Today I’m looking at a relatively modern game, released in 1999 for the Playstation, and then ported to Windows and Mac a year later. This game gives me a chance to reminisce a bit. As you may know, I’ve never owned any gaming machines other than a PC and a GameBoy Color which is lying around in a cupboard somewhere. But I first came across Driver on the Playstation. Back in those days, I would go round to a friend’s house. A friend who was obsessed with gaming. You might know him; his name was Tom. When the Megadrive was turned off, it was Driver that kept us entertained. We’d take it in turns to lead police cars on a chase up and down multi-storey car parks, or shunt cars onto the tracks and watch them get demolished when the tram came along.

Jumping over cars on the hills of San Francisco, a favourite pastime of mine

But when Tom moved away to some faraway land called Great Yarmouth, I forgot about Driver for a while. Then one day, looking for a new game to play, I came across it again. The PC version was being sold on Amazon for 1p. OK, so postage and packaging was £1.99, but £2 for a game this good was a bargain.

Driver is, quite obviously, a driving game. But it is not a racing game; I should make the distinction straight away. In undercover mode, you take driving jobs for people. Usually there is a time limit in which you must complete the mission, which can be a car chase or reaching a certain location without the police stopping you. Before you can access missions, you must pass the initial test, which requires you to show several driving skills in a car park within a very tight time limit.

While there is a limited variety of missions you can be given in a car, they do not get boring. The environment can change; there are different weather conditions in certain missions. There are many routes you can take; the city maps are open and do not restrict where you can go. If you do get fed up, or stuck on one mission for ages, there are several minigames available to play. These include car chases, checkpoint races, survival and carnage, where you have to cause as much damage as possible in a time limit.

But by far the best thing in Driver is the ‘Take a Ride’ mode. Choose a city, pick day or night, and then drive. This is the bit they put in to give Driver absolute replayability. There are 4 cities you can drive around, and the maps are huge. Admittedly there are many more recent games with much larger maps but for its time, this game was amazing. The whole city map will be accessible, and you can do anything you like. This is where you can stage car park chases and tram crashes. You can cause massive pileups or queues at junctions. Of course, if the police see you misbehaving, they’ll start chasing you. And they won’t stop until your car is completely wrecked. You can have up to 4 police cars after you at any one time, depending on your felony level, and they will also set up roadblocks on main roads. Once they’ve started chasing you, it’s just a matter of time before you’re wrecked. But it does give you plenty of opportunities to lead epic chases.

I slow down to maneuver around a road block on the Golden Gate bridge

Whatever driving mode you’re in, you will see the same indicators on the screen. You are told how much damage the car has sustained, your felony level and your speed. There is also a map, which shows your location and where there are police cars near you. The police field of vision can be seen, and this is a lot bigger when you’re being chased. Your speed flashes red when you go over 60mph, to remind you that the police will chase you if they see you going at that speed.

Once you’ve finished all the missions, cheats are unlocked which can make Take a Ride even more entertaining. Firstly, you can choose any car you’ve driven in the missions. You can turn your damage off and make yourself really heavy so that you just knock other cars flying and don’t slow down when you hit them. You can make your cars go super fast, which is especially fun when you take off on hills in San Francisco. I think the top speed you get to is around 300mph with the fastest car.

The whole game is designed to look, feel and sound like a 1970s car chase movie. You can hear this in the background music and see it in the cars. But it is even more evident in another great feature of the game. You can make your own car chase movie. While watching a replay, you can change camera angles and positions to make it look exactly how you want, and then save it and watch it whenever you want.

Editing a replay in 'Film Director' mode

So I can conclude that Driver is a fantastic game. Every car chase is different, and there is no limit to the entertainment you can get from it

Yesterday I finally acquired Driver 2 and a Playstation emulator, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so I will be able to report back on the sequel soon. According to reliable sources, it’s more of the same.

So it should be brilliant.

I got offered joint authorship of this feature on the basis that “I haven’t bought a new game in ages” and “most of the games I play are pretty old”. Not old enough in some cases, it seems. I’ve found myself having to look up when certain games were released to see if they fitted in our rough 10-years-or-older guideline. And a few of my favourite games have turned out to be only 7 or 8 years old. Thankfully, though, there are many great games which cause no problems of this kind, and it is one of these true classics I’ve been looking at this week.

Lode Runner is a platform game, perhaps the platform game, originally published in 1983 by Brøderbund for the Apple II. Certainly it’s the original and best as far as I’m concerned. You control a stick figure. You can move left and right, you can dig into the platforms left and right. You can climb ladders, swing on ropes and fall. That’s it. Crucially, there is no jumping action. This makes the game extremely difficult at times when the enemies trap you. The whole level is shown at once; there is no screen scrolling involved.

The enemies are stick figures like you, but a different colour. They will chase you around the screen. If you touch one, you lose a life. They are trying to stop you taking boxes. I’m not sure what they are, or if there’s actually a story behind the game. A simple arcade game like this doesn’t need reasons for doing things. Once you’ve collected all the boxes you must reach the top of the screen to complete the level. You can trap the enemies by digging holes where they are running. Unlike you, they will get stuck in holes rather than falling through to the next platform down. They will either climb out after a bit or respawn at the top of the screen when the hole fills in. Of course, there are some parts where you can’t dig holes. You can tell which bits, as they are shaded solid, rather than having the brickwork pattern of the majority of the map. There’s also the occasional trap, which is a bit of land that looks normal, but you actually fall into it.

This simple premise provides endless challenges. That is why a simple level editor was what made the original game a huge success.

Playing the game. Here I am in fact playing a level I created myself.

And really, that’s about it. There’s not much you can write about many of the greatest games. You just need to play them. And I’m sure you’re bored of me droning on, so I urge you to find a copy if you don’t already have one, and play it.

The version I have can be obtained from this website. For some reason it’s not a download, you have to send an e-mail requesting it, but it is free.

Enjoy.

I shall be trying all games suggested here if I can and probably writing my views of them on later weeks as well. So bring on the comments and don’t kill me for lack of content this holiday.

FamilyGames.com (AHA! Software) have developed three semi-educational point-and-click adventure games. They are responsible for what was my favourite childhood game, and one which is still very high on the list, Uncle Julius and the Anywhere Machine. You go to visit your uncle, who is a famous scientist and adventurer. When you arrive, he has vanished.

Uncle Julius' house

It transpires that his disappearance is linked with the TransDimensional InterLocator sat on his laboratory desk. This is the Anywhere Machine in the title of the game. It will allow you to travel to many different worlds, as long as you have the correct code to type in. You must rescue Uncle Julius by travelling around some of these worlds to find his homing device. The game is full of puzzles to be solved, the most difficult in my opinion being near the end of the game, where you have to navigate an old monastery with moving corridors, without being trapped by the resident ghost, Brother Leopold.

The ghost of Brother Leopold

And of course, the theme music is great!

But what’s this got to do with Christmas, I hear you ask. Well, I now come to the other two adventure games by the same developers. In Santa’s Secret Valley, you play Fizbin, one of Santa’s elves. You are put in charge of guarding Santa’s magic sack, magic boots and magic bell, but you fall asleep. Naturally when you wake up, the magic items are gone, and you must find them before Christmas is ruined.

In Santa's house

Sleeping

Oh, no!

After passing through a network of caves, you end up, via another of those TDIL machines, in the Secret Valley, a place populated by some slightly odd characters. The main method of transportation between places is the train line which runs through the valley. Again, this is a highly entertaining game full of puzzles to solve and includes a Christmas quiz in which I have learned quite a bit of pointless Christmas trivia. For example, the song Jingle Bells was actually written for Thanksgiving.

Main Street in the Secret Valley

These are both good games, and very entertaining when you first play them. Admittedly when you know how to do all the puzzles they lose some of their playability, but it’s been so long since I last played Secret Valley that I had forgotten how to do bits of it when I started playing it again this week.

The third game I have never actually played. It is a sequel to Secret Valley entitled All Aboard For Santa, and is set in the summer when Santa is on holiday. They have also made a game for younger children called I Live at Santa’s House, which isn’t so much an adventure as a collection of activities.

The two adventure ones I have played are absolutely great, and I’m sure even people of my age would find them enjoyable at least on the first run through.

Now onto a completely different game by a completely different developer. I recently rediscovered a very amusing Christmas bowling game, Elf Bowling, from NStorm. It’s available as a free download here, and I urge you all to try it. Santa’s elves have gone on strike on the night before Christmas. He decides it’s time to show them the true meaning of strike. While the gameplay isn’t complicated, it’s the comedy value that makes this game so good. There is not much skill involved in taking a shot, just click the mouse at the right moment. You can’t put spin on the ball or anything.

But your pins are alive. The elf at the front will occasionally step aside when the ball comes at him. They will try to distract you by dancing, or mooning you. They sometimes hold up signs with messages such as ‘Fewer toys! Higher wages!’ and ‘Santa sux!’. They will mock you when you fail, saying ‘gutterball’ in a ridiculous voice, or asking ‘Is that all the balls you’ve got, Santa?’. There are other distractions too. A rabbit or a frog can run across the bowling lane, and a reindeer observes the game from the side. The reindeer can be knocked out if your shot goes terribly wrong. Sometimes, an elf is decapitated as it is put down by the machine. And so it goes on.

Decapitation

Mooning

Strike!

So, simply because it’s free and also hugely entertaining, I recommend that you all play Elf Bowling over the holidays. And I think a large portion of Santa’s Secret Valley is available on the trial version available on the familygames website, so you can try that too.

Merry Christmas!

The Tyrian story mode follows the classic scrolling space shooter game with waves of enemies heading your way which you have to shoot and destroy for points. This continues for several levels with different enemies and scenery; however the main reason you’ll play this is the ship customisation and upgrading. There are several weapons for both front and rear guns to choose from at the start of each level, along with sidekicks (additional weapons or mini ships) shields, and ship types. The weapons can also be upgraded through 11 power levels and the rear weapon usually has a different fire mode allow you to adopt a different style each level. Score links directly to points in this game mode so buying upgrades will reduce your score for the chapter, yet may help you survive the next assault.

Ship Upgrade Screen

The amount of firepower you have also depends on your generator as every shot will take part of your energy which will be generated back quickly or slowly depending on the generator you have. For optimal fighting the generator has to be able to cope with constant firing otherwise you may get attacked by a wave of ships you were unprepared for.  The generator is also useful as it regenerates your shields if spare energy is available. Shields are your primary line of defence and as they regenerate allow an aggressive strategy. Armour is you second line of defence and can be considered as your health; once your shields are down, the armour takes the damage. This does not regenerate and requires you to kill a certain ship to recover it, or complete the level. No armour means game over and you go back to the ship upgrade screen.

Gameplay Video

Combat as said earlier is simple; both weapons on your ship are controlled with one button and the sidekicks with 2 other buttons if they aren’t simple firing ones. A joystick, mouse or keyboard is used to control the ship’s movement and that’s about it. To complete each level you need to kill the boss or survive to the end.

All this fighting and upgrading is wrapped around a loose storyline of you being some hero who is double crossed, and double crossed again. This comes in the form of data cubes which are provided at the start of each mission with some also being obtained during the levels, you do not have to read these but some contain useful hints or jokes; at one point they even advertise other games.

Random news report:

This is Rob Neither with the daily news. Zinglon’s Ale has been stolen! The Grand Moolah Yimbo revealed today that all of their god, Zinglon’s, holy ale has been abducted. Millions of thirsty worshippers fled in panic when the news hit. A panic-stricken Savaran citizen said “I nearly fainted when I heard the news. How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale? I don’t know yet what I’m going to do.” This is certainly a crisis of grand proportions. All other work has stopped. The Grand Moolah has told us that someone must retrieve the ale from the clutches of Dai-Zan, the god of deceit and bad form. Who will save us from this torment? My Zinglon, I need a drink!

Hint of where a good ship is:

Beppo. Top o’ the morning, wee laddie. I be the clone of that nasty old pirate.  The scourge of Torm, I be called. I found it, Trent!  Be it that I did, and did it at that.  The wondrous Prototype Stalker.  If you can make it past Savara, I might consider giving it up to you.  For a price… This baby has it all.  Someday you may even learn to use the top-secret post-it mine sprayer. Well, I be off now. Arrrrr!

Tyrian Gameplay

After completion of a playthrough the game grants you a codeword for new ships, levels or game modes. This adds replayability to the game. Along with the story mode, an arcade (single or multiplayer) and time attack modes are available. In these modes weapons are granted as power-ups and unique weapons and ships are available. Music is good, but not memorable. None of the themes get stuck in you head and as such don’t draw you into the game, however the addictiveness nature and “just one more level” feel will.

So overall, a fond memory I got to play again… and might have drawn me in into spending hours completing it.

I remember playing games on this machine when I was younger. However, I tended to prefer his other old computer, the Atari 1040 ST, which I shall probably write about another time. To be fair, it was released four years later than the Dragon, and development in the computing industry is very fast.

However, according to several Internet sources (probably all copied from Wikipedia), even in its time the Dragon was not a preferred gaming machine. Its graphics capabilities could not compete with those of its rivals, such as the Commodore 64. The graphics chip could display 8 colours, but at the highest resolution (256×192), it was limited to two. This could either be simple black and white, or black and green. It was also not a very good word processor. Due to the graphics limitations, it could not display lower case letters well. These problems led to the Dragon’s initial success (40,000 sales) quickly disappearing and their main sales outlet, Boots the chemist, refusing to stock it any more. Just two years after the first release, Dragon Data Ltd. went bankrupt. Only two of their computers ever made it onto the shelves.

My Dad's Dragon 32

Despite this, my Dad defends his Dragon. It was, he says, only inferior in the gaming market because so few people made games for it. The problem was not the machine itself, but the lack of advertising. And what it lacked in gaming, it made up for in other areas. It was a highly customisable machine, to the extent that someone who was not in any way affiliated with the company invented a device which cut the loading time for programs down from minutes to seconds. It was easy to upgrade, as shown by my Dad’s own Dragon 32 actually having 64 kilobytes of RAM. This was because there was space in the case for more components. Other computers of its era tended to be more compact.

And it was the home computer for anyone who was into programming. My Dad has several cassettes with programs on which he wrote himself. While at university, he wrote a program which analysed data for him and drew graphs. He then made a program which could give him a realistic dataset for the experiment, with some errors included, which some people used so that they didn’t have to do the experiment. The Dragon’s competitors could not be used to write programs like this. The Dragon had its own version of BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), the usual programming language at the time.

All programs for the Dragon are on cassette tapes. To play them, the right type of tape player is required. It must have three sockets; ear, microphone and remote. Unfortunately most modern ones are combined cassette/CD/radio, and only have the ‘ear’ socket for headphones.

The Dragon being set up with a television

But we have an old 80s cassette tape player, so this morning, I took the Dragon out to do some, er, research. The first thing that happens when you open the box is that you are confronted with a load of wires. The Dragon itself is essentially a keyboard with components inside. You have to plug it into a television or monitor. Apparently it won’t work with modern monitors, so I took it to the television. There is a cable which you have to plug into the aerial socket. You then have to plug the Dragon into the mains, and the cassette player into both the mains and the Dragon. People who have never used an old computer like this probably wouldn’t even know where to start. Then you turn it on, and have to tune it to an unused channel on your television. Once this is done, you can start up the Dragon. You are greeted with a green and black screen. To load a game you must insert the cassette tape into the player, rewind it to the beginning and press play. To rewind, the ‘remote’ cable must be unplugged. It should be plugged back in before pressing play. Then you have to type in the command CLOAD into the Dragon and press enter. In cases where the program is written in machine code, CLOADM must be typed in. Machine code would allow faster loading times, as it removed the need for translation between coding languages.

Then, after waiting a few minutes, the game will run. Patience is required. Remember, the machine only has 64 kilobytes of RAM.

I started off by trying Beanstalker, which is basically a Dragon version of Lode Runner, a game which deserves its own article one day. It was then that I found out my Dad’s Dragon has a few faults. It is an old machine, and has been stored in the loft for several years. Maybe it got bashed once, or has just deteriorated with age, but some of the keys don’t work any more. Most notably, the right arrow key.

Beanstalker, a Lode Runner clone

So I looked for games that didn’t use the arrow keys. When I found one (Ugh! – a ridiculously silly game in which you play a caveman trying to steal a pterodactyl’s eggs, while it tries to drop rocks on you), I came across another important key which wasn’t working. The game asked me, ‘Are you using joysticks? <Y orN>’. I wasn’t, but it turned out that N was one of the dysfunctional keys. After trying all the keys, it turned out that F, N, V, 6, the right and down arrow keys and the full stop key were all not working. My Dad’s Dragon needs some repair work, obviously. If anyone knows someone who can do it cheap, let me know.

A random thing I like about the old games (I know it doesn’t really fit in here, but it didn’t fit in anywhere else either) is their security measures. These days, we have to type in a random string of numbers and letters printed on the user manual to prove we have a legal copy of a game (or we use Steam). But the Dragon games all include a colour chart. This is basically a large grid, where each square has a different combination of colours. When using a game for the first time, you would be asked in which order the colours were in a certain grid square.

The colour grid security system

It was a shame that I didn’t get to do more ‘research’. After seeing some of the old games I remembered from my youth, I was looking forward to playing Manic Miner again, or Back Track.

The Dragon, now that I have seen it again and found out more about it from my Dad, wasn’t a bad machine at all. It is thoroughly underrated by most of the Internet. The one in our house may be broken, but it is nearly 30 years old now. That’s a pretty old age for a computer, and to be honest we probably haven’t taken the best care of it. I like the Dragon, and I want to play some of the old games on it again.

I have managed to find an emulator. For now that will have to do.

Don't mind me, I'm just that good at this game. To get a score this high you have to spend hours playing without failing. I'm now tired and have sore wrists though.

Columns drop faster as you clear gems (50 gems increases the speed and how much score you get for them) making it progressively get more difficult to continue until eventually you slip up and fill the playing area up with gems causing you to lose. Along with the progressive difficulty you can choose your overall difficulty from Novice, Amateur and Pro which decides how many different colours are available making it harder to create a set of three. Occasionally, a special column called the Magic Jewel appears which destroys all the jewels with the same colour as the one underneath it. Other game modes are available such as Flash columns, where you must mine their way through a set number of lines to get to a flashing jewel at the bottom; Doubles, where two players work together and Time trial in which three minutes to get the highest score.

Flash Columns. Clearing that green gem as fast as possible is the objective. Depending on your skill, this could be done in less than a minute.

Another thing apart from the annoying addictiveness of the game play explained above of columns is the music. The Clotho tune is so well made I’ve downloaded it and on occasion zone out whilst playing causing me to make a few mistakes and have to clear some gems fast. As well as music that distracts me there is the styling of the game, watching brightly coloured gems can’t be good for you especially as if you concentrate that’s all you can see. Well I better get back to playing col- I mean work. Hopefully I’d spend my time writing this during the week next time so the article isn’t as short.

Fancy working as a team? Give doubles a try. Just don't start killing each other if someone messes up, ok?

Let's Go!

You can transform an ordinary lemming into one of eight different specialists:

• Climber – these lemmings will, as the name suggests, climb any wall they encounter.
• Floater – these are given a parachute so that they can survive long falls
• Exploder – when selected, a 5 second countdown will start, at the end of which the lemming will explode
• Blocker – the lemming is frozen in its position and prevents any others from passing. The only way to clear the blockage is to turn the blocker into an exploder.
• Builder – when selected, they start building a bridge upwards. They will place twelve bricks, then stop and walk off the end of the bridge if they are not selected again.
• Basher – When selected, they will start bashing sideways. This will clear destructible land.
• Miner – When selected, they will start digging diagonally downwards with a pickaxe.
• Digger – When selected, they will start digging vertically downwards.

All the digging lemmings will continue until the land runs out or they are given another order. A lemming can be designated a climber or a floater without interrupting any other task they may be performing. In addition to giving lemmings skills, you can change the rate at which lemmings are released onto the map, pause or fast-forward the game and choose to explode all lemmings and give up.

The number of each specialism you can use is limited, so you must use them wisely. It is worth pointing out that at no point do the lemmings gain any intelligence. A climber will climb all walls it comes across, even if they lead to death. A builder will walk off the end of a bridge after running out of bricks. You have to keep an eye on your lemmings, and give them their abilities at the right times for them to do what you want.

Lemmings has four categories of difficulty; Fun, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem. As expected, the thought you need to put into solving the levels in higher categories is more, and there is a far higher chance that you’ll make a mistake. And the smallest mistake can mean having to start the level again from the beginning.

The music accompanying the game suits it well. It is a series of electronic versions of recognisable tunes and, like many old games, the tracks are simply midi files, which means you can actually find them in your computer and listen to them.

Lemmings is one of the all time greats in gaming. Since its first release for the Commodore Amiga in 1991, it has been released on almost every console imaginable (OK, maybe a slight exaggeration, but certainly more than most games). It has given rise to numerous sequels and spinoffs, and over 15 million copies of the original game have been sold across all platforms. It manages this through simple, addictive gameplay in a concept which appeals to all ages. I was playing Lemmings as soon as I knew how to use a mouse, and still play it now. Only the other day, my Dad sat down for a fifteen minute break to play Lemmings, and the next thing he knew, an hour had gone by.

It was this addictiveness and the pure joy of playing it that made Lemmings the foundation of my gaming life.

Yippee!

Back when I was a young lad not taller than mummy’s knee. I loved my trips to my grandparents house, for one major reason; the MegaDrive there. Better tell you some quick history of the console before I start reminiscing too much of my childhood. In the 1980s new, more powerful, PC’s were causing a decline in sales of 8-Bit home consoles and as such Sega decided to create a 16-Bit console before their rivals, Nintendo. Released in 1988 (1989 in America and 1990 in Europe) the console faired badly for the first couple of years, especially in America where Nintendo’s NES still sold well, until the release of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sales skyrocketed causing Nintendo to rush the SNES into the market. 10 years after its launch when the console was discontinued, the MegaDrive was still popular especially in Europe and Brazil (even outselling their next console the Saturn). This made it one of SEGA’s most best selling consoles ever.

The original console style. Big and box like but still loveable.

1,031 titles were released during the consoles lifespan (Full List) and many of them were classics. I fondly remember spending hours playing games such as Sonic, Streets of Rage and Columns, though frankly I wasn’t as good as I am now. These games hooked me  and weren’t available on any non SEGA console (at the time) so I started gaming due to SEGA’s MegaDrive and enjoyed every minute of it. Though overall it didn’t sell as well as it’s rival the SNES, I feel that the MegaDrive was the best console of that generation as it had a large selection of classics I still enjoy to this day.

The smaller more recognizable square shaped console. I had one like this for years until it broke >_<

There isn’t too much more to say really, quite a short article this time as I didn’t really want to bore you with the console’s history, if you’ve played on it you’ll know why it’s a great console, otherwise you should, you’re missing out. Expect me to look back at games from this console quite often.

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Disagree? Want a specific game looked at? Don’t like the name? Want to create a logo for this feature? Comment below.

Next week: JMB22 does his first article.