SNES Review 118: Spectre

Originally Spectre was a Video game for the Apple Macintosh, developed in 1990 by Peninsula Gameworks and published in 1991 by Velocity Development. It was a 3D tank battle game basically something on the lines of the old arcade classic Battlezone by Atari (which came out 10 years earlier in the 1980's), the game did very well for itself which is proberbly why around 4 years latter a SNES version was made. I guess this is a bit of a pleasent change in a way seeing a game make its way from the Apple Macintosh on to the PC after I have coverd so many Amiga games which made there way to the SNES. Well the Macintosh game scored rave reviews.

The SNES version of the game was made by a company called Synergistic a video game developer founded in 1978 who fitting started out by publishing some of the earliest available games and applications for the Apple II family of computers. They continued developing games for various platforms into the late 1990s making 4 SNES games in total this being the second game they made for the platform (the only one I own and therefore proberbly the only one I will be reviewing).

Ok so there is basically no story to this game to explain so I guess I will just have to explain what it is that you do. Well you play the part of the pilot of a tank called a Spectre tank. This is not just any old tank the Spectre can do more than youd expect sure it can fire normal rounds but it can also shoot  powerful grenades, it can also do things you really wouldnt expect a tank to be able to do such as jump, and warp into hyperspace to quickly get far away from enemies. Using the Spectre you go from level to level progressing by collecting a certain number of flags while enemy robot tanks attack you, the higher a level you get the more intellegent, quick and strong the enemy tanks get.

The Games graphics although done in a 3D style are incredably basic, the floor is basically a never ending chess board and the only diffrence between levels is the colour of half of the squares (half are always black). You have large geometric shapes cubes, spheres, and pyramids which are all colorful, enemy tanks basically look nothing like thanks though, essentially they look triangular a bit like one of those flipper robots you see so often on Robot Wars.

Other than the enemy tanks, the flag you need to collect, and the various shapes the stages are barren. There is literally nothing else too see, so its quiet a bland game really once youve seen one level you have pretty much seen them all, things might get tougher with enemy tanks being faster or smarter but they never look any diffrent.

The Sound in this game is hardly worth a mention there is some very basic background music that is ominous and fitting I guess but it also is not the best as far as quality goes, its kind of painful. The sound effects are basic in the extreme there are pretty much only like 4 sound effects the sound of your tanks gun firing, the sound of something getting hit and the sound of you getting hit and thats about your lot apart from well there is a robot voice which says game over and level complete and such but it sounds super muffled. All in all though the sound is not much of a selling point for this game at all.

There is one single player mode and four multiplayer modes to choose from. The single player mode I have basically all ready talked about in discussing how the game works, as for the multiplayer well there is one where it's you and a drone vs. a friend and a drone which is basically 2 on 2 capture the flag, a free for all where the winner is the one who destroys the most tanks, a mode where the one who captures the most flags wins and then finally ''Allied Assault'' which is just basically a 2 player co-operative version of the single player mode.

One of the biggest issues with this game is that it came out a whole year after StarWing/StarFox came out, and it compares very very poorly to that game, sure the graphics in starfox might mostly just be diffrent shapes but they are put togther in a wide variety of ways, each level looks diffrent, the enemies look diffrent, the thing is playing this game has just made me think even more about StarFox about how much it did right about how it pieced togther every little element in a way which produced well video game magic, everything just slots togther perfectly to make somthing thats much bigger and brighter than its elements this just doesnt happen with Spectre.

I yet again have to give another game a solid average 5 out of 10, look the game is fun in short doses and doesnt really do anything that badly, but things could just be so much better and there are much better titles for snes collectors and players to buy, sure if you see this for about £5 and want to give it a shot then go for it, but its really not worth going out of your way to track a copy down or paying through the teeth for it.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Yie Ar Kung Fu and Kickstart 2

 So its back to my list of Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games again, so here is another two games from my top 10. So without further ado here we go.

3: Yie Ar Kung Fu

Yie Ar Kung Fu was a pretty well known arcade gamebut I think it was possibly even more popular as a computer game the original arcade game was by a Japanese gaming company I am sure you will have heard of Konami, and it needs to be said that Imagine did a great job adapting the game to the humble spectrum. I need to admit that there is one thing that really made me keep coming back to this game and its something that people really wouldnt think of nowdays and thats loading time. Some spectrum games could take what seemed like hours to load and could feel like they just were not worth it, Yie Ar Kung Fu not only was great to play it also loaded fast as anything which back in those days was important.

The scenario of the game is a simple one. You take control of a young kung fu fighter called Oolong who wants to follow in the his fathers footsteps honouring his family name by becoming a Kung Fu Grand Master. To do this Oolong must fight and defeat a large mix of diffrent fighters with diffrent styles and in some cases weapons. The story might be simple but it just feels so well so much like a proper Kung Fu film turned into a game, the characters you face all seem to fit in the moulds of characters you would see in one of those old dubbed kung fu movies and well it just makes it feel great, youd think that with just one attack button and one stick your moves would be rather limited but when playing the game it doesnt feel this way at all. You have a roundhouse kick, a leg sweep, a body punch and leaping punches all of which you use to strike your opponent and deplete there energy bar before they can get you. You had 5 lives to try and defeat all of your opponents with and beating each one of them seemed to very much be a case of learning the way they moved and learning stratergies to cope with them. Its a very enjoyable game as you always seem to get a little bit better, the more you play the more you learn and the further you get.

Modern players might find this game a little basic in a post Street Fighter 2 world with combo's and special moves and a large choice of player characters but dont let these things put you off trying the game, it has a great character to it and it a great feel, I would love to see a modern sequel that takes the same sort of characters and feeling as Yie Ar Kung Fu but throws in all of the modern trimmings of the one on one fighter that we have gotten so used to, the combos and special moves

4: KickStart 2

Kickstart 2 is a motorcycle  racing game, it is obviously the sequel to Kikstart but this is where I have to admit that I have never actually seen or played the original Kickstart so I cant say if its a big improvment over the original or not, what I can say is that I really like this game but then I guess thats obvious with this being on this list. The game is very basic you control your bikes braking and acceleration, you also hop and pull wheelies and you do all of this in order  to navigate across a course of various obstacles including ramps, tyres, gates and telephone boxes. You have to learn how to make the best time on courses by knowing how your supposed to deal with diffrent types of obsticals, for example you need to travel slowly across wooden beams, but if you go too slowly over the tyes then you will be thrown off your bike so you need to go over those quickly. I guess this game has two things in common with the above Yie Ar Kung Fu one of them is the fact that you have to learn how to handle things be they opponents or situations and that the more you learn the better you get at the game and the other is that KickStart 2 is a very quick loading game, I used to be putting this game on all of the time because it was good and it took a fraction of the time to load that most of my games did.

If I was to try and explain to a more modern gamer what KickStart 2 is like I would say imagine an older more primative version of Trials HD, you can actually see how simmilar they are Trials is just sort of the same idea taken to its natural point of progression.What can I say though I love Trials now and I loved KickStart back then, and heck for all of the time that has passed I still think the gamkes not too shabby.

SNES Review 117: Zoop

So usually when I am looking to do a SNES review I am thinking about the story behind the review, sometimes its a story about how the game first came in to my life, did I own it as a kid or did I play it at a friends, but I have nothing here, I have to admit that I didnt as far as my memory goes ever see any footage of this game back in the old games magazines of the time nor do I remember seeing it in shops.

In fact the first I ever saw of Zoop was when I brought it for the megadrive basically just because it was cheap, in all honesty I didnt at the time even realise that it was multiplatform, it was in fact very multi-platform as it was on the Game Boy, the Game Gear, the MegaDrive/Genesis, the Atari Jaguar, the PlayStation, the PC (MS-DOS), the Macintosh, the Sega Saturn (only in Japan) and of course because I am talking about it here as a part of my 150 Super Nintendo Reviews project I think you have figured out that it was on the SNES.

So Zoop is a puzzle game and it was developed by Hookstone Productions, a video game company I can actually find very little information about they were a UK-based video game development group which was apparently active from 1994 until around 1998. As far as I can find out they were only ever responsible for this game Zoop, a game called Sentinel Returns and then a game called Ferox which was cancelled before being released. So its not like there is a whole pile of past or future games that were made by the same people for me to compare it to, I guess ultimatly as a puzzle game it will be compared to the likes of Tetris, Dr Mario and the various other puzzlers which have stood the test of time and leap straight into the average game players mind.

Ok so lets try and explain what you do in this game, I will try to keep it basic but I think its actually a rather hard game to explain. You control a triangle in the center of the screen you move it around the center area making it point in diffrent directions. To start with a piece comes in from one of the sides of the screen and if there is a piece in its way it pushes it, your not just watching one part of the screen though, two consecutive pieces will never come in from the same angle,it might come from the left or right or top or bottom of the screen and if a piece falls into the center square, the game is over.

You will notice that your triangle starts as one colour well if you shoot a piece of the same color as your triangle,well then it will be "zooped" (disapear)  and you will gain points for this. If the piece you shot is green and your triangle is green then youll destroy it, if the piece behind this piece is green youll destroy that too and so on and so on until you meet a diffrent colour. If you shoot a piece which is a diffrent colour to you, well then you wont make it disapear youll simple turn your triangle into whatever the colour you have just shot is. So if your triangle is green and you hit a green and theres another green behind it and then a red behind that you will eliminate the greens and then your triangle will turn red hopefully that makes sense, once you have played for a handful of moments it soon becomes second nature.

This all sounds pretty basic but the more pieces you can zoop in one go the more points you score, whenever you zoop the required quota for a level the game will speed up, and then there are special pieces which come into play including a proximity bomb and a line bomb and colour bomb also as the game progresses distracting backgrounds are purposly added in to try and up the challange factor this was used as a unique selling point for the game and was referd to as opti-challenge graphics, I could see some people liking this and it clearly pissing other people off, I found myself kind of falling in to the middle of this sometimes I find it annoying and sometimes my brain just seems to filter it all out for me

The sound effects in the game are kind of cartoon inspired and the music well I think at first it is catchy but soon it will make you want to pull your own ears off, yes it does that good old puzzle thing of seeming to try to be tense when the gameplay is tense but it just doesnt really cut it for me, add on to this that the graphics are just about as basic as they could possibly be, sure everything  moves smothly and its quiet a bright game but there is nothing here that tests the system in even the slighest way. I am not going to say that the game cant be fun in small bursts but its just that there are much better puzzle games out there than this, it is fun ismall dozes but its ultimatly a forgetable experiance, there is a reason you hear people go on and on about Tetris and Dr Mario and Bust A Move insted of Zoop. I would give this game a very average 5 and would say not to buy a cart of it unless you can get it for about £5 and then only if you like puzzle games as this is very unlikly to be the game to convert someone who is not a fan of them.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Fernandez Must Die and Rockstar Ate my Hamster

So I said I would do a Top Ten list for my top 10 favourate microcomputer games and then I stopped and thought about it, the truth is very few people will have played enough games across all of the various Microcomputers to really do a list that takes every machine and all of the games for it into consideration particularly not if you are the age I was when those machines were popular. You see back then you picked a machine and you were pretty much loyal to the core it was like joining a tribe, you picked your machine and at the same time you picked where your loyaltys would lay, sure you might play one of the others if you visited a friends house and he owned a diffrent machine but youd never admit that anything on it was better than what you had at home, the majority at least would make out that they were just making the best of a bad situation playing on this rival machine. My older brother had a BBC micro, and I had friends with both Amstrad and Commodore C64's but I dont feel I have really used them enough to fold them in to this, plus there are so many other lesser known micro's so I thought what the heck I should just stick to what I know and make it a Sinclair Spectrum Top Ten, then I realised that if I just did a list which went Game 1, 2 ,3 etc well I might be talking abouyt games people have never heard of. So what I have decided to do is slowly work my way through my Top Ten list 2 games at a time, every time I make a post on this subject I will talk about 2 games trying to give both a rough idea of what the game is about but also how/why it has made its way on to my list, so here goes. I am not going to put them in order because well thats too hard, oh and this is my list its not set in stone, other people would argue with it and heck in a year maybe even a months time then I very well might argue with it after all most top tens are very much based on what you think and feel at a set time. Lets kick things off with the first two games I want to talk about

1: Fernandez Must Die (1988)

 Ok so what we have here is a Commando style action game, if it moves then you kill it, you shoot with your machine gun, you throw grenades, your mission is to destroy 8 enemy bases and ultimatly to find General Fernandez and kill him. On the way to getting him your going to have to kill buckets full of  soldiers and destroy tanks and battleships. To help you there are some planes that fly over head and drop first aid kits and there are jeeps you can jump in which make you faster have a more powerful gun mounted on them. The game is best played in two player mode, it has great graphics for a game of its kind on the spectrum platform, it might be a bit of a brainless blaster but its a darn good one especially when you grab a buddy and jump right into it. I spent a great deal of time playing this with my friend Andrew when I was a kid both on my Spectrum and on his Commodore 64. If I remember correctly he got the game first, he brought a genuine copy from somewhere and then shortly after this I actually got the full game on one of those magazine cassettes you used to get for the Spectrum, the ones that usually had like 4 to 8 games on them, getting it so cheap with both a magazine and other games well it kinda felt like winning money on a scratch card. It has ended up on this list partly because its just a darn fine game and partly because I have awesome memories of it which have stood the test of time.

2: Rock Star Ate my Hamster

Ok so how to describe Rockstar Ate My Hamster its a very unique game, unlike most brilliant games it has never really been copied and this only makes it an even more special little gem. I guess youd call it a parody management strategy game, as in the game you are basically managing a Rock Band trying to get them to the top of the charts but its full of jokes and parody names and doesnt take itself very seriously at all and this makes it a brilliant bit of fun. Its all menu driven and basically all you do is make decisions, who do you want in your band, what kind of venue will you play at, how much will you charge for tickets, what are you going to call the songs on your album. Yes it might sound incredibly simple and on one level it is as all you really do is make choices and then sit back and see what the results are but it sucks you in, it makes you feel like your band is real and your decisions really matter and because of its tone and jokes it keeps you laughing all the way which is an amazing thing, so many games claim to be funny or to have comedy elements but in all honesty very few games are really gut bustingly funny and at this time this game really is. I played this game with everyone, I played it with my friends, with my brother, with my mum and I even played it for hours and hours on my own. This makes it on to the list not just because it made me laugh or because of the countless hours I invested in to it but also because I think its a very special game in that there is nothing else quiet like it out there even all these years latter it is still one of a kind.

Hammer: Dracula Prince Of Darkness

So with Hammers first Dracula film we had Chrisopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, then we got a second Dracula film the Brides of Dracula which featured Cushings Van Helsing but didnt actually featuring Christopher Lee or anyone for that matter as Dracula and so after that we got the third Hammer Dracula film, Dracula: Prince of Darkness which saw the return of Lee, this time without Cushing (with the exception of scenes from Horror Of Dracula featuring him in the prologue). I saw this film originally years ago when I was quiet young, I however recently watched it and felt that I would like to review it as a part of my series of Hammer reviews.

Ok so I try to keep things spoiler free but if you havent yet watched Horror of Dracula and dont want that film spoiling then skip this paragrape as the start of this film is the end of that one. The film starts with a prologue which replays the final scene from Horror of  Dracula, in which Dr. Van Helsing destroys Dracula by first pulling down the curtains and then using two large candle sticks to act as a cross, a cross which he uses to push Dracula back in to the sunlight that is coming through the window which kills him. These replay is accompanied by voice-over narration which tells of how Van Helsing was able to end Dracula's  reign of terror making him nothing more than a dreaded memory. I really like the way this is done, it really conects this film to the first one, it also reminds you of just how brilliantly that film ended, what once was a great ending now serves as a really awesome high impact start to this film with the naration adding a certain freshness to it, personally I think this was an awesome way to open the film.

The main story doesnt feature Van Helsing at all, it instead tells about how Dracula is reserected and then gives us a new set of characters to go against him, the closist to a Van Helsing style character being Father Sandor who goes from visiting an inn and warning four English tourists to stay away from Dracula's castle to eventually offering those who have escaped Dracula sanctuary and help to defeat him. I dont think he is as good as Peter Cushing however Andrew Keir plays Sandor well and makes him both a believeable and intresting character, you feel that he is just as knowledgable and willing to fight evil as Helsing was but he in my mind at least just doesnt feel as formidable a foe, he doesnt feel like Dracula's natural equal.

I guess your expecting me to go on and on about how wonderful Christopher Lee is now or how much I miss Peter Cushing?  Well I do and dont miss Cushing there was a nice little bit of seeing how cool he was at the start even if it was purly a recap and reused footage, yes its great to see Helsing against Dracula but its intresting to see how Dracula deals with and relates to other diffrent people. Now I find it important to note that the Dracula seen in this film is kind of diffrent to the one seen in the first movie for a start Dracula does not speak in the film, he gestures and looks and hisses apart from the hisses its almost like a silent movie portrayel of Dracula but just like with a silent film Chrisopher Lee manages to speak a thousand words with every look with every movement, he might not talk but he speaks volumes with his acting.

 According to Christopher Lee: "I didn’t speak in that picture. The reason was very simple. I read the script and saw the dialogue! I said to Hammer, if you think I’m going to say any of these lines, you’re very much mistaken."^{, this account was contradicted by the} Screenwriter Jimmy Sangsterwho claimed that "Vampires don't chat. So I didn't write him any dialogue. ''Personally I can think of a whole bunch of reasons Dracula might not talk in this film from a story point of view, maybe it was because of how he came back, maybe meeting his end and then being reserected effected him, or maybe he just didnt find anyone worth talking to that he met during this film. If it is true that Lee read the script and the dialogue was poor then I say that it was a good call on his behalf to decide that less was more and say nothing instead pouring everything in to his almost silent performance.

I didnt enjoy this game as much as Horror of Dracula but I actually have tio say that I think it was better than Brides of Dracula and certainly well worth a watch.

what it was like to be a gamer in the 80's

So when you talk about retro gaming lots of people will get an idea in there heads a picture of what you mean and usually they are going to think about old cartridge based console systems like the NES, the SNES, the MegaDrive/Genesis or maybe even slightly newer CD based systems such as the playstation the GameCube etcetera but there is so much more out there. The importance and the popularity of the NES back in its day in the United Kingdom is often overstated, people try to make out that the machine was highly supported over here, the truth was that not many people had them, if you walked in the average british house you were far more likly to be met with the sight of a micro computer a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commadore 64, an Amstrad or some other such type of machine. The truth is that if you were to see a console it would more than likly be a Master System in fact proberbly a Master System 2. The NES as a system is far more popular now in the UK as a retro console than it ever was as a current machine. Most video game fans my age will have grown up with a draw full of microcomputer tapes not NES cartridges and yet hardly anyone seems to celebrate or collect these in anyway close to the same way.

This is not the first time I have talked about this, if you have been a long time reader of this blog then you might remember me writing an article saying that the first school yard arguments were not about if you were pro MegaDrive or pro SNES they were in fact over which microcomputer you had chosen to support. When you talk to most people now though they tend to make out that they were really into Nintendo, that they owned a NES that all of there friends owned Nintendo Entertainment Systems and that they were massive in the UK, in fact you could argue that the whole history of the video game market back then steams to have been painted over it seems to have been washed away and replaced with this false spin doctored image of what things used to be like, an image that makes us appear well more American. Why is this are we as a group ashamed of our own Video Game heritage, do we feel silly and think that we backed the wrong horse? If you look at the figures for how many households in the UK actually had a NES the highest estimates put the machine in 12% of UK houses.

I think it needs to be rememberd that the humble Micro actually had some advantages over the NES, no I am not going to push how it had a keyboard and you could do programming or any of its uses as a computer why? Well thats simple its because other than a little bit of messing around with programming here and there thats just not how I or any of my friends or aquantances used there Microcomputers. Nes carts were very very expensive, when I saw them new I remember them being about £50 which now as an adult does not sound that much as we all pay sums around that level for brand new games on modern consoles but remember £50 in 1986 money (The year of the NES's UK release) is technically speaking a lot more money than £50 in current cash, they also were not anywhere near as wildly available as Micro games. I owned a Spectrum as a kid, at first it was a old hand me down 48k spectrum but then one Christmas this was changed to a brand new 128k +2 model, and where did I get my games from? I got my games from darn near everywhere. You could get games in Boots the Chemist, you could get them in Game stores, deparment stores, and newsagents, you could get them pretty much everywhere. It wasnt just the availability though it was also the price sure some real big deluxe Spectrum games in big boxes with stuff thrown in could go for as much as £14.99 but they were absolutly piles and piles of games for as little as £1.99.

People might argue that the NES games were bigger or more technical than home computer games and I guess some of them were but were they always better? The honest answer is not really, there were plenty of great games on microcomputers, I would list some here but just trust me, I am holding that back for a future top 10 Micro Computer Games post. I am not here to slag of the NES or anything but I just think its about time people stop and admit that the NES wasnt the champion here that it was in the United States, it was a minor note in the sidelines of our video game history, but I dont think we really lost out, most people were busy playing other things and thanks to things such as Mario All Stars and then things like the Zelda gamecube Collectors disc and various virtual console releases and the NES mini most people who didnt experiance these nintendo games back then have now gotten to see the classics that our American friends grew up with.