Month: October 2015

Fly Catcher

Just in time for Halloween, here’s a game by PROSM in which you play a spider and have to catch flies. WoooOOOooo! Scary! Okay, so that’s a very tenuous link to cover up the fact I’ve had this game since the middle of September and have only just got round to reviewing it. It wasn’t like this in the days of Eq Tetrachloride and Dave The Lurker, but to be fair, they never wrote 400-word essays about these games, like what we do at Sqij Towers. “Quantity, not quality” – that’s my motto, along with “better late than never, but even better really really late than just late”.

I was going to write down all the things that I thought PROSM might be an acronym for, just to pad out the review by 100 words or so, but could only think of “Patricia Routledge’s Octopus Smells Musty” before my brain started to hurt. So I stopped again.

In this game, you are a spider, and you must catch flies. I quite like spiders. I’ve never been the sort of person to go “Aaaargh, a spider, help, mummy!” and climb up the nearest tree to escape it. I’d probably make an exception for anything bigger and hairier than a kitten, or those Australian Arsebiter Killer Death Spiders who lurk underneath toilet seats and in underwear drawers, but on balance I’d rather have Boris the Spider and his chums as house guests than a bunch of dirty flies, zzz-zzzing around and vomiting all over me.
FlyCatcher1
Now what some people don’t realise is that when I first load a game for reviewing, I always turn flash loading off in my emulator, so I can experience the full experience of the loading experience, just like I would’ve done thirty years ago – that way I don’t miss any screens or fancy loaders. When I came to do this with Fly Catcher, I couldn’t help but notice there was a suspiciously short BASIC bit, followed by an even shorter piece of code, and then the game started. Now even with my limited knowledge of machine code I know that it takes more than 10 bytes of code to make a playable game – but to give PROSM the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it’s a 2K game compressed with zx7 or something. So I press a key to start, and… ahem. PROSM has entered what appears to be not a game into the crap games competition. Although at least it’s crap, so it ticks one out of the two boxes.

On the other hand, I might be missing something. The intro screen says “For more instructions see inlay”, so perhaps you’ll get further than I did if you can find it. I certainly couldn’t – I suspect this Holy Grail of inlays is at the very back of the kitchen drawer full of old batteries, rubber bands, and Soda Stream instruction manuals –  so if you do succeed in finding it, you could say there’s no flies on you! Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! Ha. Christ on a bike, I’ve still got two months to go of this shit.

Score: 8 out of 100 (one for each spider’s spidery spider leg)

Download here.

Advanced Anne Frank Simulator

Uncle Jonathan Chicken wrote this in about ten minutes whilst drunk. I’m intending to write this review in about ten minutes whilst sober. Does that mean it’s any good? (The game or the review? Ed). Let’s find out….

aafsscr.tzx

You play Anne Frank, a Jew living in hiding apparently on her own in the attic (I’m not sure this game is entirely historically accurate).

The keys are:
O – Left
P – Right
Q – Jump
W – Write in diary
S – Sleep

W and S only work if you are in the correct location. Let’s see what they do. Here’s the “sleep” action:

Zzzzzzzz......

Zzzzzzzz……

Huh? What time is it? WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY ROOM?

Oh, I was reviewing a game. I remember now. Let’s try the W action:

Scribble scribble

Scribble scribble

I can’t see any way of ending this game, or any scoring mechanism. Maybe you get carted off by the Germans and gassed if you play it for a few years.

You can also jump

You can also jump

I can’t decide whether this game is in bad taste or not. It certainly captures the boredom of living in hiding, where all you can do is write a diary, sleep or jump around. I guess that’s the point.

The best I can do is suggest a donation to the Anne Frank Trust, so some good might come out of this game.

Score: I’m not giving this game a score, because it didn’t give me one.
Download: .tap

Update

Here is an update about the lack of updates. I haven’t been updating the site because I don’t have much time to do updates, and I haven’t had an update from the rest of the Sqij reviews team about their lack of updates, however once I have time to update the site, I will update you with an update about when the next update is likely to be updated.

In the meantime, here is an updated version of the first ever program I wrote for the Speccy:

10 PRINT “LEE IS STILL COOL”

20 GOTO 10

It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now, but a man can dream.

Sex on 1st Date

Here comes yet another entry from the (appropriately-named, in this case) Gabriele Amore. I’ve been pussy-footing around this game for a while, but finally managed to stop fannying about and snatch a few spare moments to review it, although I think it might be a bit hard.

SOFD01

Enough of the puerile Finbarr Saundersisms. As you’d expect from the title, it’s a game involving having sex on the first date. As I’ve been in a relationship for 18 years and have two young children, the concept of both a “date” and “sex” are just a distant memory, but never mind, at least I can recreate it on the Speccy. Look at those graphics! I don’t think I’ve ever got so excited by a few well-placed attributes. Your lover and sex teacher Helen Blond certainly is easy on the eye (if you zoom right out and take your glasses off – alcohol probably helps too, but don’t drink too much)

SOFD02

My hart is full of lust, apparently. These pictures really don’t do the game justice, as they feature the best use of FLASH since the Manic Miner loading screen. And FLASH is the operative word – I won’t spoil the rest of the screens, but let’s just say that by the time you get on to the actual game your little swimming chaps will be stirred…SOFD06Did I mention this game was hard? Well it bloody well is. Using the M key (not sure what the M stands for – perhaps it’s something a bit mucky in Sicilian) you have to time your thrusts so that your lover is satisfied, and without getting too over-excited. Yellow star good, red cross bad.

SOFD07

On my first go, I got all aroused and it was all over far too early – a classic example of art imitating life. However with a bit of practice I worked out that if I hit the sweet spot every time my rubber lover would soon start BEEPing in ecstasy, and I moved on to the next position.

SOFD09

Now, either I’m not very good at this game, or I’m enjoying this position far too much, as I can’t ever seem to get off this level, and Helen keeps accusing me of being a selfish lover. Art imitating life again. Gab even included a link to an instructional YouTube video, but perhaps RedTube would’ve been a more appropriate place to upload it, as it now seems to have been pulled off (Stop it! Ed.)

Score: 69. What else?

Download here.