The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2015 – – Page 4 – it's crap! In a funky skillo sort of a way.

European Flag Quiz

Myke-P

20th June 2015

Billy Armstrong, 13, from Middlesbrough writes to Sqij Corner this week concerned that some “obviously-not-so-die-hard” CSSCGC followers might have missed out on one of the highlights of recent Chris Young multi-load epic; Europe-Vision 2015.

Unfortunately we can’t print his letter in full as, due to the sheer number of colourful metaphors he chose to employ on a single sheet of A4, the necessary censorship would render it incomprehensible.

The gist, however, was that the users in question may have prematurely reset their virtual Spectrums after only a handful of songs (that’s optimistic – Ed) and not had time to fully appreciate the time that Chris had obviously spent keying in the Chunkels™ for the 40 Nation’s flags.

Fear not though, Billy, as Chris is back with this Edutainment entry which caters nicely for the very same “lazy ****head casual ****ing gamer” audience you were referring to.

(not pictured; Israel or Australia)

This is altogether a much simpler affair than Chris’ previous entry (which is not necessarily just a nice way of saying “hastily knocked-up” – Ed) and begins with this hastily knocked-up (Oh – Ed) map of Europe.

After selecting “how many questions” you would like it’s straight into the game with one of the 40 flags randomly selected and displayed at the top of the screen. At the bottom you’re prompted to enter the name of the country to which it belongs.

Simple stuff; type the correct answer and hit Enter. Get it wrong and the Spectrum gives you an angry BEEP, but get it right and you’re rewarded with aural pleasure (Wha-huh? Ed.)

Ooh, ooh, I know this one!

Unfortunately, even if you’re referring to this handy ‘High Definition’ flag chart, the necessary pixilation that has occurred rendering the flag into a 6×4 Chunk-o-vision™®©^{(pat. pending)} block means that you’re probably going to struggle to recognize all but the simplest of them.

The REM statements in Chris’ BASIC show that he at least considered this problem with comments such as “UDG may be required?” and “same as Austria.”

That’s what I said!?

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, you’ve done your homework (or cheated – Ed,) squinted and/or even guessed correctly. Is there any reason why you still might get the answer wrong? Why yes:-

As noted above, some flags look almost identical, i.e.: Latvia and Austria separated only by a BRIGHT flag.
Spectrum BASIC doesn’t provide an easy UCASE / UPPER-type function to make case insensitive string comparison easy (Today’s programmers don’t know they’re born! – Ed.) Chris could have knocked one together, or even locked the CAPS on with a quick POKE, but alas, didn’t bother so just remember to type everything in CAPITALS as if you were speaking to an elderly relative.
The String$ Array used to hold the country names is too short leading to a couple of country names being truncated, for example, if you typed “SWITZERLAND” then you’d be wrong (even if you were right) as it should be “SWITZERLAN”.

Not a bad score?

All of this makes for a surprisingly challenging game, even when cheating, and one that I’d like to say I enjoyed.

Eventually you get to the end of your self-imposed questions, your score is displayed (for better or worse) and the program ends in abrupt STOP (much like this review – Ed.)

Score: 1 out of 4-letter words from Billy.

Download: .TAP.

UPDATE: I phoned Billy’s Mum to talk to her about his foul language, however, it turns out she’s also got a bit of a potty-mouth and told me “where I could take my opinions” with surprisingly little ambiguity.

COMPETITION TIME

Set the number of questions to 100 and then record an RZX of your answers.

The first person to send in a competition-grade RZX correctly identifying all 100 flags in sequence will win a signed poster of Gerri Halliwell wearing that dodgy Union Jack dress from back in the 90s!

Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Shelf Challenge

Chris

14th June 2015

Challenges, Crap Games

9 Comments

MykeP joins the CSSCGC Remake Challenge with this re-imagining of Derek Jolly‘s cult hit, Top Shelf Challenge.

Top Gear Challenge!

For those of you living under a rock for the past fifteen years, the original TSC had you playing as a spotty teenager in your local branch of John Menzies, trying to get a shufty of the jazz mags without the built-like-a-brick-shithouse of a newsagent catching you and throwing you out of the shop by your ear. Should you succeed you were rewarded with some gratuitous 8-bit nudity which we can only assume Derek didn’t enjoy searching for on Altavista.

The game was such an unexpected success that Derek released a number of cash-in sequels, the last of which had you searching for porn stashes in the bushes. The other sequels nobody remembers anything about. One of them may have been in colour.

Menu screen

Needless to say, Myke has upped the stakes with this remake and tried to make it into the game it should have been. Rather than the original text-adventure style, we now have the entire shop layout graphically presented, with the shopkeeper reading the Racing Post between checking for shoplifters and spotty oiks. Other customers come and go through inter-dimensional time portals. The layout of magazines on the shelves are randomly generated, although alas it’s not possible to walk around – I assume you’ve already figured out where the magazines of interest are and if you wander off you’re likely to only end up flicking through Gardener’s World or Your Sinclair or something. (I normally hide Sinclair User in the pages of Playboy to avoid embarrassment – Ed)

Come on Birdseye, clear off!

You also play as Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, this is called Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear – erm, I mean Shelf – Challenge for precisely that reason. Instead of browsing through Razzle you’re checking out the hotties standing next to a highly-polished supercar. Quite why the newsie frowns upon this is not explained, as it’s not 18-rated stuff. Perhaps the young Jeremy gets his cock out or something.

Anyway, once the coast is clear merely pressing a key is enough to whip What Car? Magazine off the shelf, and get an eyeful of the glamorous scantily-clad leggy blonde draped over the bonnet of a Ferrari, in glorious Chunk-o-vision.

This girl is rather overdressed for the game.

Yes, it may be a bit of a shock, but Myke has gone for high colour chunky pixels comprising non-naked ladies, as opposed to the excessive higher definition albeit monochromatic everything-on-show visual feast of the original. As a result, even if everything was on show you wouldn’t be able to tell what it was that was being shown – it’s like Myke has employed Mary Whitehouse to pixellate the naughty bits and, of course, she’s determined the entire picture is objectionable.

This is what you see if you activate “safe mode”. Filth!

Despite this, there’s even a “safer for work” mode. As an employee in a modern office, I can assure you that every desk these days is equipped with a ZX Spectrum. You wouldn’t want to get caught playing MykeP’s UDG Strip Snap, but this – oh, yes – it’s as office-friendly as you can get.

I’m not entirely convinced about the historical accuracy of this game. Jezza’s getting on a bit now, and it seems likely that he was well into his twenties by the time these cars were released. Also there’s a National Lottery logo on the door of the shop, which sets it in the 1990s at the earliest.

Get out of my shop!

Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Shelf Challenge is everything the original should have been, and less. The original worked, because it was a game that promised risqué content without the tedium of playing poker against Sam Fox. This improves the core game, but manages to remove the main reason why you’d want to play it.

Score: 1 nipple out of two (if you squint a bit)
Download: .tzx

Eurovision 2015

leespoons

13th June 2015

Challenges, Crap Games

8 Comments

Chris Young gets the remake ball rolling with an updated (and almost topical) version of his 1999 game, EuropeVision, and by god it’s almost unspeakably awful. I had the misfortune to sit through the Eurovision Song Contest a couple of weeks ago – for some bizarre reason I chose to watch it while sober – and by the end I wanted to hack my eardrums out with a rusty grapefruit spoon, but that’s nothing compared to this game.

Once again Chris outdoes himself with a perfectly rendered loading screen (including obliterating filename, natch) which wouldn’t look out of place in the Tate Gallery. Sadly, this is the best bit of the game – it’s not looking good, is it?

Did I mention it’s 128k only? Chris has very helpfully declined to save this to +3 disk, knowing how much these things annoy me. So it’s a .zip file, which when unzipped reveals a 358K .tap file. This can only mean one thing… a multiload!

Not an actual screenshot, but I wonder if Edvard Munch ever played Out Run on a 48k Speccy?

There’s only one thing worse than a multiload, and that’s a multiload that multiloads from tape. Come back sunteam, all is forgiven.

So you choose your country, choose your song, choose your gimmick (although I’m not sure if Cliff Richard or Dana were ever “DRESSED AS A FUCKING CROW”), and wait an absolute sloth’s age for the semi-finals to progress. Finally, assuming you qualify, or there’s a “Press play on tape” message, followed by the most tedious multiload sequence I’ve ever known. You press play on the (virtual) tape, and it searches for one particular block, seemingly at random, out of 39 blocks. Aaaaaaaargh! I tried turning on tape acceleration on in Spectaculator, but then it loaded the block super-quick and whizzed past the performance sequence. So in the end I resorted to sitting there clicking on each block of code hoping it was the right one, and weeping tears of rage and fury every time the border went red and cyan again.

Nearly halfway there…

Finally, the thing loaded – it was Australia’s rendition of Let’s Get Happy, which I’d never heard before, but presumably was something to do with dwarves. It wasn’t a bad rendition actually, making me wonder if Chris has some hidden musical talents (and far too much time on his hands). Sadly not, he admitted that he cheated and used a nifty program called MIDI2AY, which you can find here, if you’re so inclined. Anyway, the song rather amusingly stopped in the middle of the second verse, and then the dreaded “PRESS PLAY ON TAPE” prompt, which I recreate here in all its glory:

sigh

This rigmarole continued for several weeks, until I got so thoroughly bored that I climbed up the nearest tall building and hurled myself off – so I never did find out what happened at the end. But before this, I managed to record one of the songs – and here it is, France’s entry for the Eurovision AY Contest, 2015… Making Your Mind Up! (sorry but the Sqij Towers budget couldn’t stretch to a pixellated Cheryl Baker whipping her skirt off)

Score: an almost inevitable nul points.

Download here (zip file).

Famous Crap Games Throughout History #9: Incontinental Circus

deKay

5th June 2015

Famous Crap Games Throughout History

3 Comments

It is well known that in the late 1980s the Japanese game company Taito made a slight error with one of their titles, releasing an F1 racer called “Continental Circus” after a poor translation of “Continental Circuit”. It was an easy mistake to make, I mean, the S key is right next to the IT key on Japanese keyboards.

What is less well known is a far more interesting story and it started two years before Continental Circus, with Incontinental Circuit.

Taito (back then, known as Potaito) had developed what they thought was bound to be the next big thing in gaming – two player head-to-head motor racing with bladder control. Literally. A pair of huge arcade cabinets, each housing a large screen, a reclining chair, a steering wheel, foot pedals, and a number of straps and sensors that needed to be attached to the player. A drinking fountain was angled towards the player’s mouth, and after inserting a few 100 Yen coins, the game began.

Much like in most other motor racing games, the aim was to win the race, but the twist with Incontinental Circuit was that your car’s engine power increased as you, the player, physically filled their bladder. The more you drank, the higher your vehicle’s top speed. Don’t drink, and your car loses power. The first to pass the Chequered Flag was the winner, the first to pass urine was disqualified. That’s right – moisture sensors in the seat would alert the game to your embarrassing release.

Unfortunately for Potaito, they were hit from all sides with issues. The main one that hit the headlines was over gamers sitting in a pool of other peoples’ fluids as arcade staff failed to mop up after disqualifications, and all the associated health risks that came with it. This was the 1980s, remember, and popular myth at the time was how easy it was to contract AIDS from arcade machines. Other problems just made things worse. The water fountains needed to be connected to a water supply, which was something most arcades struggled to accommodate. All that water (and “previously drunk” water) in close proximity to electricity caused several shocking deaths, and one unfortunate individual managed to drown when his water fountain malfunctioned and he couldn’t get out of the seat straps quickly enough.

What really killed the game off, however, was the cheating. Players soon found that by wearing adult nappies, they could thwart the sensors and wet themselves all they liked without the game noticing.

Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, was when the game was produced, the translator at Potaito managed to name the game as Incontinental Circus, rather than Incontinental Circuit, confusing gamers everywhere.

With the game an expensive flop (all those proprietary and unusual components almost bankrupted Potaito before the cabinets even hit the arcades), Potaito gutted the core game and repurposed it as a more standard F1 racing game. No water, drinking or sensors. They called it Continental Circuit, but somehow the same translator made the same mistake again. He never found translating work after that, and the entire fiasco was blamed on him and him alone.

Wizzard

leespoons

29th May 2015

Crap Games

10 Comments

There are many things you can do in under thirty seconds. Here’s a few of them, interspersed with screenshots from unclechicken’s latest game, Wizzard…

1. Listen to the Napalm Death song, You Suffer, fifteen times.

Roy Wood has really let himself go, hasn’t he?

2. Run 100 metres, three times. If you’re Usain Bolt.

Spoiler: the letter “t” doesn’t actually do anything, presumably because your wife isn’t listening.

3. Google “things you can do in under 30 seconds”, and decide they’re all a bit crap.

The Wizzard goes off on his epic quest to find his lost love...

The Wizzard embarks on his epic quest to find his lost love…

4. Play unclechicken’s latest game, Wizzard.

…oh, there she is. Those pointy things in the background are either the pyramids of Giza, or The Point, Milton Keynes.

5. Write a CSSCGC review about unclechicken’s latest game, Wizzard.

Whaaaaaat?! That’s the whole review? I hear you cry. Well, back in the early 00s you’d be lucky to get a paragraph or even a sentence. One of my entries’ reviews consisted of three words – “Argh! My ears” – which was probably more than it deserved, but still poor compensation for the sweat and toil I’d put into the game. So think yourselves lucky I’ve got to 200 words already!

Score: 1 zeptosecond out of 100 aeons.

Download here.

Total Clint

leespoons

26th May 2015

Challenges, Crap Games

10 Comments

MatGubbins returns with the last Keyword Challenge entry for now (although apparently he has about 70 more ideas waiting in the wings), based around maths – yes, you heard me correctly. It’s reminiscent of all those dull-as-ditchwater educational games your parents used to buy at Christmas “to help with your homework“, which you loaded up precisely once to keep Mum happy, before going back to more exciting stuff like Captain Kill-O-Zap Blasts The Aliens or something. I was a bit of a geek at school and quite liked maths, but once we were allowed to use calculators and spent whole lessons typing in 81980085 there wasn’t much point in learning how to do long division, and I only lasted a year in A-level maths before ditching it for a far more useful subject – sociology. Stop laughing.

Bak to skool!

The usual Chunk-O-Vision (can’t remember the code for the trademark symbol) title appears. It’s 1986, Clint’s back at school, and he’s been singled out by the teacher to solve some maths problems. Don’t you hate it when that happens? You sit there at the back of the class, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible without staring out of the window too much, sending subliminal messages to the teacher: “Don’t pick me, pick Gary!” It never worked though. Now I always thought “sums” meant addition, but there’s also some division and multiplication thrown in, which made my brain go into meltdown…

231, Shirley?

Mat has devised a cunning way to input the number. Rather than simply typing it, you use the Q and A keys for up and down, you start with the lowest number (units), then press Space to move on to the tens, and so on. This all reminds me of the SMP – Scottish Maths Project – which I seem to remember placed great emphasis on thousands, hundreds, tens and units, and for some unearthly reason was forced upon the children of Bedfordshire in the early ’80s, despite Bedfordshire being closer to Belgium and France than Scotland (citation needed). This also means that there’s no way of starting again if you get it wrong… and I had lots of practice at getting it wrong.

So many ways to be wrong, but only one to be right.

Haaa-haaa! – W. Shakespeare, 1982

One redeeming feature is the rather fetching (and not remotely Chunk-O-Vision) Miss Natalie Red – if she’s based on one of Mat’s teachers from thirty-odd years ago, then all I have to say is lucky old Mat. My maths teacher in 1986 was 57 years old, completely bald, and had a luxuriant handlebar moustache. I think she’s retired now though.

To be fair, this is all very well programmed (I think there may even be some machine code involved) and it did make me use my brain, feeble though it may be. But just like those educational games from back in the day, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to play this again. Now where did I put my copy of Captain Kill-O-Zap Blasts The Aliens?

Score: 2112÷33 percent.

Download here.

BEEF II

Chris

21st May 2015

Crap Games

9 Comments

The only chicken-based relative I’m aware of is Knife from Knife and Wife. Oh, and there’s Mr Chicken of course, who may or may not be related to unclechicken, although I strongly suspect Mr Chicken would cook unclechicken and put him in a burger were he forced to play BEEF II, and not purely because as a chicken merchant he would be unhappy to play a game where the player’s character’s name is based on his arch-nemesis food product.

Commander Beef reporting for duty, sir!

After a brief departure into playability and sensible keyboard controls for BEEF!, unclechicken has regained at least some of his lost sanity for the sequel, which picks up a few minutes after the first game left off.

Upon loading, the author’s now trademark “custom font with slightly ambiguous plot” title screen appears, and pressing a key gets you straight into the heart of the action… at which point you’ll die trying to figure out how to use the key controls even a masochist would write a letter of complaint about.

This is the only splash of colour you’ll see – the game is entirely “black & white TV compatible”.

It’s a sideways scrolling shooter, like R-Type, although actually nothing like R-Type which I’ve done a disservice to by even mentioning it in the same sentence. Instead I will compare it to my fifteen-year-old effort Mothership One, which I can’t be arsed to load back up, but my memory tells me was appalling (although technically it wasn’t a *scrolling* shoot-’em-up), and at least I remember it unlike a lot of the CSSCGC entries I’ve apparently submitted over the years.

The aliens have cunningly disguised themselves as priceless ming vases.

Sooo… you know the drill with these games. You get a puny pea-shooter with a spaceship attached to it and are expected to take down wave after wave of ships sent by an alien civilisation whose economy and defence budget isn’t in the toilet like ours (note to potential invading nations: our army is the best in the world, don’t even think about it). And the reason you’re attacking them? Well, usually it appears to be just for the hell of it, something to do on a Sunday afternoon:
“What shall we do Tarquin?”
“Let’s borrow Daddy’s spaceship and take down some Jerrys*, Elizabeth, and then celebrate with tea and scones.”
“Oh, Tarquin! Mother will be most proud if we get our photograph on the front page of the Biggleswade Chronicle! We must set off at once!”
(etc.)

The particle effects are pretty good.

In this game, however, you’re being chased by the aliens who hate you, because leaving the planet in BEEF! cheesed them off, and they’ve clearly sent for reinforcements, as they all appear in front of your ship rather than shooting from behind. Other than that, it’s business as usual – identical attack wave after identical attack wave of enemy ships who can kill you just by being vaguely in the vicinity of your ship (and bizarrely appear to have no guns, so they just kamikaze into you), but if you try to shoot at them you discover there’s about a three second delay between pressing fire and actually seeing any, erm, fire. Couple that with the insane finger gymnastics and you’re going to fly straight into them anyway. And, just as in Mrs Pickford, you don’t get a chance to see your score before you are rudely thrown back to the title screen, and then back into the game and then shot at or flown into or crashed and back to the title screen, and those aliens are getting on your wick now and you don’t remember what it was that made them hate you but it probably has something to do with chickens not getting on with cattle, and they’re going to hate you even more once you manage to get your fingers in the right place to both control the spaceship and shoot at them, and maybe it’ll be easier if you get Jeeves in here to hold down the shooty thing whilst you concentrate on not flying into the alien coming right at you and…. Elizabeth, dear sister, is that a gentleman from the press at the door?

There’s another wave after this then you’re done.

Score: One cucumber sandwich short of a picnic basket full of cucumber sandwiches. (that’s not really a score, more a psychiatric assessment – Ed)

Download: .tzx

* or whatever the correct colloquial term for aliens is

BEEF!

leespoons

20th May 2015

Crap Games

6 Comments

Unclechicken (who may or may not be both an uncle and a chicken, but his real name is Jonathan, so I’m going to call him that from now on) is back with yet another flagrant abuse of AGD in BEEF! Now with a title like that, I was expecting this to be a game in which you stick your hand up a cow’s arse (Are you sure? Ed.), pull out a baby cow, force feed it until it’s nice and fat, kill it, and eat it for Sunday dinner. The perfect game for me, as I’m a vegetarian. I’ll just leave a space below for the awkward silence and silly questions that always follow this statement.

(So do you eat fish? Ed.)

(Are you allowed to eat normal bread? Ed.)

(What, not even bacon?! Ed.)

Looks more like a spaceship to me.

Beef it turns out has nothing to do with dead cows and everything to do with spaceships. Commander Beef (it’s not explained why his name is Beef) has crashed on some planet or other and needs to escape. “Avoid the enemies, they hate you” says the title screen. D’you know what, in 35 years of avoiding (virtual) enemies I’ve never once stopped to wonder why they hate me. Perhaps they don’t like my haircut, or my glasses, or something.

Unclejonathanchicken immediately wins some crap points for the misleading loading screen. I was expecting a shoot-em-up, but no, it’s the first platform game of the competition! Hurrah!

Almost too good for the CGC. Almost.

What have we here? A custom font, some half-recognisable graphics, and an actual playable game, that’s what. The eponymous spacesuited hero Commander Beef wanders around the screens collecting money, avoiding the enemies (they hate you) and collecting a tool spanner (F’nar! Ed.) so he can get away. And the game isn’t half bad – after a couple of minutes I was even starting to enjoy myself. I can only assume this is an unwanted side effect of AGD or whatever Unclechickathan used to write the game.

I’m sure I’ve seen this before

However, the game does have one or two flaws. When you die, you’re dumped onto another screen seemingly at random. And it’s far too small, only seven screens or so, and pretty easy to complete. But its biggest flaw is these flaws aren’t, erm, flawy enough to make an average platformer into a truly crap game. In short, Unclechickajon needs to try much harder to write a crap game next time… but fear not, I hear a sequel to BEEF is in the pipeline! Can’t wait!

Score: 1984%

Download here.

Fracas

Myke-P

11th May 2015

Crap Games

3 Comments

As the BBC are still toying with a replacement Top Gear line-up* it’s been over two months since the original bust-up on which this game is based and nearly a month since Sqij Tower’s finest; Chris Young actually submitted it.

The game begins with an Unsatisfactory logo followed by the proud exclamation; “presented in Chunk-o-vision… a trademark of MatGubbins, used under license.” Tricia from Accounts tells me that MatG’s cheque is in the post, however, can I ask that he lets us know before he cashes it as we’ll be a bit short this month after leespoons took ‘advantage’ of completely inappropriate web-marketing opportunity.

* My money is on Coleen Nolan, Janet Street-Porter and Jamelia from Loose Women.

Title screen

Back in 1985 Pete Moreland (then still at Beyond Software) bet Mike Singleton that he couldn’t get the Speccy to move around screen-sized sprites convincingly. Two years later Dark Sceptre was published, at least one Sinclair mag reviewer was rushed to hospital with palpitations and Commodore briefly considered recalling early Amiga 500 models in order to completely overhaul the graphics chip.

A few years later and Pit Fighter, followed by the even more commercially successful Mortal Kombat, popularised the use of poorly digitized sprites in arcade fighting games. In fact, when the home computer ports appeared, CU Amiga’s John Sloan nearly wet himself after seeing Sonya Blade’s pixelated bouncing bits!

So, as you can imagine, when this entry appeared in the Sqij inbox featuring poorly-digitized-full-screen sprites I went stark raving mad and had to go into therapy for several weeks – hence the delay in this review (Clever – Ed.)

Welcome to Wales

The screen fills with multi-coloured Chunk-o-vision™®©^{(pat. pending)} blocks which, it turns out, are meant to represent Wales. I’m guessing it’s South Wales specifically because I’m originally from the North and it’s pretty much shades of brown and grey up there!?

A positively monolithic Jeremy (or is it Ian ‘Lovejoy’ McShane?) introduces the scene causing a perfectly measured quantity of offence finished off with a topical quip.

As the game-proper begins we find ourselves (for we play as Clarkson) on the left about to face off against an oddly orange and pink member of the production team. Disappointingly there’s no verbal exchange between the two before the ‘fight’ breaks out.

The keys are O, P and Space**, but you’d best hold them down (or turn up your emu speed) because the price we pay for such large sprites is that things move pretty sluggishly.

** O and P do what you’d expect and Space initiates the one and only fighting move in the game – a sort of lazy prod to the opponent’s abdomen.

Jeremy gets one in

Much like my own UDG Fighterz effort, as long as you get the first punch in, you can pretty much get away with holding down the Space key until your opponent is KO’d – resulting in some hot FLASH action and a verbal warning!

We also get to visit Italy (featuring a vaguely recognizable Tower of Pisa, no less!) and then Canada before, inevitably, Mr C gets his marching orders from Sally in HR…

Victory in Wales!

Now I don’t mean to brag, however, I completed this one-handed on my first go whilst drinking a cup of tea. (Okay, okay, form a queue and I’ll sign autographs at the end.)

Curious as to whether it was even possible to lose I tried to experiment (slowly) by walking into my opponent (and not attacking,) and edging back from him one step at a time in an effort to make him feel comfortable enough to put a jab in.

Occasionally he would land a punch, however, if I have one criticism of this game it’s that I’m not even sure the producer is up for this fight? In the end I had to stand there, motionless, for nearly 5 minutes before he finally put in enough hits to floor me. What a wuss!

Lost in Italy!?

I would have liked a BEEPER rendition of the Top Gear theme and a food-themed Pirate Insult-esque mini game prior to each bout to set the scene – but I’m just greedy.

I don’t think there’s any denying that Mat Gubbin’s Chunkels™ are gathered together in an altogether more attractive manner***, but for sheer ambition I think Chris has done us proud on this one.

*** Translation: He does prettier pictures

Score: More Kelly Clarkson, than Jeremy!

Download .tap here.

Guess My Wait

leespoons

8th May 2015

Crap Games

8 Comments

“Whispering” Bob Harris is a DJ on Radio Two who plays folk music. I spent the first 10 years of my life listening to folk music, and I bloody hated every second of it. I think that’s why at the age of 13 I rebelled and got into house, hip hop and Bros (although at least I didn’t actually buy the Bros album, just borrowed it off my mate, honest). With the benefit of hindsight I will concede that folk music isn’t actually all that bad, in fact I like quite a lot of it, apart from Mumford and Sons, who are (in my humble opinion, and I’m sure they’re really nice people once you get to know them) crap. Anyway, Bob Harris started his radio career in 1970 presenting a programme called Sounds Of The Seventies, but it was axed in 1975, because nobody thought the Seventies would catch on. He then became a presenter on The Old Grey Whistle Test, in which he was the chief tester of old grey whistles. After that, Bob became a creepy Australian didge-fiddler (That’s Rolf! Ed.), a ventriloquist with his fist up a duck’s bottom who sadly died recently (That’s Keith! Ed.) and an American actor who played Jackson Pollock (That’s Ed! Ed.) before the Radio Two folk show and now the pinnacle of his career – writing this crap game for the CSSCGC 2015.

Right, now I’ve padded out the review with a “ha ha, this bloke’s got the same name as someone famous” bit (see also sunteam), here’s the game. Guess My Wait – do you see what he did there? – is a guessing game. The computer waits for a bit, and you have to guess how long it waits for.

Mmmmmm, currants. Might try them in my French biscuits next time I run out of raisons.

It’s a bit like Watching Paint Dry, but even more boring and crap, which is what we like here at Sqij Towers. Pick a number from 1 to 120 and find out if you’ve guessed correctly. As a bonus, you get a BEEP every time the computer waits. Somehow Bob has managed to find a BEEP that gets more and more dirge-like the longer it goes on… and bugger me, it doesn’t half go on.

If I was any more excited I think I’d wet my pants in two different ways.

As with Watching Paint Dry the joke soon wears thin, particularly as yet again no RANDOMIZE function has been employed, so the sequence of numbers is the same whenever you load the snapshot. On the other hand, it’s marginally more interesting than waiting for actual real life things… like buses, sex, or the latest CSSCGC review to be finished (or all three at the same time, if you’re really lucky! Ed.)

Score: 119 annoying dirgey BEEPs out of 120.

Download .z80 here.

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