Summer Game Finish Plan 2016

I am unhappy to report that this year's 2016 Summer Game Completion Event has been an abject failure.

I had intended to play a complete a wide spectrum of games across all platforms, eras and genres. I wont list below what I intended to play and never even touched, but instead list what I did play and how far I got and whether I intend to at least see it to the end.

Uncharted 3 - Playstation 3
I have played the first 2 games and so knew I really wanted to finished this 3rd effort before moving on to the finale. It has been enjoyable in places, but it does compare unfavourably with the epic 2nd game. Im about 2 levels away from the ending, I think Id prefer more puzzles and set action pieces rather than endless enemy battles that just never seem to end.

Ocarina of Time - Nintendo 64
I upgraded my Nintendo 64 to a Japanese RGB modded console with an Everdrive 64 and have been enjoying great picture quality and the brilliant Ocarina of Time. I have been making steady progress but as always I am stumbling around Jabu-Jabu's Belly which is so far my least favourite level. I do intend to pick this up and continue through.

Rocksmith - Xbox 360 & Xbox One
I have put less hours into this musical educational game than I intended and feel really bad about it, especially as I bought a new guitar to go along with it.

No Mans Sky - Playstation 4
I gave this game just over 1 week, and while Id love to sell it or trade it....I am living in hope a patch or DLC turns this into something more than what it is.

Adventures in Gaming Part 12

My parents decided to emigrate out to Spain and I reluctantly went with them. Because of this I missed out on the start of the 16 bit home computer revolution, but this was no bad thing as while I lived in Spain I continued to enjoy the ZX Spectrum 48k+ and my Commodore 64 until my Commodore 64 motherboard unit had a fatal burnt out. I did eventually source a second hand replacement (at a price that was almost the same as an Amiga) in Spain, but with it acquired a huge library of games I knew of but never played before. It was an incredible haul and probably one of the most exciting times of my youth.

I spent literally months going through every tape, every floppy disk searching for games, and I was never disappointed. He had two tape drives, boxes and boxes of original games and magazines. It also came with a disk drive which was a new phenomena for me. Disk drives meant for fast loading speeds, and a spare tape drive. I had never owned one of these devices before but was familiar with how they operated due to my Saturdays spent hanging around the business computer shop where my parents bought the Color Genie all those years ago. I knew all the Disk Operating System (DOS) commands to get what I needed off the floppy disks. I also played games I had never heard of before like Sky Fox (a game which could only have been played on a floppy disk), the beautiful second life experience that was Alter Ego, and disk-based Infocom adventures like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and many others including all four of the first Lucasfilm Games. My games collection exploded overnight, and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the games he had on disk. The guy who owned the machine before me seemed to have an incredibly extensive and varied collection. I was able to load and save games and files from a floppy disk. I spent weeks and many late nights going through every file on every disk and finding hidden gems, especially when I found out later that some of the disks were double sided. The previous owner of the machine was heavily into programming and had bought an assembler development kit and programmed several of his own games, including a Crystal Castles clone which was a pretty decent effort as well as Q*Bert!

Boulderdash was a visually simple arcade puzzle game that was addictive and enjoyable. I already had the first game, and managed to find a version with a construction kit built in before moving to Spain. When I bought my second hand Commodore 64, it came with all the versions of Boulderdash that existed to that date. Boulderdash is a simple puzzle game where you controlled a tiny character digging through underground mines looking for enough diamonds to complete the level and move onto the next one. It was beautifully simple with logical puzzles that required arcade like skills. The game was all about learning the rules of the blocks and the physics, and then having the level designer exploit it, and you attempting to solve it. If you died you died because of your lack of skill not because you were cheated out of a life. Everything happened for logical reasons. What blew the doors open on this game was the construction kit. I think the game spawned many sequels and user content and the variety of this action puzzle game really was impressive. The iconic hero was a symbol of the Commodore 64. I spent many hours creating my own levels and creating levels felt more like sandbox levels than levels to play and complete. I also spent time recreating some of the more enjoyable later levels.

Hidden away on two floppy disks were the original four games made by LucasFilm Games, Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus, The Eidolon and Koronis Rift. Ballblazer was a two player “football” game that was blisteringly fast but had a difficult computer opponent. I am not sure how much skill was required to play this game, but there was no doubt about its technical performance. The game was a simple one on one football game. When you were not in possession of the ball, your craft would face the direction of the ball or the opponent who had the ball. Crashing into the other player would cause them to drop the ball and you could collect it instead. The ball would stick to the front of whoever had the possession. Once you had possession, your craft faced the direction of the opponent’s end and you could either race to the opponent’s goal and walk it into the net, or fire it towards the goal. It was a narrow goal that constantly moved so it wasn't easy. It was a futuristic version of air hockey games. It was very frenetic, fast and colourful. Lucasfilm released Ballblazer on the 16 bits and consoles, but never really made the same impact as the gameplay wasn't not deep enough to hold interest for maturing gamers.

Rescue on Fractalus is probably the finest and my most favourite of LucasArts initial classic four games released by them in the 1980s. I would go as far to say it is certainly in the top ten games for the Commodore 64 of all time. Incredible graphics and very tense action in the skies and on the planet. Looking at it now the frame rate is horrendously poor, although it was better on the Atari computers. The graphics of the mountains was stunning but did have some cheesy graphic tricks such as the spiraling colour palette when you launched from the mothership down to the planet was nothing more than a simple programming trick that anyone could do themselves. But the game played like a dream and was compelling and tense. Despite their being no speech or dialogue, there was ample room for you to create your own story and narrative. The game got progressively harder with each planet you visited. I don't think I ever died in the game, I just switched it off as the game could last for hours, and there was always other games to play.

The Eidolon was a bizarre maze game that used the same graphics engine as Rescue on Fractalus but less satisfying to play. The pace of the game was sedate and slow, but mysterious. Most memorable was the graphic style which was very H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Victorian Steampunk. The game was meant to simulate walking through the dream states of the mind. The name of the craft you flew it was called the Eidolon and it was in this that your cave maze journey was viewed from. It was a mysterious game that was full of atmosphere.

Koronis Rift is an intensely deep game that I found very difficult to get into even with the instructions. I never really explored what I could and couldn't do. It was like Rescue but you had trading elements thrown in as well. I did have many tries at playing this, and like Morpheus on the Commodore 64 as well, I struggled to make sense of this. I may yet come back to this after watching a YouTube guide. It’s amazing how much they managed to squeeze into 32 kilobytes and still manage to get such a deep and immersive game.

Sky Fox was a near future combat flight sim wherein you controlled a jet fighter that could fly above the clouds for aerial combat, and under the clouds for ground based warfare. Because of the graphics were different depending on where you were in relation to the cloud level, it could only be loaded quickly from disk which would happen fairly seamlessly when you flew between the two game levels.

Alter Ego is an almost impossible to describe game, that is best described as a life simulator. Before playing this game, I had never played anything like it before, and its fair to say nothing like it since. I knew nothing of this game before loading it, and instead was sucked into a world that had me hooked from start to finish. A floppy disk only game that was a icon and text based journey that took you from birth to death and all the possible life changing events in between. When you first loaded the game you chose whether to be male or female, then either could play a stage in the life of your Alter Ego, (I think there were five in total for each gender, giving ten in total) or play the entire “campaign” from birth to death. You could either randomly create your character’s personality or answer a series of detailed questions to define how “you” would be in the game world. You were rated on happiness, success, education, wealth and so many more things. Visually the game was white icons and text (with minimalist colours) on a black background. Everything in your life was a series of decisions, which would improve one area of your life, and weaken others. New options became available depending on your life situation, but the clock always moved on. Sometimes you had a choice of up to four different decisions of which you could only choose one. E.g. Find a job, get an education, get married, emigrate etc, once a choice was made you couldn't go back. It was a stunning game that could have only existed on a disk. It had a profound effect on me, and only wished I had learnt some of the life lessons the game was trying to teach. Although the game was all content driven, the variety and options meant the game was replayable. The game took a long time to play each module. Luckily you could save, as well as progress between the five modules and document your entire virtual life.

Crystal Castles and Q*Bert were classic old school arcade games. The guy who had owned the Commodore 64 before me had learnt to program in machine code and had written his own version of Crystal Castles. He had a lot of programming manuals and even his own machine code compiler. I was too busy playing games to pay any attention to it sadly. The Commodore 64 was an aging machine that was about to be replaced by the Amiga A500. One of the assembler programs he had was the Ocean Software development kit. I had several reference materials at my disposal should I have wanted to get into programming.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a frustrating but funny computer game version of the book which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. I knew the story, the radio play and the TV show very well, but even then without access to online guides playing this was impossible, as it had some beautifully fiendish puzzles. I did read a few hints in various magazines I had at the time which helped you through the infamous Babel Fish puzzle. I made my way further into the game and became stuck at the “Tea” puzzle, which is where I gave up. You could die extremely easily in the game, which while was humorous meant you had to reload. The game also had pre-programmed events if you typed in something and would recreate asides and funny moments lifted directly from the novel. I later read a guide and was disappointed that the game just ended when you solved one difficult puzzle rather than tell the whole story of the book, and felt the puzzles were just too difficult to be enjoyable. The game was disk only as it pulled text from the floppy whenever you typed in a command. I also later found out the tea puzzle was the last puzzle in the game and the solution was, like most of the puzzles in this game, obscure. These type in adventures were definitely games that I didn't really enjoy playing. A lot of it was to do with my previous experiences but also fighting the parser and language was half the battle. He also had Douglas Adam’s Bureaucracy text adventure which was a game deliberately designed to frustrate and annoy. I never did complete the game, and this just further frustrated me as an adventure gamer.