One of Claire’s rabbits died earlier in the week. They had been smelly for the past few weeks now, and when she finally got around to cleaning the hutch out, the poor thing had a huge abscess full of maggots. It was really quite something to behold. She rushed off to the vets with it, only to be told it had to be put down as they had eaten all the way through the rabbit’s abdomen and up to it’s lungs and was pretty much gonna die anyway, whatever they did. So that was exciting.
I sold some stuff on the eBay earlier in the week, so had a bit of cash to spare which I used to get some Microsoft Points. I had it in my head to get 5 Arcade games that were 400 points each, and a new song for Lips. Here’s what I ended up with and what I thought of them:
New Rally X: We used to have a game on the Vic-20 like this. You controlled a mouse and you had to run around a big maze collecting cheese and you could let off some sparkles behind you to briefly stop the rats from chasing you. In fact, it was pretty much identical in concept, only the graphics were different.
…
After a brief Google search, I have found it – Radar Rat Race. It is New Rally X, only with different graphics! Right down to the x2 multiplier and everything. Man, this brings back some memories. That music, especially. I like how it repeats FOREVER and it’s slightly off-key at the end.
Edit: This is a newer video, as the one that was there initially had been deleted.
Anyway, it was a very easy 200 points, I finished it in about an hour. I find it hard to believe that back in 1982 Namco had more faith in this game than in Pac-Man.
Shinobi was quite good fun – I’d never played this original version, only stuff like Shinobi II/III and Shadow Dancer. Still, another easy 200 points thanks to the highly abusable save system that they use in the Sega Vintage collection.
I’m still having problems with Xevious – it’s not quite clicked in my head yet. Once it does, I’m sure it’ll be completed. I mean, the high ratio of people who’ve played it compared to people who’ve fully completed it on True Achievements makes me think that I’m just not used to it yet.
Golden Axe, like Shinobi, will be 200/200 simply because it uses the same save system. While it’s aged incredibly badly, it’s more fun and more accessible than the recent Golden Axe: Beast Rider, which I abandoned and traded in before I even earned any Achievements on it because it was just so bad.
And finally, Space Giraffe. Just like Golden Axe, it’s aged badly, even though it’s a game from 2007! It’s easy to look back and see how high the bar has been raised in terms of visual fidelity though, think the original Geometry Wars compared to Geometry Wars II. The sheer amount of stuff on screen at once hinders playing it so badly – I wish it was clearer, more HD. There is a good game in there somewhere, I have faith. I picked it up primarily because I’ve been re-reading old issues of Edge in which Jeff Minter had a column detailing his development of the game. It was fascinating to read his frustration with the Xbox Live Arcade verification process, I liked the line “I could’ve made and released three C64 games in the time it took to get Space Giraffe verified!”.
Oh, and the Lips song was “1000 Miles” by Vanessa Carlton. I look forward to singing that.
You had a VIC-20 too? Oh man! Mine really belonged to my brothers but I inherited it when they moved on to better things, like the Atari ST, and girls. (I was about six at the time)
Many happy days spent loading up all manner of shit off C90s. There was a dungeon-exploring game called King Tut that used to terrify me – you were a guy with a lantern, you had to explore King Tut’s tomb and collect treasure, but your lantern would only last for so long before it went out and you were plunged into darkness. If you stumbled across a sarcophagus, whatever was inside it would come out and kill you, and there was also a massive fucking spider along the central corridor that would presumably eat you whole.
There was another game called ‘Bewitched’ where you had been turned into a key. I remember the graphics being great on this one, it was almost as if everything was in high resolution, which is something my child brain couldn’t really comprehend. Must see if I can liberate it off my parents at some point, only for it to inevitably get stashed in the loft as there’s nowhere to put it…
We didn’t have many games, in fact, the only other one I can remember is Blitz – you are a plane and you fly from left to right, off one side of the screen and back on to the other side, gradually getting lower and you had to drop bombs on skyscrapers so the ground became flat and you could land. Quite why you couldn’t just fly off and find a flat surface to land on is beyond me, and think of all the poor dead people the bombs killed, and all the people who return home from work to find their city is now a runway.
The problem with getting it out is… Do you still have a TV that is compatible?
Actually, I’m being stupid. It’s not like it’ll only work on a CRT, all televisions still have antenna inputs!