Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #47

[I’ve just heard the sad news that the computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair died last night. He changed the lives of many, many people who grew up in the UK in the 1980s. We owe him a very great debt. RIP, Sir Clive.] Well, that was something. I spent a full hour recording this week’s episode, although I managed to whittle it down to just over half of that, as there was a huge amount of waiting around. I hope it’s still watchable enough. It started well, playing what is apparently a conversion of a classic Atari 2600 game,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #46

We’re edging closer to the end of this series (which will come at episode 64, appropriately enough). There’s still plenty of fun to be had before it’s over, though! In this week’s episode we once again play games found on a series of random floppies. We start with a game I actually enjoyed a lot called The Arc of Yesod. The main character comes with a remote drone – how cool is that? We then loaded a German strategy game called The World, but not for very long. Afterwards came Kane, Forester and Hi Ska Do. These seem to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #45

This week’s episode contains another eclectic mix of ancient Commodore 64 video games. We started with Snoopy, which turned out to be rather basic and tedious. We then tried Trucking USA, which turned out to be in German. From there things became more interesting, with a fun platformer called Burger Time, a classic arcade conversion of a game called Sea Wolf, and finally a quirky little number called Pegasis. I rather enjoyed Burger Time and Sea Wolf – as you can probably tell from the video – but the whole episode was fun to record. Here’s the cover art... Read more →

Floppy Friday #44

Another mix of games in this week’s episode! It’s hard to know what the first game, Road Runner, was meant to be, as it really must have been corrupted – there’s no other reason for the graphics to be so messed up. The second, The Hobbit, was an illustrated text adventure I remember playing for hours on my ZX Spectrum as a boy. The third was B.C.’s Quest for Tires, which seems like it was probably a classic when it came out in 1983. We finished up with an obscure but playable title named Fortress Underground, which I actually... Read more →

Floppy Friday #43

This week’s episode is an interesting one, in that it includes a couple of Italian games that I’ve found no reference to on the interwebs. And both were really fun to play! The first was Miami Race (that’s right – not Vice, but Race), which was a very playable (i.e. fun and easy) racing game, while the second was called Pogo, which was a puzzle platformer with some really interesting 3D rotational effects. We then went on to play Mandroid and the first text adventure we’ve tried in this series, S*M*A*S*H*E*D. We then tried – but ultimately failed –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #42

In this week’s episode we take a look at four games, with a brief interlude of Nothin’ Special. The first game was a Pac-Man clone that’s apparently called Munch Man 64. We then went on to play two “patrol” games (which basically have nothing in common beyond the name): Falcon Patrol II and Park Patrol. We wrap up by playing Ace of Aces, albeit - once again - very poorly. Here’s the cover art I could find for three of this week’s games: Only one had a review in Zzap!64 magazine: Ace of Aces was rated very highly in... Read more →

Floppy Friday #41

Last week I mentioned that this week we’d be continuing on the sporting theme, in honour of the Tokyo Olympics. In addition to the Indoor Sports compilation I’d found, I came across World Games, which is the first set of games we tried in this week’s episode. Here’s the cover art for this week’s games: It seems World Games was well received – here’s a glowing review from issue 19 of Zzap!64 magazine: I’ll probably switch away from sports for next week, as people will probably be happy for a break by then. Read more →

Floppy Friday #40

As we’re in the middle of the 2021 Olympics – well, more honestly because I happened to stumble across the floppy it was on – this week’s episode is all about the sports-related games contained in The Ball Games Pack for the Commodore 64. This compilation contains four games, one of which we played in Floppy Friday #36 (the classic Football Manager), so this week we just played the other three: Kick Off – a very decent yet fairly tricky soccer (yes, football) game – followed by Head Coach – a Football Manager-like game for American Football fans –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #39

I’m up in the mountains, this week, but managed to record an episode of Floppy Friday over the weekend, so we don’t skip a week. At least not this week. :-) This week’s episode takes a look at four Commodore 64 games, three of which worked fine. We start with Rambo – First Blood Part II – a game I’d been looking for for some time – then play Sword of Honour, a classic fighting game. We then try to play Superstar Ice Hockey, and while it seemed to load fine, I couldn’t find a way to play it.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #38

In this week’s episode we take a look at four more games loaded from floppy onto a Commodore 64. This week’s selection ended up being quite interesting, in my perhaps not so humble opinion. We started with Platoon, then Spy vs. Spy, A View to a Kill (which unfortunately I didn’t end up being able to play, despite three attempts at loading it), and then wrapping up with Theatre Europe. Hopefully these will bring back good memories for at least a few people. Theatre Europe in particular received a stunning review from Zzap!64 magazine: It’s probably impossible for anyone... Read more →

Floppy Friday #37

In this week’s episode we play four classic Commodore 64 games. Tetris needs no introduction, of course, while we then went on to play a horizontal shooter called Delta followed by what may have been the “goriest game of the 80s”: Deathwish III. We wrapped up with a quick play of a racing game called Buggy Boy. All in all it was a fun episode, once again. That said, I was really a bit shocked at the amount of blood shown in Deathwish III. Here’s its Zzap!64 review from September 1987: Today is my last day in Amsterdam –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #36

In this week’s episode we take a look at three more Commodore 64 games loaded from a random floppy disk I found amongst the collection. The first, Football Manager, is a stone-cold classic. Not the most visually interesting of games, but one that enthralled a generation. The next two are on the stranger side. There’s Hunchback at the Olympics – which is a very, very quirky sequel in the Hunchback series – and then there’s Rocketball, which I’ve now found out was based on the movie Rollerball. It was set in 2010, so it’s another of those “where’s my... Read more →

Floppy Friday #35

In this week’s episode we play YALNG (Yet Another Last Ninja Game), The Last Ninja 3, followed by Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior and Shanghai (a version of mahjong). Many thanks to Martin Griffin for the inspiration to dig up TLN3. As usual I did what I could to play these games without any advance preparation, so the mileage definitely varied. Here’s the cover art for this week’s games: See you next week! Read more →

Floppy Friday #34

In this week’s episode we take a look at three classic Commodore 64 games. The first game, The Last Ninja 2, is a sequel to a game we played last week, of course. The second game, Ghostbusters, is one I used to play on my ZX Spectrum as a child, although the C64 version looks quite different. The last game, Fighter Pilot, was basically incomprehensible, but there you go. Here’s the cover art for these three games (although I’m not completely sure about the last one). One of these days I’m going to have a “ZX Spectrum classics” episode,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #33

This week’s episode looks at three games I’d checked out briefly yesterday, as I’d been getting a little fed-up with editing out games that didn’t load. As it was I had to load the first game – The Last Ninja – three times before it worked properly (I did edit that bit out). After that we played Die Hard and Gee Bee Air Rally. All this week’s games were fun to play: The Last Ninja is considered a real classic, it seems, and while Die Hard starts slow, it apparently gets more interesting later on. Here are the Zzap!64... Read more →

Floppy Friday #32

That’s it – we’re halfway there! I was hoping to make a bigger splash with my 2^5th episode, but between my first vaccine jab and my first foray into team sports in 8 months (yes, perhaps not the wisest combo, but there you go), I had neither the time nor the energy to make something fancy. I was actually hoping that some good friends would come through with a Commodore SX-64 they have in their attic, but it turned out to be harder to uncover than expected. Hopefully still one for a future episode. We covered a few games... Read more →

Floppy Friday #31

This week’s episode is longer than I expected, but I found I kept going on to the next game as the one before left me wanting more. I would have loved to have played the first game – Who Dares Wins II – for longer, but it crashed almost straightaway. One to come back to, at some point. (I mentioned its similarity to Commando: according to Wikipedia, the first Who Dares Wins was “given an injunction” for basically being a copy of Commando. Funny!) Here’s its review from Issue 8 of Zzap!64 magazine: The next game, Fighting Warrior, was... Read more →

Floppy Friday #30

In this week’s episode we dust off the Atari 2600 and play a few games on cartridge. We kick things off with Stargate, which is a sequel to Defender, apparently, and then play Missile Command followed by Moon Patrol – games we saw (or talked about) on the C64 in episodes #6 and #26 respectively. After jumping over a few lunar craters, we head back down to Earth to jump hurdles in Summer Games and then juggle hacky sacks and ride downhill mountain bikes in California Games. During the episode I mentioned “that line drawing algorithm” which was meant... Read more →

Floppy Friday #29

It’s still a holiday, here in Switzerland, so I’ll keep this post short and sweet. We played four games on the C64 in today’s Floppy Friday: Defender (which we played in Floppy Friday #25 on the Atari 2600), One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, Sammy Lightfoot and David’s Midnight Magic: I couldn’t find a review of any of these games in good old Zzap! 64, so I’ve cobbled together an image from the cover art for three of them: See you next week! Read more →

Floppy Friday #28

In this week’s episode we take a look at CAD – yes, 3D CAD! – on a Commodore home computer. I’ve talked in the past about getting Home Designer running on a C128, but in this episode we look at a German-made application called Giga-CAD on the C64. It took a little while for it to get going, but I was frankly very impressed with what it could do. Here’s the episode where we look at Giga-CAD (not yet the Plus version) followed by a quick bit of gaming. As usual, I really didn’t research the software much (or... Read more →