HYPNOGORIA 243 - Valhalla, I am Loading!!!

In this podcast we revisit two ground-breaking computer rpg games from the early 1980s, the era of the home micro, when the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were king - The Hobbit from Beam Software and Valhalla from Legend

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HYPNOGORIA HOME DOMAIN 

HYPNOGORIA 139 - A History of Horror Video Games Part II

In this show we look at horror on the early home computers, with ghastly games released for the likes of the TR-80, the Apple II and the ZX81. Including terrifying titles such as The House of Usher, Deathmaze 5000, Mystery House, Asylum and 3D Monster Maze!

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HYPNOGORIA 138 - A History of Horror Video Games Part I

This week, we unearth the history of horror in video games. In this episode we explore the birth of video gaming, and take a look at Shark Jaws from Atari, Death Race from Exidy, Hunt the Wumpus on the pc, and Haunted House on the Magnavox Odyssey

DIRECT DOWNLOAD -  A History of Horror Video Games Part I

Find all the podcasts in the HYPNOGORIA family here -

HYPNOGORIA HOME DOMAIN - Full archive, RSS feed and other useful links

HYPNOGORIA on iTunes

HYPNOGORIA on STITCHER

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THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Odin, Thor and Mary?

Welcome once more dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Or rather welcome back to Asgard and the world of Valhalla! Published in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum and ported to the Commodore 64 in 1985, Valhalla was, as we have previously discussed, a ground-breaking and ambitious game. It was worlds away from the legions of Jet Set Willy clones which were clogging up game shelves back then. But was the game itself any good? 

It certainly sounded like it was going to be amazing - hanging out in a world of Norse gods and monsters, undertaking epic quests, and generally being allowed to do what the hell you liked. Well, provided you could get the bugger to load that is - for the first drawback to Valhalla was a long loading time, which greatly increased the chances of it crashing.  However, once you had listened to the five  or so minutes of electronic screeching - surely a formative influence on a generation of kids who would grow up to invent acid house, techno and jungle a decade or so later - the first thing to strike you is the scale of the world. 

The game plays out in three distinct realms from old Norse cosmology, Asgard (the world of the gods), Midgard (the land of humans) and Hell (realm of the dead). Traditionally in Norse legends there were nine worlds, with additional realms for giants, elves, dwarves and so forth, but here three worlds work well enough. And just like in the old sagas, brave heroes could physically travel between the worlds. Now in the game, these worlds of possibly exciting adventures comprised of some 81 different screens, each one a separate location - as can be seen here on the map of Valhalla. Now travel between the locations was accomplished in the usual text adventure fashion i.e. typing into "go north", "go south-east" etcetera. And there were some short-cuts available too - some screens/locations had hidden "ringways" - magic portals that teleported you to another location if you possessed a magic ring. 

But there were two downsides to all of this. Firstly you really needed to make some kind of map if you wanted to avoid becoming hopelessly confused and lost. But more importantly, travelling to another location meant the game had to draw another scene. Now the Movisoft engine did so by drawing in layers - first the background, then the midground, foreground, buildings, people and any items there. Hence travelling was a bit on the slow side as it tended to take about half a minute or so to render everything. Now playing Valhalla now, this kind of thing makes the game very slow and tedious indeed, however in fairness back in the day people didn't expect things to happen super quickly quite as much, and this kind of waiting for the computer to render a new screen wasn't exactly uncommon in the early adventure games. Plus it's easy to forget now how impressive the graphics were back then, for it was only a couple of years earlier than game graphics had consisted of basic shapes such as rectangles and squares moving about. And of course there was a novelty value to watching the computer draw in each scene layer by layer too.

Now as for doing the quests, while the instructions which came with the game were good,  it took so long to travel anywhere or get anything done, many players soon got distracted and started just having fights for the hell it and generally running amuck. Which is arguably closer to how real Vikings might have behaved... Well, that was my excuse anyway. But anyhow, historical accuracy aside, the game itself had a certain sense of mischief to it anyway. To begin with you could spend many happy hours egging on various gods and monsters to fight each other, but Valhalla had some mischief of its own up its sleeve too.

Firstly as the program had a limit on how many items could be in any one location. There could only ever be eight items in one place, whether on the ground, in a chest, or in a cupboard.  And if this limit was exceeded, the game had a novel and amusing solution. For the very second a ninth item was dropped, a character cheekily named Klepto appeared and stole one!

Which item got pilfered by Klepto was entirely random, and hence it was very possible he could take one of the much sought magic items you'd been questing for if you weren't careful. Of course, should this calamity befall you, you may very well ended up typing in "Klepto is a little shit" into the game... Although in fairness, given the freedom offered by Valhalla, and bearing in mind the general character of kids, if you were playing this back in the day, you'd no doubt already been typing in every rude word you could think of. 

However this would reveal another of Valhalla's little jokes. For swearing elicited the cryptic response - "Mary is not amused".  And a small figure would march on the screen and come and give your character a slap! Now if you are thinking "hang on, I don't remember a Mary in Norse mythology!" you'd be quite right. For this character was named after a very familiar and often hated figure in 1980s Britain - the self-appointed moral guardian Mary Whitehouse. 

For many years Mrs Whitehouse campaigned relentlessly and fearlessly against swearing, sex and violence in our media, and as a result was seen by many as being more terrible than all the monsters and demons of Valhalla, mainly of course by kids who were mad keen to see all that swearing, sex and violence. Ironically, many of us only learned about the existence of some erotic TV series or violent movie in the first place thanks to Mrs Whitehouse protesting about it. Naturally when playing Valhalla, it was great fun to just bait Mary, albeit in a pixelated form. And of course, a new unintended subgame emerged - and that was trying to discover exactly how many and which swear words the game's text parser recognised! 

Now of course, it would have been child's play to have the game's text parser not to recognise any swearing at all, but a generation of kids are very glad that they did. After all, anyone who played The Hobbit really wanted to the game to recognise the command "Tell Thorin to shut the fuck up about gold". Quite clearly, the programming team behind Valhalla had played more than a few adventures and what's more understood the mindset of their target audience. Hence Mary was a fun way to allow you to swear within the game, but, and this is the clever bit, in such a way so that boring grown-ups, who had a massive downer on computer games anyway, couldn't kick off about it. Now that's real genius! 

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Valhalla I Am Loading!

Hello dear fiends! Welcome once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now then, last time we were adventuring in the long lost lands of home micro gaming, searching for treasure, slaying dragons and wishing Thorin would stop singing about ruddy gold all the time. As we discussed at some length, the home micro version of The Hobbit back in 1982 was something of a milestone in computer gaming, and a newly formed company called Legend was very keen to pick up where Bilbo and Gandalf had left off...  

Now Legend, a spin-off company from business software outfit Microl, were not a fly-by-night (or should that be type-by-night) games publisher. Unlike dozen of other software houses that sprang up around the same time - for there wuz gold in tham thar gamin' hills - Legend didn't release hundreds of titles which very often looked suspiciously similar to other hit games. Rather they released a handful of high quality titles, with their first offering Valhalla setting the bar rather high. 

Written for the ZX Spectrum, and later ported to the Commodore 64, Valhalla was a game that came in a big box that screamed "QUALITY PRODUCT", and with a price tag to match - a very very expensive for the time £14.95. Although it was re-released a few years later as a classic title, in more modest packaging and at the pocket money friendly price of £2.99.  Valhalla was created by Richard Edwards, Graham Asher, Charles Goodwin, James Learmont and Andrew Owen, and was mostly written in the common language to home micro's BASIC, with the game engine being dubbed "Movisoft", which sounded very futuristic and interactive. In fact it's a very early example of a game having a named software engine.

And very impressive it was too. Like The Hobbit there was a vast world to explore, a large cast of characters to interact with and you played the game by typing instructions into the game. The downside of this ambition was that the game notoriously took bloody ages to load - well over 5 minutes to load - which a long time even in the era of the home micro when loading a game took several minutes. As one reviewer of the day quipped "I only just had enough time to load Valhalla - let alone review it". And as with many of the larger home micro games, a longer loading time meant increased chances of the game glitching and not loading properly. I know of several folks who never got the darn thing to do anything but display the loading screen. Which admittedly was rather nice, showing a digitised version of the famous 7th century Anglo-saxon helmet found at Sutton Hoo, but not exactly as thrilling as hanging out and fighting with Norse gods and giants. 

So then, provided you got the game to load properly, what did Valhalla offer the player? Well, the goal of the game was to collect six magic objects - Ofnir (a key), Drapnir (a ring), Skornir (a shield), Skalir (a sword), Felstrong (an axe) and Grimnir (a helmet). These magical treasures could only be collected in order, hence to get Drapnir you had to have Ofnir first and so forth. And while the items were in particular locations, if you died, any you had would be taken from you and hidden in a random location somewhere in the game world. On the upside however, dying was not a big deal in a world of gods and monsters, for if you were slain, you found yourself in Hell. However in accordance with the old legends and sagas, the land of the dead as just one of nine worlds in the old Norse cosmology, and hence just as you could travel from the world of men (Midgard) to the realms of the gods (Asgard), if you had died, the adventure wasn't over, you could just walk out of the Hell and continue your quest.

Valhalla also had some rather clever features too. Those of you have know your Dungeons & Dragons (whether as a tabletop game, or one of the many computer RPGs that use its rulesets) will be familiar with the concept of a player's character having an alignment - that is to say, a defined trait which maps out their philosophy and morals, whether good or evil, an upholder of law or a devotee of chaos. Now in Valhalla, your character doesn't have the usual RPG style character sheet with stats and traits, but very cleverly the game does take note of how you behave in the game world. When you begin your character is neutral - that is to say he is classed by the game as neither good nor evil. However as play progresses, your actions are noted by the game engine and other characters in the world of Valhalla will react accordingly. Hence if you are helpful and friendly to characters on the side of good such as Thor or Odin, all characters on the light side of the Force as it were will be inclined to be more helpful to you in your quest. Likewise being chummy with the likes of Loki will earn you favour with the forces of darkness. A very cool bit of programming I'm sure you will agree, and very ahead of its time. 

However Valhalla has an even bigger claim to fame, for it was one of the very first true open world games. Now The Hobbit is often hailed as being a pioneer of open world gaming as you could head off anywhere into Middle Earth, but at the end of the day if you wanted to get anywhere at all in the game you still had to follow a linear plot that mirrored the journey and adventures in the original book. Now normally in RPG games, the world waits for you to do something and then reacts, but things were not like that in Valhalla. Here the world of the game carried on regardless of what you were doing, characters would go about their business without waiting to react to you - they would travel between the world, eat, drink, and fight as they pleased. In fact, once the game started it would essentially play itself. Obviously that's not to say it would make choices for you and you could sit back and watch the game do the quests for you. But on the other hand, events in the game weren't tied in the slightest to you doing the quests, and indeed if you just wanted to explore, hang out with the gods or get into fights - i.e. generally doing what the hell you liked - you could.

Now all of this was obviously very impressive... But technical cleverness doth not a great game make. After all, there have been many titles down the years that boasted of having revolutionary concepts, ground-breaking coding and super new spanky graphics, but in terms of actual playability have sucked harder than a Hoover on overdrive! Next week, we are dusting off the old Spectrum, praying the rubber keyboard hasn't perished, and will be playing Valhalla! 

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Shut up Thorin!

Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! This time we are continuing our explorations of the weird world of the home micro and taking a look that some games that are truly legendary. Or at least was released by a company called Legend...  

Now at the dawn of the home micro age, there was a common perception that these small and affordable computers, that didn't require a massive room filled with spinning tape wheels and an evil genius with a beard who would program it to run amuck and try and take over the world, would mainly be used for serious purposes. Such as science, education and business. And naturally as soon as the public began snapping up the likes of the Sinclair ZX81, many saw a glimmer on the technological horizon of vast empires built on writing software. And this was no mirage - indeed there was a new frontier opening based on computer publishing... 

But the gleaming city which was built on software didn't turn out to be based on accounting programs. Nor was it built on rock and roll as predicted by Starship. For despite the efforts of pioneers and gadget gurus to educate the public on the power and potential of the mighty micro, what actually happened was that people bought them and then completely failed to get to grips with them. However, the nation's kids very quickly mastered how to load a game, and very soon the software sections in shops were expanding to contain a tidal wave of games. 

Now in these early days, one of the companies formed to create and sell business software was an outfit called Microl. However at some point in 1982, Microl very cannily realised that the big money was in games, and set up a spin-off outfit solely to create gaming titles. Headed up by John and Jan Peel, this new gaming software company was called Legend. Now although there were a host of fly-by-night companies that popped up and foisted a legion of shoddy games upon us all, Legend was no quick cash-in venture and the Peels were interested and excited by the possibilities of the emerging games scene. Quite correctly, they realised that computer games weren't just a passing fad, and that the power of the home micro allowed for gaming to evolve way beyond the arcade titles of the past and become a whole new media in themselves. And from the start they were aiming for quality. In an interview with Your Spectrum magazine (see here) , the Peels claimed "We are looking for TV quality images coupled with the interactive potential of a home computer". 

Now one of the most impressive games in the early days of home micros was The Hobbit created by Beam Software in 1982. In many ways, this computer game version of JRR Tolkien's classic wasn't exactly breaking new ground - it was basically a text adventure, a style of computer game which had been around since the mid 1970s. However these earlier text games had been mainly played on computers in labs and universities, and the general public still generally thought of computer games as things like Pong, Space Invaders or Pac Man. However The Hobbit really grabbed the public's attention - to begin with it came with a copy of the original book (see! computers were educational!) and as well as the usual typing in of phrases such as "Ask Gandalf to open the door" and "Ask Thorin to stop singing about gold", The Hobbit came with pictures. Yes, they were primitive and took ages to load but they were based on famous illustrations and really brought the game to life. 

And to the vast majority of people who were just discovering the joys of computers, The Hobbit was a massive leap forward in game-play from running about overeating or crashing spaceships. Instead of repeating the same actions or doing the same tasks over and over again, except slightly quicker on each level, in The Hobbit you could go where you liked and do what you liked. Well, provided the program could understand the command you typed in. The text parser in The Hobbit was good, but it never understood the more frequent types of commands typed in by kids determined to mispend their youth, as seen below...

Now obviously to get anywhere in the game you had to replicate the plot line of the original book, and in fact you could complete the adventure in under ten minutes if you knew what you were doing (as can be seen in walkthrough videos like this one).  However there was nothing to stop you heading off in any direction you liked, and causing mayhem in Middle Earth. And this kind of freedom in a computer game was nothing short of astounding back in the day. In fact, the lure of just wandering anywhere you liked was so great, most players never found some of the notorious bugs in some versions of the game which actually made the proper adventure unfinishable! 

Now the Peels rightly recognised that The Hobbit was a real milestone in the development of computer gaming, not just in the technical sophistication of the game engine but also in the impact it had made on the public's perception of what games could be. They realised that games that let players create their own adventures, tell their own stories had the potential to be as addictive as soap operas, and thus Legend's first venture was intended to pick up where The Hobbit left off. Very astutely for their first game, they chose as their subject matter some of the very same source materials that had inspired Tolkien's famous tales, Norse mythology. And the game that resulted was Valhalla! 

Next time - we voyage to the realms of Asgard, journey to Hell, and insult assorted Norse divinites!  

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Load ""

So then dear fiends, welcome back once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now last time we were discussing the strange era that can be found at the dawn of the 1980s - the weird world of the mighty micro. And this week we are going to be making a further exploration of that land that Computing History forgot, so pull on a cable-knit jumper and prepare your best Doug McClure impression as we venture out to make battle with fearsome microsaurs! 

Now as discovered last week, the coming of the home micro promised a new exciting age of computers coming into our homes. One of the great selling points of having a home computer was that it would help kids with their school work, however in reality what had happened was that kids had managed to con their parents into buying a machine that actually would enable them to do the exact opposite i.e. help them to play Jet Set Willy instead. But why had this state of affairs come about? Why wasn't this early generation of gamers not pestering their beleaguered oldies for the latest consoles? Well dear fiends, there were a couple of good reasons for this. Firstly many of consoles doing the rounds back then were quite frankly terrible old tat (and I promise you we we will look at some at some future visit to the 'Orrible Old 'Ouse). However, more crucial (and not in an '80s Lenny Henry way) was the second reason, which we shall dub the life cycle of the console, which many kids had bitter experience swith... 

And the life cycle of the console goes like this - kid gets a console for Christmas or a birthday pressie. Said console arrives with a couple of games on cartridges. Kid never gets any more games for the console because a) they can't afford to buy another one themselves as game cartridges were so hideously expensive, b)  parents never cough up for another because they are so bloody expensive and they don't want to forever be having their wallet lightened every time a new game is required by their spawn. And there was finally c)  said console is now virtually obsolete and there are no other games in the shops anyway other than the ones the bastard thing shipped with. And so after a few months, maybe even weeks, we have a very expensive dust collector languishing in a cupboard in a tangle of wires.

"Please buy me another cartridge..."

Now bearing these grim facts in mind, how long do you think it took the kids of the early '80s to note that firstly games for micro computers came on ordinary household cassette tapes (and yes, you did need a cassette player of some sort to hookup to the computer, although the later home micros did come with cassette decks built in). Secondly, said tapes with games on cost a fraction of console cartridges - a game for a home micro could be picked up for a little as a fiver, with a more expensive title going for ten or fifteen quid. Whereas for a console cartridge you were talking a starting price of £15 a title, going up to £25 or even £30! And finally, and perhaps most important of all, we all realised that with games and software coming on ordinary cassettes - exactly the same type that we were using to tape favourite chart hits off the radio on - it was going to be a piece of piss to pirate games from hereon in.

And thus the first age of digital piracy was born! Hence after you got a home micro, it didn't take too long to end up with an extensive collection of pirate titles. Now generally most games only took up a couple of minutes of tape play time, and therefore it was quite common to acquire a long running tape, such as a C90 (which had 45 minutes of record time on each side of the cassette) and have several dozen games on one cassette. However this first wave of piracy was not without its pitfalls. In fact there were several distinct downsides to pirated game cassettes.

Firstly having a ton of games on one cassette made finding the particular title you wanted to play a bit tricky. If your cassette recorder had a counter mechanism - literally an analogue set of wheels with numbers on that turned in sequence with the tape playing - you had to make a note of when each game started on the tape and then fast forward and rewind to that position. Or you had to develop a very good ear for screechy noise of computer code and be able to recognise the end or beginning sounds of individual games. Now that might sound mental, but actually a lot of us did develop this particular wild talent and could find a game on a pirate compilation often quicker than trying to do it by a counter!

And for those of you who are too young to remember, this what happens when you loaded a game on a home micro -

Yes, back then games didn't load instantly, and the more complex the game, the longer it took. In fact some games required you to load extra bits as you went along, meaning long tedious minutes listening to more code squeaking and warbling to get to the next bit. And it was those long minutes waiting for games to load that we learned to recognise the start and end sounds of different games - for if you were addicted to playing Manic Miner, you got to hear the song of the code loading many, many times. In fact, even now, over 30 years later, I still recognise the closing few bars of the Manic Miner code...

However there were additional perils for those attempting to load a pirated game. For often there a range of variations in recording levels on different tape machines, and a similar variance in the recorded volume levels of the actual tapes. And together these variations in volume meant that you might find that some games might not be playing loud enough to load properly. Or in other cases, if you had the volume level too loud, there would be distortions in the sound that would also bugger up the loading process. To be fair, this could occur with genuine copies too but it was far rarer. However it did mean that sometimes you had to make several attempts to load a game, each time fiddling with the volume level until you hit the right one for it load. And the real pain of it was that usually it was only when the entire program had played - having to listen to minutes of electronic shrieking - that it would crash right at the end, just as the game was supposed to start. Veterans of this era often gather round campfires and tell tales of blood-chilling terror about that time they tried to get Valhalla to load...

"Get used to seeing me kid, 'cos I take AGES to load... If I load that is...."

Anyhow, once you finally got a game to load there was then another challenge for the pirate gamer. For most games back then didn't come with training levels or in-built help menus,  and so if you had a hooky copy,  you rarely had any instructions at all and hence no idea how to play the game. Now it is true that many games of this era were ports or clones of existing arcade games, but on the flipside not that many of these early games supported the use of a joystick or gamepad. And so therefore it was a process of patient trial and error... oh alright mainly frantic hammering on the keyboard to be honest, to discover what the controls actually were.

But even when you worked up what keys to move, fire, pick up stuff, or whatever, actually were  you still had the challenge of working out what the hell you were supposed to be doing. For while the first home micro games were indeed new versions of familiar arcade classics, it wasn't long before teh home micro was spreading its wings and delivering some rather sophisticated games. The aforementioned Valhalla (Legend 1983) for example was an early and highly innovative sandbox game - a huge open world set in Norse mythology and the player was free to wander where  they liked and do as they wished. However if you had a naughty copy, you were lacking all the vital background and instructions as to what you were supposed to be trying to achieve in these lands of myth. Adventures tended to not to be epics of great heroism and usually ended up as wandering about aimlessly and swearing at various gods and monsters.

However things weren't helped by the fact that once programmers of this era had grasped the concept of not simply cloning arcade favourites, they boldly set out exploring new and exciting game concepts. And while this sometimes resulted in pioneering titles like Valhalla,  many games ended up going to some very odd places indeed... And over the next few weeks we'll be having a look at some of stranger titles that were released in this era... 

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - The Mighty Micro!

Hello dear fiends, and welcome once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse ofTterrible Old Tat! Yes, after a somewhat extended winter break, we are once again open for business, charting histories of weird and wonderful relics of yesterday. Yes, welcome once again to the land that pop culture forgot! 

Now then, recently over brandy and cigars - well a cup of tea and a Kit Kat to be honest - the conversation somehow got onto the subject of rats and apples. And I distinctly heard the sound of a dusty box conspicuously dropping off a shelf within the benighted depths of the 'Orrible Old 'Ouse. And as we wondered what this aural omen could signify, a memory stirred - a 16K memory to be precise. A flashback to the days when digital piracy involved cassette recorders, and to be specific, a year when although everyone was expecting Big Brother to be watching, (although thankfully the horror of having to watch Big Brother was still decades away). Yes, welcome back to 1984 and the glory days of the home micro! 

And for those of you too young to know what a home micro is, let me briefly explain, hopefully without patronising you within an inch of your life. The 1980s saw the real birth of the home computer market. Yes, people, usually beardie weirdie people, had been making their own little computers in garages and sheds during the 1970s, but no one paid them any attention. After all, they were beardie weirdies and nerds weren't they - just bloody hippies really, excepts one too boring for drugs and who had done maths exams instead for Pete's sake. They could bugger about with circuits and microchips all they liked but they weren't going to get anywhere were they? They certainly wouldn't end up multi-millionaires and running some of the most lucrative global corporations on the planet... Oh hang on... 

However at the dawn of the 1980s, the tech had developed to a point where it was feasibly to make a small and cheap computer that you could run at home - a micro-computer. While originally these things came in actual kits where you had to solder all the circuits and built it yourself, at the start of the '80s they began to arrive pre-assembled and pre-programmed!  Now I know these days, most stuff has sophisticated electronics bunged in it, from your phone to your fridge, but back then, computers were usually huge beasts that took up entire rooms. Hence these first computers that Joe Public could buy were termed "micro computers". And the idea of having one in your own house was indeed the stuff of science fiction. The phrase "home computer" now sounds bland to the point of meaninglessness in our current age of smart devices and wearable technology, but back then it was a massively exciting pair of two words, a duo that conjured up visions of the 21st century. And if you collide this two new phrases together, we get the then cutting edge (but now almost forgotten) term "home micro".

And make no mistake it was the buzzword du jour, appearing in titles of books, magazines and TV programmes that aimed to help the public come to understand this new technology. Or at least just to shamelessly cash in on this latest fad. And to a certain extent the home micro boom that Britain enjoyed in the early 1980s was just a craze. While the home micro promised a lot - it was claimed that they would help you with the household accounts, replace typewriters, you could make art and music on them, and kids could do homework with them - in the end it was just like the earlier similar craze for CB radios, at least to a certain extent. For the naysayers were only partly right, for without that initial boom in the market for home computers, we wouldn't now have the ever-expanding array of cyber tech we have today, a world where computers kids do their homework on them, where they are used to help with the household accounting, where they have replaced typewriters... Ironically most of today's tech is powered by the samesort chips and processors that were first developed in the early 1980s. Technology 1, luddites 0!

However the brave new world of the mighty micro was a very different place to the computing landscape today. For a start off, we had the bizarre situation where every home micro on sale had its own operating system, none of which were remotely compatible with each other. You think the Apple/PC Amazon/Google grudge matches are daft? That was nothing comparing to home computing in the '80s where even different models from the same damn manufacturers had their own software and hardware. Eventually it did settle down a bit to a battle for supremacy between a handful of leading machines (with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 being the two titans of this arena), but it was still a bizarre and bewildering situation.

And no matter which system you opted for, to be honest, you still needed a certain amount of beardie weirdie know-how to get the buggers to do anything at all. But a whole generation of kids, eager to join the 21st century when we'd be zipping around in hover cars and bossing robots about, were more than prepared to learn. Now admittedly in practice this usually only extended as far as learning to type a much abused bit of code that usually ran something like this...

10 PRINT "Nobhead"
20 GOTO 10

...which explains why so often home micros on display in various shops were often displaying screens full of scrolling obscenities, and frequently ones far worse that the example quoted above. Of course, the other code we all learned went something like this - LOAD "" - for this was the magic formula make your home micro play games. And naturally that soon became the default purpose for most home micros. Oh yes, we badgered our parents with lofty talk of how a computer would help us with our schoolwork but really we just wanted to play Manic Miner. 

Ultimately however the home micro market crashed, and largely down to two factors. Firstly, as is blindingly obvious to anyone, having more than twenty competing and incompatible systems was always going to end in tears. Too many punters got by buying machines that disappeared quickly or worse still died a long lingering death due to a lack of handy hardware such as printers or joysticks and no one stocking any software for them. The second reason was the second coming of the games console - hey kids, no more messing about with bits of code, or fighting to configure a joystick to work properly - just plug in a cartridge and away you go!

However while the home micro boom was short-lived and many of its predicted benefits completely failed to materialise, one of its loft prediction did come true. And that was that a great many people - usually the aforementioned beardie weirdies and spotty kids in bedrooms - did actually end up making small fortunes from learning to code and writing programs. Well, I say programs, but in the main, it was writing games. Now some were genuine classics, such as the previously mentioned Manic Miner, while others like 3D Ant Attack pushed the boundaries of game design. But on the other hand, some people came up with very odd ideas for games... 

Tune in next time, to discover the absolute palavar involved trying to get a game to work on a home micro. and the frequently demented nonsense that present itself when you finally got the bloody thing to load!

Dig For Victory - The Glory of MINECRAFT !

Back when video games were young and dinosaurs ruled the earth, I recall that one fine day an old chum came to visit. Having tethered his pteradon, he dashed up the drive way carrying a strange black box and demanded access to my television’s rear. Despite fearing that my idiot lantern was about to be molested, I let him have his way...

...And thankfully rather than being an early form of teledildonics, that black box of tricks turned out to be was the ill-fated Sega Saturn and what he had to show me was the father of the RTS genre, the original Command & Conquer which he memorably described as “like playing with Airfix toy soldiers again... But the best thing is you don’t have to do all that tedious tidying ‘em away afterwards!”. Needless to say I was very soon hooked again on video games, and the release of the sequel Red Alert was a major factor in buying my first proper PC, and so without that game you might not be here today reading this rambling introduction.

However aside from commanding miniature plastic armies, my favourite toy was Lego. These incredibly painful to stand on in bare feet building blocks* dominated my childhood – a Lego set was one of the earliest Christmas presents I remember, and the huge crate of bricks it eventually became was the last toy to be resigned to the darkness of the attic.

Now there have been many games over the years, including the original Command & Conquer, that have in some way recaptured the love of building stuff that Lego used to deliver. However despite the extensive world building offered by many titles down the years, none have quite completely captured the joys of those multi-coloured plastic bricks, even games bearing the Lego name. That is until the dawn of Minecraft

WARNING! Reading further may lead to you never getting a single damn thing done ever again!

No, seriously! This game is probably more addictive than crack, more dangerous than cake, and more reality warping than the true black meat (the flesh of giant aquatic Brazilian centipede)!

And I take no responsibility for loss of earnings, health issues, relationship break-downs, or any other resultant conditions or circumstances stemming from becoming a minerholic after reading this review...

So with that dire warning and ad hoc legally binding agreement in place, now read on...

To quote its maker, "Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running away from skeletons. Or something like that”.

What? That’s not sold you already? Oh alright...

In my previous musings on video games, I remarked on my worries that as the hardware wars progress, with bigger and flashier consoles flooding the market on a regular basis, that little attention was being paid actual gameplay, and that the imagination and creativity of blokes hammering out code in bedrooms that spawned so many classic titles over the years was being lost in a fog of corporations and a mire of massive development teams. Indeed it would seem to appear that increasingly modern games are simply retreads of old titles in new and gaudier clothes; fifth hand ideas and concepts tarted up with graphics many times more advanced than their sources but often delivering a fraction of the gameplay of their grandfather titles.

However Minecraft is a glorious return to the days of independent development – it’s wonderfully imaginative, utterly immersive and serves up hours of fun. It’s the creation of just one guy - Markus Alexej Persson, or Notch as he is known to minecrafters the world over. It’s a sandbox game that has been released online - www.minecraft.net

- which you can play in your web browser, or if you buy it, download and play offline. And even though it’s not actually finished yet, already the game is becoming something of a phenomenon.

Minecraft comes in two flavours Classic and Alpha. Classic is available to play for free online and is an early incarnation of the game. It’s missing a lot of the features now in the current version Alpha, but it does give you a taste of what it’s all about, so do go and have a look for yourselves!

On your first look at the world of Minecraft Classic, if you’re not into retro-gaming you may well wonder what all the fuss is about as the graphics look somewhat primitive. But once you start wandering about a bit it all starts to make sense – it’s like rambling through a brand new world made from Lego; it’s colourful and slightly surreal as everything is made from blocks including the shining square sun but utterly charming.

You have an inventory of different blocks and items to build with. A left click with the mouse lets you dig by destroying blocks in the landscape and right clicking places a new block or item. Now although there are no enemies to fight or stuff to harvest and make, it is tremendous fun just messing about trying to build something. A simple pleasure to be sure, but after a few hours of arsing around attempting making a house and generally having a whale of a time, I was warming up the old credit card to get the full version Alpha.

Now Alpha, again the game randomly generates a world composed of blocks and you are free to explore, build and generally muck about to your hearts content. There are no missions, levels or any of that bobbins – you are completely free to do as you will. Of course, as the game’s title suggests, there are great caverns beneath the earth to discover and forgotten dungeons filled with goodies to loot and baddies to vanquish.

But unlike Classic, in this world you have to collect all the blocks you need, so you have to harvest wood, hunt animals, make tools, dig for ore and make all kinds of gadgets and items. However in Alpha the perpetual sunny afternoon of Classic is gone and there is a day and night cycle... And at night the monsters spawn; giant spiders and zombies that reckon you are tea, vicious skeletons that will turn you into a pin cushion with their deadly arrows, and the dreaded creepers which sidle up to you and explode, not only killing you but blowing up everything nearby.

"Sod off! I'm trying to build an aqueduct!"

When you die you respawn and there are no limits to the amount of lives you have. Now some might say that this effectively takes away any challenge, but believe me dying is to be avoided. You see, when you die you drop all the equipment and goodies you’ve gathered, which is a major pain when you’ve worked for ages to create some high quality armour and diamond tools and are loaded to the gills with precious materials. Usually most of it will be lying at the site of your death to pick up again but it is a major headache to reclaim it if that location happens to be far away from the fixed point where you always respawn and/or in an area crawling with monsters.

But while the assorted monsters provide the necessary degree of challenge for a good game, the real fun comes with the creativity. To begin with, a tremendous amount of imagination has gone into the game design, such as a very clever system of crafting different items by combining them in different patterns on a 3 x 3 grid in the inventory. And in terms of gameplay, it’s great fun to try out different combinations of things to and see what appears. But also the game really fires your own imagination – once you get your living arrangements sorted out, do you want to go exploring, delve into dungeons, start farming or perhaps build a giant statue of Homer Simpson?

The genius of Minecraft is that you can do all these things and more. It combines the best elements of RTS, god sims, first person shooters and RPGs but also manages to be a canvas for your creativity. And almost equally addictive as the game itself is looking online at what other people have created in their blocky Edens. YouTube is awash with videos of folk showing off their endeavours - for example, here's a fellow who is building a 1.1 scale replica of the New Gen Enterprise! Impressive stuff to be sure but this team project - a recreation of York Minister in Minecraft - is even more breath taking. Check out these shots - here's an exterior view and this is the choir and altar inside. However to see really see the full beauty of this epic Minecraft construction, check out this video that shows it's construction and tours the finished edifice. It is truly incredible what wonders you can create in this game!

One word of warning however, Minecraft comes with no instructions and you will need to regularly consult the Minepedia wiki to identify items you’ve found or things you’ve encountered. However I’m sure that eventually the game itself will incorporate a tutorial and tool tips. So then, when starting out I would recommend checking out this First Night Survival Guide.

Also if you want to see the game in action and gains some handy advice for how to play, I highly recommend watching SeaNanners' series of Minecraft videos on YouTube. Not only are they are wonderful introduction to how the game plays and a great source of tips, they are also highly entertaining, and often hilarious.

Dawn chez Moon

As I said earlier Minecraft still isn’t actually finished. However it is still fully playable, with the updates being tweaks and additional fun stuff. For example, a major update was released this Halloween which along with adding the ability to make jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins, introduced a whole other dimension, the Nether to travel to via magic portals. This spooky realm is the Minecraft equivalent of Hell - full of new strange creatures and resources.

And if you do buy Alpha, all subsequent updates and upgrades are free. But as the game is still being developed, Minecraft is currently going for half price which is just under a tenner. Now this is an absolute bargain, but in all fairness, it will still be a steal at £20 when it’s finished.

Why? Well it’s simply the sheer amount of time you can lose playing this game – these days most big name games are often only delivering 20 or 30 hours of gaming before the story runs out. But with Minecraft, as it’s a sandbox game, the only end is when you’ve decided you’ve had enough, and oh boy do you get a lot of game time out of Minecraft - I’ve only had the purchase version for four days and already I’ve had well over 30 hours of gameplay out of it and I’m still just getting to grips with the basics of the game!

But aside from delivering the very best value for money, Minecraft is just an absolute joy to play. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that over the years increasingly mission and level based games often end up uncompleted in my hands for the simple reason that after a while the game just starts to become more a chore than a fun challenge. Let’s be honest, often in a shooter or RTS you end up wishing they’d just ditch the *ahem* story line, which seems to involve each progressive level becoming more of a massive pain in the arse, and just let you play with all the toys in the game world.

But Minecraft let’s you completely off the leash, with the great god Notch giving you a world of your very own and saying ‘Go ahead, play!”. You make your own story in this game, and whether it turns out be a tale of being the architect of wondrous castles, a farmer, a delver in the dim secrets being the earth’s crust, or even a landscape artist, it’s never anything less than complete fun.

Call me cynical but the bigger the games market becomes it seems the less game content we are being delivered - as games studios always have their eyes on flogging you an expansion pack or a revamped version the following year. Minecraft feels like a return to the simpler values of old – born of a desire to create a fun filled game that you can happily play with for weeks rather than just a handful of hours. And this desire to simply make an excellent game shines through in the myriad ways you can amuse yourself in a world of brightly coloured blocks.

In short, Minecraft is a real triumph of rewarding gameplay over flashy gimmicks, and proof that one man with imagination is still more than a match for bloatware titles made by vast development teams. It’s also a massive victory for independent development and distribution. But perhaps best of all Minecraft is a gigantic win for gamers everywhere.

*”Put your slippers on!!!” – my Mum, virtually every day as a nipper