew in stature and games flourished. What did you do after leaving Infogrames in 2001? | took a holiday for six months and then | went to work for Kalisto just before it closed. | tried to escape from the videogame industry and then | started to develop games for mobile phones. It's interesting that you moved into smartphone development in 2003. Had you predicted that it would become popular? It's difficult to compare the mobile games market before and after the iPhone/Android boom. Smartphones arrived in 2006-2007, and tablets arrived a bit later, so it was a niche market before 2006, and it only really became a complete industry when Apple and Google came in. But, as always, nobody had predicted that, the first iPhone developers took big risks: after all, there was no guarantee that they would have any return on their investment because the iPhone was a elitist phone that few people could afford. But, as always in this industry, taking a risk sometime pays off. Now, this is not a golden rule: some developers did invest on the Nokia N-Gage after all, but the videogame industry is like the Gold Rush, everybody is looking for the golden nugget, but you need to be both talented and lucky to find it. Are you still active in videogaming today? Yes. I'm now a teacher in several videogame and non-videogame schools and | am mainly teaching ») [PC] Vincent Baillet has continued to keep up with technology and he did some testing on Bombing Bastards. Y) [PlayStation] Tintin: Destination Adventure was based on five books involving the popular comic book character. project management, game design and videogame culture. I'm also a consultant dealing with project Management and organisation inside and outside the videogame industry. Most of the development studios waste a lot of money with delays and lack of organisation, so it's a good investment to spend some money on me. Until last November, I'd been Atlangames' vice president. Atlangames is the cluster of video game companies in the west of France and my role was to develop this industry in our region. I'm also working on a small videogame which is great because it helps me to understand what it takes and means to be a videogame developer nowadays. | need to keep in touch with the reality of development in order to avoid becoming an obsolete consultant. Are there are any French developers that you particularly admire? l admire Eric Chahi for many reasons: he's a good programmer, a good artist, a good game designer, he is creative as nobody else is, and he is also a very nice and friendly guy. As a programmer, | also had to reverse engineer the code of other people, and learned a lot from what Remy Herbulot (Macadam Bumper, Crafton & Xunk...) has done. l've never met him, but he's a guy | highly respect. Of course: Shigeru Miyamoto, who is a living god. He's probably the first one to have fully understood what was a videogame. We all are very small compared to him. And all of my talented friends: Philippe and Olivier Richez, Philippe Tesson, Christophe Gomez, Michel Winogradoff, Vincent Noiret. And lots of others. When you look back at the last three decades, what would you say were the key moments in your career, and what would you have changed if you had the chance? Going to Infogrames was probably a mistake for me as well as for the people | used to work with. These talented people could probably have made a better use of their talents elsewhere. | was probably not the right person for that job, because | do not have the political skills required by a company such as that. But as we said earlier, this industry is full of risks, and you need to take some sometime. IN THE CHAIR: VINCENT BRILUET | YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS Vincent takes a peek into our mailbag ERIC: What machine was the lead for Turbo Cup, and how did you go about programming the other versions? The lead machine was the Atari 520ST, and it was probably the best version. | enjoyed working on it. The compiling time was long, so | had a lot of time to speak with friends, smoke cigarettes and have coffees with my colleagues. ERIC: Did you use any challenging coding features for Turbo Cup and what is your favourite version? | remember that the sound aspects were challenging: you had to make dynamic motor sounds (depending on the speed of the car), so we recorded a real Porsche 944. But it sounded flat and uninteresting, so | recorded the sound of a two-cylinder motorbike, that | duplicated in order to have four cylinders. The sound was perfect, but it's not the sound of a Porsche. MERMAN: Were there any unreleased or unfinished games you worked on? Yes, many. Sometimes you stop a project because it's crap, or because you're the only one who thinks it's brilliant, or because your company goes bankrupt, or because the machine you're working on is not a success anymore, or because marketing people don't like it, or because one stupid-but- powerful-guy cancels the project. MERMAN: Did you ever program for the Commodore 64? No, the C64 was not the huge success that the CPC was in France. CPC success here did hide a lot of others — ZX Spectrum, C64, BBC, TI99-4 etc. RETRO GAMER | 35 Alien Trilogy READ THE SODDING MANUAL RETROREVIVAL » SATURN » 1996 » PROBE ENTERTAINMENT When l visited Play Expo Manchester earlier in the year | scoured the many vendors looking for cheap Saturn games. | didn't really find any, but what | did pick up was Alien Trilogy for a very reasonable £12. l'd played it in the past on PlayStation back when it was first released, and | was eager to see how the Saturn version stacked up against it. As it turns out it's actually a very good port. It lacks a few graphical elements that make the PlayStation version look so nice, and the pistol is all but useless, but it's every bit as fun to play. However, | did notice a few difficulty spikes at certain points in the game. The first comes on level 1-9 when you have to deal with an increased Xenomorph threat and gouts of flame that shoot out from the floor. "Just take it easy," my cousin advised. "You're probably rushing it." After a few abortive attempts, | got past that particular level, took down a queen and finished most of the second set of stages. All was well until | hit 3-3 a festering level of misery with narrow walkways and pits of acid, which rapidly drains your health "This level is shit mate," | told my cousin. "If | fall into the acid | can't get back up the slopes and the nearby lifts operate too quick for me to get back on them so | just end up dyin: "You must be doing something wrong or forgetting something, he replied, "just read the manual "I'm not reading the sodding manual, it's a first-person shooter — this is just rubbish game design." After several more attempts over a couple of days | finally completed the game and (those few moments aside) deeply enjoyed it. Alien Trilogy actually holds up really well and while it mechanically shows its age there's still plenty of variety thanks to the decent mission structure that the team implemented Just under a week later, | got a call from my cousin as he'd been playing it on PlayStation to see if it was as difficult as | was making it out to be. "You do know there's a run button, right? So you can easily get on lifts and climb up the slopes?" Damn, | should have read the sodding manual. * He RORA T ED Samurai Shodown SLICING THROUGH TO THE CORE >> While you won't get to read about Bloodstained this month (it turned up a little too late), we do have some cool stuff, including the latest Samurai Shodown ame, a ontra compilation and the latest Sega Ages. release. Enjoy * PICHS OF THE MONTH er. zx DARRAN Contra Anniversary Collection Some might say the games are similar, butfor non-stop action you won't be disappointed. Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night The greatnewsis | have Bloodstainedon Switch. Sofarit's a good game, buta disappointing port. 98 | RETRO GAMER INFORMATION FORMAT REVIEWED: PS4 E » ALSO ON: XBOX ONE, SWITCH, PC RELEASED: OUT NOW (PS4/XBOX ONE), WINTER 2019 (PC/SWITCH) PRICE: £4999 PUBLISHER: ATHLON GAMES DEVELOPER: SNK PLAYERS: 1-2 E E E E > [PS4] This white-on-red filter accompanies a successful Lightning Blade attack ~) After the success of The King Of Fighters XIV, we had assumed more of its classic properties, but for some reason Samurai Shodown came as a bit of a surprise. We're not entirely sure why, mind you — the original games were popular in the Nineties and SNK is renowned for producing fighting games. Perhaps we were expecting Metal Slug instead. In any case, Samurai Shodown is a series reboot that the producers would like to crack the esports scene, an ambition that shows SNK is beginning to catch up to the modern market. We think there's every chance that it could take off, too. For a start, the game is more pleasing to the eye than SNK's last couple of that SNK would revive fighters. While the slightly low-budget look of The King Of Fighters XIV hasn't completely been eradicated, the team has chosen a stylised look that helps us overlook the odd simple background model here and there. Besides, quite often the game does dazzle — there is certainly no shortage of flashy effects to accompany moves, with the occasional bit of camera direction that recalls the zooming camera of the original Neo Geo game. There's plenty of blood too, which stains characters during fights and serves to highlight the violence, without taking centre stage in quite the same way it does in a Mortal Kombat game. Fans will be pleased to note that the background music is appropriately understated, following series traditions, with the use of classical Japanese instruments. SNK's recent games have been pretty generous with content — The King Of Fighters XIV had loads of characters and SNK Heroines offered a wealth of customisation options. Unfortunately, Samurai Shodown breaks that trend with a perfunctory and relatively unambitious set of features. A reasonable 16 characters make up the standard roster, with 13 returning favourites and three newcomers, but they're at least diverse both visually and in play style. The story mode - essentially an arcade mode with a few cutscenes sprinkled throughout — offers a traditionally infuriating final boss e WAITING FOR CHALLENGER > SNK's weapons-based fighting series was introduced in arcades at the height of the early Nineties fighting boom, and quickly captured the imagination of fans. The game was converted across a variety of formats and spawned many sequels, with Samurai Shodown V Special having the honour of being the final game released for the Neo Geo AES. The most recent game in the series was 2008's Samurai Shodown Sen, an unfortunate Xbox 360 game that continued a tradition of underwhelming attempts to add 3D gameplay to the series. This reboot follows SNK’s success in reintroducing the King Of Fighters series. Kvosumo $ ^ EARTHQUAKE to tackle, though we had far more trouble with some characters than others. Other single-player modes include regular time attack and survival outings, a gauntlet mode in which you fight every character one after another, and of course a standard versus mode. The most interesting single-player mode on offer is the Dojo mode, which offers the chance to take on Al ghost representations of real human players, essentially enabling asynchronous battling. Since we were playing an early copy, very little data was available for us to test this out and some of the online ghosts behaved quite oddly, but our own ghost seemed reasonably accurate. Multiplayer modes are limited to versus and online fights, and again we weren't able to test online thoroughly. So what's left to carry the game is the fighting itself, and this is where Samurai Shodown excels. SNK has EY 'RUTNG FOR CHALLENGER recognised the fighting model that made the previous games work and preserved it — for the uninitiated, this means major damage from few hits, so a single heavy attack can wipe out as much as a third of your opponent's life bar. The result is that Samurai Shodown is a fighting game about the fundamentals, where the manual dexterity needed to perform combos is far less important than knowing when and where to strike. If you leave yourself open with an unsafe attack you can expect to be punished heavily, especially as the game is rich with defensive tricks — Just Defense blocks return from previous SNK games, as do momentary dodges. On the offensive side of things, regular special moves are handled as you'd expect but the super moves are a bit different. The rage gauge functions as it does in previous games, filling when you receive damage and providing a x [PS4] Newcomer Darli Dagger hits a flashy special on Tam Tam. REVIEWS: SAMURAI SHO > [PS4] Some attacks, like Earthquake's command throw, reward you with cool camera angles w SOMETHING OLD ‘SAMURAI SHODOWN II (NEO-GEO) 3 m v IETHING NEW KOIHIME ENBU RYORAIRAI (PS4) » [PS4] Wu-Ruixiang can lay spiky traps for idiots like Earthquake to bumble into. temporary damage boost when full. While it’s full you can attempt a weapon- flipping attack, a hugely damaging move that disarms your opponent, but your window of opportunity is brief as the gauge will automatically drain after a while. You can sacrifice the rage gauge for the opportunity to land a ‘Lightning Blade’ attack — a single, enormously powerful attack that can wipe out well over half of your opponent's health in one go — but once you've attempted that, it's gone for the rest of the match. Super special moves are similarly limited to a single use per match. In a welcome move, inputs for these attacks have been standardised across characters, so there's no chance you'll forget them. The result is that Samurai Shodown's fights always possess the kind of tension that most fighting games can only offer at the end of a closely fought round. It's not a particularly fast-paced game, but rounds can be decided in under ten seconds thanks to the high attack damage, so every action takes on heightened significance — especially as you have so few chances to land your most significant moves. Dramatic comebacks are eminently possible, and you can never feel truly safe. These high- risk fights don't just convey the danger of sword fighting and spirit of the series, they set the game apart from just about every other fighter on the market. * In a nutshell If you're looking for a lot of single- player variety, Samurai Shodown might not be the game for you, but we love the emphasis on tactics and timing over execution. For fighting fans with a competitive streak, there's nothing else quite like it. » Score 80% RETRO GAMER | 99 DOUJN RETRO ROUNDUP WE LOOK AT THE LATEST RETRO-RELATED RELEASES * PICH OF THE MONTH Contra Anniversary Collection » System: Switch (tested), Xbox One, PS4, PC > Buy it from: Online > Buy it for: £15.99 The last compilation in Konami's anniversary series closes things off with a predictable bang, and we couldn't be happier. The Contra series became one of Konami's most popular franchises during the Eighties and Nineties, and the company recently surprised everyone at this year's E3 by announcing that a brand-new game, Contra: Rogue Corps, is on the way. Until that arrives we've got this compilation to enjoy, rife with plenty of satisfying shooting action. The presentation and overall quality of Contra Anniversary Collection is extremely similar to the recently released Castlevania Anniversary Collection. This makes perfect sense, as it has also been created by emulation masters, M2. You've got excellent emulation, plenty of different screen-tweaking options (including the wonderful Dot Matrix effect for the lone Game Boy game) to ensure the games look as authentic as possible, and a lovely digital book full of fantastic art. Another similarity with the Castlevania Anniversary Collection is that the quality of Timespinner » System: Switch (tested), PC, Linux, Mac, Vita, PS4 » Buy it from: Online > Buy it for: £1499 Developer Lunar Ray Games and publisher Chucklefish have teamed up to turn back time to the Nineties for this 2D adventure game that has more than a whiff of Super Metroid and Symphony Of The Night about it. It's not a rip-off, however: it's more of a homage. You play as Lunais in a time-hopping adventure (that reminded us a little of Chrono Trigger, now that we think about it), where you have to explore and fight enemies across multiple time periods. Instead of your typical weapons Lunais wields up to two orbs for her basic attacks, which you can mix and match to your own play style. It's a nice evolution on the formula, but it does tend to play it safe with genre trends. included games is very, very high. In fact, we'll suggest that it's an even better selection, as not a single poor game has been included. Sure you could argue that this means there's not a lot of variety to the games, but that’s true of the previous Castlevania compilation as well. Things kick off with the original arcade version of Contra and simply get better from there. There's the arcade sequel, Super Contra, the NES conversion of Contra and the enhanced NES port, Super C, the magnificent Contra Ill: The Alien Wars, Game Boy blaster Operation C and the superb (and greatly underrated) Contra: Hard Corps. Seeing that the overall release of Contra games is relatively low, it could be argued that M2 could have included all of them (particularly the excellent Contra Rebirth), but it's hard to argue with this selection of games and you certainly can't argue with the low price point. Like the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, this is a fitting tribute to the much-loved series. >> Score 87% UN EI Cadence Of Hyrule » System: Switch » Buy it from: Online » Buy it for: £22.49 What do you get when you cross a traditional 2D Zelda game with a rhythm- action roguelike? The answer, apparently, is ‘one of the best games in ages’. Cadence Of Hyrule takes the mechanics of Crypt Of The Necrodancer — where you need to move and attack in time with the beat — and fuses it with the structure of something like A Link To The Past, albeit with randomised key item locations, enemy placements, and even elements of map. layout. The remixes of classic Zelda tunes are amazing, especially the way they intensify when enemies are around and mellow when a screen is clear. Learning enemy movement patterns is crucial to success, and every combination of foes presents a unique obstacle. Endlessly replayable. » [Switch] All versions of Contra: Hard Corps are included. This is the PAL version, with robots instead of butch men. »[Switch] The NES version of Contrais tough, but at least you can use the Konami code for additional lives EM Ages: Wonder Boy onster Land » chk Switch » Buy it from: Online > Buy it for: £5.99 M2's Sega Ages range of Switch titles continues to impress and Wonder Boy In Monster Land is no different. It includes all the usual bells and whistles from an M2 release, so there are replays, online rankings, the usual excellent adjustment offerings and a fantastic arcade port at its core. M2 has also added numerous challenge modes to wring extra life out of it. Sphinx Challenge and Monster Castle Challenge require you to defeat certain bosses as quickly as possible, while the Fire Ball Challenge sees you trying to score as many points as possible. They're fun additions and round off another essential entry in Sega's long-running series. >> Score 80% >> 100 | RETRO GAMER Score 92% > Score 74% INDUSTRIAL GRADE TEK Gustom Gaming Machines Built to Order Top Quality New Build Systems Top Quality Second User High Spec Gaming Systems We Buy Good Quality Pre-Owned Systems & Components mi E +A AMD RYZEN 5 24006 pru SAMING Ui -2 | —mw ! | ! 8GB 2400Mhz DDR4 RADEON VEGA Tl GRAPHICS m — Mic:4o GAMING UT-4 EE | AMD RYZEN 5 2600 CPU | 86B 3000Mhz DDR4 | NVIDIA GTX 1660 86B GRAPHICS 250 SSD Hard Drive I TTB SATA Hard Drive 500W 80+ POWER SUPPLY I Windows 10 Home Edition Tempered Glass Side Panel | AMD RYZEN 3 22006 | 86B 2400Mhz DDR4 RADEON VEGA 8 GRAPHICS i 5008B SATA Hard Drive | 400W POWER SUPPLY Windows 10 Home Edition < e b = GAMING U1-3 o. AMD RYZEN 5 1600 CPU 8GB 3000Mhz DDR4 RADEON RX-570 GRAPHICS 250 SSD Hard Drive 500GB SATA Hard Drive 500W 80+ POWER SUPPLY Windows 10 Home Edition RGB Tempered Glass Panel INTEL CORE i5 9600k CPU \ 16GB 3000Mhz DDR4 NVIDIA RTX 2070 88B GRAPHICS | 250 SSD Hard Drive TTB SATA Hard Drive 500W 80+ POWER SUPPLY Windows 10 Home Edition AGB Tempered Glass Panel Lem M — LS “< - T ^s 9i; K. N af 01473 879938 www.igtek.co.uk sales @igtek.co.uk VENTURE - QUT f 2: RAPID DEVELOPMENTS April saw the 44th instalment of Ludum Dare, a game development competition which takes place over a couple of days with each iteration having a theme. This time the entrants had to work with ‘your life is currency’ and there were over 2,500 entries submitted. That's far too many to cover in detail, but a few stood out to us for one reason or another, and this time they were all for classic systems. Alien Easter Cat is a combination of shoot-'em-up and avoiding game where the titular feline can trade in some of its lives for credits that in turn pay for shields and bullets. It's very simple and more than a little clunky, but an interesting concept. Another 8-bit entry is The Stranger, a flip-screen platformer for the NES where the 'hero' is a scoundrel who has just robbed a stage coach before picking the wrong town to lie low in. Along with critters in the surrounding wilderness, there are trigger-happy locals to worry about. One of the more unusual contributions is Venture Out: it runs on DOS - a download which bundles DOSBox to get the game running on modern machines is available — and was originally intended by its developer to be a cross between Zelda-style games and Breakout, although that scheme was hampered by the competition deadline so it now leans heavily towards the latter. All of the entries can be found at Kikstart.me.uk/ludum-dare-44. Crownlandis an Atari 8-bit platformer released over a decade ago during the annual ABBUC development competition and a popular game for fans of the machine, but soon they won't be the only 8-bit platform enjoying this colourful game because a conversion to the Amstrad CPC is under way. There's some discussion at the CPCWiki forums over at Kikstart.me.uk/ crownland-cpc which includes video footage of the scrolling background and we're looking forward to seeing how this one turns out. To finish off, an Atari 8-bit developer called Gonzo has been experimenting with the idea of converting The Predator to his platform of choice. We're not sure if what he's released so far is actually a workable method to produce the game on the Atari — there have been tech demos for many 8-bit systems over the years which look similarly promising without panning out — but there's some Polish discussion at Kikstart.me.uk/ predator-prv-a8 about that. sort of. » [Atari 8-bit] There's no sign of The Predator yet, but perhaps he's invisible? e aee > [NES] The Stran Wild West. ger takes on the perils ofthe NEW GAMES NEEDED If you have a homebrew project you would like to see featured then please contact us at: retrogamer@futurenet.com LOTS OF BERKS Programmer Jon Williams has been extremely busy of late — not creating Star Wars music, that's John Williams you're thinking about. After releasing Berks 4 on the Atari 8-bits, the developer decided to sit down and port it to the platform where the series originated. It won't fit into a stock Commodore 16 - 64K was required on the Atari version — but anyone with an expanded machine ora Plus/4 can play it. The results are extremely colourful and, as with the Atari version, fans of Robotron-style shooting action will have a blast. Take a look behind Kikstart.me.uk/berks-4-264 for the download. NO BATTERED FISH Hollywood would have us believe that being asecret agent is glamorous, but the one in Chip Rescue on the Spectrum isn't driving a flashy car or even drinking a Martíni. Instead he's searching a dingy building for parts of a microchip that, if it falls into the wrong hands, would spell disaster. Platform games are fairly common on the Spectrum, but Chip Rescue by Alessandro Grussu is unusual since it was developed without existing tools or libraries. Why not give it a try? The download can be discovered at Kikstart.me.uk/chip-rescue-spec. Sneak over that way for more information. [Plus/4] Trying to safely get out ofthe corner after picking up. a key. [2X Spectrum] Even ifthe sneaky behaviour didn't say, ‘I'ma spy’ that hatwould We speak to Stephan Katteneder, whose games, Total Refill and The Coffee Break Shootout, have both just been released as a double pack by Commodore 64 publisher Psytronik Where did the idea for The Coffee Break Shootout come from? In 1999 there was a free-to-play game called Moorhuhn which was used by Johnny Walker as an advertising gimmick and a productivity killer in offices at the time. | loved it, and when | was looking for a game idea for the Commodore 64, | wanted to pay homage to it. The Coffee Break Shootout uses a simpler approach without the scrolling background and only one layer of birds, but otherwise it has Moorhuhn's fingerprints all over it. And how about Total Refill, what was the original inspiration for that? | wish | could say it was Tapper, but | have to admit that | didn't know of Tapper before Kenz labelled Total Refillas ' Tapper- esque’. The inspiration was areal bar, with the real Chris running it. He was an awesome bartender, always on top of things, a multitasking genius in his job. One evening | thought, [C64] Developer Stephan Katteneder really has the C64 in his crosshair. "What an unforgiving job that is, there is constant pressure." Add to that a little bit of Mario's Cement Factory and that's Total Refill. How long did both games take to develop and who was involved? That's hard to answer; | didn't keep track of that. | had no clue how a game is made, so | just started hacking away on my old laptop. Big mistake, by the way: a rough estimation is 200 hours for TCBS and about twice as much for TR, testing not included. | got lost too much in detail | guess. Saul Cross delivered sound and music at an intimidating speed once he got on board, then Trevor Storey and Kenz of publisher Psytronik turned the whole thing into a product. TCBS supports mouse input, was that difficult to implement? | had no idea how they worked, but felt that a shooting game like TCBS needed mouse support. After some research and experimentation, | found an example for a C64 mouse driver online. Some modifications of that (buggy) example code later, | finally got it to work but could not limit the crosshair at the left side of the screen. Everything else worked BEER-PUMP POWER: Q 4 EE E» m just fine and it took me a while to find out what caused the overflow and a solution, but I bet there is a more elegant way of doing it. How has the C64 gaming community responded ? RGNs showcase video has only thumbs up so far, this is a friendly community. No one is just waiting to get a chance to bash a new developer. | guess most retro gamers know how much work it is to get something done in assembly language on an old system. Finally, have you got any future plans our readers might be interested in? There is a new game evolving right now, and all the things | learned during the making of my first two will go into it. With a full-time job, it's hard to estimate when it will be ready. | don't like the idea of putting videos of development stages online so there will be nothing to see before | am done with it. Atari ST-owning shoot-em-up fans looking for something new in 1990 might have stumbled across Exodus, a multidirectionally scrolling blaster which was distributed by PD purveyor Budgie UK. The gameplay sees the player's spaceship tasked with destroying all of the enemies within each stage before warping on to the next. All of the required targets for the current stage are shown on a scanner in the status area — similar to the coin-op shooter Bosconian — although some of them are mobile and need to be chased down while simultaneously dealing with the airborne nasties, weaving between bullets and occasionally taking out homing missiles. Pilots with quick reactions and itchy trigger fingers will want to blast off to give these enemies a serious kicking. Fly your ship to Kikstart.me.uk/exodus-st. » [Atari ST] If in doubt, it's a good idea to justrun away. s [Atari ST] Taking down a cluster of rail-based enemies while avoiding bullets. 04 | RETROGRTER , — ' H 4 — uryan —— IL. eye ee se ee oe oe ISX » PRICE: FREE DOWNLO, ————— qnam nmr ynm 35 (CARTRIDGE) Sir Bernard is an old knight who was [MSX] Most of the stage is done, so time to fill the last edges. [MSX] A very pretty-looking, shiny bonus to collect on the way out. cursed by an evil witch, but rather than developing a taste for human blood or having to obsessively watch daytime television — it's hard to know would be more distressing — he instead has problems with sleeping and needs to take a long walk before being able to nod off. A quick saunter before bed doesn't sound particularly bad, but having to do so every night regardless of the weather is starting to get to the poor guy, so his friend the Sorceress does a little research and finds a potential loophole: if Bernard roams all eighty rooms of Scarkeep Castle there's a possibility that this evil insomnia curse will be broken. Clearing each room of the castle involves walking over all of the floor tiles, changing their colour in the process to show which have been visited and releasing a key which can then be used to unlock the door to the next area. Making that task more difficult are nightmarish creatures which roam the castle's rooms. To begin with there are just simple old undead creatures that you have to avoid, and they're not particularly bright. Nastier and more persistent enemies appear over time, however, including predatory werewolves and vampires or wizards who can undo Bernard's progress. There's a 60-second timer ticking down to worry about, but letting it expire will only lose the player a life and there's a couple of bonus items which can appear during play which either pause or reset the clock. The lives counter can also be topped up by scoring 10,000 points and another useful item is the shield which allows our hero to take two hits from patrolling enemies before death rather than just one. Night Knight has cute graphics with lots of colour that are accompanied by a jolly in-game soundtrack; it also puts up a solid challenge with some devious level designs and sneaky enemies but, while 80 stages might seem a little overwhelming, each has a password available from the pause menu for those wanting to take a shortc » Sco Don’t forget to follow us online for all the latest retro updates RetroGamerUK FUZ @RetroGamer_Mag retrogamer@futurenet.com SCOTBOT PLATFORM: PICO-8 DEVELOPER: JUSIV » PRICE: FREE DOWNLOAD: KIKSTART.ME.UK/FUZ-PICO8 PLATFORM: ZX SPECTRUM. DEVELOPER: DOUGIE MCG » PRICE: NAME YOUR PRICE DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD: KIKSTART.ME.UK/SCOTBOT-SPEC [PICO-8] Some day we could just walk past a Fez? Never going to happen. When the warp gate he’s just materialised through is damaged, a fez-wearing creature called Gomez finds himself stranded. The world that he now inhabits is weird in that while Gomez exists in two dimensions, everything can be rotated around him, allowing otherwise inaccessible parts of the map to be reached. The first task is to gather eight cube bits and, while seven of them are easily picked up, lateral thinking and some observational skills are necessary to get the eighth. Finishing this task leads to the repair of the warp gate but does Gomez really want to just leave? This is a demade love letter to Fez which replicates the platform-based action and visual style. It also dishes out puzzles with some being more obvious than others and, while it might be petite, there's plenty to see and do for gamers who like a mental challenge alongside their platforming action. >> T (PICO-8] So here's something unapaqtaq a Meals floating cub cube Score 87% Oe Per ScOtbOt attacks his mission ona screen-by-screen basis, avoiding patrolling nasties while locating the key which unlocks the exit and any items which might be needed to defeat the more fearsome creatures. The mechanical wonder comes with nine lives, but losing one undoes most of its progress, and Nessie's minions have every intention of putting up a fight. Expect a difficult and sometimes frustrating ride. The Loch Ness Monster has had enough of humans ruining the loch's atmosphere with their cameras, and has decided to go on the offensive. That means calling on all of the other Scottish beasties, including the Selkie and Kelpie, to drive the Scots from their homeland. This doesn't sit well with the people of Scotland, so the ScOtbOt is created and tasked with taking out these threats. >> The members of Elysium are fans of Ocean's The Great Escape for the C64 but felt that it ran too slowly. To improve it they dismantled the code, profiled it to see where the busiest parts were and used some free memory for optimisations. Would-be escapees can see if they dig this updated take and its extra features by tunnelling their way over to Kikstart.me.uk/ great-escape-c64. Staying with the C64, Michael Archer was responsible for several games during the platform's commercial lifespan, including Nemesis The Warlock, Atomic Robokid and Alien 3. He recently opened up a GitHub account and uploaded all of the source code he'd retained, along with some notes. It's neat glimpse into game dev from that era, find out more at Kikstart.me.uk/m-archer-source-c64. Score 72% [ZX Spectrum] The Kelpie has no vulnerabilities, so must be manoeuvred around. BIOJET PLATFORM: AMIGA » DEVELOPER: ROY SCHNEIDER » DOWNLOAD: KIKSTART.ME.UK/BIOJET-AMIGA » PRICE: FREE There's nothing that'll put a downer on your day like doing a little exploring of the underground tunnels on an unnamed world and getting separated from your spacecraft. That's pretty much where the star of BioJet finds himself and, now that he out, the automated Security system has started up. Each area is large and scrolls around the player as they move, so some care has to be taken in order to avoid getting lost. Along with patrolling enemies and moving hazards, there are doors which require a key to open and switches that must be pushed to clear previously closed routes. Most players will find BioJeta bit too easy after they've acclimatised to the controls and collision detection, which is a shame because exploring the levels and solving puzzles is fun while it lasts but there isn't much replay value afterwards apart from aiming for a high score. » Score 70% 99931 ! by Roy Schneider M.Taupitz & J.Heinemani [Amiga] Press the large magic button to clear away some of the boulders. RETRO GAMER | 105 QUICK GUIDES TO HELP YOU GET THE BEST FROM YOUR GAMES DIFFICULTY @0000 VERY LOW FORMAT » PC ENGINE HANDY HINTS » HuCard games are region- locked. You'll need an import adaptor to run Japanese games on American Turbografx systems, and both an import adapter and a mod are required to run American games on Japanese PC Engines. » CD-ROM games have no region protection, so as long as you have an appropriate system card of any region, the game will run. However, the system cards themselves are region-locked just like HuCard games. EQUIPMENT NEEDED » Step-down converter for import consoles » NTSC-capable television BYTHE NUMBERS Which formats carry the most games? » HuCard: 280 » Supergrafx HuCard: 5 > CD-ROM2: 120 » Super CD-ROM2: 255 » Arcade CD-ROM2: |2 > LD-ROM2: |) os | RETRO GAMER PLAY EVERY PC ENGINE GAME NEC's diminutive console is a bit of a nightmare to buy for, as it has three CD-ROM formats, two different card formats and region issues to contend with. Alternatively, you could just wait for the PC Engine Mini... out of the box, as they include a built-in version of Super System Card 3.0. Japanese HuCard games, CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2 games all work. For Arcade CD-ROM2 games, you'll need an Arcade Card Duo. With a Games Express CD Card, you can also run some dodgy unlicensed adult gambling games. 02 The PC Engine Duo and Duo-R run most games for the system — with some work. It'll play every Japanese HuCard game by default, and is the only machine to support the Supergrafx titles. To play CD games, you'll need either the Super CD-ROM2 unit or the CD-ROM? unit with an IFU-30 interface and an RAU-30 adaptor, plus appropriate system cards. ( | The Supergrafx supports almost all licensed games do the PAL units that found their way to market. The only CD unit that fits the system is the American Turbografx CD add-on, which can run CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2 games. If you're in a pinch, Japanese system cards will work through an import adapter. 04 US Turbografx-16 units run NA HuCard games, as CoreGrafx || all run HuCards. To run CD games, you can grab the Super CD-ROM2 unit that plays CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2 games, so you'd only need an Arcade Card Duo or Game Express CD card for those games that require them. If you choose the CD- ROM2 and IFU-30 solution you'll need a system card. 03 The PC Engine, PC Engine LT, CoreGrafx and What on earth is a System Card and do | need one? The System Card 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 will only play CD-ROM2 games. If you're desperate to play the CD-ROM version of Altered Beast, you'll need System Card 1.0 as that's the only one it works with. So what's so special about the Super System Card 3.0, then? This will run CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2 games, which covers most of the PC Engine CD library. The Super CD-ROM2, PC Engine Duo, PC Engine Duo-R and TurboDuo all have this built in. | see some PC Engine games require an Arcade Card? Do enough games use it so make it a worthwhile thing for me to buy? Although only nine games require this, it does enhance others. CD-ROM? and Turbografx CD units require Arcade Card Duo; Super CD-ROM2, PC Engine Duo, PC Engine Duo-R and TurboDuo use Arcade Card Pro. If you're in a pinch, Japanese system cards will work through an import adapter If money is no object, a Pioneer LaserActive with the PAC-N10 module will play HuCards, CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2 games by default (this shows the MD variant). If you add an Arcade Card Duo or Games Express CD Card, it'll run those games too. It also runs the 11 LaserDisc-based LD-ROM2 games, which aren't available elsewhere. YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED. . . A how-to guide on how to buy a PC Engine would be great. | know you did an in- depth feature on the console a few months ago, but | still feel a little in the dark on the subtle differences in its product line! John Paul Sutherland You are in luck, as these very pages will tell you the upgrade paths for each model. Other than that, the main knowledge you need concerns video. Most models will output composite video at 60Hz, which will work fine on the majority of television sets. The original white PC Engine and the North American Turbografx-16 will only output RF video, and it won't work on most UK televisions. However, RGB SCART mods are available, and any system with an expansion port to connect to CD-ROM hardware will also support video output add-ons like the Grafxbooster and Engine Block AV. Is Galaga pronounced ‘gah- lay-gah’ or ‘gah-la-gah’? Management Writes We can answer this question by looking at the original Japanese name of the game, as the language is phonetically consistent in a way that English isn't. The name is rendered +575 (‘Gyaraga’) in Japanese. The key bit to pay attention to is the ‘ra’ part which points towards the latter of your choices, also the Japanese ‘ra’ sounds like something in between an English ‘ra’ and ‘la’. If it were ‘gah-lay- gah’ you would expect to see L1('rei’), as found in the likes of RayStorm (U-4Abt—A) and Professor Layton (Lí E3532). How to make games great again? No0B GamerX This is unnecessary because, yes, games were great and they still are great. The games you used to love haven't changed at all, and excellent new games are released every year. Now, that does come with a caveat - there's plenty of great stuff coming out for consoles you can buy brand new, and very little for the Atari Lynx (long-term Lynx owners may observe that this has been true for about 30 years). Likewise, open world action adventure games are everywhere you look right now, and few developers are making single-screen platform games. So while gaming is great today, it may not be a great time for the games you like to play. If that's the case, we'd advise you to learn to code, or wait for the games you like to come back in style. RETRO GAMER | 107 spa hua N | 8 — : | was lucky to find a BEEP refurbed System on import and have cuddled it ever since.” k “A Retro Man Cave Discord member named DeChief sent a link to the system on Yahoo Japan Auctions. | looked for a few seconds then knew! had to have it.” “This is something | had to have and purchased as a custom build with a carbon fibre wrap, all the controller inputs and a lightgun J os | RETRO GAMER NAME: Atari ST ESTIMATED VALUE: “| honestly have no idea, thousands | would have thought. | buy out of love so | tend to push the numbers out of my mind.” TWITTEI @STompyRR JOE his month's collector is a home computer fan with a penchant for exotic imports. Gary Pinkett's first love was the ZX Spectrum +2 and he moved on to an Atari ST, but he ultimately got rid of all of it during his first serious relationship. Still, it wasn't possible to keep him away for good "| started collecting again between three and four years ago," he explains. "During a visit to my regular comic shop in town | was asked if | wanted to buy a load of Atari ST and Amiga games, to which | instantly said yes. The nostalgia bug had bit me before | even realised.” He soon set his first collecting goal, which he's tantalisingly close to achieving. “Soon after, | decided to try i and get all the ZX Spectrum Codemasters budget games as | figured it would be easily achievable. Wrong! | still have one left, DJ Puff, which | don't seem to be able to find for love nor money!” Gary's collecting habit soon moved beyond nostalgia, as he began to explore the less-documented world of Japanese computers. "| was talking to my good friend Andrew Dalton on The Retro Man Cave's discord channel where we were discussing Cinemaware games. | happened to recall The King Of Chicago with fond memories which made me randomly query to myself, ‘What other systems did this come out for?’ Looking through the list | saw the Sharp X68000 which I had never heard of and after some Googling | knew | had to have one.” Part of the appeal is the gorgeous look of the games. “l| was lucky enough to be given two boxed games with it two which were two of the most shelf-worthy boxes | had cast eyes upon. | need more, | wanted more... | started buying up lots from Yahoo! Japan to amass my collection. Everything Japanese is so much more exotic in my humble opinion.” attached to the back.” KEEPER OF THE EXOTIC According to Gary, collecting for Japanese computer systems is not too hard but it is expensive (he admits to the charge of "more money than sense"). As a result, he's had to find ways to optimise his spending. "| would recommend buying some lots or a load of games from Yahoo! Auctions Japan using Buyee or a similar proxy service, and letting them build up over a month before paying about £10 for protective packaging (this is a must!) and sending them on the slow boat where shipping costs are the cheapest (I've waited three months for delivery) to maximise the gain on your spend.” Of course, practical realities sometimes kick in and one particular issue has caused Gary to switch his retro collecting focus for the time being. "| don't actually have any boxed FM Towns games, | would love to start collecting them too, but for the moment l'm pretty much out of space, and | would like to build up my PlayStation and Saturn collection a bit right now," he tells us. But with the switch towards consoles comes the thrill of a new hunt — something that we can all relate to. “I have been ===== “An exotic never knew existed | RR at then dreamed about. My Pro has been recapped, has a UK PSU fitted and boasts 6MB of RAM.” BARGAIN HUNT There are plenty of options if you want to start playing Nintendo's classic handheld line. The original model Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket will normally set you back or more, with considerable premiums for boxed systems and certain hardware colours - for example, the original grey system is more commonly -— . The Japan-only Game Boy Light will cost you [ETT considerably more, around for a loose system. c UN £ WE lrem's arcade action game is either very cheap or rather pricey depending fea on your format, with no middle ground. The home computer conversions by Activision can typically be had for under boxed, but the excellent PC Engine version starts at for the US version, and prices of or more are common for the Japanese release. unen viv TETAN Hudson's nifty platform game sits at the more reasonable end X of the SNES price range, with unboxed copies going for ' regardless of which region you want. We've seen boxed copies go for a wider range of — as always with games in cardboard boxes, the price you'll pay can vary massively depending on condition. If you fancy taking on the Xenomorphs of this tie-in, there are some reasonable options. The PC release is the most expensive of the bunch at around , and the PlayStation is the cheapest at . The Saturn version is a little pricier, ranging from with the manual. FINA We weren't prepared to see a listing where F: ASTI someone bought both of these games for — . Both were regular PAL copies, with FFVII L Playstation: | being the Platinum version and FFVIII having a crack on the front of the case, and neither was sealed. dragging my better half, Rachel, around to various retro gaming shops nearby picking up those games where the prices don't seem to be absolutely crazy money yet. Hopefully this will continue for a few more months until | have got all the ones that are causing an itch!" CLUB RETRO Feedback from students ranges from “we should do this more often” to “it's exactly what | needed to get my mind off all the assignments”. | thought | would share this success story, which is yet more evidence that retro games are fun and inclusive, bridge age barriers and bring people from different backgrounds together. Cheers, Dear Retro Gamer, | am a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University Of Wolverhampton, where | have created a retro gaming club. The aim is for students to enjoy themselves, relax and mingle with each other... after all, what better ice-breaker than a four-player game of GoldenEye? The club was built on almost zero budget, scavenging screens from around the building, and relying on loans and donations of games and consoles from students and colleagues (okay, on the website, but we do love the idea of it. Maybe someone could recreate the game for the Homebrew section? to be included in the final ten games. Please, please, please can you run an Ultimate Guide on the game? It's the only thing that will now cheer me up. What a brilliant and heartwarming story, Alix. This Dear Retro Gamer, mostly me). | insist on providing passion and dedication to retro Regards, In Load 194 you asked what readers an authentic experience, so real gaming needs to be rewarded. would like to see on the next cover hardware only! We met four Send us your address and we'll CD. As someone who only owned times this academic year, played throw some books your way. You're not the only one upset, a Spectrum back in the day | feel | on ten classic consoles, had very Hopefully that should give Greg. Darran was also hoping missed most of the reference points for the two CDs of reworked C64 music. While it was pleasant enough, I've not been tempted to play either disc again. I've heard amazing rock and metal covers on YouTube of classic chiptune tracks where most readers will know the original. I'm talking about Aki that Technosoft's exceptional port would make the cut, but it clearly wasn't to be. Hopefully it will pop up on the new PC Engine Mini. loud four-player tournaments with prizes provided by local sponsors. everyone something to read between games. Hi all at Retro Gamer, "3 NINTENDO" == 10 | RETRO GAMER Dear Retro Gamer, l've just seen the news about the Mega Drive Mini and | couldn't be more upset. It's great to see 42 games are being included, but where's Devil Crash MD? It's an amazing game and it seems ridiculous that it hasn't been included. | lost hours to it, and | was hoping against hope that it was going | am loving the magazine. | used to really enjoy the horse racing game Derby Day on ZX Spectrum. This was a game the whole family could enjoy at Christmas, and even my grandfather enjoyed (or seemed to pretend, at least) putting a virtual fiver on a Spectrum- generated horse such as Red Rum 48K, while enjoying a small whisky. Since all of our skills as gamers are a bit weaker now, | implore some young whippersnapper programmer to develop a 'Derby Day Flash game. This could be put on the Retro Gamer website and would use original ZX Spectrum graphics, and the original Spectrum ‘thud-thud’ horse hoof sounds. The only prize is position in leaderboard (wins versus losses), which would allow the retro gaming community to all have a go. How about it? Thanks for the idea Andrew. We're not sure how well it would work Járvinen's Golden Axe, Sebdoom’s epic Streets Of Rage; and there are dozens by Ferd K alone; from Double Dragon to Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. Many of these tracks are not available to buy, and MP3 rips sound tinny. So how about something like this for the next CD? Thanks for the suggestion Robin. We're always looking for new CD ideas, but licensing can be a big problem. You've given us some Don't forget to follow us online for all the latest retro updates RetroGamerUK @RetroGamer_Mag Retro Gamer Magazine @RetroGamerMag SET hee CONTACT US food for thought, and you're right that there's some fantastic music being showcased on YouTube. Dear Retro Gamer, One of my favourite games of all time is a SNES classic by LucasArts called Zombies Ate My Neighbours. | completed it on its original release (thanks to the password system) and regularly return to it today. Sadly, | don't believe you have covered the game in any way, so I'd really appreciate it if you could offer some behind-the-scenes insight into it. It really does deserve the coverage. Yours, Funnily enough, Darran is looking to add Zombies to his own SNES collection and he's actually been looking at getting a big feature into the magazine (perhaps an Ultimate Guide). In the meantime you've hopefully enjoyed last issue's selection of Classic Moments. Dear Retro Gamer guys, | am a massive fan of your magazine and have just started my subscription. | just have one tiny issue, though. | know. Your say Graham Plowman Air Zonk A cartoony visual feast anda great shoot-em-up to boot. Every month, Retro Gamer asks a question on social media and prints the best replies. This month we wanted to know... but think that's less likely. And Bomberman of course, that you use common abbreviations for some types of games and | know what they are, but there are many | don't understand and there is nothing worse than reading a great article and an abbreviation is chucked in and you have no idea what it means. It has proved an annoyance and | wonder if there is anything you can do such as tell us in brackets after its used the first time? Thanks very much and keep up the amazing work Yours Sincerely, Thanks for writing in, Kevin. Keeping the language accessible is something we typically strive to do, but this has clearly slipped through the net. Leave it with us. “Magical Christmas Land” Konami's surprise PC Engine Mini (or Core Grafx) announcementis all we've been talking about this issue. Darran is waiting for a Devil Crash announcement, Drew wants to know just how small it actually is, while Nick keeps repeating “my magical Christmas Land prediction has come true” over and over again. It's hard, and really shows how the PC Engine was able to push so many sprites around the screen With ease. Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood, seeing as you can no longer purchase it from the Wi Shop Channel Drvnken Master Devil Crash, one of the best pinball games outside the Amiga in the Nineties! Power Drift Would love to see Chase HQ and Out Runas well, BennyTheGreek Allof the timed caravan shooters, Some of the best shooters on any console. Ys and Ys IL Never played either. Always wanted to. Galaga 88 for me, it looked arcade perfect and! loved playing itin the arcade. Bomberman 94 One of my favourite games of all time. Ifyou don't smile when playing it, then youare soulless. Rob Taylor Can somebody please finally translate the Cyber City Oedo 808 adventure and plonk it on there? Andrea Porta Winds Of Thunder, the first time | read about killer application. Not to mention the soundtrack, my god my ears are still bleeding! Bomberman 93, Blazing Lasers and lle a happy camper. BennyTheGreek Terra Cresta the two-min version -played that for a few hours last night- and as its being sorted out by Konami, | would hope its a given that Parodius Dawill be there. Future PLC Richmond House, 33 Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH2 6EZ Editor Darran ‘Old Boy’ Jones darranjones@futurenetcom 01202 586237 Art Editor Andy ‘New Boy’ Salter Group Senior Art Editor Woz ‘Bath Boy' Brown Production Editor Drew ‘Cool Boy’ Sleep Senior Staff Writer Nick ‘Handsome Boy’ Thorpe Photographer Phil ‘Young Boy! 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Contact the International department to discuss partnership opportunities International Licensing Director Matt Ellis mattellis@futurenet.com Email enquiries contact@myfavouritemagazines.co.uk UK orderline & enquiries 0344 848 2852 Overseas order line and enquiries +44 (0) 344 848 2852 Online orders & enquiries www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk Magazines Marketing Director Sharon Todd ulation Head of Newstrade Tim Mathers Production Head of Production Mark Constance Production Project Manager Clare Scott Advertising Production Manager Joanne Crosby Digital Editions Controller Jason Hudson Production Controller Vivienne Calvert Management Chief Content Officer Aaron Asadi Commercial Finance Director Dan Jotcham Brand Director, Games Matthew Pierce Editorial Director, Games Tony Mott Head of Art & Design Rodney Dive Group Senior Art Editor, Games Warren Brown William Gibbons & Sons Ltd, 26 Planetary Road, Willenhall, WIS 3XT Distribu ted by Marketforce, 5 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London, E14 SHU www.marketforce.co.uk Tel: 0203 787 9060 ISSN 1742-3155 facturing paper mill holds full FSC (Fon ification and accreditation nts © 2019 Future ublished under licence. 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After these issues, standard subscription pricing will apply — please see online for details. Biggest savings are compared with overseas RRP. You can write to us or call us to cancel your subscription within 14 days of purchase. Payment is non-refundable after the 14 day cancellation period unless exceptional circumstances apply. Your statutory rights are not affected, Prices correct at point of print and subject to change. Full details of the Direct Debit guarantee are available upon request. UK calls will cost the same as other standard fixed line numbers (starting 01 or 02) or are included as part of any inclusive or free minutes allowances (if offered by your phone tariff). For full terms and conditions please visit: bit.ly/magtandc. Offer ends 3Ist August 2019. next LL ON SALE 8. AUGUST e09 PF * & + Jedi Master Peter Ward is your ultimate guide to ‘Super Star Wars AND MUCH MORE, INCLUDING... Gemini Wing, Rainbow Islands, PS2 Simple 2000 Series, The History Of The Sims, Super Robin Hood, Morpheus, Donkey Kong 2, Castlevania: Order Of Ecclesia, Superhero, The Legacy Of Shenmue and much more » As the Rebel Alliance's only hope of victory, it falls to our hero to save the day. On the advice of the spirit of his deceased master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, he disables his targeting computer and uses the Force to guide him. » Oh look, here's Dark Helmet, right on cue. Predictably he's quite perturbed, and vows that the next time you meet, he'll defeat you. With that grave warning he disappears, and you have to assume that he'll be upgrading Spaceball 1 and spending some time perfecting his mastery of the Schwartz. » A few issues ago, we captioned a screenshot of Star Trek: Bridge Commander and jokingly called the Enterprise the Millennium Falcon. Some were concerned that this was a genuine mistake, so we've put together something that should prove our thorough knowledge of Star Wars and re-establish our credibility with the sci-fi hardcore. So without further ado, let’s skip to the end... » Having successfully deposited a photon torpedo in the exhaust port of the Borg Cube, the mission is complete and the galaxy is saved. The Enterprise flies away, allowing its crew to live long and prosper. (Well, probably not the redshirts.) » And just so we don't miss it, here's the explosion to prove that everything definitely did go to plan, and we wont get any sort of sequel-enabling shenanigans. Man, the Cylons are going to be massively unhappy about this. » Back on Gallifrey, a massive victory presentation is arranged by the Rylan Star League. Shinji Ikari, the brave captain who defeated the enemy Gundam units and ended the Dilgar War, receives the Ellen Ripley award for bravery. (Are we sure this is right? Drew, please fact-check this rigorously — Ed.) f re z ECIHI [Ae [ [e [3 S Trustpilot € = where gamers collect > www.chilloutgames.co.uk/Sell a x! TLT az CE 6-3 (3 (a Vr wa Wonder Doy: £14.19. £4 8.07” X » » -WITH FREE COURIER AND FAST PAYMENT. Prices valid 8/7/19 and subject to change daily. Prices are for PayPal (Shop Credit add 12% more). Chillout Games and retro-games.co.uk are trading names of Chillout Games Ltd. Full terms & conditions can be found at at www.chilloutgames.co.uk Europe’s Largest Freeplay Arcade Over 500 original arcade machines Ready to play across two amazing venues Arcade Machines, Pinball, Classic Computers & Consoles V.R. Stations, PC Gaming, E-Sports & Japanese Imports Party bookings & Corporate hire available New Léeds Venue Now Open Please check website for opening times and prices Ela Mill, Cork Street, Bury, Gtr. Manchester. BL9 7BW Unit 3, Abbey Retail Park;-Kirkstall, Leeds. L. S5 3RP No need to book! k= D] @ArcadeClubUK arcadeclub.co.ukk Pay card or cash THE MINI KONAMI COMPANION OVER THE PAGE... THE MINI 50 YEARS OF FUN I spent most of my formative years either growing up in my local arcades or delving into the world of import gaming thanks to my Mega Drive and Super Nintendo. As a result, my relationship with Konami games goes back decades. | have enjoyed early arcade classics such as Frogger, Amidar and Track & Field and embraced the company’s many, many shooters. Scramble, Gradius, Salamander, Thunder Cross ll, Xexex and Axelay all have special places in my heart, while | grew up on excellent Konami franchises such as Contra and Castlevania. The company, for me, personally was pretty much untouchable during the 16-bit and 32-bit eras of gaming and it's here that the developer arguably put out some of its strongest games. Hideo Kojima was becoming a rising talent in the company, the likes of Pro Evolution Soccer and Metal Gear Solid evolved spectacularly during this period, while new IP like Suikoden and Silent Hill captured the imagination of gamers the world over. It's rather pleasing, then, to be able to put together this delightful little tome of essential Konami games to celebrate the company’s recent 50th anniversary. It's an exhaustive collection of the team's favourite games and we'd argue that they're the first titles you should consider picking up if you're planning to explore Konami's heritage in a little more depth Enjoy the booklet! CONTENTS 04 METAL GEAR SOLID 06 THE SIMPSONS 07 SCRAMBLE 07 SUNSET RIDERS 08 SILENT SCOPE 08 SALAMANDER 08 GTI CLUB: RALLY COTE D'AZUR 09 SNATCHER 09 INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR SOCCER '98 09 BUCKY O'HARE 10 FROGGER 11 GRADIUS 12 PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 6 12 BISHI BASHI SPECIAL 12 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 13 KID DRACULA 13 ZONE OF THE ENDERS 14 CONTRA 14 TRACK & FIELD 15 ALIENS 15 AXELAY 15 CASTLEVANIA: LORDS OF SHADOW 16 PENGUIN ADVENTURE 17 SPACE MANBOW 17 METAL GEAR A, É Xizzzzrrrff : 18 YIE AR KUNG-FU i 19 TIMEPILOT $ 19 AMIDAR $ 20 CASTLEVANIA: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT £ 22 BEATMANIA IIDX Í 23 DANCING STAGE EUROMIX ; 24 PARODIUS Í 24 GRADIUS V Í 25 THE GOONIES į 25 SUIKODEN : 25 GREEN BERET 1 26 SILENTHILL2 27 SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES š 28 GYRUSS 28 ROCKET KNIGHT ADVENTURES $ 28 TWINBEE 13 CASTLEVANIA Ill: DRACULA'S CURSE : SPE TRE CEAR SOLID: PEACE WALKER : 29 CONTRA: HARD CORPS ; 29 THE LEGEND OF THE MYSTICAL NINJA $ 30 METAL GEAR ACID 2 i 30 BOKTAL THE SUN IS IN YOUR HAND i 31 CONTRA Ill: THE ALIEN WARS : 31 VANDAL HEARTS i 31 SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV eve RATION METAL GEAR SOLID £ It's been a long ti ng time since | h Such a good fight sd A WORLD DRIPPING WITH TENSION There's so much that can be said about Solid Snake's return to the gaming world after almost a decade on the sidelines. For a start, there's the quality of the game — itis polished to perfec detail is extraordinary, with the developers even remembering to show Snake's breath in the cold Alaskan air, while just about every gamer can identify the distinctive that you've been spo dialogue is eminently quotable, too, thanks to the memorable performances by David Hayter and the rest of the then there's the actual experience of playing the game. The stealth action mal sense — guards are attracted by sounds and lured / footprints, and you can take advantage of that. But what sets the game apart is a hallmark of Hideo Kojima's productions at Konami, which is the number of clever ideas from out of left field. The use of ketchup to escape a jail cell is one thing, but the way the game integrates its own physical packaging and the physical console itself into the game erience is quite another, as anybody who was spooked by Psycho Mantis' knowledge of their gaming history will tell you. The team set out to THE MINI HONAM! COMPANION EMPTY THE ARMOURY It's always best to avoid a fight in Metal Gear Solid, but when combat is the only option, these are the tools at Snake's disposal SOCOM IM The first weapon you I cere L 1 acquire is a basic handgun. SOCOM It has a 12-round capacity, and can be upgraded with a suppressor. GRENADE 8 Pull the pin, throw it 36746 far away and watch as GRENADE it explodes five seconds later. It's not subtle, but it's definitely effective. FA-MAS 21 mz Í ^. W This is a fully automatic assault rifle. It's loud, so FA-MAS you'll only want to use it when enemies are already on alert. C4 I This plastic explosive can be affixed to surfaces and detonated by remote control. It's good fun to use if you like setting up traps. IEZ IE: PSG1 m When you need to take out enemies from afar, this sniper rifle is useful. Make sure to take some Diazepam, or your aim will be off. CLAYMORE W Asa proximity mine, the Claymore's explosion is triggered when a hapless I57 TE CLAYMORE victim walks too close to it. CHAFF GRENADE W This particular type of grenade disables nearby ele CHAFF.G electronics - including your own radar system. NIKITA W The remote-controlled E fae Nikita missile is useful NIKITA for destroying electronic devices and patrolmen in areas Snake can't enter. STUN GRENADE I 4e W It won't kill anybody, STUN.G but this grenade can disorientate foes and buy you some time in a gunfight. STINGER E These missiles are your 3 u 73 3 weapon of choice when STINGER raw power is needed. Point the launcher at the target, lock on and fire. THESIMPSONS SPRINGFIELD'S FINEST STREET FIGHTER ARCADE, VARIOUS, 19' Konami created some incredible scrolling fighters throu: the late Eighties and early Nineties, and The Simpsons represents the company at its creative best. Lik » [Arcade] Scramble really helped define the. shoot-em-up genre back in 1981, THE MINI IiINRÉTII COMPANION AGAINST ALL ODDS ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1981 While there's a lot of confusion over whether Scramble kickstarted started the Gradius franchise, there’s no confusion over its quality. While many games from Scramble's time period featured a lone fighter facing off against an enemy invasion, few felt as structured as Scramble did. The ever- scrolling stages change through six different environments, which helps to enforce the enormity of your mission. While there's plenty of shooting in Scramble, you'll also need good reflexes to avoid rockets, which lay dormant until you're in their path. There's also an ever-dwindling supply of fuel, which needs to be topped up by blowing up fuel tanks (don't ask). Scramble presents a constant challenge, particularly when you have to deal with low-flying comets and difficult Skyscraper layouts, but it never feels unfair. Like The Simpsons, its huge popularity in the arcades didn't lead to many home conversions, but it does crop up on numerous compilations, including the recently released Arcade Classics Collection. ROOTIN' TOOTIN' COWBOY SHOOTIN’ ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1991 Sunset Riders is a nice over-the-top alternative to the Contra series. They're both run-and-guns at heart, but Sunset Riders amps everything up, nicking mechanics from the likes of Shinobi and Rolling Thunder and throwing in some ridiculously vibrant graphics for good measure. Teaming up with up to three other players, you're required to take out bounties on opponents that range from a knife-throwing Native American, to a dapper gunslinger. = yh, There's a strong selection of power-ups to discover, alongside plenty of variety to its stages. While it was ported to both the Mega Drive and Super Famicom, i » [Arcade] Its hard to not get swept all versions tend to teena a upin SunserFiderd yinsinging pretty penny on eBay. It's a title — wildWestaction. ^ that's crying out for a re-release. + RETRO GAMER [^] TAKE A LONG SHOT ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1999 arcade ci ire which home conversic uggled to replicate. E iL. MATE While running supercars ragged around closed circuits is fun, there's just as much fun to be had After the success of Gradius, this spin-off made some big changes to the formula. ( Yt tl andard ction bar, © jame, and the an nt the je ting to the infected innards of an o Japan. hog, changing the alien. This hen bizarrely ported bac bombing up and down hills in a Mini Cooper, and that's the terror you can bring to the residents of a sleepy French Riviera village i in GTI Club. T BUILT TO LAST NEC PC-88, VARIOUS, 1988 Hideo Kojima's cyberpunk graphic adventure borrows more than a little from Blade Runner, but with results like this it would P be churlish to complain. The player directs Gillian Seed through investigation scenes and target-shooting sections, as he investigates the menace of body-stealing robots in Neo Kobe. Snatcher wasn't a great commercial hit but gained critical acclaim and a cult audience, and it might be cheaper to actually learn Japanese than buy the rare Mega-CD version, which is the only one available in English. INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR SOCCER '98 IT'S COMING HOME (AGAIN) N64, 1998. Konami put its best foot forward with this instalment of its football franchise. It wasn't too different to its excellent predecessor, but $ given that it was in a different league to its ° R m PN nd Jem R competitors anyway, that was no bad thing. nohe ye Simaona Plus, it did improve things a little by including extra animations and presentational touches. BUCKY O'HARE HIGH STAKES NES, 1992 Comic adaptation Bucky O'Hare hit TV screens in the early Nineties, and Konami managed to get a couple of really good games out of its brief time in the sun. The arcade beat-'em-up is good but we really like this NES platformer - it takes after the Mega Man games, as you can tackle the stages in any order and rescue characters with new abilities. It's technically impressive, too, as you'd expect from a game directed by future Treasure founder Masato Maegawa. = SCOR 02270 04630 FROGGER HOP TO IT When you think about the first arcade games to feature distinctive characters, it's clear that Frogger can stand proudly alongside the likes of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong as a pioneering game. Like so many of those early hits, it was easy to learn and hard to master, too — all you needed v a four-v joystick to get Frogger but the hazards on the road and river made that a challenge. In an era where shoot-* D minated the gger was an unusual game. V in the form of Fro, end of a truck, th urful visuals, ti It was a game which had a broad ind r and Frog THE MINI HONAM! COMPANION SHOOT THE CORE! | ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1985 - Konami has a strong roster of excellent visuals, too, from the distinctive boss fights to ts shoot-'em-ups to its name, and the the iconic Moai heads. " Gradius series is perhaps the most The thing that really set Gradius apart from 7 r famous of them - even if it was its competition was its innovative approach to parore originally known as Nemesis in non- power-ups, which allowed players to pick up Japanese arcades. The game features items and exchange them for ship upgrades. memorable levels with interesting features These cost as little as one item for a speed like erupting volcanoes and wrap-around boost, but the better ones cost more — the vertical scrolling, and it's packed with classic option drones, gun upgrades and such. The downside is that losing all of those hard- ë (B earned power-ups upon losing a life makes it really hard to carry on, but that difficulty directly caused the creation of the famous Konami Code to aid in the testing of the NES IM : conversion, so we'll forgive it. > [Arcade] This boss appears throughout the game and when he does make sure you ‘shoot the core’! bbb nb Ab n n A ued (m | LASER | OPTION Konami's football games have always been good fun, but when the /SS series transformed into Pro Evolution Soccer in the Noughties, it rose to become one of the PLAYSTATION, If you're a frequent host of multiplayer sessions, this minigame collection should definitely be one of the games you include in your regular rotati lis a compilation of Si j Hy shing che king c only three HEROES IN A HALF-SHELL VARIOUS, When you think about cartoon franchises that would make good scrolling beat-'em-ups, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ martial arts action ensures that it stands out as an obvious option — and Konami's mastery of developing licensed games in that particular genre made it a game to remember. KID DRAC WISE UP, (BLOOD) SUCKER GAME BOY, 1993 Cutesy spin-offs of famous series seem to be big business in Japan, judging by the existence of games like Virtua Fighter Kids and Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti. Konami used its successful Castlevania series as the base for Kid Dracula, a platform game which sees our young vampiric hero fighting to fend off Galamoth and the monsters that have turned to his side, though he's forgotten most of his spells. The game is perfect for the handheld format of the Game Boy, with bold graphics MECH MY DAY PS2, VARIOUS, 2001 Few early PlayStation 2 games could justify the wave of hype that preceded the console, but this was one of the first to show what the system could do in the right hands. Set in the vicinity of Jupiter, the game tasks players with controlling the mecha unit Jehuty, which must be returned to the Space Force following an attack from a hostile army. The game's combination of melee combat, shooting and spectacular visuals have aged well, even if its length is slightly short. HIGH STAKES NES, 1989 Drac's back, and it's up to Trevor Belmont and his band of buddies to defeat the vampiric dark lord. Castlevania Ill is the best of the original NES trilogy as it refines the platform action of the series' first game, adding companion characters, a variety of routes and multiple. endings to ensure that the game offers. superb replay value. It doesn't hurt that Castlevania Ill looks great, too, and the music is excellent — particularly in the Japanese version, which benefits from extra sound channels. CONTRA EIGHTIES MACHO ACTION Inspired by the action movies of the Eighties (its lead soldiers, Bill and Lance, are clearly based on Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone) Contra works thanks to its fast-paced action, interesting selection of power-ups and varied mechanics. It al. TRACK'S FIELD GOLD MEDAL While many preferred the multitiered events of Hyper Sports, it's worth highlighting what a QUALIFY 14500 TH | WAS THAT IN THE MOVIE? [| ARCADE, 1990 While Aliens features many of the big moments from the film, including the rescue of Newt and a final face-off against an Xenomorph Queen, it also features a lot of made up nonsense, too. Not that we're complaining, as the new enemies and bosses that are introduced keep you on your toes, while sequences like the frantic APC chase prove that Konami excelled at making action games. What a pity, then, that this never received a home release. MORE THAN MODE 7 SUPER NINTENDO, 1992 While everyone lost their marbles over Axelay's sensational Mode 7 stages, it’s worth remembering that its traditional side-on levels are just as sumptuous to look at and that it has a soundtrack that's every bit the match for its eye-scorching visuals. Mechanically it's on-point, too, with a generous selection of switchable weapons that need to be carefully managed if you want to E survive each stage. Ct Ie X. Je 201: nl Nope m ste CASTLEVANIA: LO FANG-TASTIC PLAYSTATION 3, VARIOUS, 2010 After several near misses during the Nintendo 64 and PS2 eras, MercurySteam and Kojima Productions finally nailed a 3D Castlevania game. Lords Of Shadow retains the exploration of earlier games in the series, but amps things up considerably from a combat perspective, playing more like a God Of War or Ninja Gaiden game. Its titans are straight out of Shadow Of The Colossus, while the high production values and solid voice cast are as slick as any other game of the time. A staggeringly good reboot. OF SHADOW TIME10O1 DISTOOOO ANTARCTIC ANTICS | MSX, 1986 MSX gamers will undoubtedly have a soft spot for Konami as the company was a prolific developer of high-quality software for the 8-bit platform, and Penguin Adventure is emblematic of its output on the hardware. The game sees our plucky penguin protagonist Penta on a quest to retrieve the golden apple that will cure w- Penguette, the gravely-ill princess of the penguin kingdom. In order to get it, he has to journey through caverns, across icebergs, under the sea and even into outer space, in a series of pseudo-3D stages that rank amongst the most visually appealing scenes on the system. As well as running along and aw g obs Penta has plenty to do — he can trade the fish he's collected for items, and must battle bos: > O often. There are also plenty of et routes and items to discover. Don't forget to pay attention to when you take a break while playing, too. It's important, since you can only the good ending if you pause the game once! THE MINI HONAM! COMPANION POWER ee = = = =a um um =m sma am am am mm CCE" Sine So naci 'ACE MANBOW ELI. e ig MSX2, 1989 This oddly named game is a Japanese exclusive, and one which is much like any other horizontal shoot-'em-up you've played, including those in Konami's own Gradius series. It does differ ever so slightly, though: as you need to keep picking up power-ups due to the decaying power of your main weapon, but just about everything else from the lasers to the A DE denne OC ARGUI n NET DAD. options can be found elsewhere. But sometimes a game doesn't need to be particularly innovative — it just needs to have a clear aim that is executed well. Space Manbow does exactly that, providing a shooter of high quality. The level designs are both attractive and interesting, huge bosses are delivered as you'd hope, and the soundtrack is one of the more memorable ones to have emanated from the MSX2's YM2149 chip. That explains why the game fetches so much money on the second-hand market - even loose copies have changed hands on auction sites for over £100. > [MSX2] You'd have to spend alot of money if you wantto own Space Manbowtoday. INFILTRATE AND DESTROY MSX2, VARIOUS, 1987 Although many players didn’t experience the Metal Gear series for the first time until it hit the PlayStation, that’s no reflection on the quality of the early games - they've been very good from the beginning. The original Metal Gear includes many of the key elements that the series would become known for - the emphasis on stealth, the importance of picking up your equipment over the course of the mission, and even the use of cardboard boxes to hide in. The original Metal Gearis very relevant in plot terms, too. This game concerns Solid Snake's solo mission to Outer Heaven, where the bipedal nuclear-equipped tank Metal Gear is being built. Important characters that would = play a major role in later games are introduced eris ecl tenors vu for the first time, too, including the likes of Big Boss and Gray Fox. LEE B a ee YIE ARKUNG-FU FISTS AND FEET Konami's brawler might not have been the first fighting game to arrive on the scene, but it did establish many of the elements that would go on to define the genre. r : o capit nt THE N TIME FLIES ARCADE, VARIOUS ,1982 Before Yoshiki Okamoto struck gold at Capcom with the likes of Final Fight and Street Fighter I, he was making waves at Konami with a range of interesting shoot-'em-ups, including this excellent effort. Time Pilot set itself apart from other shooters of the time thanks to its unique premise, which saw the action take place across time zones, instead of the usual space age backdrops that were so popular in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Your plucky pilot has to rescue his parachuting buddies while battling through five distinct eras: 1910, 1940, 1970, 1982 and a very optimistic take on 2001. Each time zone has its own unique flying craft to obliterate, so you'll be facing off against biplanes and blimps in 1910 and blisteringly fast UFOs in 2001 (we told you it was optimistic). Enemy patterns and ship movements become more intense Ek, with each time skip, too, with everything becoming harder still sada] Tea Ea CREOL 24 upon a full loop. While a sequel, Time Pilot '84, followed in in Time ee but Konami's pis ipis 1984, Konami's original effort remains our favourite. A-MAZE-ING ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1981 The quickest of glances at Amidar will suggest that it's a shameless Pac-Man clone. As it stands, it actually borrows ideas not only from Namco's game, but also a Japanese lottery system called Amidakuji and the end result is a fun variation of the popular maze game. Like Pac-Man you're stuck in a maze and surrounded by enemies (headhunters in this. case) but there are several differences that make Amidar stand apart from its more famous peer. The most notable is a ‘jump’ button, which sends all enemies up into the air, allowing you to dash under them, but you must also fill in square and rectangular areas of the maze by collecting all the dots that surround them. It's all finished off with the bonus round, which sees you trying to feed a pig by dropping food down pipes. Now that wasn't in Namco's game. I, $+++++....+.... + + + + **++++ ++. .+...+.......... + + + + ia - I| L9! RICHTER soo » [Pla The Nig DRACULA REBORN PLAYSTATION, 1997 Even though Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night was planned as a direct sequel to the PC Engine exclusive, Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood, Konami also intended it to be a fresh start for ens AT WHAT COST? k You don't need deep pockets to own Konami’s masterpiece US PLAYSTATION £45+ W SOTN was far more successful in the US, turning up on the Greatest Hits label. While it lacks the CD soundtrack found with the PAL. release, it's far better optimised. The original US. release of the game typically sells for double the price of the Greatest Hits version. Both are still cheaper than the PAL release, however. : PlayStation] iè SATURN £110+ I This is rising in price and could eventually dethrone the popular PAL version. It's a mixed bag, because while it allows you to play as Maria Renard and includes new areas of the castle, it also suffers graphically compared to the PlayStation original and has horrible slowdown at times. It's one for the collectors, we feel. š $ š XBOX 360 £20 (disc) £6.75 (digital) I Microsoft earned plenty of Kudos when it announced Symphony Of The Night was heading to Xbox Live Arcade. It's an excellent port of the game and is optimised for HDTVs thanks to solid work by Backbone Entertainment. While it exists in physical form in the US, the easiest way to get itis directly from Xbox Live. PSP £30 (disc) £7.99 (digital) W When Konami released Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for Sony's handheld it included ports of both Rondo Of Blood and Symphony Of The Night. SOTN requires a little bit of work to unlock, but it's worth doing as it's a revised version that features items dropped from the original and a more accurate localisation. PS& £15.99 (digital) W Castlevania Requiem on the PS4 features both SOTN and Rondo Of Blood. It's effectively the same version of the game that appeared on the PSP but it's obviously been updated to run effectively on modern day televisions. soc @ BEATMANIA IIDX BASSDROP FREAKS Beatmania was the game that kicked off Konami's dominance of the arcade music game scene, but it was the sequel that has proven to be perhaps the developer's greatest work. Th me’ features a me stem, and requires p o use a turntable and (two more than in tht ig tmania) to hit notes in time with the music. While it ok at visually, the game is 2atmania IIDX outlasi jot only sequel Beatmania Ill, w in 2002. Sir DANCING STAGE EUROMIX “SHOW ME YOUR HOTTEST MOVES!” ARCADE, PLAYSTATION, 2000 > [Arcade] Konami's superb dancing series is still a mainstay in arcades today. The Dancing Stage series (or Dance Dance Revolution outside of Europe up until recently) is a rhythm action titan, and it's not hard to see why - there was nothing else like it in the late Nineties, and it was easy to figure out exactly what you needed to do just by looking at it. For many players in the UK, this was the version that served as an introduction to the series, and its popularity spawned a legion of imitators including the likes of Dance:UK and The Jungle Book: Groove Party. The soundtrack was the secret to the success of Dancing Stage EuroMix, as it featured a strong mix of Konami originals ! „PERFECT ithe buSSier ed The m players were drawn in by the likes of Boyzone, Chumbawamba and The Buggles, while the more heavily invested crowd appreciated Dancernania tracks like Captain Jack and Dance Dance Revolution staples such as Afronova. And that's what ultimately gives the game its staying power — nearly two decades on, it's not hard to find a machine still in active service in UK arcades. WAR OF THE WEIRD ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1990 This comedy spin-off of the Gradius seri one of the best known cute-'em-ups out there, and it might even be better than the source matt jt GRADIUS V THE BACTERIANS ARE BACK PS2, 2004 In an interesting twist, the last numbered entry in the Gradius series has the distinction of being developed by a team of ex-Konami staff. THE MINI HONAM! COMPANION THE GOONIES HEY, YOU GUYS! FAMICOM, VARIOUS 1986 There's a lot of oddness about this game - it's based on one of the most beloved cult movies of the Eighties, one that has strong resonance with American audiences, yet it was never given a proper US NES release. Instead it was confined to PlayChoice-10 and Nintendo VS System cabinets. That's a shame because although it's simplistic, The Goonies is a good arcade platformer which handles brilliantly and offers a real challenge. It's well worth importing, though. A WORLD OF WARRIORS PLAYSTATION, VARIOUS, 1995 Suikoden was one of the first JRPGs to really make an impact on the PlayStation, kicking off a series on a system that would host many of the genre's classics. The game tasks your hero with leading a revolt against a corrupt state by finding and recruiting 108 warriors from rebel factions. The cast and plot are backed by exciting battles that mix 2D sprites with 3D backdrops, as well as a brilliant soundtrack. RED TERROR ARCADE, VARIOUS, 1985 Back in 1985, few arcade run-and-guns could compare with Green Beret- or Rush'n Attack if you're American (or Green Bert, if you're a Your Sinclair fanatic). The game massively improved on the side-scrolling combat template of games like Kung-Fu Master by adding platforms and ladders, as well as weapon pick-ups that allowed you to toast enemies with a flamethrower or blow them to bits with grenades. It was a perfect slice of Cold War entertainment, and converted well to many home platforms. SILENT HILL 2 A MASTERFULLY MACABRE SEQUEL Few videogames are as emotionally draining to play as Konami's exceptional horror sequel. From the moment you walk along the mist-filled path that leads to the town of Silent Hill you're immediately on edge and that tension rarely lets up as the game continues. Indeed, there is an uneasiness and oppressiveness to Konami's game that was incredibly unusual at the time and — Shattered Memories aside — no other game in the series has matched it. The likes of Resident Evil relied on hammy jump scares and waves of zombies to wear down your resolve, but Konami damaged you psychologically, scarring you for life with endless unsettling revelations which hinted at numerous taboo subjects that rarely entered the medium of mainstream videogames. Get the later Director's Cut as it's the definitive experient SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES SCARIER THAN WII SHOVELWARE WII, VARIOUS, 200! When Team Silent scattered to the four winds, numerous t Hil, you play developers were allowed a s ng to find to take a stab at Konami's revered series. After impre: Konami with Silent Hill: Origins, Climax Studios found its charge of Shattered Memorie: loose remake of the original Silent Hill. The team did not disappoint. Everything about Climax's game works exceptionally well, from Sam Barlo to the clever and inventi of the Wii's c and thi and PSP ñi t, but the original remains the best KEY CHARACTERS Who's who in Silent Hill 2 JAMES SUNDERLAND £ ` W James is the protagonist of Silent F2 Z Hill 2 and visits the town after receiving Ay a letter from his wife Mary, which ff sounds perfectly normal until you # realise she's been dead for three pf years. You soon learn that, like Silent Hill itself, there are ' two very different sides to his character. MARIA W This character comes into contact with James throughout his stay in Silent Hill. She looks identical to James’ dead wife, although she wears very different clothes and has a different personality. She becomes a playable character in the scenario, Born From A Wish, which debuted on Xbox. PYRAMID HEAD I Masahiro Ito's nightmarish creation remains the most iconic monster in the series and is also a firm favourite in the spin-off films. They are huge brutish figures, heavily muscled and are often seen wielding a great knife or spear. The Pyramid Heads featured in Silent Hill 2are a manifestation of James Sunderland's guilt. GYRUSS ONE MORE WARP ARCADE, VARIOUS 1983 Yoshiki Okamoto's second shoot-em-up for Konami plays like a cross between Tempest and Galaxian, and is just as frantic as you'd expect. F: I ROCKET KNIGHT ADVENTURES SPARKS WILL FLY MEGA DRIVE, 199 While it took a while for Konami to embrace the Mega Drive, owners of Sega's 16-bit machine certainly didn't miss out. Roc paced ¿ and the h suit. It's not the ckin constantly c ARCADE, VARIOUS, 19! TwinBee makes a spot here because it's not only a great little shooter, but also one of the earliest examples of a cute-'em-up. It THE PSP'S OWN BIG BOSS PSP, VARIOUS, 2010 As great as MGSV is, Kojami's final Konami game wouldn't exist without this. The PSP often delivered home console experiences in the palm of your hand, but it really pushed the boat out with Peace Walker. In addition to. making missions into snack-sized scenarios, Peace Walker also introduces the excellent Mother Base system, which improves on the army management mode first seen in Portable Ops. It's every bit as unique as the Acid series and one of the series' high points. MEGA MACHO TIME MEGA DRIVE, 1994 If you were lucky enough to own both a Mega Drive and SNES during the Nineties, you were treated to an excellent one-two punch of Contra action. Graphically, the Mega Drive's Hard Corps is stupendously good, delivering all manner of crazy effects that you wouldn't typically associate with the machine. It delivers with its gameplay too, thanks to multiple routes, four very different characters to play as, a useful power slide and immensely satisfying boss encounters. THE LEGEND OF THE MYSTICAL NINJA FULL OF EASTERN Errem isa PROMISE uos M, SUPER NINTENDO, 1991 a ili Even today Mystical Ninja remains an entertaining arcade-style romp, and is deliciously silly in places thanks to its delightful aesthetics, charming cutscenes and kooky bosses. It cleverly mixes elements from various genres, impresses with some clever level design on its later stages and even manages to recreate the first level of Gradius for good measure. While the first Metal Gear Acid is an intriguing card game, it has many annoying niggles that make it irksome to Lave Kc KOJIMA LIGHTS UP THE GBA While no Metal Gear game graced the GBA, Nintendo's handheld was still blessed by Hideo a's presence. U: AN EXPLOSIVE CLASSIC Konami's first 16-bit Contra for consoles was a revelation. While the top-down Mode 7 stages are beginning to show their age, it was hard to not be wowed by them in 1992. It's an excellent example of the run-and-gun genre, and the best game in the series (depending on whether you speak to a SNES or Mega Drive fan). The graphics are excellent, with brilliantly detailed sprites and enormous bosses, while the awesome soundtrack easily matches the insane action. BLOOD BATH PLAYSTATION, VARIOUS, 1996 While a lot has been made of Vandal Hearts’ gory deaths, to focus on them and them alone would do the game a disservice. It's an exceptionally accomplished strategy game with balanced mechanics and a solid selection of character classes to master that range from archers and monks to mages and clerics. While the story is perhaps a little weak, Vandal Hearts" brilliantly balanced combat mechanics ensure every battle is a satisfying challenge. ALL KILLER, NO FILLER SUPER NINTENDO, 1991 Ignore the garish graphics of its early stages, as Castlevania IV blossoms into a macabre masterpiece once it gets going. Seen on release as a graphical tour de force thanks to its extensive use of Mode 7, Masahiro Ueno's game remains a dark delight thanks to its satisfying level design, useful new moves for Simon Belmont, a series of exhilarating boss encounters and one of the best soundtracks to ever appear in a videogame. GAMER THE MINI KONAMI COMPANION