Anyone who played video games in their childhood will have some particular favourites they remember fondly. For many, this means Sonic the Hedgehog or perhaps Mario – certainly it’s one explanation for how Nintendo manage to shoehorn the Mario character into every franchise possible without their fans rising up in revolt – but I didn’t have a Sega Mega Drive or a NES. I’m can’t scare myself by sitting down in front of Sonic 1, instantly able to recall exactly where to find every secret in the Green Hill Zone as soon as the music starts. I know for a fact that some of you can.
I had an Amiga, the best home computer ever, but before that I had an Amstrad GX4000.
About as successful as the weird Amstrad emailer/phone thing that Sir Alan strangely never mentions on The Apprentice, the GX4000 was not a classic console. Wikipedia tells me that it was essentially an Amstrad CPC home computer without a keyboard, and only 25 games were ever published for it. This means I once had the distinction of owning 16% of its entire game catalogue, and our local Post Office seemed to have the rest on the shelves waiting for me. Impressive.
Among the games that made it into my collection was Navy SEALs, apparently a tie-in with a film of the same name. I’ve never seen it, and indeed I had no idea I was playing a movie tie-in at all until years later, but I became such a master at the game that I could easily reach the end without losing a life. Every time.
In the great time-honoured tradition of making the game your own, I re-christened all the game’s weapons and characters. Every guy whose face gurned from the corner of the screen had a name, faithfully recorded in the game manual. I’d love to say that it gave me an emotional attachment to them, inconsolable if I let one of them die, but remember I could play through the game without losing a life. I never had to see any of them beyond Number 5, whose grumpy visage doesn’t help me remember his name. Sorry man.
The flamethrower weapon became the “bum burner”. The mysterious screaming, exploding thing which I assume was supposed to be some kind of rocket launcher was the “screamer rocket”, or something along those lines. The final level of the game took place in Beirut, where for some reason your dude could jump twice as high as in the rest of the game, as though gravity is lower in the Middle East. Perhaps it is. It’s closer to the Equator after all.
I can only assume that the creators of Half-Life also played Navy SEALs, shamelessly stealing the idea for the final act of their game taking place in an alien landscape with significantly lower gravity.
Amazingly but inevitably, I can still play Navy SEALs thanks to the magic of emulation. The fabulous WinAPE emulates the entire Amstrad CPC range, including the GX4000. I’m sorry to report that I can no longer complete the game on a single life – in fact, thanks to the second level requiring some careful timing when it comes to crossing a lift shaft complete with moving lift, I can’t remember how to get through it at all.
You don’t get that problem with Sonic, do you? Navy SEALs – clearly a superior gaming challenge on a truly inferior console.
Wikipedia FACT: “In total, fewer than 14,000 units were ever sold, making the Amstrad GX4000 the worst selling gaming console in history.” Classic. Why doesn’t Lord Sugar ever mention this achievement?
Grand Theft Auto III celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. Scary, isn’t it? Looking back now, it’s easy to forget what a landmark the game was – one of the first games that presented you with a vast, open world to roam around in, populated by NPCs who would react to your actions and driven by missions that could be tackled in myriad different ways. Oh sure, it’d all been done before, but GTA III was the first time it was done right.
While other game types have seen similar leaps forward, one genre has stubbornly refused to move on. You can hardly even say that it reached its zenith in the late 90s and it’s been downhill ever since, because apart from a few isolated examples released since, hardly anyone has bothered to do anything with it at all. I’m referring to the good old-fashioned PC space combat simulator.
Yes, I’m talking about Wing Commander again.
The last good space combat simulator to be released commercially was Wing Commander: Prophecy. And the last good space combat simulator to be released in any form was Wing Commander: Secret Ops, the freebie followup to Prophecy. Those are the facts! I can hear you beating away at your keyboard proclaiming that Freespace 2 was pretty good or that the X: Beyond the Frontier series exists, but you might as well stop bashing and save your energy. Those games are rubbish. The fact is that Wing Commander has always held the crown for perfectly balancing the key ingredients, the Holy Trinity, of great games: fun, storyline, technical achievement.
My first exposure to Wing Commander was in glorious 32 colours on the Amiga 600. It was slow, and you knew when you’d died before it happened because the game would pause while it loaded in the death sequence from floppy disk. But that didn’t matter. It was a fantastically immersive game, managing to eke every bit of power out of the hardware to give you great-looking cutscenes alongside the space battles. It even had much better music than the PC version – inevitable for the time.
Fast forward to 2012, and it’s nearly fourteen years since the aforementioned Secret Ops was released. I’ve been playing through it again and it still holds up as a great game. For a game to deliver the visceral sensation of actually being at the centre of the action – whether that’s driving a rally car, swinging from buildings sporting Kevlar fetish wear because you’re Batman, or piloting a space fighter – is a comparatively rare thing, and Secret Ops delivers. Even without support for force feedback joysticks and constrained by the systems it was designed to run on in 1998, it delivers by the bucket load.
An amazing thing about the Wing Commander series is its dedicated fan following. Fan site the Wing Commander CIC has boasted an update every single day for x consecutive number of years, where x is an unlikely, silly number for a game series that hasn’t had an official update in over a decade.
Thanks to its dedicated fans, Wing Commander has had numerous unofficial updates in that time, all of which have kept it feeling fresh without the slightest input from EA, the custodians of the Wing Commander franchise. They’ve taken the original game engines and bent them to their will, to spectacular effect. There are at least a couple of excellent, high-quality fan games – I know of Unknown Enemy and Standoff – hosted entirely in the Secret Ops engine. I’ll probably come back to those games in another post, because they’re excellent!
Indeed, some bright sparks have been hacking around with the Secret Ops engine so much that you can now run the game in high resolution, with updated graphics, without messing around with patches or anything. Although some of the textures look a bit shoddy by modern standards, the game itself is practically timeless – and because nothing has come close to challenging it in the intervening years, Secret Ops with new graphics is the best space combat available for free.
Gamers. Get the Wing Commander: Secret Ops Enhanced English Installer Package now. Go on. You owe it to yourself.
And game developers: the PC space combat market is an open goal. What’s holding you back? Get on with it.
Christmas may be traditionally a time for giving, but over the past few years it’s taken on another role: as a time for buying countless cheap games in the Steam Sale, most of which you’ll never get around to playing.
This year, I bucked the trend by purchasing, downloading, playing and completing Limbo – all in the same week!
Limbo has been around for a couple of years, and was one of those games I couldn’t help hearing about when it was first released. People would wax lyrical about its unorthodox style and its beauty, so much so that I grudgingly downloaded the demo from Xbox Live and played as far as I could. It was lovely, but really, it was just a platformer. Wasn’t it?
Upon downloading the full game this Christmas, I started out with exactly the same thoughts. Yeah, the black-and-white, film-grain, silhouetted main character schtick is a lovely device, one to keep in your back pocket when a “games as art” discussion kicks off on your local pretentious Internet forum, but can you drag that out to an entire game? Luckily, for all my initial thoughts about Limbo being just another platformer, I found that there really is more to it than that.
As “The Boy”, you’re drawn into a mysterious world, the eponymous Limbo, where everything is in shadow and nothing is explained. For that reason, it reminded me of the Amiga classic Another World, except the plot here is even more undeveloped, to the point of nonexistence. All you know is that you’re alone – most of the time – in this Limbo, and you need to escape. Escape, it seems, is always just off the right-hand side of the screen.
With so many unanswered questions in the world, I couldn’t help but keep coming back for more. Who had left the helpful boats and, frankly, less helpful traps scattered around the world? What were these blurry, monochrome environments I could just about make out in the background? I was hoping for an answer.
Soon, I reached a point in the game where I suspected that answers would not be forthcoming. But luckily, at that point, the game’s puzzles took over as its main appeal. Inventive, 2D physics-based puzzles, including a few where the entire game world revolves with you inside it. From that moment, it began to feel less like Another World and more like a direct-control adventure game. One where you die an awful lot – which reminds me of some other game. Oh yeah. Another World.
I may be over two years late to the Limbo party, but I’m glad I joined in eventually. Limbo is a fantastically inventive 2D platformer, challenging but unlikely to be frustrating, intriguing but unlikely to disappoint with lame exposition. It’s worth every penny of the £1.74 I paid for it, and a bargain at four times the price.
P.S. If the headline “The King of Limbo” doesn’t ring any bells with you, you owe it to yourself to watch one of the most epic video game finales since GLaDOS warbled “this was a triumph”. I speak, of course, of the end sequence for Limbo of the Lost – the PC adventure game that infamously plagiarised most of its artwork from other games. With an end sequence like that, all is (almost) forgiven.
It’s that time of year again. The annual temptation to throw up any old nonsense on this decrepit old blog, which is inexplicably:
a) still running
b) not a ravaged wasteland overrun by hackers (considering that during the site’s long life, I have upgraded its Wordpress installation, taking advantage of all the wonderful security enhancements the latest version must provide, approximately never).
Looking through old stuff in any medium can throw up unexpected reminders of the past, and this blog is no exception. Even looking through the site’s “gubbins” folder produces some enigmatic relics.
Ceefax eh? Remember that? Wasn’t it great? Anything you ever wanted to know at the touch of a button. Well, several buttons, plus a long wait for the page to load, followed by an even longer wait while the multi-screen article cycled around to the beginning. But Digitiser had Reveal-Os, which made it all worthwhile!
Staying up until 5am without breaking a sweat, eh? Remember doing that? In fact, why bother going to bed at all when you’re up that late? Just push through! Easy.
Taking a photo of a random Ceefax screen at 5am and uploading it to the Internet? Well, who hasn’t done that for some random, long-forgotten reason?
The glory days. Gone, never to return.
I’m back! I survived a cycle ride from Inverness to Glasgow with only wet shoes, and eventually a flat rear tyre, to show for it.
The trip was a fantastic experience, with even heavy rain on Day 4 (the second day I failed to cover as it happened in this blog) failing to, er, dampen my spirits. Indeed, Day 4 was probably the most spectacular in terms of scenery, but I should cover the trip in chronological order. And that means going way back to the first day I descended into radio silence, the day I travelled from Pitlochry to Killin near Loch Tay.
Pitlochry to Killin
Pitlochry is a lovely little town, not far from another famous battleground at Killiecrankie, with a picturesque town centre that isn’t too busy. There’s a large hydroelectric dam nearby, with a salmon ladder running alongside – the idea is that the fishies can still jump between the concrete tanks to swim upstream. It must be a spectacular sight in the breeding season, but I suspect this isn’t it! (And perhaps the salmon would have been in bed by the time I wandered down there anyway…)
Sadly, the route out of Pitlochry is not particularly thrilling. It’s largely flat – good for a rest on the bike – but runs along quiet country lanes for most of its length. At one point it crosses an ex-railway bridge across a stretch of river, now a privately owned road, but even that isn’t particularly inspiring. Eventually you reach the town of Kenmore at one end of Loch Tay, where the heavens opened and I sought refuge in a cafe.
Several (several!) cups of tea and a light lunch later, the rain had cleared up and I was ready to get on the move again. The view from Kenmore is beautiful as you climb up above the loch, with the water seeming to stretch out endlessly into the distance. What rather sours the panorama is the fact that you know from your Sustrans map that the other end of the loch, 17 miles away at the town of Killin, is where the cycle route is leading you.
Cycling alongside a loch may be lovely, but 17 miles later even the prettiest view is going to get old. Add to that an constantly undulating route (none of the hills severe, but each less welcome than the last), and you feel rather glad when you reach your destination. As it happens, you tumble into Killin quite unexpectedly – one minute you’re barrelling down one of the many downhill sections, the next you turn a corner and encounter a group of old biddies from a coach tour standing around in the middle of the road. Good job I was braking already!
Killin’s location on the River Dochart, with its miniature waterfalls tumbling under the town’s bridge, makes it a great place to spend the night. I fell asleep to the sound of running water. Sadly, I awoke to the sound of water falling from the sky…
Yes, before I’d gone to bed I’d stolen a look at the weather forecast and was dismayed by what I saw! There was an unseasonable low pressure coming in from the Atlantic, bringing with it heavy rain and, later in the day, high winds from the southwest – headwinds for me, in other words. Not really what I wanted to hear. As Sunday dawned with diagonal rain hammering on the windows, I was tempted to abandon the day’s cycle and get the train instead.
Unfortunately, the nearest train station was over 15 miles away on a trunk road – not a very appetising prospect, and I would get soaked to the skin over that distance anyway! In the end, encouraged by some friends of my B&B host, I decided to chance the day’s ride as planned…
Killin to Balloch
I was glad I did! The route from Killin to my eventual destination at Balloch was by far the most spectacular section of the entire ride. Just outside Killin the route climbed into the hills on an old railway line, eventually popping out on the defunct Glen Ogle railway viaduct, now part of the cycle route. The views from the viaduct are amazing – if you have been over the Glenfinnan viaduct, as seen carrying the Hogwarts Express in THOSE films, you have some idea. It was still raining, I was soaked, but I didn’t care.
Just as well really – before Callander the rain held off for an hour or so, but as soon as I reached the town it fell again with a vengence. I locked my bike to the nearest immovable object and headed into a cafe, where I attempted to hide until the rain had passed. It was no good – eventually I had to leave in the pouring rain, heading onwards to Balloch. By this stage the wind had picked up too, blasting me backwards every time I tried to pick up speed. I resigned myself to making slow, wet progress; by this stage, at least, I was so wet I couldn’t actually get any wetter.
The rest of the way to Balloch was spent alternately cursing pine woods (the route passes through some forests I’m sure are lovely, in better weather), hills, rain, wind, cars (only occasionally did these pass me, but I knew their occupants were warm, dry and probably feeling pretty smug), and once, during a mercifully dry spell, punctures. Eventually though, I made it – at 8:30pm. Never before have I been so glad to arrive at a good, old-fashioned Youth Hostel, shared rooms and wet clothes hanging on every available surface and all.
But to reiterate, Sunday was the best day. There may have been rain, there may have been strong winds, but the spectacular sights en route more than made up for it. You always dry off eventually.
Balloch to Glasgow
By comparison, the route from Balloch into Glasgow city centre was an absolute doddle. It was predominantly along pancake-flat old railway paths and riverside paths, with the odd town centre route thrown in. In Dumbarton, I had an excellent opportunity to get soaked again as the route led me into an underpass – luckily I spotted just in time that the ‘puddle’ spreading across its mouth was a good two feet deep! Although hardly inspiring as a cycle route, the Balloch to Glasgow section was a welcome respite from the rigours of the previous days’ journey through the Highlands, and gave the encouraging impression of arriving into the city with plenty of energy to spare. Only the fact my shoes were still dripping wet reminded me of the previous day’s hardships, which were well worth it.
There are no pictures for the last two days of the journey, because the rain made it difficult to stop and take things out of my bag without everything getting soaked. Don’t worry – the iPhone camera would make the places I passed through look rubbish anyway. It’s the rules.
Footnote: the puncture repair made between Kenmore and Killin lasted all the way through the rainy journey from Killin to Balloch, the on-and-off rainy journey from Balloch to Glasgow, the journey home, and a commute to and from work. The patch eventually blew off just as I arrived home – an extremely considerate time for it to give up the ghost.
Thanks patch! You have now been replaced.
There was no exciting travel blog yesterday because the place where I was staying managed to have hardly any mobile phone signal. The blog tonight will be extremely short because I am very tired! :(
In fact, it will be THIS short, aside from saying that I’m by Loch Lomond. And still drying out. Night night!
Wind! A cyclist’s worst nightmare, whichever direction it’s coming from.
If it’s blowing in from behind you, it bowls you merrily along without you even being aware of its presence, giving you a misleading impression of your cycling prowess. But you’ve got no closer to being Lance Armstrong – it’s the stiff breeze doing all the work. In that sense, wind is treacherous in a way that snow and ice can never be. At least you know where you are with ice – usually on the floor or wrapped around a tree.
Cycling with the wind in your face is, on the other hand, a miserable experience. Every effort to pick up speed seems in vain as the wind pushes you back to a crawl. It’s like cycling uphill, but the only payoff comes if you turn around and go back the way you came.
The day began in wind-free fashion in a morning during which I redefined “taking it easy”. After a leisurely breakfast and many cups of tea, I headed all of two miles down the road to Newtonmore, where I stopped off at its free Highland Folk Museum. What was intended as a flying visit (it would be rude not to visit a free attraction!) soon turned into an entire morning spent poking around recreations of 1930s farms, 18th-century Highland crofting communities and a couple of great “flat-packed” churches and schools, supplied as corrugated iron sheets for assembly in situ. Truly the Ikea of the early 20th century.
Not long after leaving Newtonmore, full of more tea and a cake, I had my first encounter with my old enemy, the wind. It was blowing from directly the direction I was travelling. When I was researching the trip, I’d read that Scotland’s prevailing wind is southwesterly, making a journey from north to south the better option if you want to avoid it in your face. I decided that the other advantages of a north-to-south route outweighed the danger of being hindered by wind – I was regretting it today!
A late lunch in Dalwhinnie, only about 15 miles from Kingussie, showed just what an effect the wind (and, admittedly, my lazy morning) had made. There I met two blokes who were travelling from Pitlochry to Kingussie, the opposite of my journey. They were nearly home and dry and I had over 30 miles to go!
The wind had come on the day I would be crossing the most exposed and isolated point on the trip, the Drumochter Pass. With a summit of 1516 feet, climbing it would not be much fun on the best of days, but climbing it with a wind of 15mph+ in my face (according to the BBC weather web site) was slow work. Luckily, the scenery is spectacular, even if it runs close to the A9 most of the way (and immediately alongside – separated by a crash barrier – at times). Eventually I made it to the top, heralded first by a sign on the nearby railway line – the highest point on the rail network! – and then a similar sign for travellers on the A9.
As soon as I got over the summit, the wind abated. Don’t ask me why – you’d think the hill would have protected me from a headwind as I was climbing it, but it seems the opposite is true. The rest of the journey into Pitlochry was comparatively plain sailing – helped by the long, enjoyable run down from the views of Drumochter and some very quiet, decent roads.
Many of the roads used by this part of National Cycle Route 7 are old sections of the A9, either abandoned entirely as they were superseded by the faster, safer route of the new A9 built a short distance away, or simply reclassified as traffic moved over to the new road. These reclassified roads are great – wide and well-surfaced, as they would have been in their A9 glory days, but now almost entirely devoid of traffic. But it’s the sections that have been entirely abandoned, save for their new life as a cycle track, that are most special. They’re narrower now, as the undergrowth has been allowed to creep in on both sides, but the surface is still good and the white line leads you down the centre. Even the metal holders for the cats eyes are still in place. The only trouble comes when the white line continues straight into a newly sprouted mound of earth deposited by one of the new A9’s massive embankments…
I’m writing this while sat next to the river at Pitlochry, still broad daylight at 9:45pm. It would be very relaxing, if it wasn’t for the fact that Pitlochry Drum-n-Bass Fest 2010 seems to be taking place on the opposite bank! Oh well – you can’t have it all.
Rain! The last thing I was hoping to see, yet when I stepped off the train at Inverness it was falling from the sky by the bucketful. Luckily, it didn’t last too long and the weather satisfied itself with looking mean and moody for the first part of the ride.
My bike has, not to put too fine a point on it, some reliability issues. If a piece can fall off my bike, it probably will (and a lot of the time, has in the past). Just last week, while I was out roaming the countryside, a screw fell out and the pannier rack fell off.
Today, the bike wasn’t going to let me down. Not far out of Inverness, one side of my front mudguard fell off its mooring, leaving it flapping disconsolately through the moving spokes of the wheel. Luckily, the exact same thing had happened on the other side months earlier, so I knew exactly what to do: buy some sticky tape and Sellotape it back together! My amazing repair has, so far, been good as new – on both sides. As for the ominous creaking sound that one of the pedal cranks has developed on every revolution… we’ll have to wait and see.
The rain reared its ugly head again soon after, so I took the opportunity – and the excuse to get out of the rain – to go to the visitor centre at Culloden, the site of the last battle to be fought in Britain. Predictably, the heaviest rain was reserved for the guided tour of the battlefield, but it was worth seeing. Around 1500 men lie buried in just a few long mounds to one side of the battlefield, the result of a fight that lasted about an hour. Makes you feel lucky that those days are behind us.
Now that the weather has picked up – it was sunny, though with a fairly strong headwind, for the rest of the day – it’s still light at ten to eleven in the evening here in Kingussie. Crazy stuff.
Tomorrow promises a shorter journey than yesterday, and hopefully better weather. We’ll have to wait and see what sort of day it is for mechanical defects!
I’m writing this while thundering up the country on an overnight train. We’ve just passed Milton Keynes Central, apparently used as the filming location for the United Nations HQ in the low-budget Superman IV. That is apparently a bone fide FACT, trivia fans.
I’m travelling to Inverness, because a couple of months ago I decided it would be a good idea to cycle from there to Glasgow, over 200 miles away on National Cycleway No. 7. Don’t ask me why. I cycled about ten miles of it on a bike loaned to me by a helpful B&B owner, and it was fun. Clearly, twenty times the distance equals twenty times the fun.
The first leg of the journey is getting there, which involved getting into London, and getting out again on a ScotRail sleeper train. Arriving into Paddington and departing from Euston also meant a short hop across the mean streets of London by bike.
The first off-peak train from Oxford was a small three-coach affair, with no reserved seats, never mind dedicated bike spaces. Waiting on the platform felt a little fraught as it filled with an improbable number of passengers and fellow cyclists – would there be any room?! By a mixture of luck and judgement, I managed to be waiting just at the spot where the train doors would stop, and the other bike lovers shuffled off in defeat to other parts of the train. Result!
Sadly, my dreams of a gentle meander down the quiet streets of central London at 8:30pm proved a little naive – the place was still heaving. Luckily, bus lanes covered much of the route, and the bus drivers and cabbies knew the score! They were very accommodating, not at all like the London driver stereotype. It was surprisingly easy to cycle on the route I took, but I bet it would be a different story at rush hour!
So here I am, on a train for the next ten hours. One last piece of good fortune – the cheap seats I’d booked myself into are broken, or something, so I’ve been put into a first class cabin instead. Thanks ScotRail!
Next stop, Crewe. Next stop for me, bed.
Unrivalled in its ability to make even the most beautiful views look rubbish. In fact, I suspect there’s an unwritten law which states that a view isn’t truly worth seeing unless the iPhone camera can render it utterly unremarkable.
This post is secretly a test of posting from the iPhone Wordpress app. As you were!
