After my poor introduction to text adventure games I loaded up and first encountered Twin Kingdom Valley on the BBC Model B but didn't get very far with it. Back in those days the puzzles were simple, and you only had a small set of objects to pick up and carry and items to manipulate. The trick was discovering the words and sometimes obscure solutions to obvious puzzles to win. Twin Kingdom Valley was a very advanced graphic adventure text game that simulated a living world. Every time you moved to a new location it would take about ten to twenty seconds to draw the scene for you. Oddly watching and waiting for this never got old, and you would watch it draw the scene every time. This was as close as I got to text adventures again. The world felt alive and forward planning made this a difficult game to play, but like Valhalla and The Hobbit, it was fun to wander around and do things that you normally shouldn't. As you typed your next sentence, characters would appear and leave the location, say or do things. The game was ahead of its time.
I can't remember the reason why, but one Christmas I was lent a Commodore 64 to borrow for the entire holiday fortnight. That Christmas was the most fun I think I’ve ever had playing computer games. With no interruptions I was able to dedicate the entire fortnight to the Commodore 64. I'd go to my room whenever I possibly could and load up the computer. The computer only came with a few games, but there was just enough to blow my mind with its amazing graphics and beautiful sounds. I remember playing Epyx’s Winter Games, I signed up and played all eight events and played as all eight countries into the early hours of the morning. It was far superior to my BBC computer. I gave it back after the fortnight, with no hope of owning one, I sadly forgot all about the Commodore until several months later.
We had a charity event at school and me and Greg decided to do a sponsored “playing games day” at school. I spent the whole day playing his Atari, and he spent the whole day playing on my BBC. I think it cemented my wanting to play American games as well as British games, a need that would only be fulfilled once I got a Commodore 64. We broke only for lunch, but I played Encounter, Battlezone and many Atari classic games like Pacman, Centipede and Asteroids.
There was a new boy who joined our form class at school, Thomas, and we quickly became good friends. We shared an interest in the same kind of music, he introduced me to role-playing games and we hung out most Saturdays. I later found out he owned a Commodore 64 and he wasn't that impressed with computers, mostly due to lack of interest and games. He didn't know anyone else with a Commodore 64, but I knew what the machine was capable of and later I somehow convinced him to swap his Commodore 64 the machine for my BBC model B. The Commodore had far superior games for it. He agreed to the swap, partly because I had many more games for my BBC. Whilst I did do some programming on the BBC, once I got my Commodore 64 I never did any kind of programming for years. The next time would be on the Atari ST many years later. After I did the swap, I never really saw much of him, and when we did he never ever mentioned computers again.
The games on the Commodore were bigger and better, and musically more impressive than the BBC, and even though I had initially less games for it, I was happier and it didn't take long for my games collection to grow. The BBC was essentially a black screen with coloured sprites moving around the screen. With the Commodore 64 the screens, sprites and background were full colour. And not only that but had full three channel sound, rather than the radio hiss from the BBC speaker. The Commodore 64 had been in the consumer market for a couple of years already and had a vast array of games. I had access to all a lot of second-hand games, re-releases, compilation box sets and budget games. I did find two fellow Commodore 64 owners who were passionate about games.
I began buying ZZAP64!, a popular computer games magazine dedicated to the Commodore 64 which kept me abreast of all the good and bad games. I liked the features, the humorous writing style and especially the Work in Progress articles which gave me a huge insight into how games were created. I was suddenly exposed to the inventive programming genius of Andrew Braybrook, the audio skills of Rob Hubbard and the witty insight of Jeff Minter. They did huge interviews with groups of musicians or programmers. The games I became interested in were because of the programmer or the musician who was involved rather than anything else. The reviewers of ZZAP64! actually seemed to enjoy playing the games and they weren't afraid to give good games good reviews and terrible games a shameful review. It was refreshing to see a high level of standards of journalism. Where a magazine used a scoring system out of ten, even the worst games got at least a seven. ZZAP64! used the full spectrum of scoring. I would rate ZZAP64! along with Amiga Power, Super Play, Edge and Zero as the five best computer magazines of all time. It helped that it was written by people who enjoyed the games they played and could write enthusiastically and negatively when needed. It set the standard for which I would rate all future gaming magazines.
At this stage all my computer games were originals, as I didn't know anyone who pirated Commodore games. I knew Greg copied most if his Atari games, but that was a real struggle and appeared to take technical knowledge and spending money on hardware. I knew it was easy to copy music tape to tape from friends and we didn't consider it piracy, a term that seemed alien to us.
One of the little games Thomas had (and was now mine), was a little gem called Chuckie Egg. At the time I just felt it was a relatively interesting and easy to play platformer. I already was experienced at playing platform games, and Chuckie Egg seem to look like a clone of Burger Time, which was one of my favourite games. What made Chuckie Egg more interesting and better than Burger Time was the Miner 2049er style level layouts which had areas that could only be reached by carefully examining the screen and making careful jumps. Suddenly the basic platforming skills required to collect all the corn whilst avoiding the mindless chickens became far more enjoyable. Watching and learning their simple patterns and discovering their fairly good artificial intelligence movement patterns made for an enjoyable expansion on platform games. In my opinion any new game should either be a whole new genre or bring something new to the game instead of rehashing old styles. Added to this was a generous time limit you were given to complete the level, so while I would hesitate to class this game as pedestrian, it was so well paced. If you exceeded this time limit, the big mother chicken came out and homed in directly on you and pushed you on to finish the level faster. The original game had roughly twenty levels which when completed clocked over and started you again from level one, but with more chickens. For me, Chuckie Egg was like Bruce Lee, a game where experiencing it was more important than the challenge. I didn't think either game was difficult to play. This is the game that I loved the most at the time, and despite being easy, is a game I still find time for now.
The Commodore 64 had a reputation as a temperamental and long loader when loading games from a cassette tape. Until somebody wrote a turbo loader for the machine, most games or programs took between five and ten minutes to load and there was no visual representation of whether or not a game was loading or had loaded. The screen would go purple and wait there until the program had loaded. The “loading bars” was copied from the ZX Spectrum method of loading so at least you knew something was happening. Later programmers would develop develop loading screens, and loading music as well as even little games to play as it loaded, such as Delta's Mix-e-load.
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