There’s a little person in my computer! And I have to feed him!
Imagine a sim version of the Sims, but back in 1985 before the Sims had been invented, and before the word ‘sim’ had entered the English language.
It’s a tricky one, but your reward is Activision’s quirky Little Computer People. This was one of the very first games to use digital DNA, which would predetermine the personality of the little chap who was going to come and live inside your computer. Him and his dog, actually, and the blurb accompanying the floppy disk – which was fourteen foot in diameter – explained that the Little Computer People were always in your pc, and that the software you had just spent sixpence ha’penny on was merely the vehicle which enabled you to see them.
Hot. Sweaty. Passionate. No I’m not talking about ‘the other night’, but rather the intense sport that is Football. It’s a sport that captivates much of the Earth’s population with tens of thousands of fans turning up to most Premier League matches. But what can ‘match’ the intensity of Football? Yes, that’s right…Super Soccer on the SNES.
When you think of 1982, you immediately think of isometric projection. It was this go-on-then-but-we’re-being-very-generous 3D-ish effect that first came to the popular consciousness with the landmark game Zaxxon, an early arcade hit for the pre-Sonic house of Sega. In truth, this effect was the only thing that marked Zaxxon out from a number of the fly along and bomb stuff games which were the early glimmerings of a key genre that would one day spawn graphics card gobbling thrillathons as Il-2 Sturmovic, and the Fighter Ace massive multiplayer.
Tiredness? Sore eyes? Headache? Forget Lemsip and Clarityn. The best way to clear all these symptoms is to remove Sim City from your hard drive.
After a marathon session of gaming on my SNES, I began wondering what it would be like if some of the games from my childhood were remade on current-gen systems.
Shropshire is like pipe smoking tobacco, Last of the Summer Wine box sets and spleens: you’ll never need them, but it’s nice to know that they’re there. It’s the home of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and Ditherington flax mill, the first skyscraper in the world, which is probably about twenty foot high. I once visited Shropshire on a school trip to look at, I dunno, geology or something, and found a badge which was a take off of a Coke advert, and had something along the lines of ‘smooth running goal getting cup winning Liverpool FC’ on it. At around the same time, two brothers – Paul and Oliver Collyer – were fiddling about with Commodore 64’s in a bedroom not so far away. Less than a decade later, they would unleash Championship Manager on the world. That’s right. Spouse ignoring, divorce getting, custody losing Championship Manager.