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Vilui Since: May, 2009
Jan 7th 2011 at 9:00:28 AM •••

The current text "Exile (no, not that Exile)" with its associated potholes is messing up the navigation — e.g. on the Granny's Garden page, the "previous page" link leads to "no" instead of Exile. Is there a good way to fix this?

Logos Since: Jan, 2001
Apr 9th 2010 at 3:21:46 PM •••

The list of "classic" games made me chuckle a bit, and it certainly would have got one laughed out of my circle of former Beeb owners (clue: we all remember getting our first Beebs). I don't know what the usual criteria are for this, but the only title listed there that originated on the Beeb is the definite classic Elite. I don't know that Chuckie Egg (a term of endearment oop North, FYI) is a classic, though having played both, I would say that the Beeb version played better than the Speccy original. As for the rest:

Arkanoid: decent port of the arcade original, very playable, but memory considerations meant no opening animation, and Doh's head was represented by a mass of gold bricks.

Paperboy: bad, token port. Monochrome graphics, little sound, gameplay a pale shadow of the arcade original. I'll be charitable and put all these down to hardware limitations. NOT a Beeb classic.

Frogger: no official version, a number of rip-offs.

Space Invaders: no official version, lots of rip-offs, adaptions and modifications. None were like the original in all respects.

Tetris: oddly, I don't remember a Beeb version. One probably existed, but it would have it would have been a bit late to the party - by the time Tetris was becoming big, the Beeb (and 8-bit architecture in general) was on the way out.

So, do I have any suggestions? How about Repton: inspired by Boulder Dash but you couldn't avoid puzzle solving by outrunning the boulders; smooth full-screen scrolling; four sequels. Frak!: platformer with, for the time, amazing cartoon graphics. The Sentinel: 3D landscape game that managed to incorporate the long rendering times (1.5s for a screen redraw, 3.5s to move the point-of-view and redraw) into gameplay. Cholo: wireframe robot story game with extensive map. Thrust: rocket ship game with proper physics, recover heavy item from planet's surface. All of these games originated on the Beeb and were ported to other 8-bit platforms, some on to 16-bit and beyond.

Edit: Chuckie Egg might have been released on the Speccy and Beeb simultaneously (or in quick succession) but it's plainly and obviously a Speccy game, with the trademark monochrome sprites.

Two more actual Beeb classics: Exile: explore a giant spaceship in microgravity, with a jetpack. Revs: 3D Formula 3 racing game - actual terrain with elevation, accurate maps of real racecourses, polygon-drawn opponents with real, individualised AI, realistic physics and Formula 3 vehicle performance. Again, both originated on the Beeb, and were ported to other platforms.

Unless anyone has some good arguments against, I'm going to go ahead and edit in line with the above, with links to Wikipedia articles where no native article is available.

Edit: Just to clarify:

I am not saying that the examples that I've added are definitely the best games ever for the Beeb, just that they are a whole lot more deserving of the accolade "classic" than some of the rather dubious examples that I deleted. They originated on the Beeb, got ported to other machines because of their popularity, and, I would suggest, pushed forward or added something to game design (some a lot more than others). As it goes, I never got to play Exile (though I remember it getting very good reviews), I am crap at racing games (though a friend of a friend who had actually driven Formula 3 at Silverstone pronounced Revs an accurate enough simulation) and I didn't do at all well at Elite either.

There are all sorts of other games that could be considered: Citadel - exploration puzzler with a big map and a serious attempt to do better than an A Winner Is You ending; Stryker's Run - sideways scrolling shooter with good graphics and flying vehicles to commandeer; Stryker's Run 2 - puzzle shooter with some good graphics; Imogen - puzzle game with a polymorphing wizard, great animated graphics and lots of black humour; Aviator - Spitfire simulator, very basic wireframe graphics, but realistic flight mechanics, in 1983. I could go on. There are also games like Bugeyes 2 - Starman to the Rescue, full of surreal integer-scaled sprites and just so fun to play (for me, anyway), in spite of having what must be one of the earliest examples of an unskippable, repeated cutscene (the infamous "C5 to the rescue" scene).

As I said right at the start, I don't know what the usual criteria are, and most critically, whether games that originated on another system and were ported should count. Tynesoft did very good ports of Jet Set Willy and its sequel on the Beeb, identical to the originals, but they're still Speccy games. Certainly a ported game can be playable and popular, but only because they were playable and popular somewhere else first. Even more tricky would be when a title is released initially on more than one machine, but one of the releases appears to be the original, and the rest derivative or cut-down adaptions...

Enough. I don't have any further edits in mind at the moment, and, obviously, I'm just another troper with a Beeb in his loft. But, naturally, I reserve the right to question any dodgy examples that appear, employing jarring chords, red uniforms and the element of surprise as appropriate :-)

Edited by Logos Hide / Show Replies
Vilui Since: May, 2009
May 13th 2010 at 4:00:58 PM •••

Well, I haven't played all the games you've added to the list so I can't comment on those, but I would like to make the case for Chuckie Egg.

(1) It was indeed developed and released on the BBC and Spectrum simultaneously; you can read more about the history here.

(2) It is indeed widely regarded as a classic (see towards the end of the just-linked page). I am a frequent attender at retro-gaming conventions, and I can vouch for the fact that it's one of a very small number of BBC games (along with Repton and Granny's Garden) that you will always see someone playing. It's also one of the few BBC games that's still being ported to other platforms even to this day.

(3) It's one of very few BBC games with its own TV Tropes page, so it would be nice to make it easier for people to find that page. :)

Edited by Vilui
Logos Since: Jan, 2001
May 16th 2010 at 1:46:20 AM •••

Case made. I admit that I haven't touched a Beeb for well over a decade now, and playability (it was) and longevity are obvious factors.

Glad someone else brought up Granny's Garden. That's still in use in schools today, but I kept forgetting to add it.

Logos Since: Jan, 2001
May 7th 2010 at 3:02:37 AM •••

Did anyone actually call it the Micro?

Where I came from, it was "BBC Micro", "Beeb" or "Beeb Micro". "Micro" would only have been used during long, geeky conversations when all the other terms had been worn out.

Logos Since: Jan, 2001
Apr 30th 2010 at 4:50:24 PM •••

Re the last para:

Was the Beeb particularly notorious for ripoffs? To a greater extent than any other 8-bit platform? At the time, as I recall, everyone (multiple companies and one man outfits) was busy ripping off all the arcade standards for every platform, mostly with near impunity. (And in the arcades themselves too: anyone remember War of Bug?) The Beeb just followed the same patterns as everyone else.

BTW: Unauthorised ports were rare in the 8-bit world, if they happened at all. To get a game to run at a decent speed on the old 8-bit processors, it had to be optimised right down to the bare metal. Games were written in assembly language, not any compiled language (like C), and would write straight into work RAM and video RAM where possible. It was possible to disassemble machine code if you really wanted to, but then you had to make sense of it, and everything had to be rewritten for the new architecture (and processor, where applicable). In most cases, unless you had the commented assembler code to work from, you might as well rewrite the whole program from scratch. So most of the ripoffs were unauthorised rewrites, not ports.

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