My favourite games
Here, I'll present a list of games that I've enjoyed over the years. I'll build up this list as I collect together the necessary information. These won't be just recent games - in fact, the two I'm starting with go back to the days of the old BBC Micro.
Elite
Well, what else
did you expect? This is a scan of the novella included with the game, from
the version I got for Christmas in 1984. Woo, that's a while back. It's
scary to think that many of the contributors on the Elite newsgroup (alt.fan.elite)
these days weren't even born when it was released..! For the uninitiated,
this was a 3D space-sim wherein you had to trade, rob and fight your way
through the ranks from harmless to elite. I particularly liked the freedom
the game gave you. It was up to you how you progressed through the game
- a peaceful trader, bounty hunter, pirate or all-out prohibited-goods-selling
fugitive. Also, if you'd got a bit of a battering in a dogfight, you could
hang back and wait for your shields to repair before continuing - though
this didn't always work! The exploration of the eight galaxies available
in the game enhanced the lifespan of the game, aided by rumours of generation
ships, space dredgers and other oddities that may be lurking on the far
side of the sun of planet Velaso in galaxy 5. Or possibly not, but we were
all tempted to go and look. Ported to just about everything, the 32-bit
Acorn version commonly known as ArcElite is now regarded as the definitive
version. From a programming point of view, though, the BBC Micro version
was an amazing piece of work. How on earth the game was squashed down into
the sub-20kb block of memory available on the BBC Micro, I don't know!
- The Level 9 Novella Homepage - Read the Elite novella here
- The Acorn Elite Pages - Acorn Arcade's Elite section
- Ian Bell's Elite pages - Half of the original authors, with many versions of Elite available for download
Exile was a huge
game released in 1988, again for the BBC Micro, but I believe it was later
ported to Commodore 64 and Amiga. If you had to fit it into a genre, I
guess it would be a platformer. The story behind the game was that you
had been sent to find out what had happened to the crew of a spaceship
that had crash landed. On arrival, the main bad guy, Triax, teleports in
and out, taking an important component from your craft, thus preventing
you from leaving. A series of tunnels opens out below the stripped remains
of the marooned spacecraft, with no sign of the crew. The exploration side
of the game appealed to me - just when you thought the playing area couldn't
get any bigger, you found another tunnel or managed to open a door that
led to a whole new section. The attention to detail also made the game.
All moveable objects were subject to gravity, bouncing and falling around
the game, or being blown by wind or blasts from explosions. Gunshots and
explosions provided a firework display of sparks. Items dropped into pools
of water splashed and bobbed up and down. The AI controlling the various
creatures and robots you met through the game was very well done. None
were too predictable or performed noticably wrong actions - problems which
still plague games today. A curious feature of the game was that you were
never killed. If you were being badly hurt, you'd be automatically transported
back to wherever you'd previously designated as a teleport point, or back
to your ship if you hadn't set a location. The game would reach a point
where you couldn't continue, as your weapons and jetpack would run out
of power, so if you couldn't jump there you couldn't get there.
Another top game from a programming point of view. Storing the game world map alone within the confines of BBC's 32K memory would be difficult enough, but then you've got the screen memory, graphics and the actual game code itself. They've definitely used some kind of magic for this one!