Retro Gamer: Recent Episodes
None
Growing up in a relatively unremarkable mid-sized town, it’s easy to become convinced that nothing cool ever happens where you live. Save for that time Gladiators stars came to open the local branch of Blockbuster Video, even the celebrity sightings are mundane – Glenn Hoddle out for a walk with the family, or Ray Winstone shopping in Tesco. That changed in my late teens when I had a friend whose “my dad makes videogames” story was actually true. He’d worked with Julian Gollop on games like Laser Squad, the Rebelstar series and Magic & Mayhem. We’d never talked about games much because we were studying politics together, so I didn’t learn this until we’d already known each other for a few years, and I wish he’d told me sooner.
You see, around that time I was really enjoying Rebelstar: Tactical Command, the anime-style revival of the brand that felt like it had rather more in common with X-COM than the original 8-bit games. The game had struggled to gain an audience due to the rise of the DS and soon went on clearance, so I’d picked it up for just £6 brand new. Suddenly that brilliant bargain felt almost like theft. Never mind that Namco had published it, the people that made it were people that I could conceivably bump into in the street, and I’d bought it for a price that probably barely covered manufacturing.
I resolved that the best thing I could do was champion it, and I still like to switch people on to it today. While the Advance Wars games are the turn-based strategy titans on the Game Boy Advance, Rebelstar is different enough to complement them rather than competing with them. Beside the obvious difference in presentation, success depends far more on properly equipping your squad for the mission at hand, and bringing things down to infantry combat allows you to invest in your individual soldiers much more closely. If you’re looking for an engrossing single-player strategy game to occupy your time, this is a strong option that is frequently overlooked.
This review originally appeared in Sega Power issue 86, December 1996
Has the best ever third-party game just arrived for the Saturn? Well you’ll just have to read the review, won’t you.
Tomb Raider has always looked a bit special. When we previewed it (exclusively, I might add) back in Issue 78, we had to double-check which shots were artwork and which actually came from the game. We’ve been following the game’s progress ever since and now seven months later we finally have our finished copy.
I must admit to a degree of pre- game cynicism. Can a game that looks and moves as well as Tomb Raider possibly have the depth of gameplay to make it the classic many are hailing it as? Remember, the usually unflappable journos on certain PC mags are hailing Tomb Raider as the nearest thing to Mario 64, that will appear on the PC. There’s been hype, there’s been merchandising, there’s been an all-expenses paid trip to Egypt but we’ve seen this kind of thing before and when the games finally arrived, they never lived up to expectations.
Happily though, Tomb Raider is one of, if not the Game of the Year. It’s part shoot-’em-up, part platform adventure, part role-playing game all seamlessly integrated into one of the most impressive graphical packages ever seen on the Saturn. There are places in Tomb Raider where the graphics are so good, you just want to stand and stare at them and you probably will.
The game follows the adventures of Lara Croft an Indiana Jones type in a worryingly- exaggerated female body. She’s been hired by a global Mega Corps to track down an ancient artifact called the Scion. However, once her adventure has started high in the South American Andes it soon becomes clear that darker forces are at work. With the background story safely dispensed with, let’s move on…
The game is divided into four sections with four subsections in each. If you knew exactly what to do in each section (and could manage to do it), it would take over 100 hours to complete the game – immediately allaying one of our major fears: that the game would be too short. The major thrust of the game is exploration. Explore the areas open to you to find switches (to open further sections) or objects such as keys. A lot of the areas that you’ll enter are populated by enemies – usually animals quite keen on biting, scratching or chomping you to death. These must be ruthlessly gunned down with a variety of weapons. One for the animal rights people, there.
The game uses a unique ‘floating camera’ technique that follows Lara’s adventures from behind and above. It’s a mark of the brilliance of this system that as you run from room to room, jump, crash through floors and climb, you hardly ever notice the dynamic changes the camera has to make to keep everything in view. On top of this, in the situations where you need to look very carefully where you’re going to go, the ‘head view’ comes in extremely useful. By holding down the Y button and manipulation the joypad, you can direct the camera in a 180° arc. In fact, Tomb Raider has such a perfect game engine that playing it feels remarkably natural and watching it is almost cinematic.
Game difficulty is set high but the curve is well judged level-to-level. In the initial Andes adventures enemies are lightweight but, more importantly, the skill needed to progress is lower. Although a lot of the gameplay is exploration and puzzle-solving, success is also very much dependent upon a good mastery of the controls. Lara can pull off an impressive array of forwards, sideways, backwards jumps and roles, and to get her to do the most complicated of them, you’ll need to synchronise a four-button/joypad combination. That might not sound too tricky to you Street Kombat, Mortal Fighter-types but in many cases, if you mis-time your jump, it’s game over. The game does include a ‘Gym’ feature where Lara can practice her more difficult moves. You’ll probably ignore this initially but after a few disastrous performances, you’ll probably change your mind.
The major criticism with Tomb Raider is the game save technique it employs. Game positions can only be saved when levels are completed or when you come across one of the blue floating crystals. Now, all would be fine if these cropped up at regular intervals but they don’t – two per bloody huge level is all you can expect to see. On top of that, the cheeky buggers disappear once you’ve used them making the well-worn tactic of ‘do a difficult bit, save, do another difficult bit, save again’ impossible. Of course, making games tricky makes them last longer but it also has the downside of making them EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING IN PLACES.
Tomb Raider stands alongside Exhumed as the best 3D adventure/shooter for the Saturn. Core have developed the game specifically for Sega’s machine and the Saturn version is only bettered by the Accelerated PC edition (which requires a hefty Pentium and an expensive graphics card to run). No dodgy conversions, no shallow gameplay, no cheap Doom rip-offs – buy Tomb Raider and you’ll play it till your eyes go funny. You really must have this game.
GRAPHICS: 10
Brilliant. Total freedom in a beautiful 3D world. Unsurpassed.
SOUND: 9
Clever use of music to suggest approaching danger. Everything else superb.
ORIGINALITY: 9
The first Saturn game to take trad platform elements and bung them in 3D.
LIFESPAN: 9
Difficult enough to last for ages with loads of secret stuff to bump up the replay value.
FINAL VERDICT: 93%
Quite possibly the game of the year. Original, beautiful, challenging – the kind of game the Saturn was made for.
James Ashton
I generally consider myself quite lucky to be able to play videogames, as it’s not something to be taken for granted. One of my younger sisters developed arthritis at an early age, and eventually found that playing her Nintendo DS was just caused her too much pain to be worthwhile. There’s little that can be done to work around that, but other barriers to accessibility are sometimes overlooked. For example, I remember hearing of a friend of a friend whose experience with Sonic Mania was soured by the inclusion of the Mean Bean Machine boss, as they were colour-blind and this had never been a problem in previous Sonic games.
The person who highlighted this issue to me mentioned the Puzzle Bobble series as a good example of how to do things better, as the series has distinguished different bubbles with internal shapes as well as colours. As it turns out, this doesn’t just help players with visual impairments, either – it ensures that the game transfers surprisingly well to the original Game Boy. While it should be applauded that the game includes the full puzzle mode and the ability to have battles against the computer, all of this would be for nothing if you couldn’t work out which bubbles were which. Fortunately, the developers made the most of those various shapes and symbols to distinguish the bubbles from one another, since they had no way to use colour. It’s a good job too, as there’s no Super Game Boy support and playing it on the Game Boy Color doesn’t help at all. In fact, there’s a case to be made that it’s actually better than later Game Boy games that do support colour graphics, like the rather sluggish Bust-A-Move Millennium.
The WonderSwan version of Puzzle Bobble actually uses a similar technique to distinguish its bubbles, so the issue is one that can be addressed with a little thought. It’s a shame that’s still the exception rather than the norm, but games like Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 now include options for colour-blind players, so at least steps are being made in the right direction.
Year Released: 1983
Original Price: £199
Buy It Now For: £20+
Associated magazines: Electron User, Micro User, Acorn User, A&B Computing, Acorn Programs
Why The Acorn Electron Was Great: The Electron offered the main functionality of the BBC B at half the size, and at a fraction of the cost. It had strong software backing, and boasted one of the best keyboards of any computer, with great feel and responsiveness and a variety of shortcuts to common BASIC commands. And it was built to last, too.
After the roaring success of the BBC Microcomputer, Acorn was a company going places. It had conquered the schools market almost unchallenged, and with a cheaper, cut-down sibling to the Beeb designed for home use on the way, it was massively confident that it could dominate the marketplace. Four months ahead of the Electron’s launch, joint managing director of the company Chris Curry was in bullish mood. “We are not placing any limits on the size we can grow to,” he told The Times. “We see the Electron as a very powerful threat to the existing dominance by Sinclair and the Commodore VIC-20. We hope to get half the home computer market.”
“It was absolutely manic – an insane time really,” recalls Tom Hohenberg, Acorn’s former marketing manager. “There were exhibitions going on all the time, and there’d be 50,000 to 60,000 people besieging the stands. The BBC Micro was selling like hot cakes – we couldn’t make them quickly enough – so there were huge hopes for the Electron. Half the size, half the price, and the same sort of power. We were buzzing.”
Lessons had clearly been learnt from the supply problems that had beset the BBC. Thankfully, due to the machine’s tie-in with the broadcaster, the Beeb still went on to become very successful. Six months ahead of the Electron’s launch, Curry told The Guardian that the new model would not even be advertised, let alone sold, until they were “completely confident that stocks are available”. “More than almost anybody else we have suffered in the past from problems of lack of product when the demand is high,” he said. “We are not going to let it happen again.”
An expanded Acron Electron (img: John Simpson).
Launch day arrived on 23 August 1983, and anticipation was massive. The first review of the new machine was in, and so glowing that Acorn quoted it extensively on the full-page advertising it took out in the newspapers. “Compared to other micros in its price range, the likes of the Spectrum, Oric and VIC-20, the Electron wins on all counts,” What Micro? magazine said. “It has better graphics, a better keyboard, and faster and more versatile BASIC. Acorn had better be ready for a rush, there’s going to be one.” If only Acorn had paid closer attention to that last line.
Acorn’s strategy was to show parents that the Electron was a way of bringing their learning at school on the BBC into the home, and a £300,000 TV ad was commissioned to make the point. “It took three days to shoot, and was quite an epic production,” says Hohenberg. “There were lots of kids and several sets. We spent £3 million on airtime.” The marketing of the machine was so successful that a reported 300,000 orders were received for the run-up to Christmas 1983.
Significantly reduced in size from its predecessor, but lacking some of the features and connectivity, the Electron’s dimensions had in fact been based on a tissue box, after Acorn found itself unhappy with the case put forward by an industrial designer. “It will have been six to nine months to do the basic design, but then there were problems with the ULA,” says former Acorn hardware designer Steve Furber. “We were geared up to produce 300,000,” continues Hohenberg, “and then the ULA, the heart of the machine… only one in ten of them worked.”
Electron User was a popular mag of the time.
As a result, only 30,000 Electrons hit the shelves in this period. “All these families had promised the kids an Electron for Christmas, and it just wasn’t obtainable,” says Hohenberg. “We’d get a shipment in, then there’d be a stampede. People were fighting in Rumbelows.” The Manchester branch of WHSmith reportedly received 1,500 phone enquiries in one week alone from people desperate to find one in time for Christmas.
Despite the production problems, support for the Electron steadily grew. Acorn’s software arm – Acornsoft – led the charge, and its first batch of games included some superb conversions: Snapper (an excellent Pac-Man clone), Meteors (Asteroids) and Monsters (Space Panic), as well as Peter Irvin’s fine space-based shooter Starship Command. “I sent it to several publishers who all wanted it,” he explains. “But I decided to go with Acornsoft because, although their royalty rates were lower, I thought they were the better publisher.”
The other main player on the Electron software scene in the early days was Leeds-based Micro Power. Fine conversions of Frogger and Donkey Kong – Croaker and Killer Gorilla – sold well, but the real gem was the outstanding maze-based shooter Cybertron Mission, heavily influenced by Berzerk. Alongside the early software players came the arrival of Electron User, the only magazine dedicated solely to the Electron. Launched in September 1983, it became vital to the machine’s user base.
Inside the Acorn Electron. (image: Steve Furber).
Late 1983 also saw the first Electron offerings from Superior Software, a company that would become the most important and long-lasting supporter of the machine. Already active on the BBC scene, Richard Hanson’s company was wary of Acorn’s supply problems, but dipped a toe into the market anyway. “Richard spent half the night reprogramming a one-armed bandit simulator,” says ex-Superior man Steve Botterill. “Beeb sales were brilliant, but it took until the end of the year before Electron sales picked up.
We had put about half-a-dozen titles together for it to see how it would go.” After small numbers were initially picked up in the countdown to Christmas, Superior Software’s big break for the Electron arrived. “In February, WHSmith ordered 1,000 each of seven Electron titles,” Botterill recalls. “This marked the start of the Electron selling big numbers.”
By February, a backlog of 200,000 orders for the Electron itself reportedly still remained. Acorn’s production troubles soon eased, but the missed Christmas rush resulted in tens of thousands of machines arriving into the country with only a fraction of the demand for the machine remaining. “We had this warehouse in Wellingborough,” Hohenberg recalls. “Before Christmas, the trucks were lining up at one end wanting to take the few Electrons we had away to stores, but now the trucks were all at the other end, delivering, and the market had completely dried up. Seeing Electrons piled floor to ceiling… it was very depressing.”
And the company’s troubles didn’t end there. Shortly after the Electron’s launch, Acorn had attempted to capitalise on its expected success by advertising 11.23 million shares for trading on the London Stock Exchange. The company’s performance in the market was soon described in The Times, however, as “abysmal”. Coupled with ill-fated attempts to set up operations in the USA and Germany, from a position of enormous financial strength, the company soon found itself in serious difficulty. Even Acorn’s much-prized contract with the BBC was said to be under threat.
Like many 8-bit computers of the time, the Electron sported an add-on
cassette deck. (Image: John Simpson).
The software market for the Electron was gaining in strength, however. 1984 saw the arrival of Acornsoft’s classic Elite. “The Electron version was more restricted than the BBC disk edition,” says David Braben. “The video hardware on the Electron was very poor compared to the BBC, and we couldn’t do some of the trickery we did on the BBC to save memory – this is why it was black and white on the Electron.” Even in cut-down form, Electron Elite remains one of the finest technical achievements on the machine, and although Braben wasn’t overly happy with the version, he and co-author Ian Bell have left one lucky user a present: “We never bought an Electron – one was loaned to us by Acorn, and when we finished, we attached a note to the inside of the case, saying ‘Elite was written on this machine’,” he says. “We both signed it, so somewhere, hopefully, it’s still there in someone’s machine.”
Other 1984 arrivals included A&F’s Chuckie Egg, as well as the evergreen (literally) Repton. This Boulder Dash-influenced series was Superior’s biggest seller, and loomed over the 8-bit Acorn scene throughout the Electron’s life. Acorn’s popular Plus 1 and Plus 3 expansion boxes were launched too, between them adding joystick and disk-drive interfaces, as well as ROM cartridge slots.
Doubtless spurred on by the steadily increasing user base, Acorn seemingly rallied. The BBC contract was renewed, and by September sales of the Electron were said to be over 90,000. A stronger than expected Christmas saw this number double, with a Dixons spokesman expressing delight that the Electron was selling “four to five times as well as we had expected”. This in spite of Acorn sticking to its £199 launch price, the same price as the heavily discounted C64, and vastly more expensive than the all-conquering £129.99 Spectrum 48K. In January 1985, however, Sir Clive Sinclair put the squeeze on still further, slashing the price of the Spectrum+ to £129.99. Acorn responded immediately, dropping the Electron by £70 to go head-to-head at that price point, but the new mark undoubtedly put further pressure on the company – the Electron was widely known to be costlier to produce than the Spectrum.
Despite strong Christmas sales, the company suspended share trading five weeks into the new year after its share price dropped to 28p, down from a high of 193p the previous year. Redundancies followed, and Olivetti stepped in to mop up a cut-price 49.3 per cent stake in the company, increased to a massive 79.8 per cent a few months later. After recording a £10.8 million profit in 1984, Acorn was now reeling from a £22.2 million loss. “That was grim,” says Hohenberg. “We just felt like ‘oh my god – we’ve sold out to big brother’.” Olivetti chairman Carlo De Benedetti criticised the company in an interview with The Times, observing that it’d tried to move into the US market “with forces totally inconsistent with their size, and their financial and managerial strength”. A loss-making sub-£100 price tag was soon placed on the Electron, with the bulk of Acorn’s warehoused stock ‘distress sold’ to Dixons. Profits were no longer an issue – Acorn needed cash, and fast.
Four Great Acorn Electron GamesBoulderdash
Overdrive
Skirmish
Crayzee Rider
Read the full feature in Retro Gamer issue 57, on sale digitally from GreatDigitalMags.com
Retro Gamer magazine and bookazines are available in print from ImagineShop
One of the benefits of growing up with older cousins was the hand-me-downs that you’d get, and the first time I benefited from that in a gaming sense was when I was given a Commodore 64 in 1994. My cousins were teenagers, and they’d made the switch up to the Mega Drive and SNES, so the trusty breadbin went to me. For the most part, the games they gave me were exactly what you’d expect – lots of sports stuff, TV and film licences like Ghostbusters and Knightmare, and of course arcade conversions like Space Harrier, Double Dragon and Paperboy. But like me, one or the other had an eye for silly concepts, though this didn’t always work out as the presence of Bionic Granny proves.
One of the other things I got a lot of was Commodore Format Power Pack tapes, and I like to imagine that my cousin saw Sheep In Space and Attack Of The Mutant Camels on the cover one month and decided it was an instant purchase. It was certainly an eye opener for me. I didn’t know that it was a lot like The Empire Strikes Back as a kid, but then I’d also never seen a Star Wars film at that point anyway. The silly name drew me in, and the simple shoot-’em-up gameplay kept me going when a lot of the stuff I got for the computer was just a bit over my head.
I won’t pretend that I was a Jeff Minter devotee from there on – I was seven, after all – but it was my first encounter with a formula that has kept me coming back to his work for decades since. Good shooting and some references to ungulates, that’s all I need. I played the free Java trial of Gridrunner++ to death as a teenager, and hoped that Unity would be a GameCube exclusive I’d be recommending to all my friends. I even broke my own rules about not buying digital-only releases to pick up Space Giraffe and TxK. So today, I look back at that tape with a great deal of fondness.
It’s hard to believe with today’s insane prices, but videogames could be bought for as cheaply as £1.99 back in the Eighties. These budget games became extremely popular, with companies such as Codemasters starting off this way. One of the most popular however was Mastertronic, which had a host of games that covered all sorts of different genres. Here we talk to the people who helped found this company, which is still going strong today.
- You are standing in a shop, probably one of the major chains on the high street such as WHSmith or Boots. There are rows and rows of bright and shiny cassette cases. Within any one of them could be the videogame of your dreams. You have two crisp one pound notes. What now?
The truth is, if it were 1983, you’d probably go home empty handed. Why? Because, believe it or not, this was an era when budget software hardly existed. The cheapest game you could purchase was generally a minimum of five pounds, with prices reaching an eye-watering ten quid. Fortunately, a small band of entrepreneurs – fresh from the buoyant video industry – formed a partnership in this year that would ease the pain of those school kids on a tight budget – which, let’s face it, was most of us.
Their names were Martin Alper, Frank Herman, Terry Medway and Alan Sharam, four men with virtually no experience of the game software market, but outstanding knowledge and contacts in the fields of marketing and distribution – and they had a plan. The men had joined forces, following a meeting convened by Martin and Frank, in order to generate interest in a new company specialising in games distribution. Its first home, the basement of Alan’s existing business (a surveying and property company) on George Street in London, would become the spiritual beginning of this low-price revolution.
The Magic Knight games were extremely popular for Mastertronic.
But back to the plan, which would contain two vital tenets. Firstly, and most importantly, was the price. The men wanted their games to enter the market at an unprecedented level, a level previously thought of as unsustainable by other software houses of the time, with the theory being that the low cost alone would sell the game. Secondly, they wanted to widen the availability of their games, to sell them at retail locations hitherto alien to computer software. To achieve this, the entrepreneurs turned to someone they already knew from the videocassette business: ex-professional cricketer, Richard Bielby.
“Frank [Herman] had the rights to sell a particular range of American films and I contacted him in 1982 with a view to selling them into my outlets,” begins Richard. “The business expanded quickly, and I began taking on self-employed agents to sell on my behalf throughout the UK.” Richard would meet with the avuncular Frank Herman each week to settle his account and collect more stock. The location was often a video shop owned by Martin Alper and Terry Medway, also in George Street, London.
“Towards the end of 1983, Frank asked me if I would also be interested in offering a new proposed range of computer games,” says Richard, “and it was suggested they would be a nice extra line to sell during the quieter summer months.” And so, a gentleman’s agreement between Richard Bielby and Mastertronic was formed, whereby Richard (with assistance from his wife, Alison) supplied all independent retail outlets. The range was launched on 01 April 1984. “We found that by the end of that first week we had sold in excess of 40,000 games,” grins Richard, “and these were sold into garages, newsagents, video and convenience stores.” With Mastertronic using self-contained 100-game dealer packs (complete with a counter stand), such outlets lapped up the new product. Conversely, because of the low retail price, the computer game wholesale industry had little or no interest in the games. Richard Bielby’s sales operation and Mastertronic was the perfect match. “We didn’t really need a clever strategy because the games sold themselves,” he notes, “so I saw my role as finding good agents who could offer a first-class and efficient service.”
Chiller was by the Darling brothers. They soon realised they’d have more success on their own, forming Codemasters in the process.
Naturally, Mastertronic still needed developers to write its games, and so had already begun forging alliances with programmers. The first of these was Galactic Software – aka Jim Darling and his two sons, Richard and David – and the siblings were swiftly producing some of Mastertronic’s most popular early games. “They were undoubtedly vital – as young kids they were brilliant at turning out very playable games to their peer group in no time,” says Richard, “and new titles were the key in those early days.” More development partners such as Binary Design and Mr. Chip were also recruited. For these and other solo efforts, Mastertronic’s games buyer was John Maxwell, who would contact any prospective young coder in order to propose a deal. Such deals varied, but generally Maxwell would offer an up-front fee followed by royalties per unit sold, usually five or ten pence.
Working with the Darlings was 18-year old Alison Beasley, who also moved across to the budget publisher in 1984 as the young coders became part of the Mastertronic operation, performing in the role of evaluating new submissions. Alison herself would soon also have a vital part to play, as she explains: “When I first joined I did a bit of anything – reception, paperwork, taking orders and more – but it wasn’t long before I suggested they do a newsletter for their customers and they let me have a go.” The newsletter was a success and prompted Alison to ask Mastertronic’s founders if she could try her hand at public relations as well. “They were very supportive and encouraging – in the way that true entrepreneurs are.” Alison’s role expanded with encouragement from Martin Alper – she soon became involved in marketing, artwork and presentations, including trips to computer game fairs and forming a bond with the ever-growing batch of game magazines. This latter task would test her new skills considering Mastertronic’s advertising budget: “They didn’t believe it was a good way to spend their money – and I think they were right,” ponders Alison, “as efforts went instead into getting the best product they could and supporting the retailers with the racking systems and blister packs.” As to the magazines themselves, with Alison in regular contact and promoting the latest games, Mastertronic would eventually build a good relationship with the press. “Although it was often about them not reviewing a game – if I thought it was a stinker – than about actually reviewing it!” she laughs.
Mastertronic’s success was done to covering all types of games and genres. This is the rather enjoyable Space Walk.
We have formed a picture of the operation of Mastertronic, but what of its enigmatic founders? Frank Herman still involved himself with many facets of the business while Alan Sharam concentrated on sales and distribution. Terry Medway, as co-owner with Martin Alper of the original video shop on the street where Mastertronic ostensibly began, sold his share of the company early on, while Martin himself jetted across the Atlantic in 1986 to set up Mastertronic in the United States. Joining in 1985 was Anthony Guter, a much-needed recruit for the accounts department, and a year later Ron Harris, head-hunted by Frank Herman from Argus Press Software to facilitate the continual supply of games. Ron joined the company as it was entering its most successful period, and essentially filled the hole left vacant by the departing Darlings, who had decided to create their own software house. “The atmosphere was very much one of aggressive growth,” he recalls, “and it was a vibrant and expanding company. Yet formal systems came very much second to getting it done.” This was demonstrated palpably to Ron when it came to his first task at Mastertronic: organising the office partitioning for his new development department. “I had asked for an office and was told, if I wanted one, to go and build it,” he smiles, “and when it was finished, Frank wandered in, looked around, said ‘I’d have built it bigger’ and left…” Ron and his team proved crucial to Mastertronic, sifting through ‘letterbox’ submissions for suitable games, then hunting out bugs and building master tapes, often as many as 20 a week.
By 1987, the games market was changing rapidly. Full-price 8-bit software was dying, replaced by a booming budget industry that was also destined to be short-term. After several years of practically owning the low-price games market, Mastertronic suddenly found extreme competition thanks to rivals Codemasters, Firebird, Players and Alternative – in addition to full-price publishers such as Ocean and Elite concocting their own budget labels to re-release back-catalogue games. Mastertronic began doing the same, re-releasing classic titles on its Ricochet label, initially with games owned by Melbourne House (which it had recently purchased) and then other third-party titles, including a phenomenally successful re-release of Activision’s excellent Ghostbusters. Things were looking up for Mastertronic, especially when Frank Herman realised that Sega lacked a suitable UK distributor…
Notable Mastrtronic GamesVoyage Into The Unknown
Spellbound
Ghostbusters
BMX Racers
Kikstart II
To read the whole feature you can download issue 118 from GreatDigitalMags.com
Retro Gamer magazine and bookazines are available in print from ImagineShop
At this point, we’ve had retro plug and play consoles for a good while, and I’m utterly convinced that I’ve fundamentally got them wrong in my mind. See, I’m pretty sure that what’s supposed to happen is that if you buy one of those systems and find a new favourite, you think to yourself “that’s good, I’m glad I own it via this mini console.” But that’s not what I do – I think “that’s good, I will now go and buy a copy for original hardware.” And while the PC Engine Mini certainly didn’t tempt me to drop ridiculous amounts of money on shoot-’em-ups, it did leave me convinced that Be Ball should join my HuCard library.
PC Engine Mini and Turbografx 16 owners will better know this game as Chew Man Fu, and it’s a maze game in which you need to direct four differently coloured balls onto their respective floor pads. This is naturally complicated by enemies, but there’s the catch – the balls aren’t just your objective, but your primary means of defending yourself. Kicking the ball launches it forward, damaging enemies and potentially destroying maze walls too. You can set up the balls in such a way as to trap your foes too, but you’ll need to be mindful of the time limit as you do so. It’s a fairly simple game but it’s very well implemented, particularly when it comes to control – you’ll very rarely ever find yourself heading backwards when you don’t want to be.
Maze games weren’t particularly fashionable by the Nineties and so they’re not particularly common on machines of this generation. That’s a shame, because games like Be Ball show that there were still inventive things that could be done with the genre. Fortunately, Be Ball isn’t one of the ridiculously pricey games that the PC Engine is notorious for having, coming in at affordable prices whether it’s loose or complete. Give it a chance and you should find that there’s a great deal of fun to be had – or alternatively, stick to the mini console like I probably should.
For many, the Amiga 500 remains one of the best gaming machines of all time. It has a staggering arraay of games that cover all sorts of different genres, some cracking arcade conversions and a number of exclusive, groundbreaking games. It’s certainly been tough coming up with 10 games that define the machine, but we think we’ve done a pretty good job with the following. Don’t agree with us? Let us know in the comments section.
Worms
Released: 1995
You’d have thought that by 1995, ten years after the Amiga 1000’s launch, it had seen every one of its defining games already. Well, Andy Davidson and Yorkshire-based Team 17 obviously thought there was room for one more and the world agreed with them. Worms was an absolute sensation and went on to sell millions of copies across countless formats, sequels and spin-offs. It’s important to remember that the multiplayer strategy game began life on the Amiga, however, and was mostly a five year labour of love of just one man and a copy of Blitz Basic. And that was what was really great about the Amiga: it turned bedroom programmers into millionaires and created memorable franchises that endure for a lifetime. Can the same be said of the Xbox? We think not.
Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker
Released: 1991
It may have been written by Retro Gamer’s ex-columnist, Archer Maclean, but there’s no favouritism here. Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker deserves to be in the Perfect Ten because it was the first game to really make snooker work on a home computer and remains a damn good sports title to this day. The 3D graphics and accurate real-time physics on each of the balls made Whirlwind Snooker a landmark game that pushed the hardware further than most gamers thought possible. It’s arguable that the game has never been bettered, if not in its gameplay and graphics then definitely in its humour. Who can forget the cheeky faces the balls would pull if you didn’t take a shot?
Another World
Released: 1991
Defender Of The Crown and Shadow Of The Beast may be the two games that wowed consumers enough to buy an Amiga but they were both severely lacking in the gameplay department. Another World, on the other hand, had both incredible graphics and utterly gripping gameplay to match. Essentially an evolution of the Prince Of Persia style of game, Another World swapped sword fighting for laser guns and added a bunch of fiendishly tricky action puzzles. The game looked stunning too; the use of vector graphics was a stroke of genius that ensured that Another World looked light years ahead of any other game of the time. Erik recently returned to the limelight in 2011 when he released the God sim From Dust.Lemmings
Released: 1991
What can be said about Lemmings that hasn’t been said before? It’s appeared on nearly every format known to man and is surely as much a household name as Tetris and Space Invaders. Sequels and updates continue to appear to this day and the little suicidal rodents show no sign of losing their popularity. Back in 1991, however, the release of Lemmings was a complete surprise. The concept was totally original and made for an instant hit. Its biggest achievement: the simple presentation and easy-to-use control system meant that anyone could pick up the game and play it. Lemmings had the whole family playing games together 15 years before the Nintendo Wii had even launched. It’s recently been seen on the Vita in the form of a rather poor touchscreen-based game.
Speedball 2
Released: 1990
The recent news that a next-gen remake of Speedball 2 is in the works has had the Retro Gamer staff drooling uncontrollably into their coffee cups every morning since the game’s announcement. Why, you may ask? Because the original Amiga game was sheer digital perfection, the likes of which had never been seen before, or since. Oozing style from the Bitmaps’ trademark metallic visuals to the cries of “Ice Cream!, Ice Cream!”, Speedball 2’s greatest triumph was its imaginative rule set and peerless two-player gameplay. Many Amiga owners must remember whiling away the hours with a friend and probably do so to this day. A finer sports game it is impossible to find, in the past or present. It’s so good, in fact, that we wish it was a real sport. We’d be too scared to play it mind…
The Secret Of Monkey Island
Released: 1991
The Amiga’s incredible graphical capabilities and standard mouse controller made it a perfect machine for point-and-click adventures and there were plenty of them made over the years. Picking out a favourite is an incredibly difficult task but as The Secret Of Monkey Island will have been the first adventure that many of us actually played on the Amiga, we have to go for that. Using an enhanced version of the SCUMM engine from Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island looked great and featured plenty of brilliant puzzles. But it was the insane humour that really set it apart from the competition. The world would be a much duller place without Insult Sword fighting now wouldn’t it? LucasArts thought so to, releasing a cool special edition version before it finally closed its doors.
Alien Breed
Released: 1991
With only one previous title, the beat-em-up, Full Contact, to its name, few expected much from ex-PD codeshop Team 17 with its second title. That is until Alien Breed made its stunning debut and sent jaws hurtling towards the floor, up and down the country. One of the first Amiga games to use a full 1MB of RAM, Alien Breed looked incredible back in the day and played even better. Basically a sci-fi version of Gauntlet with a great two-player mode, tons of cool weapons and even sampled speech, Alien Breed set Team 17’s standard for creating top-quality arcade-style titles on the Amiga. Later sequels were technically better but none quite had the shocking impact of the original. No wonder its Special Edition spent a whopping 33 weeks in the budget charts. A trilogy was released on last gen systems, but sadly didn’t have the same impact.
Sensible Soccer
Released: 1992
Football games have been around for as long as games machines themselves and, over the years, have become much more realistic simulations of the sport as technology has improved. There’s one football game that managed to be extremely playable without being a simulation, however, and that game was the mighty Sensible Soccer. With the emphasis placed well and truly on the fun factor, Sensible Soccer was, for many gamers, the greatest football game of the Nineties and remains the superior choice to this day (although just as many prefer Sensible World of Soccer). There are still hundreds of people out there who kept hold of their Amigas just to play Sensible Soccer. Everyone else can play the superb Xbox Live Arcade version to see what all the fuss is about.
Theme Park
Released: 1994
Back in the early Nineties, resource management games were defined by one title alone: Will Wright’s highly influential Sim City. A truly brilliant game, Sim City’s only problem was that constant town planning wasn’t actually that much fun. The average sugar-fuelled kid needed something with a little more colour, something with fast-moving vehicles and something where little cartoon people throw up on screen. Those needs were answered by British coding legend Peter Molyneux and his ground breaking Theme Park. Designing stomach-churning rollercoasters was endless fun for the child in all of us, whilst adding extra salt to food in order to improve drinks sales appealed to the unscrupulous capitalist inside. The recent DS remake is well worth a look as well.
Wings
Released: 1990
You couldn’t ask for a more varied game than Cinemaware’s Wings. Not only did the World War I game feature isometric shooting sections and two-dimensional bombing runs but it also had a tasty three-dimensional dog-fighting mode that was way ahead of its time. It’s hard to believe that the game was made in 1990 as the 3D sections looked absolutely incredible and far in advance of anything that had appeared on consoles, PC or even the arcades at the time. Not just a graphical treat, Wings also had emotional impact and fully immersed you in its world. In between each level it would show pages of a diary, which told of the main character’s eerily realistic wartime experiences, provoking an emotional response in the player that is all too rare in retro and modern gaming alike. An update is due in the coming months, so keep an eye out for it.
You can read the original article in issue 39. Buy it now from GreatDigitalMags.com
Retro Gamer magazine and bookazines are available in print from ImagineShop
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Taito Legends 2 is one of the greatest compilations ever released. The first volume was full of familiar delights like Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, Rastan and The New Zealand Story, but the second introduced me to many favourites that I’d never encountered before – games like Cameltry, Liquid Kids, Elevator Action Returns and Cleopatra Fortune.
One game in the package that I became particularly enthralled with was The Legend Of Kage. The plot is simple – Kage must rescue the kidnapped princess Kirihime, by battling his way through a relentless and seemingly endless army of randomly spawning ninjas and magicians. The gameplay is just as simple. You’ll leap through a forest, approach and ultimately scale a fortress, then enter it and rescue the princess before doing battle with a boss. The whole sequence can be done in under five minutes but you can carry on until you run out of lives, and an end sequence plays after every second loop.
While it’s not complex, it does have the benefit of starring a ninja and Taito managed to nail all the key traits a ninja should have. Gaming ninjas should be fast and agile. Kage runs along at a good pace, can leap dozens of feet into the air, and can even climb trees and other objects should he feel the need to. Ninjas should also feel capable of responding to any threat, and Kage can fire shurikens in any direction, even in mid-air. Finally, ninjas should always have some kind of parry move because of how great you feel when you nail the timing, and Kage can use his short sword to parry enemy shurikens. As a result, The Legend Of Kage is a game that doesn’t need meticulously placed enemies or clever level designs – it just feels right, and sometimes that goes a very long way indeed.
This review originally appeared in Edge issue 4, January 1994
After seeing Virgin’s smart Mega Drive version of Aladdin running at the Chicago CES last summer, it’s rumoured that Capcom went back to the drawing board to improve the animation in their long awaited SNES game. But with the finished game finally here, you can’t help feeling that their efforts might have been better directed at some of the game’s more immediate flaws. Chiefly its lack of levels. And accordingly, its lack of any real challenge. The game is way too short and horribly easy to finish. And this is a great shame when so many of its other characteristics, notably the gameplay, shine so brightly.
But, despite the challenge factor, is the game as pretty as the Sega version? Does it match up to the high standards set by Virgin and Disney? Well, yes, and… sort of. In terms of game structure, SNES Aladdin is basically their Mickey’s Magical Quest game in a new outfit. There are seven levels, each divided into a few sub-sections, and there are bosses at the end of most levels. Virgin’s game saw fit to dispense with such conventions.
But where Capcom’s Aladdin really scores is with the gameplay – it’s a bit more sophisticated, borrowing a lot of its appeal from Prince Of Persia-style play mechanics.
So, there’s a distinctive Capcom flavour here, certainly. But while it plays absolutely wonderfully, it’s also lacking so much. And what it lacks is so fundamental that you wonder what Capcom are playing at. It’s hard to believe that they could mess up Aladdin when they’ve had so long to work on it.
Mickey’s Magical Quest, another platformer that lacked content, fared better because it had more variety and detail in the individual levels. Sadly Aladdin’s levels are quite sparse in places; one entire level is wasted on a flying carpet bonus section. Just as bad is Aladdin’s soundtrack – a dismal warbling rendition of the film music, using exactly the same sounds used in every Capcom SNES game ever.
In many ways the problem with Aladdin is integral to the licence. It’s a mainstream property so it has to be geared to satisfy the casual player first. And the big drawback with this is that it makes the game way, way too easy. We finished all seven levels in just one hour of intense playing – that roughly equates to a pound per minute. Fun while it lasts, but it doesn’t last long enough.
Edge rating: Six/10
As a Master System owner in 1993, I came to understand that while I could have some of the same big name games that my dad could get on the Mega Drive, there would inevitably be compromises to deal with when they came to my console. Mortal Kombat only had two backgrounds and you couldn’t play as Kano, while Streets Of Rage had its multiplayer support omitted. Even miraculous efforts like the brilliant conversion of Desert Strike suffered a little because of the system’s two button control pad. Then there was Sensible Soccer, the Amiga classic ported by Eurocom. If I hadn’t known any better, I could have been convinced that it was designed specifically for the 8-bit machine. The small sprites were a stylistic choice of the original, but allowed for the speed of the gameplay to come across intact, without any irritating flickering. Because the game was designed for the Amiga, another system with limited buttons, the control scheme just happened to be perfect for the pad already.
Of course, there were still some concessions to be made. The sound was naturally limited to a simple white noise crowd roar, with none of the sampled sounds of the 16-bit versions. Instant replays were out too, likely because of the memory overhead needed for such a feature. These omissions didn’t really feel particularly consequential though – Sensible Soccer felt much closer to its original version than many Master System conversions of the time. What’s more, Sensible Soccer was of Premiership pedigree compared to the Sunday League efforts that were the Master System’s previous football games, like the slow and awkward World Soccer or the hopelessly broken Champions Of Europe,. The irony of it all is that those games had been designed for Sega’s console from the ground up, but Sensible Software had created a game that fit Sega’s venerable hardware better than any of them, without having ever intended to.
The last Retro Gamer of 2022 hits the shelves today, and we’re celebrating the sewer-dwelling saviours of the city, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! From Konami’s classic games to this year’s excellent beat-’em-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, we chronicle the history of the licence with the help of Digital Eclipse – the team behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. It’s a fascinating licensed property – as well as the obvious choices for genuinely worthwhile games across the decades, there are overlooked entries like Ubisoft’s excellent Game Boy Advance game and surprising duds from well known developers such as Platinum Games.
Of course, that’s not all we have to offer. You can read all about the creation of games including the classic crossover Lego Star Wars, the appropriately snowy 1080 Snowboarding, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and the awesome Amiga game Fightin’ Spirit. We’ve also got a tribute to the games of Hewson and Ultimate Guides to Strider’s spiritual successor Cannon Dancer and Sabre Wulf – a fine choice for an Ultimate Guide feature if ever there was one. Beyond those things, you’ll find pieces on The Jungle Book, Zero Wing, The Legend Of Zelda: The Minish Cap, WipEout Pure and the 3DO FZ-10, as well as all your favourite regular pieces including Back To The Noughties, Homebrew, Collector’s Corner, Hot Topic and My Retro Life.
You can find issue 241 of Retro Gamer in all good newsagents, or if you don’t fancy braving a trip out in the cold, you can order a copy online via magazinesdirect.com.
Everyone's celebrating the anniversary of the CPC 464, but don't forget its upgraded sequel.
Sega's spherical simian spectacular leads the action in the latest issue of Retro Gamer!
Surprisingly, Kaneko's platformer has nothing to do with the post-war division of Germany, and everything to do with a little lad with a whacking great hammer.
For a whole decade, Spike Chunsoft’s classic visual novel was only available to Japanese speakers. Now it’s in English, find out why you shouldn’t sleep on its striking real world presentation and complex web of intersecting stories…
We don't know why Data East decided that the world needed a pinball and run-and-gun mashup, but we're glad it did.
We highlight the greatest games to appear on Commodore's 8-bit machine. How many did you get to play?
What one little change from Capcom's platform shooter formula made Darkwing Duck so enjoyable?
Nick recalls how this sports game he hadn't intended to buy ended up outshining the one he had originally wanted.
Could this import exclusive Ninja Warrior tie-in game really be any good? With Konami behind it, absolutely.