Modern Games Suck

Okay games today look rather better, but in the days of the CPC, they had to write every game by hand in Assembly and draw every single shape and so on. These days there are graphical frameworks, game libraries and all sorts, as well as friendly higher level languages such as C++ and Python. Games should be easier to write than ever.

Today when I see young kids have a games console and only 20 games, often far less, I think that the state of the games industry today is rather pathetic. Games are just too expensive, too complicated, with too much money spent on marketing and advertising to force the message down kids' throats that they really must have Halo 2, rather than a competitive market where you would get ten cheaper games at the same price. The result is that many modern games require lots of solitary time spent on them before you get anywhere (to give the impression that the high cost was worth it), so kids play alone in their bedrooms for hours and hours on end.

The best computer games are accessible and can be enjoyed out of the box, these games encourage social interaction, all the family can gather around to see what it does and have a go, then next week you can get a new one.

CPC Games were great

We had hundreds of CPC games scattered around in piles on the floor and stored in large fruit boxes. Our family bought almost every major CPC game (we often bought several every week during the key CPC era), cassette games were like £1.99, you could often get them for less. Okay the purchasing power of £1.99 in the 1980s was higher than today, but the dollar was also far far higher than it is now; you also expect better value over time rather than worse. Random aunties could easily afford a game (presumably picked out for them) as a present to the three boys, and they were affordable with any money we happened to obtain (pocket money was not invented then).

I am hoping that the GP2X is the first sprouts of a new age of open gaming hardware. Open Source has not yet managed to break through massively in gaming, although there have been encouraging attempts. How we combat the branding and brainwashing I'm not sure, but fun has a lot to do with it, and once we have great open source games for open minded kids to enjoy; we can let the rich fat kids waste their money if they want. You can take a horse to water, but you cannot force it to stop moaning for carbonated sugary drinks that it has seen on TV.

The CPC in 2007

A guy called Ulrich Cordes, wrote a CPC emulator called cpc4x, available from here. It is a really nicely written emulator, and it ran fine on Gentoo and Ubuntu Linux. The Function keys provide control over the virtual machine, for example, F3 allows you to feed it a disk image. I have been using it avidly and all the screenshots in this post were taken using this program.

Here is the welcome screen, when you flick the on switch then you get this instantly, no booting, no BIOS or other PC nonsense:

Hello World is a bit boring so here is a little cow instead:

CPC Games

There are loads of disk images of these old obsolete games on the Internet, I got mine from here but there are many other places too. The morality of downloading these old abandoned games, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Many of them are orphans of long bankrupted British software houses, and certainly no one is making money of them any more. The commercial sales of CPC games ended at about the same time as the Soviet Union. I have all the original games on tape in my parents' loft, so I do own legitimate copies in their original medium, which seems to be the moral basis of iPods etc.

The limitation is that the emulator does not yet run games that rely on hardware hacks, i.e. all the best later ones and all the best Indie ones. There are still so many great games to choose from, here are a few of my favourites that I have gotten to work already:

The game above is Harrier Attack. It was loosely based on the Falklands War, it was a side scrolling plane game. You could bomb enemy tanks and bases and dog fight with enemy jets.

The game above is Dizzy. This was the first in a series of puzzle games starring Dizzy the bouncing egg. Despite the strange premise, it was really quite witty and clever, it is still very fun to play today.

'Yes Prime Minister' was a 'play along novel'-type thing based on the classic TV show, as you can see for the dodgy colours, it was a spectrum port. Most speecy ports were best avoided but this was so good that it was worth the hairy colours.

Ghostbusters was, by far, my favourite game. It was, of course, made before the film came out, I liked the movie, but I am very glad the game creators used their own creativity, it is a far better game for it. Since they were only working on the basis of the script and a few stills, they seem to have interpreted it as serious Sci-Fi rather than the ham comedy that the Saturday Night Live stars of the movie made it. Instead, think X-Files or Torchwood meets Monopoly or the Apprentice.

The premise of the game is that you have just bought a franchise of a ghost- busting business, and you have to drive around town, killing ghosts and earning enough revenue to pay back the initial bank loan and the fines that you run up when things go wrong. The game characters have very little to do with the film characters, and the ghosts look rather different. There is also lots of extra cool equipment, such as bait you can use to kill the Marshmallow-men and the ghost hoover that you can use to suck up any ghosts you pass while cruising around, as displayed here:

What was your favourite 1980s computer game? Assuming you were born of course!!