Welcome and thank you for taking a look

It's taken me 30 years to finally document my journey through the wonderful world of video games. My love began a long time ago back to video arcades which hosted such games as Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, Asteroids and Stargate.

Stargate was a side scrolling space shooter, aliens were kidnapping humans from the surface of the planet and your job was to shoot the aliens before they reached the top of the screen with the human, or before they captured the human in the first place.

There's a lovely tribute to stargate here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQYyhreWFD4


Another favourite of mine at the time was a game called Jump Bug which was a side scrolling game where you drove a car which bounced along, you could shoot and you could land on top of the harmful attackers. The controls made the game initially difficult because bouncing the car caused you to stray into aliens. There were some fantastic scenes you travelled through, from a city to a desert to pyramids and underwater. This was the first game I truly mastered and could play it for hours having inserted a single coin into the machine.

A tribute to Jump Bug is located here

I'm new to blogging, so I'll save this to see how it turns out and hopefully you'll see some great improvements in the layout of the page over the coming weeks!

Football Games and how they've evolved

I remember as a kid being addicted to Match Day for the ZX Spectrum. Matchday was a soccer game which at the time appeared to captured all the atmosphere of a real game. The game was written by John Ritman and Bernie Drummond who would later go on to program such greats as Batman and Head over Heels. 

Match Day wasn't the first soccer game I purchased, the first was the pretty awful soccer game from Artic Computing called World Cup Football
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzo7Wpsndac

I think what sours peoples memories of World Cup Football is that one of the largest publishers at the time US Gold announced a football release for the Mexico 86 World Cup, the story goes that their developers failed to deliver for the release date so they purchased the rights to the already poor Artic World Cup Football and released it as their own. Many a consumer was stung and pretty annoyed.

My next experience of soccer games was the World Cup Soccer for the Game Gear, this was a fast paced football game played from above looking down on the pitch. At the time it was a good game but difficult at times to comprehend where you were on the pitch.

There was of course the Sensible Soccer experience on the PC which was terrific but I never thought I could do better than the Pro Evolution Soccer for the playstation 2......until of course FIFA appeared on the XBOX...currently playing FIFA 11 and saving the spare cash for FIFA 12. Yes football on the console has very addictive qualities.

Football Games and how they've evolved Part 2

Following my experience of football games on the ZX Spectrum and the Game Gear my next venture in electronic footballing was on a 386 PC. I had the great fortune to purchase a compilation of 4 games for the PC called World Cup Year 94 published by Empire.
The compilation included the

• Championship Manager '93 (a game I'll come back and write about because it dominated years of my life)
• Goal!
• Sensible Soccer
• Striker 

Sensible Soccer

 Sensible Soccer was the game which dominated the soccer market in the mid 1990s. What was attractive about the game was the speed of play and the challenge of the game, all the game features were there...even red cards, players were able to jump, and the variety of kicks on goal allowed you to curve and loop the ball around the keeper. Graphics are small and blocky but you take little notice of this as you become engrossed in the gameplay.

The other two arcade soccer games in the compilation were nowhere near as good as sensible soccer, striker was a very poorly designed game in terms of gameplay and I never really enjoyed it.

The other game GOAL! was terrific fun but was always a poor relation to Sensible Soccer. I always felt that I never gave GOAL! the attention it deserved as a game and if I had never owned sensible soccer then GOAL! may very well have become my favourite.
What I didn't realise however was that I had a real gem of a game sitting in the compilation, it wasn't an arcade game but a strategy game based on football management called Championship Manager. Championship Manager became my addiction, it nearly broke my marriage, resulted in several months of sleepless nights, made me curse loudly at real life players whenever I saw them play on tv but were out of my 'virtual team' for months due to long term injuries. I'm going to dedicate a full posting to the various incarnations of Championship Manager but there's nothing more rewarding than guiding your favourite team to the top of the league.

Football Games and how they've evolved part 3

Playstation 1
Addidas Power Soccer
My first football on the playstation 1 was Addidas Power Soccer. I recall there were some long delays in the game, if memory serves me correctly the awarding of a free kick would just kill time, but I enjoyed the graphics as it was the first major step into what I considered arcade quality graphics in the home.
I found the following on Youtube which gives you an idea as to how the game played.

 

Actua Soccer Series

I never owned Actua Soccer 1 on the Playstation 1 but was lucky to own Actua Soccer 2 and Actua Soccer 3.  These games were simply seen as the closest you could get to being in a real football match. On reflection the graphics are a little dated compared to what you get these days but at the time one would simply drool at the quality of the graphics and gameplay.

 

At the time around 1996 the Actua game series were serious competitors to EA sports in the sports games market. Games such as Actua Golf, Actua Tennis and Actua Ice Hockey were released in the series.

Pro Evolution Soccer Playstation 2

 The pro evolution series of games took soccer games into a new realm, they had it all, graphics, gameplay, speed, and realism. I discovered this link on Youtube which is a homage to all the PS2 pro evolution soccer games. Enjoy!!

Football Games and how they've evolved - Part 4

Electronic Arts through EA Sports published the official FIFA licensed football game as far back as late 1993. There was a lot of competition in football based games at the time where games such as Sensible Soccer dominated. Personally I always felt (incorrectly I might add) that the FIFA series was a poorly developed franchise and that it would never gain a proper foothold among gamers. As Sensible Soccer fell to one side the PES series from KONAMI took over and seemed unbeatable.

 (above video credited to nintexs uploaded to youtube on Sep 10, 2011)

I had played some of the FIFA games on DOS based systems and on the SNES but it wasn't until I played FIFA 10 on the XBOX360 where I realised they had overtaken the Pro-evolution soccer series in terms of playability. One gripe I do have....EA appear to shut down the ability to play online within two years of the games release, for example FIFA10 no longer supports online play where's I purchased a second hand copy of PES 6 and I can still play online. I don't feel I have to fork out 50euro every two years in order to play football online with EA sports.

War Games
My first introduction to war strategy games was on the ZX Spectrum when I purchased a two player game called Confrontation published by a company called Lothlorien. The game was based around the standard war board games where you move pieces on the board and then when you attacked an enemy unit the environment, what forces were nearby and the relative attacking and defensive strengths were taken into account and the computer would determine if you suffered losses or defeated the opponent.
Confrontation was not the sort of game you'd play for half an hour, it would require undivided attention for hours.

Moving on from Confrontation the next big war game I played on the spectrum was a fantastic game called Apocalypse which was published by Red Shift under license from Games Workshop. Apocalypse was very much like the board game Risk but up to 4 players could play the game which as I recall was played out in western Europe and covered the tensions of the cold war - which was of course a real issue at the time. Nuclear weapons were an element to the game only I recall they caused a great degree of tension among players, it actually resulted in non nuclear treaties between players, or agreement during the game on non use of nuclear weapons. I have fond memories of Apocalypse.

Following Apocalypse I was hooked on war games and what appeared to be the most impressive war game on the spectrum was a Games Workshop game called D-Day. This was a war game with large bright graphics, when tanks fired there was an action animated element to the game where you could follow the missile to target. With four detailed scenarios it allowed for great gameplay,