The ZX Spectrum is a great technological milestone. Not only was it pretty much the first popular home computer, it contained – as the rainbow device on the right hand side of the machine will verify – the first gay microprocessor.

To save memory space, most of the games written for it were rubbish. However, most of the eighteen thousand programs written for it were gaming titles, and it did come up with some classics, among which are what is known as the Horace series. Not a great deal is known about the author of the series – William Tang – except that he suffered a collapsed lung halfway through writing them.

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Berzerk is an eerie and malevolent game. Visually and conceptually simple – the stick figure player wanders around the screen from room to room avoiding stick figure robots programmed to kill him – the whole bleakly addictive shebang is presided over by a horrible smiley killjoy called Evil Otto. The atmosphere is foreboding and, while playing for extended lengths, it is not hard to reach the chirpy conclusion that you’ve inadvertently unleashed some ghastly being which will be hiding just behind you, dodging out of sight no matter how quickly you spin around, for the rest of your life. Berzerk has the unhappy distinction of being the only video game to have directly killed people playing it: 19 year old Jeff Dailey suffered a fatal heart attack after achieving a slightly creepy 16,660 in January 1981, and fifteen months later, 18 year old Peter Burkowski also died from heart failure during a long session in which he posted two consecutive high scores at his local arcade in Mitchigan.

So, brace yourself and whistle a cheery tune to keep your spirits up as complete our Pac Man Fever odyssey by taking a wander around the murky yet brilliant world of Berzerk.

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With Street Fighter IV’s long awaited release looming, those awesome guys over at Ready-Up have managed to get an exclusive interview with Capcom’s Leo Tan – who among other things, assures the gaming world that the last six months he’s spent honing his fighting skills will result in the “utter annihilation” of everyone he meets online in the first week of launch.
Fingers flexed and at the ready then.

Get on over to Ready-Up to read the exclusive Leo Tan interview and in part 2 released later this week, you’ll have the chance to win one of our coveted Street Fighter t-shirts.

Perfect.

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Defender has been described as ‘quite possibly, the hardest significant game there is’ by people who know about these things. It is also the most referenced in popular culture, appearing as the subject of part six of our Pac Man Fever odyssey, the Weirdies’ recent ‘I Wanna Play Defender’, ‘Defender Contender’ by, apparantly, R. Cade and the Video Victims, and getting a mention on the Beastie Boys’ ‘Body Movin’ with the line ‘…and if you play Defender I could be your hyperspace’. This last point bears further explanation. Hitting hyperspace is a usually a guarantee of a fairly safe, if a bit haphazard, safety net, as we saw previously in Asteroids. However, Defender’s standard gameplay is so barking mad that it’s already like being trapped in some random electronic maelstrom. Nonetheless, so iconic is Defender that it is the only video game to feature on a postage stamp, and it’s ringtone package is the internet’s most frequently dowloaded non-musical fellow passenger annoyer. Welcome, then, to to a baffling world of instant death and mutant madness, of baiters and pods and swarmers, of one joysticks flanked by a battery of buttons, all screaming for attention. Welcome to Defender.

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Imagine the scary music from Jaws, but played on a cardiac monitoring
machine in a hospital corridor. That is the enigmatic sound of all round
minimalist Asteroids, track five on our journey through Buckner and
Garcia’s Pac Man Fever album. The track – Hyperspace – is so bad
that we are better off promising never to mention it again, but no fag-smoke and
Lilt-can infested early 80s arcade would be complete without the game itself.
The stark and distinctive line drawing graphics look they way they do because
Asteroids is a ‘vector’ game. Vectoring is a method that games
programmers at the time used as a clever way to make their graphics look really,
really bad. In this instance, however, it works very well, and, combined with
the medical equipment audio set up, gives a fair representation of the bleakness
of fighting a lonely battle you will inevitably lose in the bleak and chilly
depths of space.
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Frank Krmel, of Atlanta, Georgia and Shigeru Miyamoto of Kyoto, Japan are unlikely to find themselves mentioned together in any sentence other than this one. Miyamoto spent his childhood exploring the lakes and caves with which the land around his family home was amply blessed, endlessly drawing and sketching local wildlife. Krmel spent his childhood hunting catfish in a swamp. Both men, however, chased an ape-themed dream which would elevate them to the top of their respective professions: this dream would manifest itself as Donkey Kong, which is also the fourth track on our Pac Man Fever odyssey. For Miyamoto, Donkey Kong was the beginning of an incredible journey that would see him hailed as ‘the Father of Modern Videogames’ by the New York Times, and ‘the Walt Disney of electronic gaming’ by the Wall Street Journal. He invented the Wii gaming system, and his sheepdog, Pikku, was the inspiration for the Nintendogs franchise. For his part, Krmel drove a monster truck called Donkey Kong into the ninth Monster Jam World Finals in 2007. The truck is designed to look like a big monkey wearing a tie. Two men, one shared destiny: an angry gorllla throwing barrels at an Italian.
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It was quite hard picking the next retro review. I’ve been buying some retro games from the internet, but I finally decided.

I was going to review Crazy Taxi 2 actually. I’m not sure why, but it may be because I thought it would be better than the original. How wrong was I! Crazy Taxi 2 sucks like you would never believe. On appearance it looks the same as the first installment (which is a good thing) and it has the same modes (which is a bad thing).

In short, Crazy Taxi 2 keeps most of the recipe which made the first so great, but doesn’t add enough to the mix. You now drive around New York, but all the fares seem to go to the same places and you barely see much of the city in any case. They just didn’t make enough progress to warrant a crappy sequel.

Thankfully the original Crazy Taxi doesn’t have any of these problems – in fact it would make a better sequel to the…er…sequel.

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Dona Bailey was one of the only female programmers involved in gaming at the
turn of the 1980s. As a representative of a gender not traditionally at ease
with insects, spiders, and creepy crawlies generally, it is perhaps remarkable
that she threw her creative and technical know-how into a game about a giant
centipede. The subject of track three on our Pac Man Fever odyssey,
Centipede itself is not one of the more immediately recognisable games
featured on the album, but spawned a litany of similar games, including the
pre-3G mobile phone standard. Atari released Centipede in 1980, and
it was one of the first games to become familiar to home console players. It
is fair to say that the album track is a less familiar landmark in popular
culture, although artwork adorning the side of the arcade cabinet was used on
the cover of the Strokes’ 2004 single Reptillia.
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