|
Oh, these poor, self-deluding Spectrum
fools. Even now they are just the same as they were back
in the day, when they would claim absolutely ridiculous things
just to avoid the basic facts…
The Speccy never had a decent keyboard (rubber
keys or those nasty plasticky square Amstrad-style keys, never
a proper, recognisably keyboard-like keyboard, with proper keys
and everything, like us decent Commodore folk were used to), or
any sound effects to speak of (either farty noises or a poxy AY
chip on later models, not a proper synthesiser like us proper
Commodore people had, and which is still sought-after to this
day) or even a decent disk drive (fragile Microdrive thingies
which were flimsy as hell, and not a proper, built-like-a-tank
floppy unit like we had, which could load a game in slightly less
time than it would have taken to enter the hex dump by hand...
er... I'll shut up about disk drives, then).
We had hardware scroll, they had a poor Z80
busting a gut just to shovel stuff around on the screen –
and you could forget about frame sync. We had hardware sprites,
and they had flickery things that changed colour at odd times
in big square blocks.
And we had decent games.
Miner: Manic.
Even now you will still hear Speccy owners going
on about how great Manic Miner and Jet Set fucking Willy were.
Even now they cannot see the blatant truth:
Manic Miner was COCK!
Awful, screechy title ‘tune’? Check.
Farty sound effects? Check.
Flickery graphics? Check.
And the gameplay. Oh, the gameplay. If ever
there were a set-piece illustrating how not to design a game,
Manic Miner was it. In a good game, the difficulty should be cleverly
implemented through good level design whilst still allowing the
player to feel that he has comfortable control of the game. With
platform games in particular, the control needs to *flow*. Look
at Super Mario World - you can scarper through the levels gleefully,
joyously bounding about collecting your mushrooms and fire flowers
and twatting Koopas. Uncle Shigsy knows his stuff, and thank Goat
they never had Spectrums in Japan.
Miners: Calm.
The difficulty in Manic Miner is implemented
in the cheapest and crappest way possible: by putting obstacles
in the player's way that you have to be at EXACTLY the correct
pixel position to jump over. Which means that instead of the lovely
flowing gameplay that decent platformers provide, here’s
what you get playing Manic Miner…
Shuffleshuffleshuffleshuffleshufflejump…
<farty noise>
Back to the start of the level.
Again and again and again.
Maybe with a few more shuffles as you went a
tiny bit further into the level just out of sheer bloody-mindedness,
because you were a Spectrum owner and you HAD to make out this
was actually fun, and not a horribly futile exercise in bitter
frustration.
Us proper, decent, upstanding Commodore folk
had a couple of goes, recognised COCK when we saw it, and went
back to Jumpman and Miner 2049er and Montezuma's Revenge for some
platform action that wasn't COCK.
Chuckie Egg – now there was a decent platformer
on the Speccy. Manic Miner isn't fit to lick Chuckie Egg's arse.
But even then you'd want to play it on the BBC or something and
not a Spectrum, to avoid the farty sound effects.
Miner: Bird.
But Manic Miner – COCK. And Jet Set Willy
– MORE COCK. Same gameplay flaws and glaring bugs that made
it even more frustrating to play. And yet still you hear the poor
ex-Speccy owners waxing eulogical about both those packages of
pure male chicken.
Proof that even after all these years, the delusion
circuitry of the Spectrum owner's mind remains fully functional.
YAK, April
2004.
RODENT CASH RATING -
UTTERLY SHIT-ALL
"What the fuck?"
Comment
Here.
____________________________________________________________________ |
