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Starfox: the stars are colourful

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You press a button, and wait for a couple of minutes for the view to change. You hear something shooting at you, but there are no instruments telling you from which direction. You flail around panning up, down, left and right, until you finally see some weird distorted polygon on one of your screens. If it’s in your front screen, you hit the lasers and fail to do anything since it’s already disappeared. If it’s in your back or side screens, you can see it merrily firing at you while you try (and fail) to turn around to face it. You then accidentally press the T button and see your ship rocketing off into space, with no idea where you’re going.

I’m sure I’m missing something. There must be a way of seeing where you are supposed to fly to, and then to see where things are when you get there. I was told I was near a planet, and near a fuel ship, but didn’t see either of them. I was told I was near a convoy – and saw a single ship each time.

I think I’ll stick to Elite.

Robocop: initially like a dalek

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Robocop on the CPC is a great game. Responsive, colourful, fast, full of action. It’s also pretty difficult, and relies on you memorising every enemy pattern throughout its levels.

The majority of the game is a side-scrolling platformer. Enemies include standard gun holders (walking along or appearing at windows above), chainsaw users, and flying kick specialists. The latter are pretty easy; as soon as they appear at the side of the screen, you can duck down and they will jump over you when they reach you anyway. Others need to be hit in a certain pattern at certain times to avoid taking damage; there are limited health recharge powerups, and only three lives for the whole game, so preserving health is important. On the second scrolling level (the third overall) there are bikes that you need to crouch down and shoot as soon as they appear, and even then it’s a toss up as to whether they’ll be destroyed before they hit you. I can get to the end of the third level now without losing a life, but only just.

The second mission is a shootout, where you need to hit a kidnapper without hitting the hostage he’s hiding behind. The fourth mission is a photofit game where you need to match up parts of a face. The fifth mission is another side-on platformer, but now you can walk up stairs and the screen scrolls vertically as well as horizontally. I don’t yet know about levels past this, because the enemies keep killing me as I walk up stairs.

Robots are very slow at walking up stairs.

The game is similar to the spectrum version but 34,218% more colourful.

I must admit it took me a while to even know I could walk up the stairs. In the first couple of scrolling sections, you can’t, even though the stairs look exactly the same as they do in the factory level. To walk up stairs you need to be in the correct spot and then press diagonally up, meaning that you are pretty vulnerable to enemies who aren’t standing obligingly at the top.

So it has some foibles, but it’s also a really fun game. I think I have found an exploit on the first and third level, though. The game can only cope with five sprites at a time, meaning that if you can shepherd four enemies along with you, no others will appear. Most enemies will come in from one side, shoot at you or hit you with a chainsaw, and then walk back to the side; they’ll then come back in to get you again. If instead you just walk along behind them, they’ll carry on walking away from you all the way to the end of the level. If four of the flying kick people are clustering you, you can just keep on ducking their attacks and walking along when they’re off screen.

Chase HQ: completed!

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Everyone remembers the synthesised speech of “Let’s go, Mr Driver!”, but in fact there are other sayings in different levels; the one that I noticed as I played through today was “Giddy up, boy!”. I wonder how many people have heard the full set.

Chase HQ on the CPC is one of the best 8-bit computer arcade conversions of all time. Comparing it to the arcade machine there are obvious differences – smaller sprites, digital controls, less accurate handling and lower framerate – but given the constraints of the hardware the game plays amazingly well. I remember when we first bought the game, on disk, from the basement of Hamleys in London – I’d read the review in Amstrad Action and knew it was meant to be good, but when we got home and I played it for the first time it was better than I could imagine. So colourful, so fast, and speech as well. Amazing.

There’s not so much amazement nowadays, since we can, if we want, play the actual arcade game emulated on a computer, and driving games like Need for Speed Most Wanted have provide a more coherent ramming-the-baddies experience. Nostalgia is still a powerful thing, though.

Getting the game to run wasn’t easy. I had a CPC core in RetroArch, and Caprice32 as a standalone emulator. The latter crashed immediately on startup. The former worked fine, until I loaded the game in – and found that it was a pre-hacked disk file which offered me the option of infinite time and infinite turbos. I didn’t want these, so pressed “N” … and found that the keyboard didn’t work. To be exact, some of the keys didn’t work – they’re mapped to RetroArch shortcuts – and some did. I could get into the game by choosing “O” (for ‘oui’) and the “W” key seemed to be mapped to RETURN. Once in game I could use a joypad, or the cursor keys (with X changing gears and A operating the turbo). The joypad was OK apart from the fact that the accelerator was mapped to UP on the d-pad, which got a bit painful after a while.

I committed to only using three turbos per stage, and roughly timed 60 seconds to get to the criminal and then another 60 seconds to take them out. I think I just about managed it, but it’s hard to be sure.

Who puts massive columns at the side of the road anyway?

The game is still great, if a little samey after you’ve completed the first few levels. There are five in total, and the only thing that seems to change is traffic density and the length of the stage – meaning the last level is pretty tricky to complete. Well, complete in the right time limit anyway. I’ll try to find an unhacked ROM and try that one out next time.

Pinball Dreams: frighteningly accurate

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When I went to Arcade Club for the RLLMUK anniversary meet last year, I spent a little time on pinball machines, completely failing to get the ball anywhere I wanted – and when I did, I was never quite sure if I was meant to get there anyway. Pinball machines can be very confusing in terms of which routes you should be hitting and how to gain the jackpot. The overload of flashing lights and sounds doesn’t help.

Maybe that’s why I’ve generally preferred videogame pinball. It is often much easier to see where the targets are, the tables can often tell more of a story, and everything’s a little calmer. The extremes of this come to Sonic Spinball, which is hardly a traditional pinball game at all, and Super Mario Ball, where the game is almost adventure-like. A lot rests on the physics of the ball, and whether it’s realistic. Sonic Pinball Party was pretty good apart from the fact the ball felt too light and floaty. Pinball on the CD-i, which was probably the game I played most on that machine, was far too fast and skittery. Pokémon Pinball was a little slow. In recent years, I’ve played a bit of Zen Pinball, which is well known for its accurate ball physics but is a bit too faithful to real pinball tables for my tastes.

I remember sitting in Kevin’s house one afternoon, back in around 1993, and him showing us Pinball Dreams on the Amiga. We took turns in playing on the four different tables, and I remember being really impressed with how realistic it felt, while also being a bit frustrated with the fact that sometimes you couldn’t see far enough up the table to know where you should be aiming. Background graphics indicating the pathways were OK to a point, but I made some shots which narrowly missed the openings. Still, it was excellent and I came away very impressed. I played Pinball Dreams on WinUAE a few years ago and those memories came flooding back: this was probably the best videogame version of pinball, with clearly laid out tables, great ball physics, and a great competitive element to it. At the time I had a Mega Drive and a CPC on which to play games, and neither had a pinball game that could match it.

That’s quite a preamble but by now you may have joined the dots. Pinball Dreams, CPC, couldn’t I just have bought the port which you’ve no doubt seen in the cover image? Well, no. Pinball Dreams for the CPC is an official conversion which was released in 2019 – initially intended for a commercial release, but after that fell through it was freely distributed. With such a late release, the team behind the game has been able to make use of all manner of clever tricks to get the game running, and it’s an astounding success.

All four of the tables from the Amiga original are included, with the game requiring 128k and a disk drive to run. There are obvious graphical compromises – the CPC can manage at most 16 from a selection of 27 colours, and the tables are significantly more zoomed out (I understand to allow for a more limited scrolling requirement). Yet the physics and controls are spot on, feeling accurate and realistic throughout. There has been only one occasion where the physics model went a little wonky, with the ball balancing on top of one of the bumpers.

My favourite table is probably Beat Box, with Nightmare a close second. Both of these have some clever routing of ball paths around the table, and Beat Box in particular has a good variety of targets. There is actually a real benefit to the tables being zoomed out, as alluded to above – you can get a much better feeling for where to aim for.

I am still pretty hopeless at the game, mind. I managed to get fourth place on the high score table for Steel Wheel once. More practice is needed.

Switchblade: exploring the caves

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Switchblade was always touted as one of the great games on the GX4000, using the power of the console over the standard CPC version and benefiting from instant loading.  Given the size of the map, that's not surprising; the disk version certainly seems to chug regularly.  Despite having owned it for many years, I've never given it a proper go beyond making sure that the cartridge worked.  Over the Christmas holidays I had some time to rectify that.


The first thing I was surprised about was the accuracy of controls. When playing many 8-bit games, there's a noticeable lag in inputs, and games are often designed to allow for this.  Some games did this better than others - Titus the Fox, for example, allowed a bit of leeway in jumping.  That's not the case here, but the response to inputs is instant, making you feel much more in control.


The second thing I noticed, after playing for a while, is how complex the game is.  It's packed with puzzles, in terms of finding new rooms, finding ways to attack enemies without taking damage, and exploration.  I originally thought that the fact that enemies can't attack you while you're standing on a crate was a limitation of the game, but in many cases it's the very basis of the puzzle.

That's not to say that the game isn't an action-based title.  I've not completed it yet, because the five lives you start with don't last long when you're being attacked.  I shall try again, though - each time I play I get a bit further.  I may need map paper soon though ...

Meanwhile, I loaded up an emulator to take some screenshots, and took the opportunity to compare the GX4000 game to the CPC version.  As I said above, the disk version seems to chug a bit more, which may be loading, but the main difference is the visuals.  Look at them, it's an astounding change.



(GX4000 is the top, standard CPC is the bottom.)