Halls Of The Things
I remember with some fondness seeing this advert for Halls of the Things on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the eighties. It looked like the sort of game I’d enjoy; fantasy with a hint of science fiction. And crouching! Oh, how I loved to crouch in the eighties! And being t-shirtless! It was the warm decade where secondhand cocaine abuse by stock market traders heated us all into a frenzy of toplessness. A sword! We were all armed to the teeth back then. Duran Duran might appear at any moment and only cutting off their heads could stop them. Orange stars and white sparkles! Another side effect of nearly toxic levels of cocaine in the atmosphere. What a period! Yet for some reason I never bought the game and I don’t know why. Fast forward a couple of years (okay, a few decades if we’re getting picky) and I’m now rich enough and powerful enough (and deluded enough to think I’m rich enough and powerful enough) to be able to play this game whenever I want. I’ll be honest: I was...
Terror-Daktil 4D
Browsing through some old Spectrum magazine adverts and I happened upon this little beauty for a game I’d never played before called Terror-Daktil 4D. Now, as someone with an interest in science I was particularly intrigued by the four-dimensional element to the game so decided to fire up the emulator and have a play with this Melbourne House-published title. The loading screen and a reasonable facsimile of the advert which – you’ll notice – features a heroine and not a hero! Admittedly, it’s a heroine almost bursting out of her khaki top, screaming in fear, and firing near-blindly at what could arguably be described as the scientific find of the millenium but baby steps, baby steps… The game starts with a plane ride on Lost-Jungle Airlines (not affiliated with Drowned-Civilisations Cruise Inc.) and a captain who lets us know we can smoke. Ah, the days when you could smoke on board a plane! The 1830s I think. There’s then a bit of trouble with the aircraft and cigarettes are requested to be put out. If your plane does fall out of the sky and crash into the side of a mountain, wings shearing off and fuselage folding up like a concertina as rocks and trees rip it apart then you really don’t want to compound the issue by dropping your fag and burning a hole in your trousers. The plane apparently crashes and the next thing we are treated to is a Space Invader invasion over a landscape incorporating a volcano, a river, and signs of advanced agriculture or generous allotment allocations on a vast plain. Something in the foreground lobs things towards the Space Invaders and it’s possible to move left and right. I haven’t got a clue what’s going on. The eponymous villain of the piece then turns up; the Terror-Daktil flaps a bit and flies towards you and nothing you do makes a difference. Demonstrating its ancestry with birds it then flies straight into the window/monitor and smashes it. At this point I felt the game had barely delivered on 1D let alone four of the things and gave...
1961 Magazine Adverts
I love getting my hands on old things. Vintage vinyl and magazines are such wonderful sources for a glimpse into life in the past. Forget stuffy analysis from experts or people’s unreliable memories; if you want to know how things really were just stick on an old LP and flip over a publication from before you were born. Time machine time! Things I’ve been able to discern from reading a 1961-published, American magazine aimed at adult men (yeah, you know the sort) is that: jokes back then were just dreadful, stories back then were mind-numbingly dull, but women had curves in all the right places (yay!), and magazine adverts were simply wonderful. A vacuum pump to remove blackheads! It’s a bloody vacuum pump to remove blackheads! And you wonder why Americans are all so beautiful now? It’s because they had vacuum pumps to remove blackheads people! The Korean war was particularly harsh on the number of blacksmiths in America and this advert was just one prong of the fork that aimed to poke the art of blacksmithery back into the nation’s forefront. Does that sentence even make any sense? Thoughts of blacksmithing are confusing my brain! A rare example of a rival to Disney trying to get its foot in the door but here we can clearly see a fatal mistake in the advertising process: don’t give away your best example of cartoonery for everyone to see! Old Walt didn’t like what he saw and the originator of this ad was never heard from again. Without this advert we would have no Columbo. That’s right. Relieves drunkenness in five days? How drunk would you have to have been? I mean, it takes me a little longer than it used to but I’m still pretty much back to normal in under 18 hours. Either there was a lot of alcohol consumption back then or Americans were quite wimpy when it came to drinking. I’ve been to America and drunk their beers. I think it’s the latter one. The first rule in deciding whether to response to an advert claiming to improve your English is checking to see whether it conforms to good English. I found this ad to be very, ahem, entertaing. Do you see what I did there? Well, you probably need to have pretty decent English to spot it in the first place to be honest. A new way of prayer! This way of prayer proved to be far more effective than the other way of prayer which – as you may remember from school history lessons – didn’t help anybody ever and so was introduced into churches...
Old Computer Magazine Adverts
I recently bought a set of DVDs containing a ZX Spectrum emulator, hundreds of games, videos, and magazine scans. Ah, what a wonderful trip down memory lane they’re providing. Yes, I’m enjoying playing the games – some I had and used to love, most I’ve never played (or heard of) before – and I’ve even tried my hand at some very simplistic but satisfying programming since that’s where it all started for me, but by far the most fun I’m having is reading the old magazines; titles such as Big K, Your Sinclair, Computer Gamer, and others that I remember fondly from my youth. The articles are great, the predictions are dreadful, the program listings fill me with nostalgic bliss, and the adverts… heaven! I, like many thousands of people, spent a stupid amount of time playing Football Manager for the Spectrum. As a young teenager on the weekends it was not unusual for me to stay up through the night trying to get Portsmouth out of the fourth division and winning the F.A. cup. This advert featuring the bearded visage of Kevin Toms was a common sight in the magazines of the day and it’s interesting to see that nearly three decades on he’s still working on the game, this time for the iOS platform: http://blog.kevintoms.com/ I was not familiar with System 3 Software (although they’re still going today: System 3) or, at least, not with the games promoted above but this advert jumped out at me because of the wonderfully, obviously unlicensed versions of Star Wars and Tron, Deathstar Interceptor and Lazer Cycle respectively. I think it’s the blatancy of the games that hits me most; you couldn’t get away with something like this today. It also doesn’t quite fit in with the blurb on the company’s About page which describes their “development ethos for producing truly original gaming experiences for everyone” but that almost makes it even better. I don’t know who Keith Dean was (or is) but I am quite interested in finding out whether he ever got any of the hackers he was after. I never bought the “fabulous Cassette 50 from Cascade” but I remember seeing the advert a lot in the 80s and I remember being very tempted. Fifty games! Fifty! Still, maybe I was demonstrating some of the skepticism early on that would serve me well in later life because there’s something not quite right about the description: “it is impossible to tell you everything about the 50 games on Cassette 50”. Indeed. Still, something might have been nice. Finally, Llamasoft, and the games from the mind of Jeff Minter. Who...
My Computers
For no other reason than spotting that it was the 31st anniversary of the launch of the ZX81 recently I decided to take a trip down memory lane at the computers I’ve owned, loved, and not-quite-loved and how I became the rich, world-famous web developer still waiting to become famous or earn any riches that I am today. Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K Oh, how I loved this small, warm computer with its rubber keyboard! This computer taught me to program and, since I’m a web developer these days, that means I owe it and Sir Clive Sinclair a great deal of thanks. But not money because, if you’ll remember, I don’t have any. In fact, since I knew I was getting this computer months in advance I started teaching myself how to program before I even had it, writing lines of pseudo-code guessed from program listings in magazines down in little orange notebooks, waiting for the day to arrive when I could finally realise I was way off thinking that’s how software worked. It had some issues, of course, but only if you compared it to the big rival of the times: the Commodore 64. But why would you? Sure, the Speccy’s sound wasn’t that great (single channel, BEEP heaven!) and the 8×8 sprites were limited to a single background and foreground colour which often meant blocks of colours changing as characters in games passed in front of the scenery, but even still, it was a wonderful machine. I wrote a text adventure game engine in my teens on this thing, capable of parsing input into verbs and nouns and working out valid or invalid responses; just thinking about it makes me want to do the same thing now! Note to self: do that. And speaking of games… this here is nostalgia overload, my friends: I moved from the BASIC I’d already learnt to Z80 assembly language coding, directly PEEKing and POKEing parts of the memory to do things you couldn’t otherwise do in an effort to reproduce some of the things I enjoyed playing so much but, eventually, something interesting popped up on the market and I was able to persuade my parents that it would make a lovely birthday present and Christmas present rolled into one. Amstrad CPC 6128 Gone (well, not really, but almost) were the tape cassettes of the Spectrum era as the Amstrad came complete with a built-in floppy disk drive. And not just any floppy disk drive! A three-inch floppy disk drive! None of your three-point-five inch or five-and-a-quarter inch nonsense for Amstrad users! I almost loved this computer with its Locomotive BASIC...
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