Games On The BBC Micro - All you didn't want to know but are going to anyway
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By Crispin Boylan
Ok, so, you've got a Beeb, you play games on it - which ones? Chances are
games like Elite, Exile, Revs, Snapper will be named in abundance, but what
else is on offer? I mean, if you just look at the well known
Superior/Acornsoft/MicroPower band of companies then you will probably be fine,
I mean those three Software Houses are the most prolific and certainly they
produce the best games - but there are others!
Some of you probably know that I run a website dedicated to games on the Beeb,
and most of my knowledge of them stems from a very useful archive at
ftp.nvg.unit.no which has about 1500 games for the BBC on it. Some are well
known, a lot are completely obscure ones, most of them deserve to be completely
obscure, but know and again I come across a real Gem of a game, maybe not in
the same technical class as Exile or Elite, but they are good fun to play
games. One of these is Starquake, by the little known company Bubblebus, which
I discovered whilst sorting out the Various directory of the archive, which
holds about 300 assorted games, 150-200 of which I have been able to identify
as being made by one particular company, and 100-150 games which bear no
markings as to who made them, save the odd Author name here and there. Believe
me, searching and playing each one of these games is not usually a happy
experience, until you have played them you don't know how lucky we are these
days to have a Quality Control on games, ie publishers with at least some sort
of pride in their name!!
Anyway, back to the games, there are lots of them, from obscure companies with
titles such as Duckworth and Electrosoft, but just because they weren't well
known, it doesn't mean all their games were no good, more like 90%. Another
good, but obscure game is Bozo and Beebo by BP Soft, it is based on an old
theme of bouncing people on a see-saw to collect objects, it is one of the most
colourful games I've seen and looks very good, it also plays ok too.
Another theme that seems to run high through the entire collection of BBC Games
is repetition, you wouldn't believe how many faceless Space
Invaders/Frogger/Defender clones there are, and what makes it even worse is
that some companies (notably Bug-byte) released about 4 games, all based on
Space Invaders or one of the other well known arcade games, each one with just
a different graphics set or the added bonus of being able to move your ship in
two dimensions as opposed to one! How companies didn't get sued for this I
will never know...
Overall, as my website is starting to reflect for those of you that have seen
it, the BBC micro games scene did produce a lot of 'mediocre' games, in fact if
you put all of them into a big box and ask someone to pick one out at random
you will probably find that it will be a crap or ok game, because I really
don't think that many companies cared that their reputations were reduced to
very fine mud after their first terrible release, and there are a lot of
companies which did just release one terrible game - and I feel sorry for
people that bought them! My advice to you now that the Beeb scene is almost
completely dead would be to voyage off of the Superior/Micropower/Acornsoft
path that you have trodden for so long and to check out a few games by unknown
companies, you never know you might just find a classic that you will cherish
until your Beeb blows up...which will be quite some time!
Happy hunting.
Cris.
E4W.