The Icon Bar: Games: Your favourite acorn 32bit platform games
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Your favourite acorn 32bit platform games |
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forestman (21:02 4/4/2013)
deadmalc (18:41 5/4/2013)
hubersn (16:51 7/4/2013)
ulaggy (13:15 9/4/2013)
filecore (14:17 9/4/2013)
sirbod (19:39 9/4/2013)
pwx (09:40 15/4/2013)
filecore (09:43 15/4/2013)
forestman (20:06 27/4/2013)
davidb (22:22 15/4/2013)
pkersey (13:34 27/11/2013)
sirbod (19:48 27/11/2013)
sa_scott (09:36 29/11/2013)
sirbod (11:44 29/11/2013)
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jon black |
Message #122260, posted by forestman at 21:02, 4/4/2013 |
Member
Posts: 25
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Having recently got an acorn machine again got me reminiscing on my favourite games for the acorn... I probably bought 50 games for the acorn , maybe more, basically all of 4d and krisalis' catalogue from 1990 to 1995 Here we're my ones...
favourite pd game:
Bloxed - multi player Tetris. Also have to mention tron that I wrote in basic (which was rather good) and Tom coopers range of games
Most disappointing game:
Technodream. I finished it after about 2 or 3 plays and felt gutted... "Is that it?"
Special mention for enter the realm.... parallax scrolling by dull.
The "I never got it" game
The wimp game.
Best 4 player game
Spheres of chaos....many 6th form free periods spent on that!...still got the high scores on an adf disk image that I need to transfer!
Oddest "favourite game"
Drop ship. I played it for hours and hours (probably as it was rock hard) despite it being average. At least I got my money's worth for it.
Best Amiga port
I thought about lemmings, zool, speedball 2, populous
but in the end I settled for Cannon fodder. War was never so much fun.
best in game music
Xenon 2. Top banana was acclaimed but too random for me.
Best car game.
Lotus 2. It was better than the amiga version which was nice, Stunt racer 2000 and saloon cars ran it close though.
Most played game
Elite. Best version of the original, but should have been so much more if the authors would have been allowed to stray a bit further from the original BBC version. Had the gold edition with all the cards. Can believe I binned it....
Favourite game overall.
Chocks away.. Awesome game. I know air supremacy and star fighter were technically better, but chocks away amazing when it came out in 1990 (I think). It was immensely playable, had a great 2 player version and great frame refresh even on arm250 machines. Still got the disks. Doesn't work on Rpc though....think I'll have to make a purchase of new as compatible version!!!
Well that post drifted...was going to be just my favourite game...but I had so many...,and I didn't even mention starch "arry you're fired", Pandora's box, power band, e-type, mad prof, swiv, gods, quest for gold. etc. |
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Malcolm Hussain-Gambles |
Message #122282, posted by deadmalc at 18:41, 5/4/2013, in reply to message #122260 |
Member
Posts: 9
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Favourite games:
Cannon Fodder - RComp
Chaos Engine - RComp
Pandoras Box - APDL
Cataclysm - APDL
Spheres of Chaos - ?
(All work using ArcEm!)
Not tried these yet, but will be getting them soon, given my success so far 
Chocks Away - APDL
Stunt Racer 2000 - APDL
Saloon Cars - APDL
Holed Out - APDL
Etype - APDL |
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Steffen Huber |
Message #122286, posted by hubersn at 16:51, 7/4/2013, in reply to message #122260 |
Member
Posts: 91
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Hmmm...my favourites (sorted by "wasted time" ;-)):
* Aldebaran
* Dune 2
* Lemmings
* Cannon Fodder
* Star Fighter 3000
* Zarch
* Conqueror
* Stunt Racer 2000
* Chocks Away
* Interdictor 2
* Spheres of Chaos (although I played the demo much longer than the full version)
* E-Type |
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Alun Millard |
Message #122287, posted by ulaggy at 13:15, 9/4/2013, in reply to message #122286 |
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Posts: 20
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Dune 2 was one of my absolute favourite games ever, alongside Chocks Away. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #122288, posted by filecore at 14:17, 9/4/2013, in reply to message #122287 |
Posts: 3868
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Dune 2 was one of my absolute favourite games ever, alongside Chocks Away. Chocks Away was an absolute classic. Loved the Special Missions for it too. Great in two player head-to-head.
If you liked Dune 2, as I did, but got sick of the one-unit-at-a-time clicking, you might want to check out Dune 2000. It was basically Dune 2, but rewritten with the C&C engine, allowing drag-select of multiple units, and other C&C-type functionality. Good fun. |
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Jon Abbott |
Message #122289, posted by sirbod at 19:39, 9/4/2013, in reply to message #122288 |
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Posts: 563
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Dune 2000 was excellent, although I have to confess to playing it on the PC - I piped the MIDI output to the Arc, wrote a really complicated MIDI orchestrator to route different instruments off to physical synths, including changing sounds banks of required etc. There was 1 MIDI in and 3 out and it used all channels.
I wish I'd recorded it, as it was awesome. Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones were the best, as they were properly orchestrated. I used to play them just to hear it, especially the intro sequence to Indy.
Anyway, I'm going of topic. Sadly I didn't get much time to play games, I was spending too much time writing them or podule drivers.
The two I did spend a lot of time on were Elite and Moria. |
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Philip Webster |
Message #122290, posted by pwx at 09:40, 15/4/2013, in reply to message #122260 |
Member
Posts: 227
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Just counting the native (non-ported) games, I'd say these are my top 10, in no particular order:
1) Chocks Away
2) Stunt Racer 2000
3) Star Fighter 3000
4) Cataclysm
5) Inertia
6) Apocalypse
7) Break 147 / Superpool
 Pandora's Box (shame they never finished the sound - it's a bit quiet)
9) Guile
10) Pysanki (not a popular choice, this - but I like Repton-like games and this one is better than Man-at-Arms)
The top 3 are by the same authors, as are 4 and 5 (David Postlethwaite) and 6 and 7 (Gordon J Key). I did consider putting Carnage Inc. at 10th place, but although I finished it, I never bothered to play it through ever again. I suppose I'd give an honourable mention to Drop Ship (Andrew Catling), which I did play a lot.
Andrew Martin's Guile doesn't seem to have sold very well, despite a demo being on the first Acorn Computing coverdisk. I don't really understand why - I think it's very well done, original, playable, and not as mercilessly difficult as superficially-similar games like Zarch.
If ports are allowed, I'd add Elite (a no-brainer choice, I know), Paradroid 2000, Robocod, Dune 2, DOOM, Gribbly's Day Out on the Arc, Lemmings, SWIV... and Chuck Rock.
Lemmings got a lot of play-time, and SWIV would have done if it wasn't so short and easy. Gribbly is fun but infuriatingly difficult.
Most dissapointing game - Black Angel (Gordon J Key). Technically it's impressive, but the gameplay just isn't there. Enter the Realm (Graeme Richardson) wasn't as good as the magazine previous made it out to be, which was a shame, as Nevryon (by the same author) was pretty good.
My 'all-time worst game' choice has to be a toss-up between "Grievous Bodily 'ARM" or "The Exotic Adventures of Sylvia Layne".
I thought Powerband was too much like a tech demo to be a really good game. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #122291, posted by filecore at 09:43, 15/4/2013, in reply to message #122290 |
Posts: 3868
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SWIV would have done if it wasn't so short and easy. SWIV was great fun for an afternoon after school if playing with a friend. Sometimes I would mirror the controls for both vehicles to the same ones and play two-player by myself; other times, only with jeep or helicopter. I loved that game.
The best SWIV recollection I have is on first time discovering that you can drive around and around in the corn field and leave tyre tracks  |
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David Boddie |
Message #122292, posted by davidb at 22:22, 15/4/2013, in reply to message #122260 |
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Posts: 147
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Ballarena. Pretty slick, especially for an early game, as was Thundermonk.
Warlocks. Nice looking platformer, though the end of game boss was a bit disappointing.
Axis. Nicely done, if a bit tough in places. Didn't this just hang at the end?
Chocks Away. Provided a lot of play time, and the two player mode gave it a longer life.
Oddball. Better than the screenshots made it out to be, though it does get a bit repetitive in the later levels.
Twinworld. A cute scrolling platformer with nice music, at least for the first few times one played it. |
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jon black |
Message #122323, posted by forestman at 20:06, 27/4/2013, in reply to message #122290 |
Member
Posts: 25
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Ah...Guile!
I had forgotten totally about that game. I remember playing that, and Fervour quite a bit also...mostly as my sister liked them both.
Weirdly when I was at University (1994-199 the most popular game I had at the time on my A5000 was "frogger" - if only due to the fight to be top of the high score table.
I've started the process of trying to get some of my existing software to work on the RISC PC. One big issue is understanding which disk errors are due to the floppy disks not liking being in the loft for 10 years, or due to real errors! |
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pkersey |
Message #122858, posted by pkersey at 13:34, 27/11/2013, in reply to message #122260 |
Member
Posts: 11
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Hi. Can't find most of these games people are talking here. Do I have to spend 35 quid buying old original discs to get to know them?
I have those ones available at the Qube and some even got malware in them so I was told. In one occasion VProtect triggered when inserting a copy of Ixium. I found another I assume is good.
I have no idea whether there are actual viruses in the images and what sort of evil they could cause. Can they wipe my hard drive?
Having recently got an acorn machine again got me reminiscing on my favourite games for the acorn... I probably bought 50 games for the acorn , maybe more, basically all of 4d and krisalis' catalogue from 1990 to 1995 Here we're my ones...
favourite pd game:
Bloxed - multi player Tetris. Also have to mention tron that I wrote in basic (which was rather good) and Tom coopers range of games
Most disappointing game:
Technodream. I finished it after about 2 or 3 plays and felt gutted... "Is that it?"
Special mention for enter the realm.... parallax scrolling by dull.
The "I never got it" game
The wimp game.
Best 4 player game
Spheres of chaos....many 6th form free periods spent on that!...still got the high scores on an adf disk image that I need to transfer!
Oddest "favourite game"
Drop ship. I played it for hours and hours (probably as it was rock hard) despite it being average. At least I got my money's worth for it.
Best Amiga port
I thought about lemmings, zool, speedball 2, populous
but in the end I settled for Cannon fodder. War was never so much fun.
best in game music
Xenon 2. Top banana was acclaimed but too random for me.
Best car game.
Lotus 2. It was better than the amiga version which was nice, Stunt racer 2000 and saloon cars ran it close though.
Most played game
Elite. Best version of the original, but should have been so much more if the authors would have been allowed to stray a bit further from the original BBC version. Had the gold edition with all the cards. Can believe I binned it....
Favourite game overall.
Chocks away.. Awesome game. I know air supremacy and star fighter were technically better, but chocks away amazing when it came out in 1990 (I think). It was immensely playable, had a great 2 player version and great frame refresh even on arm250 machines. Still got the disks. Doesn't work on Rpc though....think I'll have to make a purchase of new as compatible version!!!
Well that post drifted...was going to be just my favourite game...but I had so many...,and I didn't even mention starch "arry you're fired", Pandora's box, power band, e-type, mad prof, swiv, gods, quest for gold. etc. [Edited by pkersey at 13:36, 27/11/2013] |
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Jon Abbott |
Message #122862, posted by sirbod at 19:48, 27/11/2013, in reply to message #122858 |
Member
Posts: 563
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About half of those can be released through JASPP, I just need to find the time to test the images, sort out the scans / manuals and get them uploaded. |
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Stephen Scott |
Message #122867, posted by sa_scott at 09:36, 29/11/2013, in reply to message #122862 |
Member
Posts: 73
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Good luck with that.
May as well add my 2p's worth.
Chocks Away was by far the game I spent most hours with, both alone and with friends. I initially got the first release, which was very very slow, the v2 update was a belter, improved the playability no end.
Andrew Hutchings is an unsung hero. He, and his colleague Tim Parry, went on to do Stunt Racer 2000 and Starfighter 3000, a marvellous hat trick.
I'd love to play these again.
Other games I wasted less time on, but were equally enjoyable, were SWIV, Lemmings and Galactic Dan. The latter is graphically a mess, but played reasonably well on my (then) A3000. The processor heaved under the weight of the last few levels, and could never finish them.
Our platform may have had fewer games, but the ones we did have, were by and large excellent! |
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Jon Abbott |
Message #122869, posted by sirbod at 11:44, 29/11/2013, in reply to message #122867 |
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Posts: 563
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S.W.I.V. [BUZZ version], Lemmings and Lemmings [RPC version] have been released. |
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The Icon Bar: Games: Your favourite acorn 32bit platform games |
